MAY AND ME

The fire engines had come late.  The place was beyond saving, the fire, at its peak intensity, having already consumed most of the building.  Sprawling isolated in its three-acre, shore-line lot, the huge house burned rapidly, the firemen putting up a cordon and taking their water from Northern Boulevard, some several hundred yards away.  It was only when the building was gone that they began hosing it down.  Later, very little stood—lower portions of the walls here and there, the stone hearth and a piece of chimney, the steps at the front door.  When I arrived, morning was well along, and investigators in rubber boots were walking within, poking into the wet ashes.  They were looking for whatever evidence remained of the origin of the fire, and for human remains.  Oakley and his wife were reportedly at home, and since no one had heard from them, the fire marshal feared the worst.

     I didn’t know what to make of it.  I had only just arrived at LaGuardia.  Since Oakley wasn’t there to meet me and didn’t answer when I called his home, I rented a car and came out.  He was expecting me.  I wasn’t expecting this.  I asked what they were doing poking amid the ashes, and I hoped of course, when I learned, their search would come up negative.  I half expected it would.  But I also feared the worst.  I came at Oakley’s call, he needed me, he said, and sounded down.  I came as soon as I could—the next day, really.  He knew I was coming.  If the fire was accidental, he just might be lying in there, both him and his wife. 

     If.  I say “if,” because I suspected it wasn’t.  An accident, that is.  Oakley was down.  That’s why he called me.  Oakley wasn’t the type to do this to himself.  Not on purpose.  He might have been down, but he was not the suicidal type.  On the other hand, he wasn’t the type to get caught in a burning house, either.  He was too smart.  An accident might have got him, I’d have to admit it.  Though I doubted it.  If the fire started at night, even while they were sleeping, he wouldn’t have been trapped in it.  His and Elyse’s bedroom was on the ground floor and had sliding doors onto the brick arbor-covered patio, the one that faced the dock and the Sound.  All they had to do was step out and they would be safe.  No.  Their dying in the fire seemed unlikely to me.  That left a couple other possibilities—and I wasn’t going to find out about them by hanging around here.  What to do now?  I scanned the dock Oakley was so fond of and the Sound beyond.  It was still early and the surface of the water quivered a silver light.  It all looked so normal.  Oakley’s boat was still hoisted into the boathouse under the canvas awning.  I supposed I should go home. 

     I asked myself what Oakley would expect me to do.  Get a motel room somewhere?  Go back to the airport?  He would expect me to hang around.  Yes.  He would expect me to be here when his kids came.  If Oakley is up to something, I thought, that’s what he’d expect.  And if he’s not, I supposed I should be here for the kids, at the least.  So I reconciled myself to a long day.  His daughter and son were already informed.  I asked the fire marshal, of course.  They would be here in a couple hours.  I had time to drive somewhere for breakfast and to call May (I don’t own a cell phone).  The fire marshal said they expected the investigators to work till at least noon.  That means they would be here when the kids came.  Good.  I wanted that.  I left, feeling odd.  Such a sense of conspiracy and duplicity overtook me, looking at the ashes, I literally tingled.

                  

***

Losing your livelihood may well be the worst thing that can happen in a world as gone to pot as our own.  Every generation in this country, calculating from day one, has seen change, dramatic change at that.  Coping with change may well be our most persistent tradition.  But change is not always “progress.”  Change is good when it is.  For example, remember Rip, that good-for-nothing roustabout, who’d rather play with the village’s kids and dogs than sow his fields? 

     In Rip’s day, Ben Franklin preached hard work and self-discipline as the way to wealth.  Rip was his opposite, finding more worth in life’s distractions than in moneymaking.  Anyway, you all know his story.  He goes squirrel hunting in the mountains, falls asleep, and wakes up twenty years later.  The whole world had changed while he slept.  This was change for the better, constructive change.  He fell asleep a subject of the King of England and woke a long-bearded citizen of the United States of America, which nevertheless didn’t mean enough to change him personally.  He lived to the end of his days the same disconnected roustabout he always was. 

     What has all this to do with Oakley and his house burning down?  Actually, it has more to do with me.  Oakley was not the Rip Van Winkle type.  I have always been, however.  The times they were achangin’, but these last many years I’ve felt like the carefree Rip who had come back from his slumber a little ridiculous and out of touch with the world.  I’m not unique.  Many people are just like me.  I’m not a Luddite, either.  I’m just set in my ways and have no use for the shortcuts technology makes possible.  Shortcuts?  These have a way of taking over and making chop-chop of you.  I still have that old-fashioned sense of “use.”  What helps me I use.  What doesn’t, I don’t.  But the world doesn’t live that way anymore.  But why go on?  Anyway, I’m retired, which means I don’t work anymore, except when I can’t stand being retired, which means I generally look forward to the office calling me in when they get backlogged.  It’s not so much loss of livelihood as, not being engrossed, loss of that stress one loves to be distracted from.  When one is actually living like Rip, old Ben can seem inordinately wise.

     I knew Oakley most of his life.  We went to college together, and though I wasted those years mooning about aimlessly, Oakley prepared single mindedly for a career.  Ten years after college, he was way ahead of me in terms of earnings and position.  But that’s a never-mind, since most people were way ahead of me in terms of earnings and position.  I didn’t use that Rip analogy for nothing.  Though, to tell the truth, I’m not quite the waster of time Rip was.  As I said, I do share with Rip, which Oakley didn’t, a love of distraction and could take a moment out of a busy day to toss a paper airplane out a window.  I would much rather get home with enough time left in the day to play with the kids than drive myself relentlessly for those additional zeros on the W2 form.

     We stayed in touch, Oakley and I.  We were friends, and that never changed.  But we became different kinds of people.  I never had his drive.  Oakley was the kind of person who put in an hour jogging before going to work.  I would drop dead before doing that.  Oakley wore fifteen-hundred dollar suits, I wore twenty dollar khakis and a tweed jacket.  Oakley kept trim through all that exercise and never watched his diet.  I kept trim through careful eating.  But these were superficial differences. 

     The real differences between us were of another nature altogether.  These were—how else to name them?—class differences.  We started out the same as far as that goes—working parents, tract housing, neighborhood public schools.  The class differences came later.  These had to do with who we married, where we lived, the schools our kids went to, the social circles we spent our lives in.  The one thing about Oakley that never changed, though, was our friendship.  And when his world collapsed, that was all he had left.  But it wasn’t enough.

It was tax time, the beginning of April, and I had gone back to the office to help out.  May was working anyway, since she had moved up from gift shop manager to director of the museum and was putting in full days all week long.  The receptionist beeped me and said I had a call from New York.  I expected it was Oakley, since my brother and sisters never called.  When I spoke with them, it was always at my initiative.  Oakley did call every once in a while, usually with some news about the family—his daughter was getting married and could I come to the wedding, or his son is graduating and might I make some time to visit? 

    May and I liked going to his place.  He had that immense house in Westbury, Long Island, right on the Sound.  Of course, there was a boathouse and a dock with huge green and white striped awnings over them, and nearly ground enough to play golf.  The house was dark cedar on the outside with rambling multitier slate roofs and six bedrooms, room enough for May and me and the kids when we visited.  It was Oakley, all right.  But my pleasure at the sound of his voice was dampened by its tone.  He sounded down. 

     He needed to open a bottle of cognac, he said, and share it with a friend.  Could I come?  I said sure.  This was rush time in my little office, but I had already separated myself from the business and was only helping out.  I could get away, I told him.  Come now, he said.  I told him I’d try to fly into LaGuardia the next day and that I’d call him back and let him know for sure.

     First I called May at the museum and told her that something was up with Oakley and that I needed to go to New York.  She said go.  You have to, that’s what friends are for, and not to worry about her.  Good ol’ May.  So I made the flight arrangements and called him back and he sounded so relieved, I started to really worry.  Things must be going badly for him, and I wondered what.  I expected his problems were domestic—his marriage falling apart, perhaps, though Elyse, his wife, was always as solid a spouse as May has been.  I couldn’t imagine what his trouble was.  As I got in the rental car and steered round the hoses the firemen were winding up and crept down the long wooded lane to Northern Boulevard, I was even more perplexed.

I needed a place where I could find a phone and some privacy.  Figuring I wouldn’t be returning to South Dakota that day and would need a room for the night at least, I decided to look for a motel that had it’s own restaurant.  I knew I’d find one sooner or later on Northern Boulevard, so I just drove west, toward the city, and trusted in something coming up.  Something did—a huge multi-story hotel-like Ramada Inn.  It was early, yet, only 10 a.m., and I had no trouble getting a room.  I wouldn’t have anyway.  It was Good Friday, and most people stay home for Easter. 

     I dialed May from the room.  I expected her to be alarmed by what happened, and I expected, also, that she’d want to come.  For reasons I couldn’t really explain, I would have to persuade her not to.  I knew she’d want to.  She can sometimes be stubborn, and at times like this—that is, in times of emergencies—she pretty much takes her own council and does what she thinks she needs to.  I didn’t want her here because I knew if she came she would dismiss my suspicions.  Something was wrong.  I mean, I was all atingle with the feeling that things were not what they appeared.  Oakley was trying to tell me something, and I would miss it if she were here.  I was convinced there was a connection between Oakley’s calling yesterday and what was happening now.  He wanted me here for some reason, and it wasn’t to share a bottle of cognac.

     If Oakley and Elyse did die in that fire, May would want to be here for the kids’ sake, and there’d be no stopping her.  Fine.  If that were the case, I would want her here.  She’s better at handling these things than I am.  As the phone rang, I thought how I was going to explain my doubts about what seemed to have happened.  She answered with her usual, “Hello, this is your community art center, how can I help you?”

     I said, “Hello, May, listen, I have some bad news.”

     And she said before I had a chance to go on, “I can’t believe it’s you!  The strangest thing just happened.  Not two minutes ago Oakley called.  The phone rang and it was him.  I’m sure of it.  I heard a voice that sounded like him.  I’m sure it was him.  He said, ‘Look for me in the market.  I’ll be there next Friday,’ and hung up!  It was so strange, no ‘Hello, May, how are you?’  I was that puzzled I wanted to call him back to find out if it was him and what he meant, only you know I don’t remember numbers.  I was actually getting ready to go home and dig out the address book, and then you call!”

     I told her what I found when I got here and about Liz and Franklyn coming and that I was going back to the house to wait for them. 

     “What does it mean?” she asked.  She sounded afraid, and I told her I wasn’t surprised she got that message from Oakley. 

     “It’s so cryptic!” she said.  “What does he mean by ‘the market’?”

     “I’m not sure,” I admitted.  “Maybe we’ll hear from him again.  In the meantime, I’ll think about it.  Maybe the kids know what he means.  Anyway, I’ll be able to give them some peace of mind.”

     The breakfast hours were pretty much over, and there were no diners at the tables.  No waitress was around either.  I just walked in and took a seat at a table in the middle of the floor so someone would notice me.  It worked.  During breakfast I thought about what Oakley meant by “the market.”  Perhaps he meant Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange.  That was a stretch, I thought.  I tried to recall places we had been to.  Anyplace that might fit that description.  It was a mystery.  I couldn’t think of any place.  Maybe Liz or Franklyn would know.  Maybe that call to May was his way of getting a message to them. 

     I was gone about an hour and a half.  When I returned, two men and a woman were on their haunches digging into the debris on that side of the house by the brick patio.  They had to be, I thought, right inside Oakley’s bedroom.  They were lifting bits of things out of the wreckage and dropping them into plastic bags.  My stomach dropped.  I saw the fire marshal and dipped under the yellow tape stretched between the trees.  I called to him as I approached.  He didn’t look happy to see me, but he didn’t press me to leave.  I asked him what they were finding.  I had already told him I was a close friend of the Banks’ and reminded him that I was waiting for their son and daughter to arrive.  He spoke consolingly.  Apparently, they were finding teeth and bone fragments from two bodies.  

     I half stumbled back to the car, opened the door, and leaned into the seat.  It was nearing noon and the sky was clear.  The remains of the house were bright in the sun, and the trees around—maples and ash—were not yet leafed out and so cast little shade.  It wasn’t them.  Couldn’t be them.  May--?  Could she have been wrong?  I couldn’t believe it.  Oakley called her.  He was alive, at least.  Whose remains were they finding, then?  Possibilities came arush, possibilities I refused to accept.  I put them out of mind.  Oakley wasn’t a murderer.  Elyse wasn’t a cheater.  Something else was going on.  I was certain Oakley would have said something to May if he thought Elyse was killed in the fire.  If he knew about the fire.  But why be so cryptic if he didn’t?  I had a feeling Oakley was nearby, and Elyse was with him.  But whose remains were they finding in the ashes?

Franklyn was the first to arrive.  He came up the lane from the boulevard in his own car, a gold Lexus.  I got out of the rental and waved and he wheeled in beside me.  When he got out, he came over and gave me a hug, looking grim.  Franklyn was three years younger than his sister, just turning thirty.  He was slender and nice looking but something of a twit.  By that I mean he was excessively self-conscious, or should I say, image-conscious.  Impeccably and expensively dressed, he had a way of looking you over and letting you know he was comparing.  He had that kind of smile that made me want to smack him.  He was also one of those young men of privilege who couldn’t find a direction in life and lived off his parents’ largesse.  He was always planning some kind of “career move” or coming up with a “business idea.”  But nothing ever came of his first-blush enthusiasm. 

     I didn’t dislike Franklyn.  He was fine as a boy, and well mannered enough as a man, making allowances, and he could be earnest when occasion called.  I often warmed to him.  I wondered what he knew about what had happened here.  Looking at the grimness in his face, I guessed he didn’t know much.  I wanted to wait till his sister arrived before talking about his father’s call to May.  But Franklyn looked distraught and I felt for him.  I took him by the upper arms and shook him and said things would be OK. 

     He said, “It’s all gone.  I can’t believe it.”

     “Have you heard from your father?” I asked.

     He didn’t answer right away, looking away from me, and looking guilty as hell, too.  He told me more in that moment than he knew.  I could see clearly I was wrong in my first impression.

     “We talk a couple times a week,” he said.

     “I mean, have you heard from him today?”  I pushed.  Again, a long silence, his looking uncertain arousing me even more.  Poor Franklyn, I thought, he wants to say something but was probably told by his father not to.  What came so strongly to me then was, why am I here?  Oakley literally arranged this scene between Franklyn and me, and I suspected he even foresaw this conversation.  I was getting nervous, Franklyn was giving me butterflies. 

     “They’re finding remains in there, now,” I said.  “Two people, in your parents’ bedroom.  What do you think?” I asked him directly, looking into his face.

     “What do you mean?” he said.

     “I mean, do you think those remains are your parents?”

     “Who else?” he said. 

     He had such a look in his face, I could just tell he was lying, or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, trying not to tell what he knew.  He did still look grim, and he was pale, and that seemed genuine.  I didn’t know what to make of him.  He was not carrying this off well. 

     “I wonder if anybody’s got in the basement,” he said, looking at the remains of the house.

     “Why do you ask?” I replied, staring in the same direction.

     “Just wondering,” he said.

     I got a bad taste just then.  I thought I knew what he was thinking, and the wastrel side of him started to show.  Damn, I said to myself, now’s not the time for that.

     There was a side to Oakley he let few people know.  He had taken me once to see his little “shop” in the basement.  We never talked about it afterwards.  There was a repressed side of him he used to give expression to when he had the rare combination of time and inclination, an artistic side, which he, utilitarian that he was, turned to practical use.  He made jewelry.  He made his own molds and had the furnace for melting metals, the small lead pots, the files, odd-shaped pliers, buffers, even that eyepiece jewelers wear when they work over their desks.  He kept small gold and silver ingots and a substantial variety of gems stored in a safe on his workbench.  The pendants, brooches, bracelets, rings he made were impressively attractive.  He took me down there on that occasion when he gave a lapel pin to May.  I suspected Franklyn hankered for that loot.  Having that on his mind at a time like this angered me, and I was about to say something about it when he ducked under the yellow tape and ran to the house.

     Before the fire marshal could stop him, he leaped onto the foundation wall, stepped up into the house, and, picking his path gingerly through the blackened debris, disappeared down the stairs into the basement.  The fire marshal shouted after him and followed to the steps Franklyn had gone down, but instead of descending, he stood there calling after him. 

     “Give me a hand,” I heard coming up from below.

     “I’m not going down there,” the fire marshal shouted down at him.  “You crazy bastard, what the hell do you need?”

     When no reply came, the fire marshal shouted again, “What do you need down there?  A ladder?  Do you need a ladder?”

     Then I saw Franklyn’s head pop up above the floor.  He shouted at me, “It’s all here, intact.  C’mon and help me.”

     I had ducked under the tape behind Franklyn but didn’t climb up onto the floor of the house.  Ignoring the fire marshal, he waved at me urgently, pleadingly, to come and help.  I shouted no and told him to leave that stuff where it was.

     The fire marshal then came to me and asked what it was Franklyn had found.  I told him.  He was livid.  In an instant he had flipped out his walkie-talkie, which sat in a leather holster on his belt, and asked for a patrol car.  Franklyn’s head reappeared above the floor, and I could see he was breaking his back lifting, getting the safe up one step at a time.  He got it to the top by himself when the fire marshal helped him shove it onto the floor.

     “This is my father’s stuff,” he said, out of breath.  “He’d want us to save it.  It has sentimental value.”

     I laughed.  Franklyn, Franklyn, I said to myself, you’re so transparent.  But he was deadly serious and began shouting, “This is mine, I’m not leaving it, this is mine.”  The fire marshal tried to push him back.  I could see this was going to end badly, so I climbed up into the house and picked my way over to them.  Franklyn was almost in tears when I reached them.  Then we saw the patrol car through the trees creeping up the lane.  Franklyn had gone limp.  I looked at the safe and wondered about it.  Again, I had that feeling that something was wrong, that more was going on than I knew.  What was in that safe? 

     We had gathered around my rental car to talk with the cop.  Franklyn didn’t like what the cop had to say.  I had tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen.  He was told he couldn’t just walk off with things.  All valuables would go into probate and the courts would control everything, at least until his parents’ situation had been resolved.  Franklyn was filthy, smudged all over, his clothes blackened, shoes mucky.  Was all this effort just an impulse?  A sudden itch to get something before his sister got here?  I looked at him.  He seemed distraught.  Seemed.  I had a feeling it was an act.  If it was, he deserved applause. 

     The cop had gone and the fire marshal and his crew were wrapping up.  We were hanging out by our cars, Franklyn sitting morosely on the driver’s seat of my rental, staring across at the house and, I guess, at the safe still where he had wrestled it out of the basement.  His legs hung out of the car, his now spoiled shoes just touching the gravel.  I heard that godawful tinging sound.  It was his cell phone, and it’s signal sounded like it came from his crotch.  He leaped up and turned his back to me, and for all the world it looked like he was fishing in his fly for the phone.  He was wearing an olive cord jacket unbuttoned, and I suppose the phone was in a case attached to his belt.  With his back to me I heard him say, “Yes.  Ok, OK.”  Then, his back still to me, he folded it into its little holster.  Privacy in the modern world!  He turned and said it was Liz and that she’d be here in fifteen minutes or so.

Those remains they found in the bedroom—routine DNA tests would tell if they were Oakley and Elyse.  That bothered me.  As we waited for Liz, Franklyn, who had gone to his own car, sat quietly behind the wheel, and I thought about those remains.  Medical examiners would want swabs from both Liz and Franklyn, and then the jig would be up for Oakley.  It was a big problem if what I was thinking was true.  A piece was missing, had to be.  Oakley has to know this.  He can’t be faking his and Elyse’s death.  I tried to separate what I knew for certain from what I was feeling and guessing.

     What I knew is that Oakley is alive, that he called May this morning with a cryptic message that I can’t for the life of me understand—understand the why of it, that is.  Why Oakley felt he had to be so cryptic.  The house burned and apparently two people’s remains were found in it.  I hesitated to say to myself that two people died in the fire.  That I didn’t know.  Oakley called me yesterday morning and asked me to come here “to share a bottle of cognac.”  This is what I knew.

     What I felt and what I guessed—a dark conspiracy is afoot, possibly involving Franklyn, perhaps even Liz, and I am being used somehow.  Somehow, my being here is part of it.

     The fire marshal and his investigators were gone now.  They had hauled the safe to the trunk of the fire marshal’s red car, and one of the investigators had gone into the basement, dangerous though it was, to take a look around for any other spoils Franklyn might try to pillage after they left.  Finding nothing else, they drove off, leaving us to ourselves.  I was standing under the trees near the yellow tape, gazing out at the Sound, and Franklyn was listening to a CD now, his body bobbing and swaying.  I really wanted to smack him.

     It was nearing half-past twelve when Liz turned off Northern Boulevard onto the lane leading up to the house.  I could see she was alone.  As she approached, it occurred to me that that was strange.  I just naturally expected she’d be with her husband.  I tried to imagine the  conversation between them:

     “Richard, I just got word that my childhood home burned to the ground and my mother and father might have been inside.  I think I’ll take off and go have a look.”    

     “Sure, dear.  Let me know what you find out.” 

     Franklyn didn’t have anybody.  His coming alone, I guess, is natural, expected.  But Liz?  I’ve known her all her life.  Has the world changed that much as I dreamed away my life in South Dakota?  Somehow, I doubted it.  I decided not to ask Liz directly why she came alone but to just listen and observe the both of them and keep my own council.

     She pulled in slowly alongside her brother.  He turned off the music and got out of the Lexus and she got out of her car and they embraced.  From where I stood under the trees, I couldn’t hear what they said.  She released herself from his hold and came toward me.  I half held my breath as she raised her arms to give me a hug.  She had a puzzled look as I let her hug me.  Then she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me away at arms length, looking into my face.

     “Why are you here?” she asked.

     “Didn’t you know?” I asked.  “Franklyn didn’t say?”

     “No.  I’m glad you’re here.  It’s so awful.”

     “Your father called me yesterday and asked me to come.  He asked that I come right away.  The fire was already out when I got here this morning.”

     “Why did he want you to come?  Did he say?” she asked.

     “He sounded down to me.  He said he needed someone to share a bottle of cognac with and would I come right away.”

     I didn’t want to say anything about his call to May.  I wanted to see how she reacted.  Franklyn showed no surprise at finding me here when he arrived.  Now that, too, seemed strange to me.

     “I can’t remember my father ever being down, not that down, anyway.  Mom was always so cheerful.  He couldn’t be down with her around.  I haven’t spoken with either of them in a while.”

     She turned then to look at the remains of the house.  She ducked under the yellow tape and walked around the house to the red brick patio.  From there she turned to look at the boathouse and the dock.  I followed, letting her stay a good distance ahead, and Franklyn followed me.  We must have looked odd walking like that.  The smell of the burned place was strong, and by the time I reached the patio, she had headed toward the boathouse.  I followed.  Catching up to her there, I grabbed her arm and held on to her.  She turned into me and began to sob.  I held her, patted her back, and let her cry.  I was convinced she knew nothing.

The New York skyline, so familiar to me, had been changed by that other catastrophe.  I felt the burning of Oakley’s house deep inside me as something almost worse.  The Boeing 787 lifted us into the afternoon sky, and I could see lower Manhattan with its bridges crossing into Brooklyn and the statue in the harbor, where a Circle Line craft deboarded tourists.  I spent the rest of that day with Liz, Franklyn having no stomach for talk.  I suspected he wanted to find a way to wrangle his father’s safe away from the fire marshal.  He had that distracted look, suggesting something was nagging at him, and I guessed it was that.

     Liz and I had gone to the Ramada Inn and had a late lunch and then went to my room, where we talked.  I told her then about her father’s call to May.  She was shocked and then distraught by that news rather than relieved, as I thought she would be.  She wouldn’t tell me why, but her attitude had changed since we walked around the house, or what was left of it.  I confronted her about it quite directly, but she was evasive, saying only that she loved her mother and was devastated by what happened. 

     “Don’t you also love your father?” I asked gently, noticing her narrowing eyes and her hesitation.  “Surely, the news that he called May must gladden you, no?” I insisted.  But she didn’t respond to my prodding.  Her manner convinced me that some of my speculations earlier in the day must be near the mark.  Also, her manner convinced me that she knew things after all, and that like her brother she was just not going to share them with me.

     I asked her about the “market,” but she was no help in figuring out what her father meant.  We talked about markets, farmers’ markets, supermarkets, any place that one would know to go to if he was told by her father that he would meet him at “the market.”  She was, I was convinced, genuinely clueless.  There was a certain translucent delicacy about her, and a clarity of skin and wideness of eyes, that always impressed me, even when she was little, as being outward features of her inner nature—innocence and guilelessness—qualities that her brother completely lacked.

We talked the afternoon away.  She left about four o’clock, but not before leaving me with the impression that she blamed her father for her mother’s death.  Finding myself alone, with no understanding of what had happened here, only suspicions, I called the airlines and arranged for my return trip the next day.  Then I called May. 

     I nestled into the seat after we reached cruising altitude and closed my eyes.  A little more than twenty-four hours had passed since I arrived at LGA.  I am not young anymore and the strain of those hours took their toll, mostly in the form of sleeplessness.  A couple hours of sleep would help, but the same buzzing in my head that kept me awake all night kept me from sleeping now.  

     Elyse is dead.  Someone else is also dead, someone in her bed, presumably, and it wasn’t Oakley.  Franklyn seemed to know something, but whatever it was he knew, he gave no impression that he believed his father was alive.  Liz, on the other hand, who knew he was alive because I told her about the phone call, showed no joy in it, and I could get nothing from her to explain it.  I hoped my own children would never be so unfeeling where I am concerned.  But how to explain Liz?  Her coldness toward the news that her father had called May that morning implied that Elyse had been unfaithful and that it was this, her mother’s infidelity, Liz knew and wouldn’t confide to me, and that therefore she suspected her father knew, too, and in his rage committed the unthinkable.  That’s what all her manner and evasiveness said to me, her not coming out with it an expression still of loyalty to her father.  I felt terrible for Liz, torn as she was between grief over her mother and love for her father, contemplating what could only be the inevitable for him.  Terrible.  And it saddened me that she felt she couldn’t confide in me.  But for now, I left that one alone.  She was confused and hurting, and I felt only compassion for her. 

     I asked myself all night and continued to ask myself as I rested in the seat if I believed Oakley capable of murder, of double murder, of not just murder, but of murdering Elyse, mother of his children and spouse for thirty-plus years.  Faithful?  At least up until now.  And then other thoughts came, unbidden, of Elyse at Liz’ wedding, of Elyse at my daughter’s graduation at Notre Dame, of Elyse last New Year’s Eve, when May and I had come to Westbury to spend the holiday with the Banks.  Unfruitful.  One couldn’t review one’s relations with people in retrospect like that without either getting paranoid, because one imagines all sorts of things that never were, or buried in minutia.  But I couldn’t help myself.  May wasn’t with me.  Her common sense and earthiness have always been the counterbalance to my moony dreaminess. 

     But I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe two things.  First, that Oakley would kill Elyse, even if he knew she was sleeping in their bedroom with another man.  This wasn’t Oakley.  To Liz, Oakley is a father.  She knows him in that way, as father.  I know Oakley more intimately than she ever could.  Longer, for one thing.  And a man confides in another man, a friend, a long-time friend, many things he would never say to his kids, even his wife.  No.  I guess there just isn’t anybody who knows Oakley like I do.  I’m an Oakley authority.  And I say, No!  Not so.  Oakley did not, could not have committed this crime, if a crime there was.

     The second thing I couldn’t believe is that Oakley intended to involve me in all of this, that he wanted me to witness the burning down of his house and the finding of the dead inside.  This is macabre.  This is exactly not Oakley.  The man doesn’t live, feel, think, engage the world in any way that would make this kind of behavior possible.  I would stake everything I own on it.  Not so.  Oakley didn’t burn his house down.  Oakley didn’t kill Elyse and whoever was in her bed.  Yet Oakley was alive, the house in ruins. . . the plane’s engines rushed with that shuddering whoosh as it’s wheels hit the pavement.  Minneapolis.  A few more hours and I’ll be home.  Then, with a little help from a small white pill, I’ll get some sleep.

“We’ll have to go back, you know.  There has to be a funeral,” May said, “and we can’t not be there for Liz and Franklyn.”

     “I know.  We’ll have to call Liz.  She and her husband will probably make the arrangements.  But I’m supposing a funeral won’t happen for some time yet.  The lab will have to complete its testing to find out first who died in the fire.  The police assume the remains are the Banks, even though we know one of them isn’t.  We really don’t even know for sure if Elyse is one of them.”

     That upset her.  May didn’t tolerate uncertainty well.  We had gone over everything a dozen times, all that happened after I got there, Oakley’s phone call, my conversations with Franklyn and Liz—it all made her head spin.  The kids’ lack of candor upset her more than anything else.  That they knew something and weren’t telling us angered her, and she wanted to call both of them and read them the riot act.  That was May.  Get to the bottom of it and don’t paddle around. 

     That night, at May’s insistence, I called Liz.  We could both tell how distraught she was, and for once, May held her tongue.  She sat in the brown chair by the piano in our living room and listened mostly as I asked Liz about when she thought the funeral for her mother would be possible.  There was a long pause and we could hear her through the muffling of the phone.  May had taken a tissue from her pocket and taking her glasses off dabbed her eyes. 

     She looked old to me then, active and energetic though she was, her thinness making her look frail, her hair getting more and more gray by the day, almost.  I tried for the moment Liz had muffled the phone to imagine May, like Elyse, lying in bed with a strange man.  The incongruity of it hit me so hard, I tried to imagine myself being Oakley and actually witnessing it, if that was what all of this is about.  I was uncertain that it wasn’t all just conjecture, and felt that when the truth finally came out, it would seem absurd we thought such things. 

Liz had no idea when they would release the remains.  She said that both she and Franklyn had been asked to give swabs to the lab, and they could get no date from them for the results of the testing.  I asked her if she had told Franklyn about her father’s call to May the morning of the fire, and she said she hadn’t.  I didn’t push her on that point, and neither did May. 

As soon as she knew, she said, she would call us.  May offered to go there to spend some time with her, and she seemed grateful for the offer but said maybe she would need her to come after the funeral.  Her father’s being alive just hung in the air, the unwelcome fact she didn’t want to deal with.  Just when she would tell the police about it interested me.  As far as the police were concerned, no crime was committed.  But as soon as they knew Oakley was alive, they would rush to that conclusion, and everything was going to change.  Who knew then when the funeral could be?  It was a nightmare. 

The Friday we were supposed to meet Oakley at the “market” came and went.  I itched all that day expecting him to call, but he didn’t.  They wanted me at the office, for we had only days to go before the fifteenth, but I just couldn’t tear myself away from the house.  The suspense was so thick that if Oakley called and I wasn’t there, I knew I would just die.  And I knew, too, that Oakley wouldn’t call again at the office, since he couldn’t get a line directly to me there but would have to go through our secretary, who would want to know who he was before connecting us.  So the day came and went with no word from Oakley.

Then Saturday passed with no word.  Sunday morning, May and I dressed for church after breakfast.  It was cool and rainy, a typical April day.  After making sure our umbrellas were stowed on the back seat, I started the car and backed out of the garage, when a light blue Ford Taurus pulled slowly to the curb in front of the house.  At first, I thought nothing of it, assuming the person was visiting someone across the street, but as I neared the end of the drive, I could see the person sitting behind the wheel, and I was sure it was Oakley.  He was looking over his shoulder directly at me.  I said so to May, who got excited and wanted to rush over in the rain, but I held her arm and told her to wait.  I thought it strange that he just sat there.  If Oakley wasn’t getting out, there was a reason.  I let the car idle at the end of the drive and waited.  Sure enough, Oakley pulled away and drove very slowly down the street.  We followed.  At the intersection where our residential road crossed into the business loop, he turned right, heading toward the Holiday Inn.  But it wasn’t at the Inn we stopped. 

The Holiday Inn marks the western most edge of town, beyond which is county road heading into farm country, the kind of blacktop that is crossed only by gravel lanes leading to farm addresses.  A mile or so outside of town, the asphalt is littered with the corpses of skunks and raccoons, deer and badgers, and pheasants pick at the gravel on the shoulders of the road. 

“What is he doing?” I said to May.  “Where’s he going?  There’s nothing out here.  I don’t get it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be seen,” she offered as an explanation.

“Obviously,” I said, irritated.  “But why?  Who the hell would recognize him here?  In all of South Dakota, there’re two people who’d recognize Oakley Banks, you and me.”

“Well,” she said, irritated at me, “he has his reasons!”

“I just don’t get it,” I said, and at that moment, Oakley turned into a gravel lane.  We followed, crunching along at about fifteen miles an hour, until we came to a shelter belt, a dense thicket of trees about two hundred, two hundred fifty yards long.  Oakley drove off the lane into the trees, leaving room for us to get beside him, turned off the engine and got out of the car.  He came over to us and got in the back seat.

“Throw those umbrellas on the floor,” I said as he opened the door and slid in.

“Hello May,” he said as he leaned toward her and planted a kiss on her proffered cheek.

“How are you Oakley,” I said sympathetically, “you look like hell.”

“Feel like it,” he said. 

It wasn’t the unshaved face and uncombed hair, the wrinkled jacket, the obviously slept in clothes he wore that made him look so bad.  It was the set of his mouth, his eyes, the whole sagging of his face.  He had all the look of someone battered emotionally.  It would take a ruthless battering to make him look the way he did.  I could see May was concerned, more, alarmed at his appearance.  I was, too.  When he was through telling us his story, I felt almost as battered as him.  May cried.  That started us off.  I couldn’t help myself and neither could Oakley.  We sat there the three of us and cried like babies.  Then the anger set in.

Oakley had to go back a long ways to get the story of the last week started, back to when his son came to him wanting his inheritance “before you all kick the bucket,” as he had put it to his father.  Oakley thought Franklyn was just into another one of his schemes to make it on his own and was more than willing to help him out.  But Franklyn wanted more than that.  He wanted “his share,” as he put it.  What disturbed Oakley, though, was Elyse’s reaction when he told her.  She vehemently opposed giving him that kind of money, spitting fire at the idea of it.  He had never seen her so wrought up over anything, especially anything involving her son.

“Over my dead body!  We have our retirement years to finance, and I’m not sacrificing them so he can squander what we’ve invested.”

“I was amazed,” Oakley said, staring dully through the windshield.  “I know Franklyn would have accepted in the end whatever we were willing to give him, and it didn’t have to be ‘his share.’  He was being his typical extravagant self.  You know Franklyn, how he can come across sometimes.”

Yes, I know, I said to myself, recalling him lugging that safe up those charred steps.

“But Elyse had gone crazy about it,” he continued, still staring through the windshield, as though he were seeing it happening out there, with the trees as a backdrop.   

 “She had her own agenda, as things turned out.  I was such a fool.  When I think about it now, I was so blind.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but he hadn’t got to that yet, so I let him go on uninterrupted.  The rain had begun to fall heavily, pounding the roof of the car, and we sat for a few moments listening.  Lightening flashed.  The mildly rainy Sunday morning was turning stormy.  Wind began to drive the rain against the side of the car.  Oakley looked out the window at it.  He was balding now, though not completely so.  He had some hair on top.  He sat back and looked at me.

“About a month after that, I had been out of town on business.  I had gone to our office in Seoul, and from there I was supposed to go to Tokyo, but the Tokyo business had settled itself, without my help, which left me with a two-week opening in my schedule.  I planned to surprise Elyse with a vacation.  It was December, a good time to ski, and I had called ahead to Vale and reserved rooms at the lodge where we often go.  I got into Kennedy at ten in the evening, called a limousine, and had it drop me off on the lane in front of the house.  I didn’t want her to hear me.  It was a surprise, you see.”

I just knew where this was going.  I was feeling all kinds of things as he talked.  And then there was the very real relief he was feeling finally getting it all said.  This is what he wanted to talk about over that bottle of brandy.  I wondered what May was feeling.  She’s known Elyse for as long as she’s known me.  Poor Oakley.  He looked like hell. 

“There were no lights on inside, so I assumed Elyse was out with a friend.  You know how she is,” he said, and paused.  “Was,” he added as he rested his forehead on the back of May’s seat.  “She goes to bed before midnight only when she doesn’t feel well,” he said, getting confused all over again.  My heart was breaking.  “I let myself in the front door and turned on the light,” he went on, sitting back now.  “I was going to pour myself a brandy when I noticed a man’s suit jacket on the back of one of the dining room chairs.  ‘What the hell is this?’ I said to myself.  Then, on the table, I saw a wallet, car keys, some change, a nail clipper.  I looked for the driver’s license in the wallet fold.  The photo was of someone I didn’t know, of a guy maybe a few years younger than me. 

“You ever get that feeling in your gut, like someone just reached in there and squeezed?  I wanted to start screaming, to run around the house like a madman until they came out, then kill the bastard.  But I didn’t do it.  The hall to the bedrooms takes two turns before reaching ours.  I kicked my shoes off at the last turn, and tip toed up to our bedroom door.  I didn’t have to open it.  Not expecting any intrusion, they weren’t guarded about what they were doing.  I saw them clearly.  They never knew I was there.  I left and went to Vale on my own.  It was the worst two weeks I ever spent in my life.”

“What did you do?” May said, “Didn’t you confront her?”

I could hear all sorts of nuances in May’s voice.  That Elyse should do such a thing dismayed her, but it also provoked a sense of wonder, and, I’m sure, for I heard it with the utmost clarity, a sense of dread.  Being unfaithful plays no part in May’s sense of life.  That sort of thing is for characters in the movies.  I’m pretty much the same way, so I shouldn’t say it as though May is naïve or anything.  I’m not naïve, and May isn’t, either.  What keeps either of us from infidelity, like Elyse, like anybody, for that matter?  I have my suspicions.  Not naiveté, I can say that for certain.  May and me, we struggled all through our lives together.  I earned enough, as I said earlier, but I was not like Oakley.  We, she, I should say, paid our bills, put a few dollars aside, afforded ourselves a luxury now and then—but never conspicuously.  May squeezed nickels out of pennies.  And she worked.  When a man and a woman pull together in the traces, like May and me always did, bonds develop that don’t break so easily.  You need each other, need with a need that doesn’t recognize conditions.  Even if May were to die, I couldn’t see myself with another woman, not now, not twenty years ago, even. 

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said to May, rubbing his face.  “I mishandled everything.  Elyse is dead,” he said, turning to me.  “That’s not my fault.  In Vale, I skied.  I thought about her.  I drank.  I drank a lot.  But in the end, I came to no conclusions.  I know what I should have done.  I should have ended our marriage.  She’d be alive right now if I had done that.  And a lot of other things would not have happened.  I haven’t told you the worst of it.”

“There’s more?” May almost erupted. 

“Tell us,” I said.  I thought I knew why Oakley looked so defeated. 

“I came home from Vale, and Elyse played her part as well as ever.  She catered to my every wish.  I tried to remember if she was always like that—demonstrative, effusive, in making me comfortable after I’ve been away.  She seemed so fake, deceitful, and I wondered if I would have noticed had I not found her out.

“But Franklyn came again, wanting ‘his share.’  I thought I might just as well give it to him.  I’d rather he got it to waste or squander than Elyse’s guy.  So I listened to Franklyn, told him I would consider it, that his mother and I had to come to terms with it first, couldn’t he see?  He acted badly that night.  He couldn’t see.  He wanted what he wanted, and he wasn’t pleased with me, even though I was sympathetic and gave him hope.”

“That just doesn’t sound like Franklyn,” May said.  “He was never the greedy type.  A little spacey, maybe.  Sometimes mean, when he felt put upon.  Oakley, do you think he’s in some kind of trouble?”

“I don’t give a damn about Franklyn, May.  If he’s in trouble, it’s his doing.”

I was almost holding my breath, waiting for him to go on, to get to what I knew was coming.  The rain was letting up, though not stopping, and the noise it made had ceased.  The sky looked like it was sitting on the trees, and the wind was still blowing.  We’d just be getting out of church now had May and I gone and would have missed the worst of the storm.  Still, we missed it, and we didn’t.

“Franklyn left that night as angry as I’ve ever seen him,” Oakley said, a tone of dismay creeping into his voice.  “I thought it was time to talk to Liz about him, so I called her.  It was all news to her.  She and Franklyn don’t see eye to eye on much, and they don’t have much to do with each other.  They see each other mostly when they’re home.  So she had nothing to say.  About Franklyn having ‘his share,’ she said that’s our business, we should leave her out of it.”

Oakley loved both his kids, but I could just see his admiration for Liz as he talked about her.  Fathers are always partial to their daughters, I guess.  I thought of Liz at the Ramada Inn, and her response to the news that her father was alive.   

“I was all the more ready after that to give Franklyn what he wanted.  It only needed my telling Elyse and getting her by it.  That wasn’t going to be easy.  Franklyn certainly knew who to work on to get his money.  He’d have gotten no sympathy from his mother and no dime.”

Just then, a horrendous peal of thunder clapped over our heads, the rain came furiously pouring against the car again, and we sat silent for a while.  I had suggested we go find ourselves a motel room and get out from under these trees, but Oakley didn’t want to do that.

“Where’re you going to stay tonight?” I asked him.

“Not here in town,” he said.

“Will you go to Sioux Falls?” I replied.

“No,” he said.  “Omaha.  It’s safer.”

“Safer from what?” I asked, really worried.

“You’ll understand in a while,” he said cryptically. 

It was crazy our sitting out there, under trees off a gravel lane, the storm pounding, the soil already soft from the March snowmelt, shouting at each other to be heard above the din from outside. 

“Franklyn finally threatened me,” Oakley said, grief pulling his face downward like a G-force.  “I had told him that I would speak to his mother the next day, but I hadn’t.  I didn’t want Elyse to go ballistic, like she did the last time we spoke about Franklyn.  I had been planning on finding out just how deep her unfaithfulness was.  I told her I had to go abroad again, this time to France, and that I would return for only a short while—a week—and would have to leave again for England.  Meanwhile, I hired a detective to keep an eye on her, and he had also installed cams around the house to monitor her.  It was the night before I was supposed to leave for France when Franklyn called.  He had asked me what his mother had to say, and I told him I hadn’t had time to talk with her about it yet.  He got angry, shouting that I had better get it done or the lawyers would do it instead of me.

“Can you imagine?”  There was pure dismay in his voice.  “Where did he get these notions in the first place?”

“I just can’t imagine,” May said, and I know she was thinking of our own kids.  I was too.  How could I help it?

“I was that mad at him for threatening me that I decided I wasn’t giving him a damn cent.  Besides, he was distracting me from the big problem in my life.  I decided that once the detective had enough evidence of consistent betrayal, I would just confront Elyse and demand a divorce.”

He paused at this point. Reaching over for one of the umbrellas, he hefted it, clutching it in the middle and tapping the back of the seat with the handle.  The rain was letting up again and the wind was calming down.  The clouds were beginning to lift, and patches of blue began to open here and there.

“He found no evidence.  During the times I faked my absences, she didn’t see the guy.  I felt mixed up over it.  I wanted to get it out in the open, but I was glad she wasn’t deep into a relationship.  If it was only a fling, maybe we could get by it, you know?  That’s where I was at that time.  It was not to last. 

“I have to admit, I behaved badly.  I became a snoop and a sneak, a liar, a deceiver, an all round miserable guy.  She had no idea.  She died innocent of my torment and wrong doings.  I found her out, again and again.  I found the guy out.  He was married, had kids, a nice house.  I was beside myself with anger at both of them.  They were so trivial, I mean as people.  Elyse!  Can you believe it, May?   I should have walked away.  I should have shook my head and walked away, the way one walks away from all that is beneath contempt.”

“So,” I said, “you called and asked me to come so we could talk about all this over that bottle of cognac.”

“No,” he said, “I had something else in mind.”

The storm had let up and the sun began poking through now, and on the other side of the trees, the newly plowed fields looked black from the wet.  A couple of squirrels were romping around in front of the cars, and the three of us sat silently looking at them. 

“I had faked enough absences to see the pattern of their lives,” Oakley worked himself up to go on.  “As soon as I was gone, they got together, always at the house.  I never knew them to go places together.  He came to the house in a taxi.  How he explained his overnight absences to his own wife, I don’t know.  He lied, I guess.”

I could see him judging himself there.  He had a conscience.  The kind of life he was living all through this time was a lie, and it must have killed him.  No wonder he looked so battered.

“Anyway, he’d come in the evening, and they’d spend the night and the morning together.  He didn’t leave until noon, when he would meet a taxi on Northern Boulevard.  I didn’t keep that detective after the first fiasco, so I never learned anything more about this guy than his name and where he lived, which I saw on his driver’s license that first night, and I don’t know what he did for a living.”

“Too bad, too bad,” May said, shaking her head.  “If your plan had worked that time, none of this would have happened.”

“I’m not so sure things wouldn’t have been worse,” he said.  “You see, when I called you, I had rented a room for us at the Airport Hotel.  My plan was to walk in on them the next morning with you beside me.  That’s what I wanted.  I wanted Elyse outed, and I wanted her to know there was no chance of burying it.  Had I gone in alone, or confronted her alone, I know how she would have done—you would have been my strength to end it, right there.”

He was looking at me as he talked, and I guess he misread my expression. 

“I’m sorry, old friend, for using you like that.  I caused you a lot of pain.”

“Never mind me,” I said.  “I’m yours to be used.  It’s just that, your telling me about Elyse at the hotel would have been such a shock, I don’t know how I would have reacted.”

“Now comes the horrible part.  Sometimes, this guy left early in the morning, like about six thirty, just after dawn.  When that happened, he usually didn’t return the next day, and sometimes he wouldn’t return for a week. If my plan was going to work, I had to make sure he was going to be there when we walked in.  So, just before dawn, I took a taxi and got out at the beginning of the drive.  I walked up to the house and got in among the trees on the east side, you know, where the cordwood is piled.  I figured I’d stay until about seven.  If he didn’t leave by then, things would go as I planned.”

Here he got breathless and pained.  He paused a long time, then got out of the car and trod into the trees.  May and I looked at each other, and she reached for my hand.  Oakley was retching into the dirt, making an awful sound.

“You have to go out there,” May said in a hurried whisper.  “Go stay by him.”  The alarm in her voice was also my own.  I did as she said.  I didn’t say anything but just stood beside him.  He reached up for me, and I grasped his hand and helped pull him upright.  I rubbed his upper arm, and said, “OK?” And he replied, “OK.”  We walked back to the car.  Once inside, he continued.

“I wasn’t there but ten minutes when someone else come up the drive.  I recognized Franklyn’s Lexus, even though it was still dark.  He parked at the top of the drive, not coming near the house.  He took two large containers from his trunk, carried them to the front door, and let himself in.”

“No! no!” May cried aloud.  “Not Franklyn!  Not him!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!” 

We all sat silent after that.  Oakley was crying.  I was literally in a state of shock.  Since I was absolutely convinced Oakley didn’t start the fire, I was expecting him to describe how it did start—a shorting out transformer on the pole beside the house, something inside happening, like a kitchen fire.  So it was, I was thinking, an accident after all.  But Franklyn!  I couldn’t believe it.  Murdering his parents? 

“Oakley, are you sure it was him?  Couldn’t you have been mistaken?”

“Like I don’t know my own son?” he said bitterly.

“Couldn’t it have been someone else?  Someone from this other guy’s life?”

“It was Franklyn.  I know him.  And he’s here, in South Dakota.  He’s here, and more than likely you’ll hear from him.”

“What does he want coming here?” May asked, bewildered.

“He wants me.”

“I don’t understand,” May said, “why?  Why does he want you?” 

Everything had gone from bad to worse.  That first morning, when I left to find a room and to call May, Oakley was still there.  When he saw flames through the windows, he lost it.  Franklyn had come running out the front door and raced to his Lexus.  Beside himself with horror, he ran round the back of the house to the patio, thinking he could smash through the glass doors and get Elyse and the man out.  But by time he got there, the whole bedroom area was burning, and the heat was too intense to get near.  Nauseated, he ran through the trees behind the house to the Sound and walked along the shore.  About a quarter mile up was another home, but he didn’t go there.  They had a boat house and dock, also, and he collapsed there under the awning, trying to get a hold of himself. 

     Some time after the fire was out, he had come back along the shore to see what he could see.  I had just left to find a room and to call May, so he didn’t know I was there.  But someone else was.  Franklyn, never far away, had returned and parked by the trees on the east side and had gotten out of the car.  When Oakley spotted him, he tried to dash out of sight, but too late.  Franklyn had seen him.  Oakley ran like hell back along the shore, and Franklyn jumped in his car and tore out onto Northern Boulevard.  When he returned some time later, I was back and naturally thought he was just arriving.  He spent the time between his first arrival and his second trying to find his father.  It was then that Oakley called May.  No wonder he was so cryptic.  He was hiding in the neighbor’s boat under the awning with Franklyn prowling around.

     Franklyn didn’t know of his mother’s infidelities, but knowing that the investigators found two bodies in the ashes, and having seen his father, he put two and two together.  He was smart enough to realize that his father would naturally fall under suspicion once the DNA testing was done and that that would get him off the hook.  All he had to do was to contrive a way to keep his father from talking.  And that meant murder again.  But then there were May and me.  That’s why Oakley didn’t want to be seen anywhere near us.  As long as we were in different places, Franklyn couldn’t act against all of us at once, and that would put a break on him, at least temporarily.

     When we had finished our long talk in the shelter belt, Oakley drove off by himself, intending to go to Omaha, saying he would keep in touch.  I’ll never get his face out of my mind when he opened the car door to get out.  More of the sky opened now as the storm blew by, and sunlight lay on the fields that had been turned by the plow.  Through the trees we could see the dark earth rimmed with April greened grass that sparkled from the rain.  When May and I first came to South Dakota, Franklyn was eight years old.  This earth had been turned twenty-two times since then.  Our hearts were heavy.  May was still crying.  Finally, I started the car, and we creeped out to the blacktop and drove back to town.

May and I were both in shock.  The image Oakley gave of Franklyn carrying those cans in the dark to the house he grew up in, the house he thought his mother and father were sleeping in, destroyed us.  That he was hunting his father, that he meant harm to us, pained me beyond enduring, and May as well.  We drove home silently, the whole thing beyond speech.  How could life go so wrong?  How does it happen that a boy one day finds himself splashing gasoline around his parents’ bedroom?  In the same way that a woman married thirty plus years finds herself in bed with a stranger?  Has something got loose in us, in some of us, anyway?  Have we gotten feeble?  Have the ties that bind, that used to govern our affections and keep us straight, unraveled? 

     As I contemplated these imponderables driving back to town, it occurred to me that since Franklyn used arson to try to kill his parents, he may very well try it again on us, and I felt defenseless.  So when we got home, I called my friend Comer, who is our police chief, and told him we needed to talk.  He sensed the urgency and came right over.  We told him everything. 

     “This young man is desperate now,” he said in his cool police-chief manner, and agreed that my fear was well founded.   

     I hadn’t seen much of Comer in the last year, for reasons having to do with another spirit-sapping incident.  But he was there for us.  He would have a patrol car circulate in this neighborhood for the next couple of days, he said, day and night.  Then he took us to Cellular One and made us get cell phones, which he programmed for us to dial 911 at the touch of a button.  He also programmed our numbers into his phone.  Knowing that we had only the one phone in the house, he told us to keep the cell phones near our bed when we turned in for the night.  When he finally left us, I felt like we were living under siege, but I felt, also, the incredible usefulness of cell phones.   Franklyn turned out to be bolder than I had imagined he could be.  He chose to show up in broad day on neutral ground—that is, he walked into the Art Center and cornered May in the main gallery, in front of half-a-dozen people.  That was at nine thirty in the morning on the Wednesday following our meeting in the shelter belt with his father.  May recognized him instantly, but didn’t react quickly enough.  She should have reached for her cell phone and pushed that button, but she let him get too close, and then she was afraid to do it. 

     The Art Center is located in the old Carnegie library on Third Street.  It’s a lovely red quartzite building with a dome that sits atop the lobby entrance.  To the left of the lobby is the east gallery, ahead is the south or main gallery, and on the right is the gift shop, where May used to work.  When Franklyn entered, May was in the far west corner of the main gallery with six people around her, giving a tour.  As he approached with a broad smile, the six discretely scattered.

     He pretended to be glad to see her, reached for her and kissed her on the cheek, and acted all innocence and purity.

     “Hi, Aunt May,” he chirped. 

     “What are you doing here?” May managed to say while keeping her composure.

     She didn’t feel menaced at first, partly because of his manner, but partly also because there were others in the gallery. 

     “Where’s my father?” he replied, and then looked stonily at her.

     May glanced around the gallery, indicating with her eyes the others wandering from painting to painting.  Beside her was a pedestal supporting a sculpture in pink quartzite—a bust of a Sioux chief, with exquisitely chiseled feathers hanging down onto the neck.  Franklyn pretended to examine it. 

     “Why do you want to know?” she replied as he pretended to admire the sculpture.  “Oh, Franklyn,” she cried, seeing him suddenly as the boy she had always known, reaching to touch him, “what are you doing?  Go,” she urged, “go home, go to Liz.”

     “Haven’t you heard?” he shot back at her, “There is no ‘home’ anymore.”

     It was the wrong thing to say.  She only exacerbated his desperation by mentioning his home, marking the irreversibility of all that he had done.

     “Where’s my father?” he repeated.

     “I don’t know,” she said firmly.

     “If you don’t tell me. . .,” he threatened, and then fell silent, not saying what he would do.

     After a moment, he smiled again and said he needed to talk with his father, it was important, because his father was all mixed up and not himself. 

     “Dad has gotten delusional,” he said.  “He thinks mom died in the fire he started and God knows what else.  He’s running away out of guilt.  We need to find him and help him.”

     “What are you talking about, Franklyn?” May whispered desperately, her eyes revealing the doubt that suddenly assailed her.  Could Oakley have been lying?  His face, his depression, the story he told, all came crowding in.  For a moment, she could only stare at Franklyn.  It lasted only a moment before she snapped out of it.  “Your mother died in the fire,” she barely whispered, the truth asserting itself, emboldening her as she looked at him.  “I’ve spoken with Liz.  Franklyn, what are you saying?”  She was horrified that Franklyn either baldly lied to her or was delusional himself. 

     “I’m saying everybody’s got it wrong.  Mom’s all right.  And dad, he’s running around delusional.  You have to tell me where he is, for his sake, Aunt May.”

     “Shall I call him on the phone, Franklyn?” she said, inspired, reaching into her pocket for the cell.  She flipped it open and pushed the button for 911. 

     For the merest instant Franklyn looked at her, then slapped the phone out of her hand.  It went skidding across the gallery floor and bumped into the wall.  There were two people left in the gallery, elderly women, who, noticing what he did, hurried out, leaving them alone. 

     By pushing the button, however, May set in motion a chain of events whose outcome was as unsettling as everything else that had happened in this unsettling time.

     Fearing that May had sounded the alarm about him, Franklyn had gotten desperate.  He reached for her arm and, pulling her close to him, rasped, “You’re coming with me.  Don’t resist or I’ll drag you.”

     Holding her arm and beaming a fake smile at the two old ladies in the lobby, he led May out.  His Lexus was parked at the curb a half block down toward Main.  As he opened the passenger door, he snarled at May to belt herself in.  Then he raced over to his side, jumped in, keyed the engine, and pulled away from the curb.  A few moments later, another car, parked near the corner, pulled away from the curb and followed, half a block behind the Lexus.

     Meanwhile, the dispatcher, getting no response to her queries, called the phone company for a trace.  Comer, alerted by her urgency, leaped from his chair.  Fearing that Franklyn had shown up in town and knowing that if the call came from one of our cells, the phone company would be no help, he told the dispatcher to send patrol cars to the Art Center, to our house, and to my office on Main.  Then he called me.

     May, as usual, had taken our car, and I had walked to the office.  I told Comer not to worry about me, that May was alone at the Art Center, go there.  The dispatcher, getting no answer from the Center, shouted that at Comer as he rushed out.  I was already out the door and heading down Main when the prowler got there.  I flagged him and he picked me up.  When we got to the Center, two patrol cars were parked in front, and Comer was on the sidewalk talking to the two old ladies.  They, the ladies, intimidated by Franklyn’s behavior, had nevertheless followed him and May out of the building and saw them drive off.  They were pointing up Third, indicating the way he had gone.

     “I’m afraid he’s got her,” Comer said as I neared him.

     It wasn’t fear I felt so much as utter dismay, disbelief.  Franklyn?  Franklyn?  Could he possibly hurt her?  May?  Who has known and loved him all his life?  Could he?  The questions didn’t form themselves so much as bombarded me as feelings.  The red quartzite front of the Art Center, its broad steps with black wrought iron rails, the cracked concrete pavement of the sidewalk, the small petunia-lined lawns on either side of the steps—these have all been ingrained in me as part of May’s life for the past  fifteen years.  Now she was gone!  And then, God help me, I couldn’t control it, images of Elyse burning overwhelmed me, and I almost collapsed.  Comer had reached for and steadied me, handed me off to the officer who had driven me there, and told him to take me home.

     Then he sped away, blue and red lights flashing atop his car, down Third, then south onto the by-pass toward the interstate.  He had the dispatcher call the State Troopers.  With luck, he thought, they’ll get Franklyn on the Interstate before he gets too far, and if he stays in town, well, we’ll nab him. 

     But, again, Franklyn did the unexpected.  He took May home and put his car in our garage, so that when the officer dropped me off, Franklyn saw me from the window walk round the house to the back door, which May and I habitually use to come and go.  As I pushed open the door, the familiar smell of the kitchen comforted me, and then I saw her, standing in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room.  I was surprised, relieved beyond belief.  Franklyn was right behind her, and though apprehensive at the sight of him, my relief was stronger.  I actually felt grateful that Franklyn, kidnapping May, had brought her home.

     “May,” I shouted, crossing the kitchen, holding out my arms to her.  “Thank God,” I said, embracing her. 

     But she was stiff as a rod, and her fear brought me back.  I tilted my head up to get a look at Franklyn’s face, which was twisted into a worried grimace.  I could see that there would be no reasoning with him.  Adrenaline raised the hairs on my neck, and my hands trembled.

     “Hello, Franklyn,” I said, trying to keep my alarm under control.

     “Hello, Uncle Will,” he said, his voice sounding normal.

     I looked again at his face, surprised.  For a moment, I felt that this had all been a misunderstanding, that Franklyn was no threat to anybody, least of all May and me, and that his bringing her home showed it.  How foolish of me to have been afraid, I thought.

     Then he reached for May’s arm and pulled her around and led her back to the living room, saying as he forced her to sit on the couch,

     “Don’t do anything stupid, Uncle.  You’ll regret it.”

     “Why, Franklyn?” I responded, “What are you doing?  Do you really mean to harm your Aunt May?  Franklyn?”

     “Don’t talk to me like that!  You make it worse!” he shouted.

     He had maneuvered me in front of the couch, put his hand on my chest, and pushed me down beside May.  As I fell into the cushion, I instinctively knew I had to keep him talking.

     “Worse than what?  How worse, Franklyn?  What are you going to do?”

     Sitting on the couch like that, looking up at him, also made me feel terrifically vulnerable.

     “Where’s my father,” he said, standing in front of us.

     Two couches faced each other in the living room, with a coffee table between them.  He was on the other side of the coffee table, where he would naturally be if he meant to sit on the other couch.  But he didn’t sit.  Sitting would take the menace from him, and he knew it.  Serious fear began to come over me.

     “I don’t know,” I said, “the last time I heard from your father was the day of the fire.”

     “Why didn’t you tell me that that day?”

     I could hear both curiosity and malice in his voice.  Did he know?  Did Liz tell him?  I didn’t know, and not knowing made it difficult to answer. 

     “I didn’t tell you because I thought your father had died in the fire,” I improvised on what I knew we both knew, “which is what you thought, too.  Aunt May had a call from someone.  We didn’t really know who it was.  I didn’t want to give you false hope.”  The irony of that struck both of us, I could see.  He frowned.

     “You lie, Uncle, you lie,” he viciously threw at me in response.  “Tell me where my father is!”

     “I said I don’t know.”

     We were at an impasse, and I could feel May trembling beside me.  So much had happened.  Only half an hour ago, I was in my office.  From the look of him, I expected the worse. 

     “OK, Uncle, you leave me no choice.”

     “What are you going to do?” I asked, the fear now palpable in my voice. 

I contemplated leaping across the coffee table, knocking him onto the couch, and sitting on him while May called the police.  I might have been able to do that when he was fifteen and I still in my prime.  But I knew I couldn’t do it now.  He’d probably kill me outright if I tried.

“Uncle, Uncle,” he said cheerfully, “there’s going to be an accident here.  Your house is going to burn down.”

“Franklyn, the police know.  They’re looking for you right now.  May tipped them off in the Art Center.  How far do you think you’ll get?” 

I was reasoning with him, and the feeling of futility overcame me.  I saw him now as someone I didn’t know, as a stranger, a dangerous person, the Franklyn I knew gone. 

“How faar?” he mocked, “Uncle, why not just tell me where my father is, then I’ll leave.”

He had gotten harsh at that, pushing his chest out.  The little faker, I thought, the little monster.  As soon as he found out where Oakley was, he’d kill us.  He had left himself no options.  There would be no point in killing his father and leaving us alive.  He had to know I knew this and May, too.  His position was futile.  We would not say.  But I had to try to find an option for him, our lives depended on it.

“If I knew, I’d tell you.  I don’t, Franklyn.  You have to believe me.”

As long as I could keep him doubting, he would need time to think what to do, putting him off.  I looked up at him, desperately vulnerable, hoping he would feel something, or that something would stir in him, some boyhood memory, perhaps.  I raised my palms upward, imploringly.

Then he got really vicious.  He shouted and swung into the air as he came rushing around the table, grabbed my shirt and tie, and backhanded me across the face.  May cried out and leaped at his hand as he tried to swing it back for another blow, blocking it.  He pushed her violently to the floor and came at me again.  My glasses went careening across the room with the next blow, and I lost consciousness for a moment.  I couldn’t see clearly when I regained my sight, so I didn’t actually see what happened next.  May was on the floor to the side of the couch, moaning from hitting the edge of the coffee table as she fell, and I was lying sprawled across the sofa cushions, my face numb from the blow.  I saw a blurred double image for a second, like two men standing in front of me, then there was one. 

It happened so quickly that for a moment I wasn’t sure I had seen it.  Then I heard Comer’s voice, and then I heard Oakley’s.  And then I heard May sobbing.

When Oakley pulled away from the shelter belt, he had every intention of driving to Omaha, fearing his son was already in town, and fearing for May and me if Franklyn should find us all together.  What he might contrive if he did, Oakley couldn’t imagine.  That he would try something desperate, something vicious, he was certain.  He had already seen how vicious Franklyn could be.  Elyse was dead. 

     He couldn’t see into the bedroom when he ran round the house, the fire was already too intense, its heat keeping him away.  He couldn’t see her.  He lived almost all his adult life with her.  Her infidelity and his obsession with it, her death, Franklyn’s lust for “his share,” his murderousness—all these he took now as his own personal failures, failures as a husband and a father.  As he drove off the gravel lane onto the asphalt, he felt the one great duty, the one great burden he now had to carry was protecting May and me.  He was determined not to let our friendship down, to fail us as he had failed them.

     So when he turned onto the asphalt, he drove back to town.  When he came to the Holiday Inn, he turned into the parking lot and drove all through it looking for Franklyn’s Lexus.  He was certain that if Franklyn came to South Dakota, he drove instead of flew, as he himself had done, renting the Taurus when he got here.  Why?  Because Franklyn was broke.  Desperately broke.  After all, that was what this was all about.  Not seeing the Lexus, he parked, went in, and rented a room. 

     It was late Sunday morning, and he was not merely tired.  He was emotionally and physically exhausted.  He threw himself on the bed and slept.  Later, when he awoke, he ordered room service, not wanting to risk being seen by Franklyn.  There were a dozen large motels in town, and the risk was infinitesimal, but too much depended on his presence not being known, even by May and me.  He stayed in his room until 2 a.m.  Then he left, got in the Taurus, and searched every motel parking lot in town for Franklyn’s Lexus.  He would recognize it by its New York plates, as well as by a quick glance inside.  Franklyn was the messy type.  The passenger seat and the floor in front of it were always littered with hamburger wrappers, French fries cartons, and empty pop containers with their lids on and straws sticking up.  That was Franklyn.  His son.  Educated at Princeton, raised with every advantage, doted on, encouraged, praised—pop containers with straws, on the floor of his car!

     He did find it.  He was cruising the parking lot of the Hampton Inn, just south of the Interstate east of town.  The Holiday Inn was north of the Interstate west of town.  That fact comforted him.  There would be no reason for Franklyn to poke his head into that part of town, since our home, the Art Center, and my office were all clustered within a few blocks of Main Street. 

     Oakley planned to surveil his son.  He would be waiting when Franklyn left the motel.  He would follow him, keep an eye on him throughout the day and evening, and intervene if it came to that.  He knew Franklyn would pay no attention to the light blue Taurus, and he intended to buy a baseball cap, which he would wear while following him.  Oakley never wore hats.  The hat and the Taurus would be disguise enough. 

     He went back to the Inn and slept until six.  There was only one entrance-exit from the Hampton Inn, and that led to the road that came into town, which passed under the Interstate.  Just north of the Interstate on that road was the truck stop, and Oakley positioned himself in its parking lot so he could see the road and waited.  It was after nine when he saw the Lexus drive by into town.  He followed, staying well behind. 

     That was Monday.  All Franklyn did that day was drive by our home, then the Art Center, and finally my office.  He parked in front of my office just before noon, watched me leave and followed as I walked down Main Street to the Canyon, where I usually lunch, then followed me back.  That night he parked in our neighborhood, keeping watch on the house.  Oakley shuddered to think what might happen if he came in.  The next day, he did the same with May, learning that she didn’t leave the museum for lunch.  All this time, Oakley remained hidden to us. 

     On Wednesday, when Franklyn, visibly dragging May out of the Art Center, drove off, Oakley was right behind him, furious at Franklyn’s manhandling of May and frightened.  Almost at the same time as Comer pulled away from the museum, blue and red lights flashing, Oakley parked on our block a few houses down from us and watched the garage door lower behind the Lexus.  He had not sat there for ten minutes when the patrol car arrived, dropping me off.  Very much afraid now, he felt immensely relieved when he got the tone on the cell and touched in 911.  He told the dispatcher who he was and where he was and asked for help, then waited.  When Comer arrived, Oakley roared up to the house, and came in with him through the back door. 

     It was Comer who took Franklyn down, and just at that moment, I groggily saw Oakley, and heard May moaning.  She was badly bruised on her right side where she hit the coffee table during her fall.  But she’s all right.  I’m all right.  Oakley stayed with us for a week afterwards, having no home to return to.  During that time, we talked and talked, finally, over that bottle of cognac.  There’s no healing from a thing like that.  But Liz, thank God, has been very good.  Once the truth was out, she felt more than awful for thinking what she did and made up for it in every way she could.  Oakley, though, he’s back to work, doing what he does.