Nine Lives(50)

After cuing up his running mix, he left his condo, thinking he’d do three miles at least.





5





WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 8:49 P.M.


Ethan and Caroline still emailed, but they’d spent more time on the phone lately, and they’d even taken up skyping. Ethan sometimes believed skyping was the safest mode of conversation. He assumed that the police or the FBI or some lunatic killer was constantly listening in on any conversation that went between their cell phones. Skype felt private, somehow, even if it wasn’t. It also meant that he could look at Caroline instead of looking only at the words she typed or listening to her voice on the cell. He’d become enamored by her face. His mother used to collect small ceramic animals that were dressed like tiny humans. They had a name, although Ethan couldn’t remember exactly what it was—woodland creatures, or something like that—and whenever she’d gotten a new piece for her collection, she’d stare at all their little faces and say again and again how cute they were.

Caroline’s face reminded Ethan of a woodland creature, not something he’d ever tell her. She had a small mouth and a small nose, but large eyes and a large forehead, made larger by the brown hair that she always pulled back into a loose bun. Her skin was so pale that it almost seemed reflective, as did her pale brown eyes. Ethan thought she alternated between looking like a young girl and looking like an old lady. Again, these were things he hadn’t told her.

But he had told her almost everything else. About how he subsisted on the meager royalties from the one song he’d sold over five years ago, a song that had been retrofitted into a national commercial for jeans. About all his relationships with women, about his fear that he had no talent, that he was wasting his life on the pursuit of an unattainable dream. He told her about his year-long relationship with Phoebe Faunce, another singer-songwriter, and how she’d died from an Oxycontin overdose while he’d slept beside her. And he even told her about what his parents’ friend Bob O’Neal had done to him in the dunes near a Cape Cod rental they had all shared one summer week when Ethan was twelve. In return, Caroline had spoken at length about her family dynamics and the particular insidious cruelty of her own father, and how, when she’d finally confronted her mother about him after he died a few years earlier, her mother had said that she married her father because he’d been cruel, not in spite of it.

And they talked about the list, and the police presence that had become part of their lives, and, once, they had talked late into the night about their own impending deaths, and whether they thought the police would catch whoever had killed Frank Hopkins, Matthew Beaumont, and Arthur Kruse.

“I think they’ll get him or her,” Ethan said. He had propped several pillows under his head, and was lying on his side, looking at Caroline doing the same thing from her house in Michigan.

“Really?”

“I don’t know. He’s stopped now, for a while, anyway.”

“That’s because we’re all being watched,” Caroline said. “But they can’t watch us forever. I think he’s just biding his time.”

“You’re probably right. He killed as many of us as he could kill before the police presence got out of hand, and now he’s just waiting. There’s no real rush, unless they figure out who he is.”

“I hope so,” Caroline said.

“I read somewhere that human beings can’t actually conceive of their own deaths, that if we could we’d all be paralyzed by fear.”

“I study poetry for a living and, trust me, poets must be the exception to that particular rule. Lots of conception of mortality.”

“What about your students?” Ethan said.

Caroline frowned, then laughed. “I think you’re onto something there. My students definitely have no conception they will one day die, which is probably why they seem so unmoved by poetry.”

Ethan didn’t immediately respond; his mind was trying to unearth a thought. These silences—comfortable silences, for the most part—had become part of their routine, especially when they talked on Skype. “They might catch him,” he said, at last. “They clearly have a lead.”

“Oh, we’re back to that. Do you mean our parents are the lead?”

“Uh-huh.”

A few days earlier both Ethan and Caroline had been contacted by different federal agents, and asked questions about their parents. Shortly after that, their parents had been questioned as well. Ethan had talked with his mom immediately after she’d been interviewed, and she told him that they had a long list of names, people they wondered if she knew.

“Caroline Geddes? Jay Coates? Jessica Winslow?” Ethan had asked.

“I don’t think so. The last names sound familiar. They asked me about a Wayne Coates, and I told them I knew a Wayne Chalfant, you remember him, don’t you, that nice retarded man who worked at the grocery store?”

“So you didn’t know any of the actual people they mentioned?”

“No, I didn’t, honey, but maybe I’m getting old and forgetful. I mean, that’s what your father tells me, anyway.”

“I don’t think you’re getting forgetful, Mom,” he lied. “And, really, the agents are just fishing. What about Mary Louise Gauthier? Or Meg Gauthier?”