"Terry," Cynthia said.
Ordinarily, I might have said "Be there in a sec" and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife"s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.
So I did.
Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man"s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.
12.
She tried to move in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, "For heaven"s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won"t even open your eyes. You think it"s easy getting here? The things you"ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You"ve got the whole day to sleep, I"m only here for a little while. in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, "For heaven"s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won"t even open your eyes. You think it"s easy getting here? The things you"ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You"ve got the whole day to sleep, I"m only here for a little while.
"Well, let me tell you something. You"re not quitting on us. You"re going to be with us for a while longer, that"s for sure. When it"s time for you to go, believe me, you"ll be the first to know."
And then he seemed to be trying to say something.
"What"s that?" she said. She was just able to make out a question. "Oh, him," she said. "He couldn"t come tonight."
13.
Gently, I set Grace down on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen. on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.
The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.
It wasn"t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. "You watch Grace for a minute," I said.
"Be careful," Cynthia said.
I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.
I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished bas.e.m.e.nt. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.
"What do you see?" Cynthia called from upstairs.
I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an a.s.sortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.
I came back upstairs. "The house is empty," I said.
Cynthia was still staring at the hat. "He was here," she said.
"Who was here?"
"My father. He was here."
"Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?"
"It"s his hat," she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. "Don"t touch it!" she said.
"It"s not going to bite me," I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.
It was an old hat, no question. The edges of the brim were worn, the lining darkened from years of sweat, the nap worn to the point of shiny in places.
"It"s just a hat," I said.
"Look inside," she said. "My father, years ago, he lost a couple of hats, people took his by mistake at restaurants, one time he took somebody else"s, so he got a marker and he put a "C," the letter, he wrote it on the inside of the band. For "Clayton.""
I ran my finger along the inside of the band, folding it back. I found it on the right side, near the back. I turned the hat around so that Cynthia could see.
She took a breath. "Oh my G.o.d." She took three tentative steps toward me, reached her hand out. I extended the hat toward her, and she took it, holding it as though it was something from King Tut"s tomb. She held it reverently in her hands for a moment, then slowly moved it toward her face. For a moment, I thought she was going to put it on, but instead, she brought it to her nose, took in its fragrance.
"It"s him," she said.
I wasn"t going to argue. I knew that the sense of smell was perhaps the strongest when it came to triggering memories. I could recall going back to my own childhood home once in adulthood-the one my parents moved from when I was four-and asking the current owners if they"d mind my looking around. They were most obliging, and while the layout of the house, the creak of the fourth step as I climbed to the second floor, the view of the backyard from the kitchen window, were all familiar, it was when I stuck my nose into a crawl s.p.a.ce, and caught a whiff of cedar mixed with dampness, that I felt almost dizzy. A flood of memories broke through the dam at that moment.
So I had an idea of what Cynthia was sensing as she held the hat so close to her face. She could smell her father.
She just knew.
"He was here," she said. "He was right here, in this kitchen, in our house. Why, Terry? Why would he come here? Why would he do this? Why would he leave his G.o.dd.a.m.n hat but not wait for me to come home?"
"Cynthia," I said, trying to keep my voice even, "even if it is your father"s hat-and if you say it is, I believe you-the fact that it"s here doesn"t mean that it was your father that left it."
"He never went anywhere without it. He wore it everywhere. He was wearing that hat the last night I saw him. It wasn"t left behind in the house. You know what this means, don"t you?"
I waited.
"It means he"s alive."
"It might, yes, it might mean that. But not necessarily."
Cynthia put the hat back on the table, started to reach for the phone, then stopped, then reached for it again, and again stopped herself.
"The police," she said. "They can take fingerprints."
"Off that hat?" I said. "I doubt it. But you already know it"s your father"s. Even if they could get his prints off it, so what?"
"No," Cynthia said. "Off the k.n.o.b." She pointed to the front door. "Or the table. Something. If they find his fingerprints in here, it"ll prove he"s alive."
I wasn"t so sure about that, but I agreed that calling the police was a good idea. Someone-if not Clayton Bigge, then somebody somebody-had been in our house while we were out. Was it breaking and entering if nothing appeared broken? At least it was entering.
I called 911. "Someone...was in our house," I told the dispatcher. "My wife and I are very upset, we have a little girl, we"re very worried."
There was a car at the house about ten minutes later. Two uniforms, a man and a woman. They checked the doors and windows for any obvious signs of entry, came up with nothing. Grace, of course, had woken up during all the excitement and was refusing to go to bed. Even when we sent her back to her room and told her to get ready for bed, we spotted her at the top of the stairs, peering through the railings like an underage inmate.
"Was anything stolen?" the woman cop asked, her partner standing alongside her, tipping his hat back and scratching his head.
"Uh, no, not as far as we can tell," I said. "I haven"t had a close look, but it doesn"t seem like it."
"Any damage done? Any vandalism of any kind?"
"No," I said. "Nothing of that sort."
"You need to check for fingerprints," Cynthia said.
The male cop said, "Ma"am?"
"Fingerprints. Isn"t that what you do when there"s a break-in?"
"Ma"am, I"m afraid there"s no real evidence here that there"s been a break-in. Everything seems in order."
"But this hat was left here. That shows someone broke in. We locked the house up before we left."
"So you"re saying," the male cop said, "someone broke in to your house, didn"t take anything, didn"t break anything, but they got in here just so they could leave that hat on your kitchen table?"
Cynthia nodded. I could imagine how this looked to the officers.
"I think we"d have a hard time getting someone out to dust for prints," the woman said, "when there"s no evidence of a crime having been committed."
"This may be nothing more than a practical joke," her partner said. "Chances are it"s someone you know having a bit of fun with you is all."
Fun, I thought. Look at us, falling down laughing.
"There"s no sign of the lock being messed with," he said. "Maybe someone you"ve given a key to came in, left this here, thought it belonged to you. Simple as that."
My eye went to the small, empty hook where we usually keep the extra key. The one Cynthia had noticed missing the other morning.
"Can you have an officer park out front?" Cynthia asked. "To keep an eye on the house? In case anyone tries to get in again? But just to stop them, see who it is, not hurt them. I don"t want you hurting whoever it is."
"Cyn," I said.
"Ma"am, I"m afraid there"s no call for that. And we don"t have the manpower to put a car out front of your house, not without good reason," the woman cop said. "But if you have any more problems, you be sure to give us a call."
With that, they excused themselves. And in all likelihood, got back in their car and had a good laugh at our expense. I could see us on the police blotter. Responded to report of strange hat. Everyone at the station would get a good chuckle out of that.
Once they were gone, we both took a seat at the kitchen table, the hat between us, neither of us saying a word.
Grace came into the kitchen, having slipped down the stairs noiselessly, pointed to the hat, grinned, and said, "Can I wear it?"
Cynthia grabbed the hat. "No," she said.
"Go to bed, honey," I said, and Grace toddled off. Cynthia didn"t release her grip on the hat until we went up to bed.
That night, staring at the ceiling again, I thought about how Cynthia had forgotten, at the last minute, to take along her s...o...b..x to the station for that disastrous meeting with the psychic. How she"d had to run back into the house, just for a minute, while Grace and I waited in the car.
How, even though I"d offered to run in and get the box for her, she beat me to it.
She was in the house a long time, just to grab a box. Took an Advil, she told me when she got back into the car.
Not possible, I told myself, glancing over at Cynthia, sleeping next to me.
Surely not.
14.
I had a free period, so I poked my head into Rolly Carruthers"s office. "I"m on a prep. You got a minute?"
Rolly looked at the stack of stuff on his desk. Reports from the board office, teacher evaluations, budget estimates. He was drowning in paperwork. "If you only need a minute, I"ll have to say no. If you need at least an hour, however, I might be able to help you out."
"An hour sounds about right."
"You had lunch?"
"No."
"Let"s go over to the Stonebridge. You drive. I may decide to get smashed." He slipped on his sport jacket, told his secretary he"d be out of the school for a while but she could reach him on his cell if the building caught fire. "So I"ll know that I don"t need to come back," he said.
His secretary insisted he speak to one of the superintendents, who was holding, so he signaled to me that he would be just a couple of minutes. I stepped outside the office, right in the path of Jane Scavullo, who was bearing down the hall at high speed, no doubt for a date to beat the s.h.i.t out of some other girl in the schoolyard.
The handful of books she was carrying scattered across the hallway. "f.u.c.king h.e.l.l," she said.
"Sorry," I said, and knelt down to help her pick them up.
"It"s okay," she said, scrambling to get to the books before I did. But she wasn"t quick enough. I already had Foxfire, Foxfire, the Joyce Carol Oates book I"d recommended to her, in my hand. the Joyce Carol Oates book I"d recommended to her, in my hand.
She s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from me, tucked it in with the rest of her stuff. I said, without a trace of I-told-you-so in my voice, "How are you liking it?"
"It"s good," Jane said. "Those girls are seriously messed up. Why"d you suggest I read it? You think I"m as bad as the girls in this story?"
"Those girls aren"t all bad," I said. "And no, I don"t think you"re like them. But I thought you"d appreciate the writing."
She snapped her gum. "Can I ask you something?"