The Wrong Man Read online

  Ashley felt a little ridiculous.

  She had jammed a week’s worth of clothing into a black duffel bag and a second week’s worth into a small suitcase with rollers. The day before, the Federal Express deliveryman had arrived with a package for her from her father. It included two different guidebooks to cities in Italy, an English-Italian dictionary, and three large books about Renaissance art. Of these three, she already owned two. There was also a handbook put out by his own college called A Student’s Guide to Study Abroad.

  He had written up a brief letter, using his computer to make up an impressive masthead from the fictional Institute for the Study of Renaissance Art welcoming her to the program, and giving the name of a contact when she arrived in Rome. The contact was actually real—a professor at the University of Bologna whom Scott had once met at a historical conference, and whom he knew was on a yearlong sabbatical, teaching in Africa. He didn’t think Michael O’Connell would ever be able to find him. And, even if he did, Scott had decided that mixing something fictional with someone real would at the very least be confusing. This, he had thought, was clever.

  This letter was to be left behind by Ashley, as if forgotten by accident.

  His directions for what she was supposed to do beyond leaving the fictional letter behind were detailed and, she thought, a little over-the-top. But he had made her promise that she would do precisely as he instructed. Nothing he was suggesting was truly out of line, and it all made eminently good sense, because to achieve what he wanted, some deception was in order.

  One of the guidebooks was to be placed in an outside pocket on the duffel bag with the title protruding out, so that anyone who saw her carrying it couldn’t help but notice it. The other books were to be left around the apartment, so that they would be packed, although Scott urged Ashley to arrange them prominently on her desktop and bedside table.

  The next-to-last call she should make, before calling the telephone company and canceling her landline service, was to a taxi company.

  When the cab arrived, she was to lock her apartment and place the key on the lintel above the outside door, where the football movers could easily find it.

  Ashley looked around at the place that she’d come to regard as a sort of home. The posters on the walls, the potted plants, the dingy orange shower curtain, had been her own, and her first, and she was surprised by how emotional she suddenly felt about the simplest of items. She sometimes thought that she wasn’t yet sure who she was, and who she was going to become, but the apartment had been a first step toward those definitions.

  “God damn you!” she said out loud. She did not even have to form the name in her mind.

  She looked down at her father’s handwritten note. All right, she said to herself. Might as well play it out.

  Then she went to the phone and dialed a cab.

  She waited nervously right inside the apartment-building door until the taxi arrived. Following her father’s suggestions, she was wearing dark sunglasses and a knit hat pulled down over her hair. Her jacket collar was turned up. Look like someone who doesn’t want to be recognized and is in the process of running away, he had written her. She was a little unsure whether she was acting, as if on a stage, or behaving reasonably. As the taxi rolled to a stop in front of her building, she hurriedly stepped through the doorway and placed the key where her father had told her to. Then, head down, looking neither right nor left, she burst forward, acting as rapidly and as furtively as she could, still assuming that Michael O’Connell was watching from some location. It was early in the afternoon, and glare from the sun shredded the cool air around her, casting odd shadows into alleyways. She tossed her suitcase and duffel onto the seat, then threw herself in behind them.

  “Logan,” she said. “International departures terminal.”

  Then she lowered her head, scrunching down in the seat as if hiding.

  At the airport, she gave the driver a modest tip and made a point of saying, “Italy. I’m going to Florence. Going to study abroad.” She was unsure whether he understood anything she said.

  She rolled her bags into the departures arena, her steps punctuated by the constant roar of jets taking off above the harbor waters. There was excitement in the lines of people checking in. A hum of conversation, in all sorts of languages, filled the space. She glanced toward the exit gates, then she abruptly turned and headed to her right, to a bank of elevators. She fell in close with a crowd that had come off an Aer Lingus flight from Shannon, all redheads, white-skinned, speaking rapidly in accented tones, wearing the distinctive green-and-white-striped Celtic jerseys, on their way to a big family reunion in South Boston.

  Ashley found a little space in the back of the elevator and quickly opened up her duffel bag. She stuffed her knit cap, fleece jacket, and sunglasses inside, removed a maroon Boston College baseball cap and a brown leather overcoat, changing swiftly, thankful that the other passengers, if they did notice what she was doing, seemed to think nothing of it.

  She exited at the third-story walkway to the central parking garage. In the gray, shadowy parking area, smelling of oil and punctuated by high-pitched squealing sounds from tires on the circular ramps, she rapidly made her way across to the domestic terminals. She followed the signs toward the bus connecting to the T station.

  Only a half dozen people were in the subway train compartment, and none of them were Michael O’Connell. There was no chance, she thought, that she was being followed. Not any longer. She began to feel excitement and a heady sense of freedom. Her pulse increased and she realized that she was smiling, probably for the first time in days.

  Still, she elected to follow her father’s instructions, thinking, They may be crazy, but I think they’ve worked so far. She got off the train at Congress Street and, still dragging her two bags, walked the few short blocks to the Children’s Museum. Inside the entrance, she was able to check her bags and buy a single ticket. Then she rose up into the meandering maze of the museum, wandering from LEGO room to science exhibit, constantly surrounded by giggling squads of fast-moving children, teachers, and parents. She stood in the midst of all sorts of happy, excited noises and immediately understood the logic behind her father’s plan: Michael O’Connell would have been unable to hide in the museum, despite the angles, stairs, and slides that filled it. He would instantly have stood out as wrong, where Ashley immediately became no different from any preschool teacher or mother’s helper, making her slow and exhausted way through the crowds in the museum.

  She checked her watch, still keeping to her father’s schedule. At precisely 4 p.m. she retrieved her bags and exited directly into one of the cabs waiting outside. This time she inspected the street carefully for any signs of O’Connell. The museum was located in a onetime warehouse district, and the broad street was open in both directions. She recognized the genius in their choice of the location: no place to hide, no alleys, trees, dark places.

  Ashley smiled and asked the cab to take her to the Peter Pan bus station. The driver grumbled—it was only a short ride—but she didn’t care; for the first time in days it seemed, she had lost the sensation of being watched. She even hummed a little as the cab cut through the downtown Boston streets.

  She purchased a ticket for Montreal on a bus leaving in less than ten minutes. The bus stopped in Brattleboro, Vermont, before going on to Canada; she would merely exit well before the destination on her ticket. And she was looking forward to seeing Catherine.

  The stench of exhaust and grease filled her nostrils as she climbed onto the bus. It was already dark, and shafts of neon blended with the gleaming silver shape of the bus. She found a seat in the back, next to a window. For a moment, she stared out into the growing night and was a little amazed that instead of feeling uncertain and unsettled, she felt almost free. And when the driver slammed the door shut and ground the gears as he backed the bus out of its loading dock, she closed her eyes, listening to the rhythm of the engine, as it accelerated through downtown streets, heading
toward the highway, and leaving the city behind. Although it was only early in the evening, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The sun was unrelenting. It was one of those Valley days where the stagnant air seemed trapped between the hills, obese with heat, when I parked a few blocks away from Matthew Murphy’s office. A film of wavy, unapologetic warm air hung just above the sidewalk.

  In many older New England cities, it is easy to see where the reconstruction dollars ran out and the local politicians counted up votes and saw little return. In the space of a single block or two, upscale businesses give way to a seedier, more decrepit look. It is not precisely decay, the way a tooth rots from the inside out, but more a sort of resignation.

  The block where I expected to find his office was perhaps a little more rundown than some of the others. A dark and cavernous bar on the corner advertised TOPLESS ALL DAY ALL NITE on a handwritten sign stuck beneath a bright red BUDWEISER neon light in the window. Across from that was a small bodega with stacks of chips, fruits, Tecate malt drink, and canned foodstuffs cluttering the aisles, and a Honduran flag hanging by the front door. The rest of the buildings were the ubiquitous redbrick of almost every city. A police car rolled past me.

  I found the entrance to Murphy’s building midblock. It was an unremarkable place, with a single elevator inside next to a directory that listed four offices on two floors.

  Murphy was across from a social services agency. A cheap black wooden plaque by the door had his name and the phrase Confidential Inquiries of All Natures underneath in gold script.

  I put my hand on the door to enter the office, but it was locked. I tried a couple of times, then reached up and knocked loudly.

  There was no answer.

  I knocked again and swore a couple of times under my breath.

  When I stepped back, shaking my head and thinking that I had wasted the entire day driving down to the office, the door to the social services agency opened, and a middle-aged woman carrying an armful of dossiers emerged. She sighed when she saw me and offered up quickly, “No one’s there anymore.”

  “Did they move?” I asked.

  “Sort of. It was in the papers.”

  I looked surprised, and she frowned. “You have business with Murphy?”

  “I have some questions for him.”

  “Well,” she said stiffly, “I can give you his new address. It’s just a half dozen blocks from here.”

  “Great. Where about are we talking?”

  She shrugged. “River View Cemetery.”

  23

  Anger

  He reminded himself to remain calm.

  This was difficult for Michael O’Connell. He generally functioned better on the edge of rage, where streaks of fury colored his judgment, reliably steering him into places where he was comfortable. A fight. An insult. An obscenity. These were all moments that he enjoyed almost as much as he did when he was making plans. There were few things, he thought, more satisfying than predicting what people would do, then watching them do it, just as he’d imagined they would.

  He had observed Ashley’s furtive dash from her building to the taxi, noting the cab company and identifying number. He wasn’t surprised that she was going somewhere. Running came naturally to people like Ashley and her family, he had told himself. He considered them cowards.

  He called the dispatcher for the cab service, gave the taxi’s ID number, and said he’d found some prescription glasses in a case that the young lady had apparently dropped on the sidewalk. Was there any way he could return them to her?

  The dispatcher had hesitated for a moment while he went over his log of radio calls.

  “Ah, I don’t think so, fella.”

  “Why not?” O’Connell had asked.

  “That trip was to the international departures terminal at Logan. You might as well just chuck ’em. Or drop ’em in one of those eyeglasses-for-charity boxes you see.”

  “Well,” O’Connell said, trying to make a joke, “somebody’s not gonna see too many sights in wherever they’re going on vacation.”

  “Tough luck for her.”

  That was an understatement, Michael O’Connell thought, seething inwardly.

  Now he was perched a half block from her apartment, watching three young men move boxes out of her apartment building. They had a midsize U-Haul truck double-parked in the street outside, and they seemed to be hustling to get the job done and get on their way. Once again, O’Connell told himself to remain calm. He shrugged his shoulders to try to loosen the tension that had built up in his neck, and he clenched and unclenched his fists a half dozen times, trying to relax himself. Then he slowly sauntered down the block toward where the three young men were working.

  One of the boys was carrying two boxes of books, with a lamp precariously balanced on top, when O’Connell arrived at the front stoop. The boy was a little unsteady under the weight.

  “Hey, coming or going?” O’Connell asked.

  “Just moving out,” the boy replied.

  “Let me grab that for you,” O’Connell said, reaching out for the lamp before it fell to the sidewalk. He had an electric sensation as he wrapped his fingers around the metallic base, as if the mere touch of Ashley’s belongings were the same as stroking her skin. His hand caressed the lamp, and in his mind’s eye he recalled precisely where it had been in the apartment, on the bedside table. He could sense the light throwing an arc over her body, illuminating curves and shapes. His breathing accelerated, and he almost felt dizzy when he handed it to the moving boy.

  “Thanks,” the boy responded as he wedged the lamp unceremoniously into the truck. “Just got the damn desk and the bed and a rug or two to go.”

  O’Connell swallowed hard and gestured toward a pink bedspread. He remembered that one night he had kicked it aside, before bending over her form. “This isn’t your stuff?”

  “Nah,” the boy responded, stretching his back. “We’re moving a professor’s daughter’s stuff. Getting paid pretty well.”

  “Not bad,” O’Connell said slowly, as if biting off each word, working hard to keep anything other than idle curiosity out of his voice. “This must be the girl that lives on the second floor. I live down there.” He gestured toward a couple of other buildings. “She’s pretty hot. She leaving town?”

  “Florence, Italy, the man says. Got a scholarship to study.”

  “Not bad. Sounds like a good deal.”

  “No shit.”

  “Well, good luck with the stuff.” O’Connell gave a small wave and continued walking. He crossed the street and found a tree trunk to lean against.

  He breathed in rapidly, letting an icy cold compulsion build up inside him. He watched Ashley’s furniture disappear into the back of the truck and wondered if what he was watching was really happening. It was like standing in front of a movie screen, where everything seemed real, but not. A taxi driver with a fare to Logan International Airport. A trio of college kids packing and moving on a quiet Sunday morning. A private detective with an address in Springfield taking his picture from a car parked across from his own apartment. Michael O’Connell knew it added up to something, but precisely what, he wasn’t yet certain. He was sure of one thing, however. If Ashley’s folks thought that buying her a plane ticket would get her away from him, they were genuinely mistaken. All they had managed was to make things far more interesting for him. He would find her, even if he had to fly all the way to Italy.

  “No one steals from me,” he whispered to himself. “No one takes what’s mine.”

  Catherine Frazier pulled her fleece jacket a little closer and watched her breath like smoke curl in front of her. The night air had an edge that predicted the evenings to come. Vermont is like that, she thought, it always gives a warning about what is coming, if one is only careful enough to pay attention. A cold taste of the dark sky on her lips, a sensation of numbness on her cheeks, above her a rattle of tree branches, a thin edge of ice on the ponds in the morning. There would be flurri
es in the next few days. She made a mental note to check her store of split wood piled up behind her house. She wished she could read people with the same accuracy as she did the weather.

  The Boston bus was a little late, and instead of waiting inside the bowling alley and restaurant where it made its stop before heading on to Burlington and Montreal, she had stepped outside. Bright lights made her strangely nervous; she was more comfortable in shadows and fog.

  She was looking forward to seeing Ashley, although, as always, she was a little nervous about how precisely she was to refer to her during her visit. Ashley wasn’t her granddaughter, nor was she a niece. She wasn’t related through adoption, although that was closest to what she was. Vermonters, as a rule, rarely butted into anyone else’s business, having that Yankee sensibility that the less said, the better. But Catherine knew that the other ladies of her church, and the folks behind the counter at the general store, the Ace Hardware, and other places where she was well-known, would have their questions. Like many in New England, they all had fined-tuned radars for any small act that suggested hypocrisy. And something about welcoming her daughter’s partner’s child into her home, while silently but obviously condemning that relationship, put some feelings on edge.

  Catherine put her head back and let her eyes sweep over the canopy of night sky. She wondered if one could have as many conflicted feelings as there were stars in the heavens.

  Ashley had been a child when she had first entered Catherine’s life. She remembered her first meeting with Ashley and found herself smiling in the darkness at the memory. I was wearing too many clothes. It was hot, but I had on a woolen skirt and sweater. How silly. I must have seemed like I was a hundred years old.

  Catherine had been stiff, almost arch, stupidly formal, holding out her hand for a handshake, when she had been introduced to the eleven-year-old Ashley. But the child had disarmed her immediately, and so, in some respects, what truce she had with her own daughter, and the civility she displayed outwardly toward her daughter’s partner—Catherine hated that word; it made their relationship seem like a business—stemmed from her affection for Ashley. She had attended raucous birthday parties and dismally wet soccer games, watched Ashley play Juliet in a high school production, although she hated it when the character Ashley played died on the stage. She had sat on the edge of Ashley’s bed one night while the fifteen-year-old had sobbed uncontrollably at the breakup with her first boyfriend, and she had driven fast, far faster than ordinary, to get to Hope and Sally’s home in time to snap pictures of Ashley in her prom dress. She had nursed Ashley through a bout with the flu, when Sally had been preoccupied with a court case, sleeping on the floor next to her, listening for her breathing throughout the night. She had hosted Ashley when she’d shown up, camping gear in tow, with a couple of college friends, heading toward the Green Mountains, and entertained her at dinner in Boston on a couple of happy occasions and one truly wonderful time in the bleacher seats at Fenway, when Catherine had found an excuse to go to the city and had offhandedly called, although she had inwardly known that seeing Ashley was the real reason for the trip.