Nine Lives(24)

“Uh-huh,” he said, and coughed to clear his phlegmy throat. Was he about to get arrested?

“Do you mind coming with me to the station? You’re being put under temporary protective custody. There’s a federal agent on his or her way to the station who can explain it to you.”

“Seriously? What’s going on?”

“Honestly, I have no idea, man. But I’d find some comfortable clothes to put on. You don’t know how long you’ll be in them.”





7





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 3:10 P.M.


Jack Radebaugh heard the unusually loud thump of his mail being delivered through the slot in his front door and got up from the kitchen table to go take a look. There was a package from his wife in a manila envelope. She hadn’t written a return address, but he knew her writing better than he knew his own.

He went back to the kitchen table with the thick package and slit it open using a steak knife. Inside was a stack of mail addressed to him at his old address. On the top letter was a sticky note, on which Harriet had written: Change your address!

He flipped through his mail, half of which could’ve been thrown out unopened. There were lapsed subscription notices, pleas for political donations, offers for credit cards. There was also his royalty check from his publishing house, a Christmas card from his old friend Earnest that was either very early or very, very late, and a thin white envelope, that, like the package it arrived in, had no return address. He opened it, and read a list of names, his included. He slid it on top of the pile of mail he intended on throwing out, then changed his mind, and moved it to the pile of keepers.

Three days earlier he’d received a call from a female FBI agent asking him if he’d received a list in the mail with his name on it. He’d told her that he hadn’t, but now that he’d actually received such a list, he supposed that the thing to do would be to call her back. He wondered if he’d kept her number.

He got up and refilled his coffee mug, knowing he would take only a few sips, but liking the feel of the hot mug in his hands. Fall had arrived. Jack’s favorite season anywhere, but especially in West Hartford, where he’d grown up, and where he was now living again, having bought his childhood house. It was a three-bedroom Tudor in a neighborhood of brick Tudors, each with its own fairytale profile—the steep roof, the narrow windows—and each with its own tidy front yard.

The square kitchen of his newly reacquired home was toward the back, and from its side window he could see into the backyard of his neighbor’s property. That house had belonged to a family named Lambert when Jack was a boy. This was back in the early 1950s. There were three children in the Lambert family, all slightly older than Jack and his sister. There was a teenage girl, who still retained her English accent from the time before the Lamberts had emigrated to America. Two more girls, fraternal twins, liked to embroil Jack and his sister in strange games of imagination, usually involving the fairies that lived in their conjoined backyards. Jack remembered those games better than he remembered any of the Lamberts’ faces. He wondered what had happened to them. The parents would be dead now, of course, and those young girls would all be older than him. They’d most likely have children and grandchildren and successes and heartbreak. And the chances were that at least one of them was already dead.

Looking out at the Lamberts’ old house now, he watched as a very thin woman with long brown hair stepped into the back sunroom, holding her own mug of coffee and staring into her backyard. The sunroom had not been part of his neighbor’s house when he’d been a child. It was an addition, probably added in the 1970s or 1980s, a room almost entirely made of glass. He was calling it a sunroom even though he was pretty sure it went by another name that he couldn’t quite remember. Words had been escaping him lately. They were like cigarette smoke. He’d open his mouth and the word would billow away on the wind. He could see its shape as it dissipated but the word was gone.

Jack, coming out of this reverie, refocused on his neighbor’s house. The woman with the mug was now turned and looking directly at him, not with any animosity, but with curiosity, if anything. He raised a hand and she waved back, and then Jack stepped away from his kitchen window. There was a mirror in the front hall and Jack took a look at himself, making sure he had no food in his teeth, nothing crusty around his eyes, then he swept his fingers through his thick, mane of gray hair, and made his way to his back porch. If the woman was still in her solarium—that was it, a goddamn solarium!—then he’d say hello.

It was colder outside than he thought it would be, and Jack buttoned up his cardigan as he wandered across toward his neighbor. The woman was still there, and she stepped outside as well, just as he reached the threshold of her property.

“Thought I’d introduce myself,” Jack said.

“I’m Margaret,” she said, putting out her hand, and taking three quick, awkward steps to shake his.

“I’m Jack. I’m—”

“I’ve been meaning to come over and introduce myself, and I even put together half of a welcome basket, but then ended up eating the muffins, and I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. I’m sorry I haven’t come over sooner.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. I’ve only been here less than a month.”

“I know. I just don’t want you to think I’m not neighborly. I’ve got a pot of coffee on, if you want a cup.”