Nine Lives(53)

“I’m sorry to be bringing this up,” Caroline said. “It’s just that … it’s obvious, to me at least, that the agents who are investigating this list think that the connection might be between the parents of the people on the list. That’s why they called you, right? They asked you about a series of names?”

“I told them I didn’t know any of those names. Caroline, trust me, if I did, I’d have told them.”

“I know, Mom. I’m not accusing you of holding anything back, but I wonder if there was something from way back when, maybe even when you were a child, that might have some importance. You probably don’t remember this either, but when you’ve been very depressed sometimes you’ve told me that you deserve it, and once you told me that you were a bad child, and that you were paying a price.”

“Well, I’m not sure that I was a very nice child, really. At least according to your grandmother.” Meg moved a piece of chicken onto her fork and put it in her mouth.

“But you can’t remember anything specific?”

“We had a neighbor, I think their last names were Landry, and the little boy was probably about three years younger than me, and he’d come over every day to see if I wanted to play with him. Which I didn’t, of course. At first, I would tell my mother to say I wasn’t there, but then I started going to the door myself when he’d ring the bell, and telling him to meet me down at the park in five minutes. And I just wouldn’t go. The sad thing was, he kept coming back.”

Caroline had heard this story before as an example of her mother’s childhood cruelty. “The FBI didn’t ask you about anyone named Landry, did they?”

“Oh, no. The only name that was vaguely familiar to me was Jack Radebaugh but then I realized that he’s an author of some book I think your father bought. No, Holly, no chicken for you. Maybe after we clean up.” The dog had woken up.

They would normally have taken a walk after lunch, especially with the weather so nice, but it seemed unnecessarily risky, so they made coffee and sat outside on the stone patio. They talked about Grey’s Anatomy, Meg’s favorite show, and they talked about Julius, of course, who had been in a motorcycle accident in Mongolia of all places, and was staying there, recuperating, for now. Dark clouds had moved into the sky, and Caroline’s fingertips had turned white, but her mother didn’t seem to notice. There was a pause in conversation, and Caroline was about to stand up and move them both inside, when her mother said, “I did have a terrible dream when I was a kid, and it’s something I’ve never really stopped thinking about it.”

“Oh, what’s that?” Caroline said.

“It’ll sound silly, I know, but it was so vivid, and I can still see it. I think sometimes I still dream about it, like the way I still keep dreaming that I’ve forgotten my locker combination at school.”

“What was the dream?”

“I am probably around ten or eleven years old, and I’ve run away from home with a bunch of other kids. My friends, I guess, although I can’t really remember who they were. But we’ve all run away, and, somehow, we’ve managed to steal a great big boat and we’re sailing across the ocean. It has two masts and a sail, and it’s a wooden boat, like an old pirate ship, I guess you’d say. And there’s a plank, of course. And what I remember most from the dream is that we all decide that one of us—one of the kids—has to walk the plank. I’m worried it’s going to be me, but we choose another little girl, and we tie her up, and tell her that she has to walk off the end of the plank or we’ll all die.”

A gust of wind whipped her mother’s scarf up across her mouth for a moment, and she pulled it away to keep talking.

“That’s it. That’s the dream.”

“So the girl walked off the plank?”

“Yes. We tied her up and she was crying but she went into the ocean and didn’t come back up. It was awful. It makes me sick just to think of it now.”

“You don’t remember names?”

“From the dream?” Meg said. “No. They were just other kids, like me.”

“I wonder what it means.”

Meg stood, and so did Caroline. Together they walked through the sliding doors into the warm house. “Does it always have to mean something?” Meg said. “It was just a scary dream. Kids have scary dreams.”





8





FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 6:09 P.M.


Jack got back to his house in West Hartford at dusk, and went from room to room turning lamps on. He’d driven up from Summit, New Jersey, where he’d had lunch with his attorney, then visited his wife very briefly, standing in their front yard, where she handed him the papers he’d asked for.

“You look thin,” she’d said. He’d thanked her and she told him it wasn’t a compliment.

Later, driving on the parkway under a densely clouded sky, he wished he’d said, “This is me in the winter of my life.” That phrase—the winter of my life—had been rattling around in his mind for a while. It was still in his mind now that he was back in his childhood home in Hartford, turning on lamps and pulling curtains. He was only going to be here for one night, so he went to the refrigerator to see if there was the possibility of scrounging something for dinner or if he should go out. But looking at the withered vegetables, some ancient cheese, and half a dozen eggs that might be past their sell-by date, he realized he wasn’t hungry, just jumpy. He pulled on his jacket and went outside to take a walk.