40

A Run through the Shadows

Ashley pushed against the headboard of her bed, placing her feet against the wood, so that she was back to front, feeling the muscles in her legs tighten until they began to shake with exertion. It was what she had done when she was young, when her body seemed to outdistance itself, and she was afflicted with “growing pains,” feeling as if her bones no longer fit into her skin. Sports, running hard in the afternoons, while Hope watched, had helped, but many nights she had tossed and turned in her bed, waiting for her body to grow into whoever it was she was going to become.

It was early, and the house was still filled with the occasional sounds of sleep. Catherine in the next room snored loudly. There wasn’t any stirring from either Sally or Hope, although late the night before, she had heard them talking. The words had been too distant for her to make out, but she presumed they had something to do with her. She hadn’t heard any muffled, hidden noises of affection in some time, and this troubled her. She very much wanted her mother to stay with Hope, but Sally had grown so distant in the past years, she was unsure what would happen. Sometimes she didn’t believe she could handle the emotional briars of another divorce, even one that was gentle. From experience she knew the “amicable divorce” doesn’t really make the internal pain any less.

For a moment, Ashley listened, then slowly let a few tears well up in the corners of her eyes. Nameless had always slept at the end of the hallway on a tattered dog bed just outside the master bedroom, so that he could be close to Hope. But often, when Ashley was young, he had sensed in that magical dog way when something was troubling her, and he would come down, uncalled, nose open the door to her room, and without any fuss take up a position on the carpet by her bureau. He would watch her until she would tell him whatever was bothering her. It was as if by reassuring the dog, she could reassure herself.

Ashley bit down on her lip. I’d shoot him myself, just for what he did to Nameless.

She kicked her feet off the bed and rose. For a moment, she let her eyes meander slowly over all the familiar items of her childhood. On one wall, surrounding a poster board, were dozens of her own drawings. There were snapshots of her friends, of herself dressed up for Halloween, on the soccer field, and ready for the prom. There was a large, multihued flag with the word PEACE in its center above an embroidered white dove. An empty bottle of champagne with two paper flowers in it signified the night her freshman year in college when she’d lost her virginity, an event she had secretly shared with Hope, but not her mother and father. She slowly let out her breath and thought to herself that all the things she could see in front of her were signs of who she had been, but what she needed to imagine was what she was going to become. She went to the shoulder bag hanging from the doorknob to her closet, reached in, and removed the revolver.

Ashley hefted it in her hand, then turned and assumed a firing position, aiming first at the bed. Slowly, one eye closed, she rotated, bringing the weapon to bear on the window. Fire all six shots, she reminded herself. Aim for the chest. Don’t jerk on the trigger. Keep the weapon as steady as possible.

She was a little afraid that she looked ridiculous.

He won’t be standing still, she thought. He might be rushing forward, trying to close the distance between himself and death. She reassumed her stance, widening her bare feet on the floor, lowering herself a couple of inches. She did measurements in her memory: How tall was O’Connell? How strong was he? How fast would he move? Would he plead for his life? Would he promise to leave her alone?

Shoot him in the goddamn heart, she told herself, if he has one.

“Bang,” she whispered out loud. “Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.”

She lowered the revolver to her side.

“You’re dead and I’m alive. And my life gets to go on,” she said softly, to make certain that no matter how troubled the sleep of the others was, they wouldn’t hear her. “No matter how damn bad it might seem, it will be better than this.”

Still gripping the gun, she sidled to the edge of the window. Concealing herself behind the curtains, she peered up and down the street. It was only a little past dawn, a weak half-light slowly bringing out shapes up and down the block of houses. It would be cold, she thought. There would be damp frost on the lawns. Too cold for O’Connell to have spent the night outside, keeping watch.

She nodded and replaced the gun in her satchel. Then she rapidly pulled tights, a black turtleneck, and a hooded sweatshirt from her drawers and grabbed her running shoes. She did not think that she would have many moments over the next few days when she could be alone, but this seemed to her to be one of them. As she tiptoed from the room, she had a twinge of regret, leaving the pistol behind. But she couldn’t really run with it, she thought. Too heavy. Too crazy.

The air was tinged with Canadian cold that had drifted down through Vermont. She closed the front door quietly and pulled a knit cap down over her ears, then took off fast up the street, wanting to get away from the house before anyone could tell her not to do what she was doing. Whatever risk was involved, it rapidly fled from Ashley’s thoughts as she accelerated hard, forcing her heartbeat to warm her hands, going fast enough to leave even the cold behind.

Ashley ran hard, seeming to keep up a rhythm to her thoughts. She let the pounding of her feet turn her anger into a sort of runner’s poetry. She was so fed up with being restricted and ordered around and constrained by her family and by her fears that she insisted to herself that she was willing to take a chance. Of course, she told herself, don’t be so stupid as to not make it difficult; she traveled an erratic, zigzag path.

What she wanted, she thought, was the luxury of acting rashly.

Two miles became three, then four, and the morning’s spontaneity dissolved into a steadiness that she hoped protected her. The wind was no longer cold and burning on her lips and drawn into her lungs, and she could feel sweat around her neck. When she turned and started back toward her home, she felt some fatigue, but not enough to slow her down. Instead, what she felt was an unsettled heat that burned inside her. She scanned the path ahead and suddenly saw movement. She was nearly overcome by the sensation that she was no longer alone. She shook her head and kept moving.

Some eight blocks from her house, a car sliced dangerously close by. She gasped, wanting to shout an obscenity, but kept running.

Six blocks from her house, a loud voice called out a name as she ran past. She could not tell if it was hers, and she didn’t turn to look, but started to move faster.

Four blocks from her house, someone nearby honked a car horn. The sound made her nearly jump out of her skin, and she started to sprint.

Two blocks from her house, she suddenly heard tires squealing behind her. She gasped for breath and, again, didn’t turn to investigate, but leaped from the roadway to the uneven cement sidewalk, broken up by tree roots that had pushed the surface into a ripple of cracks and breaks, like the unsettled surface of the ocean before a storm. The pavement seemed to snap at her ankles, and her feet complained with the difficulty. She ran harder. She wanted to close her eyes and tried to shut out all sounds. This was impossible, so she began humming to herself. She religiously kept her eyes straight ahead, refusing to turn in either direction, like a racehorse with blinders on, sprinting as fast as she could manage toward her home. She jumped across a flower bed and dashed across the lawn, almost slamming into the front door, before she stopped and slowly turned around.

She stared up, then down the street. She saw a man backing his car out of his driveway. Some laughing children overloaded with bulging backpacks heading toward a school bus stop. A woman with a long, bright green overcoat tossed over her nightgown, reaching down for the morning paper.

No O’Connell. At least nowhere that she could see.

She leaned her head back, gasping in drafts of cold air. Her eyes strayed across the morning normalcy and she gasped back a sob. In that moment, she realized that he no longer actually had to be present in order to be present.

         

From a spot a short ways down the street, Michael O’Connell feasted his vision upon Ashley as she stood hesitantly on the front porch of her mother’s house. He was sipping from a large coffee cup, hunched down behind the wheel of his car. He believed that if she knew how to look, she might see him, but he made little other effort to conceal himself. He simply waited.

He had considered, then dismissed, trying to stop her as she ran. The surprise might cause her to panic, and it would have been too easy for her to flee. She was far more familiar with the side streets and backyards of the neighborhood, and as quick as he was, he was unsure whether he could have caught her. But, more important, she might have screamed, gotten the attention of neighbors, and somebody might have called the police. If she had made a scene, he would have had to back down before he had a chance to speak with her. More than anything, what he did not want was to have to make some sort of explanation to some skeptical police officer as to what he was doing.

He had to find the right moment. Not this one, on the street where she’d grown up. It resonated her past. He was her future.

Easier, by far, he thought, to drink in her vision. He particularly liked watching her legs move. They were long and supple, and he wished that in their sole night together, he’d paid even more attention to them. Still, he was able to picture them, naked, glistening, and he shifted about in his seat as he felt the first heat of being aroused. He wished that Ashley would remove her knit cap, so that he could see her hair, and when he looked up and she did this, he smiled and wondered if he could send her all sorts of subliminal messages, directly from his thoughts to hers. It just reinforced in his mind how linked they were.

Michael O’Connell laughed out loud.

He could simply look at Ashley from afar and feel her warmth throughout his body. It was as if she energized him. He reached out, as if driven by passion, unable to sit still, and opened his door.

A short ways away, Ashley turned at that same moment and, without seeing the movement, filled with despair, stepped back into the house.

Michael O’Connell stood up, half in the car, one leg on the ground behind the door, staring at the spot where Ashley had disappeared. In his imagination, he could still see her.

Steal her, he said to himself.

It seemed so simple to him.

He smiled. It was just a matter of getting her alone.

Not exactly alone, he thought. But alone in his world. Not hers.

I am invisible, he thought, as he slid back into the car and pulled away from the curb.

He was wrong about this. From the window in her upstairs bedroom, Sally stood, watching. She gripped the window frame with white-knuckled fingers, close to breaking the wood, her nails digging into the paint. It was the first time she had seen Michael O’Connell in the flesh. When she’d first spotted the figure behind the wheel of the car, she had tried to tell herself that he wasn’t who she thought he was, but, in the same thought, knew she was deluding herself. It was him. It could be no one else. He was as close as he’d always been, right beyond their reach, shadowing Ashley’s every step. Even when she could not see him, he was there. She felt dizzy, enraged, and almost overcome by anxiety. Love is hate, she thought. Love is evil. Love is wrong.

She watched the car disappear down the street.

Love is death, she thought.

Breathing hard, she turned away from the window. She decided against instantly telling everyone that she’d spotted O’Connell on their street, only yards away from the front door, spying on Ashley. The family would be enraged, she thought. Angry people behave rashly. We need to be calm. Intelligent. Organized. Get to work. Get to work. Get to work. She turned back and found the pad of paper where she was making her notes. Notes for a murder. When she picked up her pencil, though, she noticed that her hand was quivering just slightly.

         

In the late afternoon, Sally went shopping for items she believed were integral to their task. It was not until early in the evening that she got back, checked once on Ashley, who appeared oddly bored, curled up on her bed reading, wondered where Hope was, as she listened to Catherine fiddle about in the kitchen, and then got around to calling Scott on the phone.

“Yes?”

“Scott? It’s Sally.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. We got through the day more or less without incident,” she said without mentioning that she had seen O’Connell lurking about their street that morning. “How much longer that will be the case, I have my doubts.”

“I understand that.”

“Good. I hope so. Because I think you should come over here now.”

“All right…” He hesitated.

“It’s time to act.” Sally laughed, but without humor, as if pricked by some deep cynicism. “It seems to me that we’ve agreed more in the past few weeks than we ever did when we were actually married.”

Scott, too, smiled ruefully. “That is a strange way of looking at things. Maybe. But when we were together, well, there were times it wasn’t that bad.”

“You weren’t living a lie like I was.”

“Lie is a strong word.”

“Look, Scott, I don’t want to fight over past fights again, if that makes sense.”

For a moment they remained silent, then Sally added, “We’re getting sidetracked. This isn’t about where we were, it’s about where we can go or even who we are. And most important, it’s about Ashley.”

“Okay,” Scott said, feeling that some huge swamp of emotions was between them that was never spoken of and never would be.

“I have a plan,” Sally blurted.

“Good,” he said after taking a deep breath. He wasn’t sure that he meant that.

“I don’t know if it is a good one. I don’t know if it will work. I don’t know if we can pull it off.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“We shouldn’t be talking on the phone. At least not on these lines.”

“Right. Of course not. That makes sense.” He wasn’t at all sure why this made sense, but he said it anyway. “I’ll be over straightaway.” He hung up the phone and thought that there was something awful in the routines of life. Teaching, living alone with all the ghosts of statesmen, soldiers, and politicians that made up his courses, his existence was completely predictable. He guessed that that was going to change.

         

Hope returned to the house before Scott arrived. She had been out walking, trying without much luck to sort through all that was happening. She found Sally in the living room, poring over some loose sheets of paper, pencil stuck in her mouth. She looked up when Hope entered.

“I have a plan. I’m not sure it will work. But Scott’s coming over and we can go over it together.”

“Where are my mother and Ashley?”

“Upstairs. Not at all pleased with being banned from the conversation.”

“My mother doesn’t appreciate being excluded from things, which is a curious position for someone who has spent much of her adult life living in the woods in Vermont, but there you have it. That’s the way she is.” Hope hesitated, and Sally looked up as if she heard a catch in Hope’s voice.

“What is it?”

Hope shook her head. “I don’t know exactly, but try to follow me on this. She’s doing what we ask her to, right? Well, that’s just not her style. Not in the slightest. She’s always been a lone-wolf type, the I don’t give a damn what other people think sort of person. And her seeming compliance…well, I’m not sure that we should rely on her ever doing exactly what we ask her to. She’s just a bit of a loose cannon. It’s what my dad always loved about her, and me, too, except, upon occasion, growing up, it made things, well, difficult, if you catch my drift.”

Sally smiled. “Are you all that different?”

Hope shrugged, but laughed in response. “I guess not.”

“And don’t you think that I might have been attracted to those qualities, as well?”

“I never thought of stubborn and unpredictable as my best sides.”

“Well, just goes to show what you know.” Sally managed a small grin as she dipped her head to the paperwork spread out on her lap.

The two women were both silent. Oddly, Hope thought, it was the first affectionate thing Sally had said in weeks.

There was a knock on the door. “That will be Scott,” Sally said. She gathered her papers together as Hope went to let him in. In the second or two of solitude, she put her head back and took in a deep breath. Once you start this thing moving, there will be no going back.

         

Catherine fumed inwardly. She looked across at the younger woman, until finally Ashley dashed her book to the floor after reading the same page for the third time and said, “I don’t know if I can stand this much longer. I’m being treated like a six-year-old. Being sent to my room. Told to keep myself occupied while my parents map out my future. God damn it, Catherine, I’m not a baby! I can fight for myself.”

“I agree, dear,” Catherine said.

“You know, I should take that damn pistol and just solve this problem once and for all.”

“I believe, Ashley, dear, that’s in some ways what your parents are trying to avoid. And I didn’t get you that gun so that you could go off and use it willy-nilly, just because you’re pissed off. I got it so that you could protect yourself, if O’Connell came after you.”

Ashley leaned her head back. “He has, you know.”

“Has what, dear?”

“He’s come after me. He’s probably outside right now. Just waiting.”

“Waiting, dear?”

“For the right moment. He’s crazy. Crazy in love. Crazy obsessed. Crazy I don’t know what. But he’s there. He has only one thing of any importance in his life, and it is me.”

Catherine nodded. She suddenly leaned forward. “Can you do it?”

Ashley opened her eyes and stared across the room, first fixing on Catherine, then on the shoulder bag that contained the pistol.

“Can you do it?” Catherine repeated.

“Yes,” Ashley answered stiffly. “I can. I can. I know it.”

“I couldn’t. I should have. With the shotgun when he was right across from me. I should have. But I didn’t. Can you be stronger than I was, dear? Can you be more determined? Are you braver?”

“I don’t know. But, yes. I think so.”

“I need to know.”

“How can anyone know, until they actually do it? I mean, I’m angry enough. Maybe scared enough. But can I pull the trigger? I think so.”

“I imagine you could,” Catherine said. “At least maybe you could. The chances are, you could. It’s dark out. Are you convinced he’s out there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you could end it all by putting the pistol in your jacket pocket and taking a walk with me around midnight. And when he tried to stop us, you act. He might say he just wants to talk with you, that’s what they always say. But instead of talking you just shoot him. Right there. Right then. The police will come and probably arrest you. And then we can have your mother hire the best attorney. Take your chances in a court of law. It’s not exactly as if this community, where your mother and Hope live, is particularly predisposed to giving men—and especially men who have been stalking a young woman—much leeway. Or, for that matter, the benefit of any doubt whatsoever.”

“You think…”

“I think you can do it if you’re willing to pay the price.”

“Prison?”

“Maybe. Notoriety. Being the poster child for every person with some other agenda, which will surely happen, just as your folks have predicted it would. But it might be worth it.”

Ashley rocked her head back. “I can’t stand this for much longer. One minute I’m terrified. The next I’m furious. I feel safe one second. Then threatened the next.”

“Why can’t we be violent before they are violent towards us?” Catherine said fiercely. “Why is that so goddamn unfair? Why do we have to wait to be a victim?”

“I’m not going to.”

“Good. I didn’t think so. So, let’s consider what we can do.”

Ashley nodded her head in agreement.

         

Scott looked at several small piles of items collected in the living room. “You’ve been shopping.”

“Indeed,” Sally said.

“You want to go over it for us?” Scott picked up and fiddled with a box of ammonia-based Handi Wipes. “Like these?”

Sally was quiet, even-toned. “If one thought they had left a DNA sample in a compromising location, they could swipe it down with these, eradicating any trace evidence.”

Scott blew out his cheeks. He was almost dizzy. Handi Wipes, he thought. Part of a murder weapon.

Sally watched her ex-husband and could feel him wavering. She continued solidly, “As best as I can deduce, what we have agreed to do is bring O’Connell and his father together. We can do that. Scott more or less inadvertently has given us a way. And I think we can presume they will have words. We’ve been over that. Then we must find a way to steal O’Connell’s own weapon, use it, as he presumably would, on his father, and return it to O’Connell’s hideaway before he realizes it is missing.”

“Why not just leave it at the, ah, crime scene?” Scott asked.

“I thought of that,” Sally replied. “But it will be the crucial piece of evidence. The police and the prosecution just love finding the murder weapon. It’s what they will build their theory around. It will be the item that is incontrovertible in a court of law. To be sure, it, more than anything else, needs to be discovered in his control.”

“What are these other things?” Hope asked.

Sally looked over at the gathered items. There were several cell phones, a tube of Super Glue, a portable computer, a size-small men’s coverall, two boxes of surgical gloves, several pairs of surgical bootees that could be pulled over a pair of shoes, two black, tight-fitting balaclava face and head cover-ups, and a Swiss Army knife. “They are what we need, as best as I can tell. There are some other things that would be really useful, as well, like some hair from a comb in O’Connell’s apartment, maybe. I’m still fitting pieces together.”

“What’s the computer for?” Scott asked.

Sally sighed. She turned to Hope. “That’s the same make and model that you saw in O’Connell’s apartment, right?”

Hope examined the machine. “Yes. As best as I can tell. At least, that’s what I remember.”

“Well,” Sally said, “you said that his computer contains encrypted material about Ashley. And about us. This one doesn’t.”

Hope nodded. “I think I see.”

“The police will seize his computer. I’d rather have it be one that we’d prepared for that circumstance.”

“Switch them?”

“Correct. It will just erase a link between us and him. He’s probably got backup somewhere, with all the stuff about Ashley and us, but still…Timing will be critical.”

She handed each of them a sheet of yellow legal-pad paper. At the top she had drawn a timeline.

Hope stared down at the paper. Sally had delineated tasks, events, actions, but had marked each with an A, B, or C. When she looked up, she saw that Sally was watching her.

“You haven’t assigned roles,” Hope said. “You’ve got three people doing interrelated things, but you haven’t yet said who does what.”

Sally leaned back in her chair, trying to remain composed. “I have tried to think of this from the position of a modern police officer,” she said. “You have to consider what they will find, and how they will interpret it. Crimes are always about a certain logic. One thing should lead them to the next. They have modern techniques, like DNA analysis and forensic weapons studies and all sorts of capabilities that we only know about peripherally. I’ve tried to think of as many of these as I could and remember what screws up investigations. Fire, for example, makes a mess of things—but it doesn’t necessarily destroy firearms forensics. Water compromises all sorts of wounds and DNA, ruins fingerprints. Our problem is that we want to commit a crime, a violent crime, but we want to leave a trail. Not a perfect trail, but enough of one that leads in the direction we want. The police will, if we’re careful, do the rest, even without a confession from O’Connell.”

“What if he points the police in our direction?”

“We must be prepared for that. We can, to some degree, create alibis for each other. But mainly, we must make it seem unreasonable. That’s the trick. Far better that the police simply not believe anything he says—which is what they will be inclined to do—and try to ride out any attention that comes our way. Don’t underestimate how unlikely it is that we are doing what we are about to do. And police, well, they really like simple answers to simple questions. Even simple questions about death.”

Sally paused, staring first at Scott, then Hope.

“But I don’t think he will,” Sally said.

“Will what?”

“Point the police at us. If we do this right, he won’t know.”

Scott nodded. “But, you know, I was there, asking questions. Someone is likely to remember me.”

“That’s why at some key point you will have to be miles away doing something in someone else’s presence. Like using a credit card and making a complaint someplace where there is a video camera. But on the other hand, it’s probably critical that you’re close by, as well.”

Scott sat back hard. “I see that, but…”

“The same is true for Ashley and Catherine. Although they will have a role to play.”

Again the others remained silent.

Sally took a deep breath. “Which brings us to the crucial question. The actual crime. I’ve thought about this, and I think it will have to be me.”

She waited for someone to say something, but no one did.

“I’ll have to get the gun,” Hope said. “I’m the one who knows where it is. I’ve got the key.”

“Yes. But you were there once before. You have the same problem that Scott has. No, someone else has to get the gun. You can tell me where.”

Hope nodded, but Scott shook his head.

“That’s, of course, assuming it remains where you saw it. Which is a big assumption.”

Sally coughed, then said, “Yes, but if we cannot recover the gun, we’re only partially committed. We can still pull back, then come up with a secondary plan on a new day.”

Scott was still shaking his head. “Okay, if we steal the gun. And then get it to you…what makes you think you can handle a weapon? Especially under these circumstances?”

“I’ll just have to. It’s my job, I think.”

Hope shook her head. “I don’t know about that. It seems to me that there is a certain danger—I’m trying to be like you, Sally, and think like a policeman—in Ashley’s mother committing the crime. That might make sense to a cop, you know. Protecting your child. But I doubt that any cop would think that the mother’s partner would perform this act. In other words, my distance from Ashley, her not being my own child, my own blood, protects me from inquiries, don’t you think? And I’m younger, quicker, and stronger, in case there is some actual running involved in all this.”

Both Scott and Sally stared at her. Both could see what she was about to say, but neither could muster the words to prevent her from saying it.

Hope tried to smile through a cloud of her own doubt. “No,” she said slowly, “it should be me with that gun in my hand.”

This time, I was sure I could hear a catch in her voice.

“Do you ever wonder how much of life can change in a second? So many things seem small, yet they become large.”

It was close to midnight, and she had surprised me by calling.

“Do you think,” she asked abruptly, “that we make better choices in the dark, alone, at night, when we lie in bed and try to sort through a sea of troubles? Or is it wiser to wait until morning, when there is daylight and clarity? I wonder what sort of decisions they were making,” she said slowly. “Night decisions? Day decisions? You tell me.”

I didn’t answer. I thought she wasn’t really looking for a response, but she persisted.

“I mean, how would you characterize it? You’re the writer. Was this wise? Were they taking steps that were difficult, but necessary? Or were they acting foolishly? What were the odds of success? Or of failure? They were all such reasonable people, about to embark on the least reasonable of courses.”

I said nothing as she stifled a sob.

“I have a name for you,” she said quickly, taking me by surprise. “It will, I suspect, bring you a little closer.”

I waited, pen ready, saying nothing, imagining everything.

“The end,” she said. “Can you see it? Let me put it to you this way: do you think they were prepared for the unexpected?”

“No. Who ever truly is?”

She laughed, but then the sound seemed to turn to tears. It was hard to tell over the phone line.