I set the drink down and walked to the main closet near the door. In it, below the clothes, footwear, and Christmas decorations I’d need in just a few weeks were some boxes. Including a couple containing Donna’s stuff, things that had previously been in the garage and in a storage locker downtown — stuff that neither of us had done anything with in all the time we were married. Most of it I’d never even looked at.
I wanted to look at it now. Between the shower and the drink and the thinking, I was wide awake.
I set the boxes, there were three, in the centre of the room, sat cross-legged on a scatter rug at the end of the bed, and went through Donna’s stuff for two and a half hours, feeling like a voyeur, like I was invading her privacy, the only thing that was left of her.
Two and a half hours of fifteen-year-old bank statements, Day-Timers loaded with to-do lists and appointment times, a couple of English essays from what looked like a first-year university lit survey course. I read one, Donna’s take on choosing Marlow rather than Kurtz as the hero of Heart of Darkness. I read the essay and cried, not for the content but for the creator of the content. I set the second essay aside unread — it was something about Polonius’s role in Hamlet.
Tax receipts, a phone directory, travel brochures, four letters from me during our courting days … I didn’t read them but I did notice that she had written notes in the margins. “Sweet!!” and “I love that man” were a couple that caught my attention.
I tried not to let the time deteriorate into a nostalgia session and concentrated on finding some tiny hint, some clue that might provide a reason for someone to hate the woman I loved.
Two and a half hours of nothing. I was closing in on comatose. I picked up one more piece of paper. One yellowed piece of three-hole-punched paper like something torn from a school Duo-Tang or notebook. A neatly written note in what I was fairly certain was Donna’s handwriting.
Kelly — The bastard did it again. D
And under that, what I guessed was the reply.
Pig.K
It had been stuck between the pages of a battered paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Hundred to one odds it was meaningless — there were a hundred innocuous explanations for the note. And I might have forgotten the whole thing except that it was out of character for the Donna I knew to vent her anger in that way, which wasn’t to say she didn’t get angry at times, but mostly she dealt with it internally or in some totally civilized and controlled way that didn’t involve name calling or writing angry notes.
Still, this was likely high school or even junior high. What kid didn’t vent occasionally as part of the growing up/going to school/rebelling against parents and the world phase?
And that was it. Close to three hours of searching had resulted in one hand-written note to someone named Kelly — a note containing six words. Seven if you counted Kelly’s one word reply. Not much there to make me change my belief that the arsonist had been targeting me and had messed up.
I left the stuff spread over the bedroom floor and stumbled into bed. Now I was tired. Del Barber was singing “62 Richmond” for the third time. I didn’t bother to shut off the stereo. I was asleep before the end of the song.
But not for long. I dreamt. Something about a fire and a fire alarm. At least it started as a fire alarm then morphed into a phone ringing. It took me a while to figure that out. The fog in my brain finally cleared enough that I realized the phone wasn’t in my dream. I was actually awake and the reason was that the phone on the end table next to my bed wouldn’t shut up.
After maybe the tenth ring, I got it picked up and juggled over to where I was. I rested it more or less against my ear.
“Hello.”
Cobb’s voice. “Sorry to call at this hour.”
“You’re hard on rest, my friend.”
“Yeah. I called to tell you you’re out.”
“What? Out what?”
“I won’t be picking you up in the morning. You’re out of the search for Jay Blevins.”
I rubbed my face with my left hand. “You find a better journalist or what?”
“Blevins is dead.”
I sat up.
“Jay?”
“Larry. The old man. They got to him before he could turn himself in. Shot in the back of the head but that was after someone did a lot of nasty stuff to him … something like forty broken bones. The cops couldn’t recognize him from his face.”
“How did you find out?”
“I was a cop, Adam, I know some people.”
“Any idea who?”
“He was found beside a Dumpster a few blocks from his house. Time of death about midnight.”
About the time we were getting back to my apartment.
“Shit,” I said.
“These are bad bastards, Adam. I can’t run the risk of having them come after you.”
“Isn’t that my risk and my decision?”
“No, it isn’t. I asked you to help me, you did, and I appreciate it, but things have changed and I’ll need to do this without having to … on my own.”
“You were going to say without having to look out for me.”
No answer.
“Back to my earlier point, I can decide for myself what risks I’m prepared to take. And besides, you can’t fire a volunteer.”
“I’m not firing you. Look, I’m sorry, but I need to be on my own and I haven’t got time to argue with you about it. Thanks for what you did on this.”
I wanted to debate it further but I would have been talking to a dial tone. Cobb had hung up. I set the phone back on its cradle and stared into the dark for a while. Knowing sleep wouldn’t be happening any time soon, I got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and made a pot of coffee. Finally shut off the stereo. I sat at the table and drank two cups of coffee with milk and more sugar than usual.
I turned on the TV to see if there was anything about Blevins. There wasn’t, although there were several reports about the “gangland-style slaying” of two suspected narcotics dealers. No names. Footage of the house on Raleigh, reporters voicing comments that were a collection of generalities, which was probably all they had. I doubted the cops would be all that forthcoming, especially since they likely didn’t know a hell of a lot themselves. I wondered how long it would be before they were able to tie Blevins’s death to the shooting of the two dealers.
I turned off the TV and started on a third cup of coffee while I leafed through Donna’s stuff again. It was a small pile — not much to show for thirty plus years of life. The fire had taken the rest.
But halfway through the third cup of coffee I started to question that supposition. I thought about my own situation — most of the flotsam and jetsam of my past had also been destroyed in the fire. Most, but not all.
If I were trying to uncover my own past, where would I look? Parents, best friends, maybe even school. The point was, there were places. It all hadn’t just disappeared over time. I spent the next half hour making a list of places I might be able to look to reconstruct at least some of Donna’s life from before I knew her.
The list wasn’t long; the truth is I didn’t really know much about Donna (then) Leybrand. I’d lied, I’m not sure why, when I told Cobb that Donna and I had talked about all that kind of thing. In truth we’d almost never talked about Donna’s life before we knew each other. I never got the impression she was hiding anything or didn’t want to talk about the past. We just didn’t.
But maybe that wasn’t quite accurate either. We’d talked about my past. At least the stuff I