He awoke confused by the sunlight. He never woke to sunlight, not in his apartment, not since the cage began coming. But there’d been no cage this past night.
He felt the floor for his phone. It was 8:15.
She shifted beside him.
Startled, he rolled over, thinking he was dreaming, hoping that the grandmother of all nightmares was over. Praying that Judith was there.
Aria’s eyes were wide open, fully awake.
He felt shame. ‘How the hell did we get here?’ he said.
A slow smile formed on her lips. ‘I’m not memorable?’
‘It’s not that, it’s …’ He stopped. Her face was simply and totally beautiful.
She smiled widely then, or, rather, she leered. ‘The living-room floor was too littered.’
‘What?’
‘You asked how we got here.’ She rolled on to the floor and stood up, magnificent now in only pearls. He remembered exactly how they’d gotten there.
She walked to his closet slowly, perhaps to not agitate the pearls, more likely to agitate his memory. ‘Why do you have nothing but white shirts?’
‘I got rid of most of my stuff.’
‘Everything even remotely festive?’
‘I was thinking of moving full-time to the dunes.’
‘And moving away from Chicago memories, I suspect,’ she said. She pulled a white shirt from a hanger. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, slipping it on with no haste at all.
‘In the cabinet above the stove.’
A moment later, she called from the kitchen. ‘It’s instant.’
‘The kettle is on the stove.’ He got up and slipped on trousers and yesterday’s shirt, wishing for the first time since Judith died that he had a blue shirt, or red, or one of any other color except white.
‘Yuck to instant.’ She came back into the bedroom, picked up her clothes and walked into the bathroom. ‘Real coffee is essential,’ she called through the door.
And so, now, would be searing regret, but he didn’t call that back to her.
She emerged, dressed, a moment later. They left the bedroom and began stepping across the files they’d scattered on the living-room floor.
He remembered then.
‘Peter Tanson,’ he said.
She looked at him, startled to realize he’d just now remembered. ‘Of course, Peter Tanson,’ she said. ‘Peter Tanson, thanks to me.’ She went out the door without a kiss or another word.
Peter Tanson. Horses, the Happy Times Stables, the vaguest note in one of his files. Peter Tanson.
He knelt to cram all the files into the boxes, in a hurry to stuff them away as worthless. All except one, but even that one was unnecessary to leave out. He’d never again forget the name.
Peter Tanson.
He sat on the love seat to rethink the evening. Not what came with Aria afterward, borne of an odd conflict of elation and desperation, a mix that kept them up so late that the cage hadn’t the time to come – but before.
He’d bought black Oxfords and a pair of socks at the shoe store down the block from the Pink, and then headed to meet her for dinner, as agreed, at a Chinese restaurant out by the highway. But, when he arrived, she was standing inside the door, holding a paper bag. General Tsao chicken, and pot stickers, fried rice and lemon chicken – takeout, she said, so she could see his wall of files. They got to his apartment at six thirty.
‘Minimalist,’ she’d said, stepping inside.
‘It used to have furniture,’ he said, of the living room.
‘Now it has only the love seat …’
‘Yes.’
‘And that tall wall of file boxes with a small television balanced on top.’ She went over to the boxes and began reading their labels. ‘“Discovery”,’ she began, and then, ‘“Autopsy” … “John Henderson, Senior: life and associates” …?’ She turned. ‘“Life and associates”?’
‘The father was in the building trades, a contractor. Not particularly wealthy, but successful enough, perhaps, to have angered someone along the way. It was a theory that went nowhere.’
‘Thorough you,’ she said. ‘What do you do with all these, exactly?’
‘Look for something I missed.’
‘Incessantly?’
‘I suppose.’
‘And now stables and Kevin Wilcox?’
‘I’m sure there’s no mention of them in any of the files.’
She pointed to the only item hung on the walls – the framed front page of the last edition of the Chicago Daily News, its headline bold: SO LONG, CHICAGO.
‘March 4, 1978. Neither of us was born yet.’ She turned to him. ‘This resonates with you?’
‘A eulogy, almost an elegy, written by the great Mike Royko.’
‘We read it in college,’ she said. ‘Do you ever wonder if one will be written for the Examiner?’
‘I fear we’ll just slip away unnoticed.’
They took down boxes and sat on the floor, resting their backs against the seat cushions of the love seat, and passed the four containers of Chinese food back and forth – she’d spurned his offer of paper plates and plastic forks, his only dinnerware – eating with chopsticks and looking through the files he’d looked through so many times before.
She found it at ten o’clock, faint and easily missed. ‘What about this kid, Peter Tanson?’
He didn’t remember the name.
‘On a list of Bobby Stemec’s classmates,’ she said, holding out a sheet. ‘You wrote horse rides next to his name.’
He looked at the list. ‘It was just a note, something I probably got from someone else. I didn’t make any connection.’
‘Nor should you have. Nobody had interest in horses or stables at that time.’
Something oily worked up his throat. ‘Anything in there about which stables … which stables …?’ He didn’t want to finish the thought, frightened at what he might have missed.
She fanned some papers, shook her head. ‘No. Just that one horse rides reference on a list of classmates.’ She smiled. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’
He got up and walked – horrified or ecstatic, he didn’t know – to the kitchen. A kid, one he’d never bothered to chase down, might have been linked to the Happy Times Stables; a kid who might have known something about Kevin Wilcox. A link – maybe the link – had been there, in the damned boxes, all the time, waiting for him to see it, to interview the kid, Peter Tanson, to learn maybe that Bobby and John and Anthony had gone riding at the Happy Times Stables the last damned day of their lives.
His hand shook as he took the Scotch from the cabinet. If he’d seen, maybe more kids – girls, this time – would be alive.
He poured two small Scotches and brought them back to the living-room floor. ‘Why is my gut sure Peter Tanson knew the boys went to Wilcox’s stables?’ he said, slumping down against the cushions.
‘Because you want it to be so, for closure, and because the Happy Times Stables is so close to Robinson Woods, and because Glet is so sure Wilcox links to the boys.’ She took one of the glasses. ‘How long do you expect to live like this?’ she asked, motioning with her free hand at the barren living room, littered now with folders strewn on the floor.
He looked around, trying to see it fresh with her eyes. ‘I haven’t wondered about that.’
‘You ought to store these boxes where it won’t be so easy to access them.’
‘If I had, you wouldn’t have come up with the name of a potential witness linking Wilcox to the boys, someone I should have found months ago.’
He wasn’t sure what happened next, whether she shifted, or he did, but their shoulders had touched. And, after a time, she touched his hand and they got up off the floor. It was to be a night of frightening new discoveries all around. Good or bad, he could not tell.
‘This way?’ she asked.
He nodded. They walked into the bedroom.
She laughed. ‘Don’t you have a bed?’
He tried to pretend confusion. ‘It’s that rectangle,’ he joked.
‘A mattress on the floor, no matter how neatly made up with a bedspread, does not make a proper bed.’ She turned to him, her face serious. ‘You’re still married, aren’t you?’
‘Very much.’
‘Oooh, risky,’ she said. ‘I’m here with a married man.’
Neither of them said anything more. The time for that, for him, had just passed.
Now, in the morning, she called three minutes after she left the apartment. ‘Turn on your television! Route 83, just south of Plainfield Road!’
‘What’s—?’
‘Maybe three clustered freckles,’ she screamed.