Red 1-2-3 (3 page)

It was night and well past the dinner hour when Karen pulled onto the long dirt and gravel driveway that led to her house, stopping at the beaten old mailbox by the side of the road. She lived in a rural part of the county, adjacent to conservation land and walking paths through dark woods, where modestly expensive homes were pushed back away from any roadway and many sported views of distant hills. In the fall this landscape was spectacular as the leaves changed, but that time had swept past, and now it was trapped in cold, muddy, and barren winter.

The lights were ablaze inside her home, but this wasn’t because there was someone to meet her; she’d had a timing system installed because she lived alone, and she didn’t like coming home to a dark house on sad nights like this one. It wasn’t the same as being greeted by a family, but it made the return home slightly more welcoming. She had a pair of cats—Martin 15

JOHN KATZENBACH

and Lewis—who would be waiting for her with feline enthusiasm, which, she was sad to admit, wasn’t really very much. She was torn about her pets.

She would have preferred a dog, some bounding, tail-wagging golden retriever who made up for lack of brains with unabashed eagerness, but because she worked such long hours away from her house, she hadn’t felt it fair to a dog, especially a breed that suffered without human companion-ship. The cats, with their lofty self-determination and haughty approach to life, were better suited for the isolation of Karen’s daily grind.

That she lived alone, away from city lights and energy, was something she had simply fallen into over the years. She had been married once. It hadn’t worked. She had a lover once. It hadn’t worked. She’d engaged in a relationship with another woman once. It hadn’t worked. She had given up on one-night-meet-you-in-the-bar stands and Internet service dating sites that promised real compatibility once you filled out the question-naire and suggested that love was waiting right around the corner. None of these had worked, either. She had discovered that solitude didn’t bother her in the least. It gave her confidence.

What she had was her job and a hobby that she kept hidden from her physician coworkers: She was a dedicated if completely amateur stand-up comic. Once a month she would drive to any of the dozen or so comedy clubs throughout the state that had “open-mike” nights and would try out various routines. What she loved about performing comedy was its unpre-dictability. It was impossible to gauge whether any given audience would be howling with laughs, guffawing with hilarity, or sitting stony-faced, lips curling up, before the inevitable catcalls started to ring out and she would be forced to make a rapid retreat from the unrelenting spotlight. Karen loved making people laugh, and she even oddly appreciated the embarrassment of being hooted off the stage. Both reminded her of the frailties and eccentricity of life.

She kept a small Apple laptop with only a few applications on it to write her comedy routines and try out new jokes. Her regular computer was jammed with patient records, medical data, and the ordinary electronic life of a busy professional. The smaller one she kept locked away in 16

RED 1–2–3

the same way that she concealed her hobby from coworkers and her few friends and distant relatives. Comedy, like smoking, she told herself, was an addiction best kept secret.

Her mailbox door had been left slightly ajar—a habit the delivery person had that often resulted in her mail being soaked by the elements. She got out of her car, jogged around to the mailbox, and grabbed everything inside without looking at any of it. It had started to spit freezing rain, and a few drops hit her neck and chilled her. Then she hustled back behind the wheel and launched herself up the driveway, tires spinning against loose gravel and some ice that had already formed.

She found herself fixating on the old man who had died that day. This wasn’t uncommon for her, when she signed off on a death. It was as if some sort of vacuum had been created within her, and she felt a need to fill it with
some
bits of information.
Bagpipes. Iowa.
She had no idea how that connection was made. She began to speculate, trying to invent a story that would satisfy her curiosity.
He first heard the pipes when he was
a small child, after a new neighbor arrived from Glasgow or Edinburgh into
the weather-beaten house next door. The neighbor would often drink a little
too much, and he’d become melancholy and long for his native land. When
this loneliness came over him, the neighbor would bring down his instrument
from a shelf in the closet and decide to pipe in the evening dark, just as the sun
would set over the flat Iowa horizon, all because he missed the rolling green
hills of his home. Mister Wilson—only he wasn’t yet Mister Wilson—would
be in his bedroom, and the rich, unusual music would float through his open
window: “Scotland the Brave” or “Blue Bonnet.” That was where the fascination came from.
Karen thought that as good a story possibility as any.

She wondered:
Is there a routine in this?
Her mind churned up
So, I
watched an old man who loved the bagpipes die . . .
and could she make it seem like it was the unusual notes from the instrument that killed him and not old age?

The car crunched to a halt by the front door. She grabbed her briefcase, coat, and the pile of mail, and arms filled, she hustled through the gloomy darkness and damp chill toward her home.

17

JOHN KATZENBACH

The two cats sort of stirred to greet her as she came through the front door, but it seemed more an idle curiosity combined with dinner expecta-tions that had forced them from slumber. She headed into the kitchen, intending to pour them a new bowl of dry food, fix herself a glass of white wine, and consider what leftover in the refrigerator wasn’t too close to homicidal spoilage to reheat for dinner. Food did not interest her much, which helped keep her build wiry even as she crept in age into her fifties. She dropped the coat on a bench and shoved her briefcase beside it.

Then she went straight for the trash bin to sort through the mail. The letter without any identifying characteristics other than the New York City postmark was stuck between a telephone bill from Verizon, another from the local electric company, two promotional letters for credit cards she didn’t need or want, and several solicitation letters from the Democratic National Committee, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace.

Karen set the bills on a counter, tossed all the others into a bin for paper recycling, and tore open the anonymous letter.

The message made her hands twitch, and she gasped out loud.

When she became Red Two,
Sarah Locksley was naked.

She had stripped off first her pants and then her sweater, dropping them to the floor beside her. She was slightly drunk and slightly stoned from her usual afternoon combination of vodka and barbiturates when the postman pushed her daily mail delivery through the slot in her front door. She heard the sound of envelopes slapping against the hardwood floor of the vestibule. She knew most would be marked
Overdue
or
Final
Notice
. These were the daily deluge of bills and demands that she had no intention of paying the slightest attention to. She stood up and caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the television screen and thought it made no sense to go halfway, so she tugged off her bra and stepped out of her underwear and tossed it all onto a nearby couch with a flourish. She pirouetted right and left in front of the screen, thinking how little of her seemed to be left. She felt scrawny, emaciated, too thin by a half, and not 18

RED 1–2–3

from obsessive exercise or marathon race training. She knew that she had been sexy once, but now her slenderness was caused solely by despair.

Sarah picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. Her own reflected image on the screen was immediately replaced by the familiar characters of an afternoon soap opera. She found the
mute
switch on the remote and killed off the dialogue. Sarah preferred to make up her own story, substituting what she believed they should be saying for whatever the writing staff had come up with. She wanted her dialogue to be more trite. More clichéd. More stilted and more stupid. She did not want to allow even the slightest touch of emotional accuracy or acceptable reality into her versions of the soap operas. She wanted it to be sloppy and overwrought and she did not trust the soap opera’s writers to be as over the top as she could be. She did not expect to be able to do this for much longer—the Big Box
store where she’d purchased the television on credit was likely to come asking for it back any week. The same was true for her furniture, her car, and probably her house as well.

Her voice seemed to echo around her, her words slurred slightly, as if they were photographs taken out of focus.

“Oh Denise, I love you so much . . . especially your unbelievable Barbie-doll figure.”

“Yes, Doctor Smith, I love you too. Take me in your arms and spirit me and
my medically augmented breasts away from here . . ..”

On the television screen, a dark-haired, strapping man who looked significantly more like a male model than a heart surgeon was embracing a statuesque blond woman whose most serious disease ever might have been a cracked nail or the sniffles. The only time she’d ever had to see a doctor was when she’d had her teeth capped. Their mouths moved with words, but Sarah continued to supply the dialogue.

“Yes, darling, I will . . . except your test results have come back from the
laboratory, and, I don’t know how to say this, but you haven’t much time . . .”

“Our love is stronger than any disease . . ..”

Hah!
Sarah thought.
I bet it isn’t.

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JOHN KATZENBACH

Then she told herself:
I guess I’ll be writing the lovely Botoxed Denise and
the handsome Doctor Smith out of my life.

Sarah walked over to the front window as the show’s credits scrawled across the screen. She stood motionless for a few moments, arms lifted above her head, totally exposed, half-hoping one of her nosy neighbors would see her, or that the afternoon yellow school bus from the junior high school would roll past jammed with students and she could give all the preteens a real show. Some of the kids on the bus would remember her from her days in the classroom. Fifth grade. Mrs. Locksley.

She shut her eyes.
Look at me,
she thought.
Come on, goddammit, look
at me!

She could feel tears starting to well up uncontrollably in the corners of her eyes, running hot down her cheeks. This was normal for her.

Sarah had been a popular teacher right up to the moment she resigned.

If any of her former students saw her this day framed in her living room window stark naked, they would probably like her even more.

She had quit a little less than a year earlier, on one of the last days of the semester before summer vacation started. She quit on a Monday, two days after the bright, warm morning her husband had taken their three-year-old daughter on the most innocent of Saturday errands—a trip to the grocery store for milk and cereal—and never returned.

Sarah turned from the window and stared through the living room to the front door where the pile of mail was bunched up on the floor.
Never
answer the door,
she said to herself.
Never answer a ringing doorbell, or a
hard knock. Don’t pick up a telephone when someone unknown calls. Just stay
where you are, because it just might be a young state trooper with his Smokey
the Bear hat in his hands, looking embarrassed and stammering, “There’s been
an accident, and I hate to have to tell you this, Mrs. Locksley . . ..”

She sometimes wondered why her life had been ruined on such a fine day. It should have been a raining, sleeting, miserable, gloomy wintry mix, like this day was. But instead, it had been bright, warm, an endless blue sky, so when she fell to the floor that morning, her eyes had scoured the heavens above her, trying to find some shape that they could fix on, as if 20

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they could tether her to even a passing cloud, so desperate was she to hold on to something.

Sarah shrugged at the injustice of it all.

She looked outside the window. No one passing by. No naked sideshow this day. She ran her hands through her mane of red hair, wondering when it was that she’d showered, or taken a comb to the tangled thatch. A couple of days, at the least. She shrugged.
I was beautiful once. I was happy
once. I had the life I wanted once.

No more.

She turned and looked at the pile of envelopes by her front door.
Reality intrudes,
she told herself. She wished she were drunker or more stoned, but she felt totally sober.

So, she walked over to the pile of dunning letters.
Take it all,
she said.
I
don’t want to have anything left.

The nondescript letter with the New York postmark was resting on top. She didn’t know why it grabbed her attention, but she reached down and picked it up from the pile. At first, she imagined this was a really clever way some creditor had devised to get her to respond. Putting
Second
Notice
in large red letters on the outside was really designed to have her ignore whatever the notice was demanding pretty rapidly. But
not putting
anything
—well, she thought, that was smart. Her curiosity was pricked.

Reverse psychology.

Okay,
she told herself, as she idly tore open the envelope,
I’ll give you
this one. You won this round. I’ll read your threatening letter requiring me to
pay money I don’t have for something I no longer want or need.

She started reading, and swiftly realized that whatever she had had to drink earlier and whatever pills she had taken that morning, it might not have been enough.