The Realm of Last Chances (21 page)

He decided to quit drinking anything stronger than beer, and while not going to bed in a stupor had its virtues, he again was having terrible dreams in which he was descending a steep slope into a gully, his skin as dry as paper, the manzanita scratching his shins and flaying him alive with each halting step.

Fearing the nightmares, he fought off sleep as much as he could, though since he was trying to behave like a normal husband in an average marriage, he stayed in bed beside Kristin rather than prowling the house and attempting to wear himself out. Due to his size, he couldn’t shift position very often without waking her up, so he lay on his back, still and stiff, his right hand gripping the railing.

During the day he often felt disoriented and lethargic, and he’d stopped working on the house. When he wasn’t parked on the couch thinking about Saucer, he spent time with his friends on the third floor. At the hospital they’d told him not to play for several days, since that might cause his stitches to work loose, but he’d never been able to keep his hands off a stringed instrument if one was nearby. Figuring he was most likely to hurt himself on the guitars, he generally played one of his mandolins for a little bit, mostly open chords that didn’t require any big stretches. Even if you weren’t trying to improve your technique or learn something new, you could simply appreciate tone. He had a vintage Gibson F-5 that cost him a
staggering eleven grand and a four-year-old Bitterroot, made in Montana, that he’d bought new for twenty-nine hundred. The F-5 sounded pretty good, but the Bitterroot sounded great, delivering such a piercing treble that you didn’t have to attack it hard on single-note leads. He sat with it on the daybed for an hour or two at a time, strumming D’s and A’s and listening to the strings sing.

The Bitterroot was very basic, something very few professional musicians would ever play. Most, if they saw one hanging on the wall of some high-end shop, would walk right on by and reach for the oldest F-5 in sight or, if they couldn’t swing that, would settle for a Gilchrist or a Monteleone. Andrew Saucer was the kind of man you walked right on by, unless he was waving a gun in your face. Practically a definition of basicness. But the Bitterroot had a great tone, whereas Saucer’s was off. He didn’t sound good, didn’t look good, couldn’t think well, and as soon as Mass General released him from intensive care he’d be right back in jail.

When Cal finally laid the Bitterroot in its case, he was drawn to the window, where he stood looking at the neighbors’ maple. After searching online, he’d decided the tree was of the Autumn Blaze variety, and even though he could see others in the distance that looked almost identical, this one fascinated him. He wished there were some means of determining how long it had stood there, how many times it had burst into color or its leaves had turned brown and fallen off and whether it had suffered any significant storm damage. Surely, the snow must weigh it down. Even on a tree this big and sturdy, a branch would have to break eventually.

Over the next couple of weeks, Kristin began to return late—sometimes after nine—but he’d grown used to that in California. The further she got into her school year, the more meetings she’d have to attend. And those meetings meant it was more
likely that things would go wrong. Though he lacked evidence, he suspected the main activity university administrators engaged in was coming up with stuff to administer. Like contractors, they got paid twice: first for building something, then for repairing it after it began to fall apart.

Each day, when she left, she’d tell him if she’d be coming home late. If so, around six thirty or seven that evening he’d put on a warm jacket, then go out and light a fire in the Smokey Joe. While waiting for the coals, he sat by the grill and enjoyed the crisp air. There were leaves everywhere now, brittle and crunchy, and each evening he promised himself that the next day he’d drive down to the hardware and buy some of the tall brown lawn bags he’d seen standing on the sidewalk throughout the neighborhood, awaiting curbside pickup. But when the next day came, he again stayed home.

One night toward the end of the month he was out there with Suzy, sipping Sam Adams and debating whether he wanted to throw a steak or a couple of chicken breasts on the grate. He’d just about decided on red meat when he heard someone call his name, and stood up.

In the light from the kitchen window he could see his neighbor standing at the fence, holding a comically large wineglass. You could have poured half a bottle into that thing, and it looked like the older man had.

“How you doing?” Vico asked.

“So-so,” Cal said. “Just trying to figure out what to eat.”

“Haven’t had a chance to talk to you lately.”

“I’ve kind of been keeping a low profile.”

“That business at the store shake you up?”

“I guess maybe it did. A little bit.”

“Scared the living shit out of me.” With his free hand, Vico gestured at his own house. “I mean, I’ve always assumed I’d die right there, in some mundane way. Know what I’m saying? Have a heart attack and fall down the stairs. There’s a rug right
at the bottom that’s about six inches thick, so I’m hoping that’ll minimize disfiguration. I got some relatives that went into their boxes in poor condition—bullet wounds, water damage, you name it—and since it’s my buddies who’ll most likely find me, I don’t want to cause them any loss of appetite.”

“That’s considerate of you.”

“Well, these guys appreciate a good meal.”

The level of disengagement Cal felt began to frighten him. For an instant, he forgot almost everything he knew about this guy—his former profession, what kind of car he drove, who the hell he was. He remembered only that the man had watched him beat another person half to death. His neighbor would never forget it, and in his eyes that was who Cal would always be, just as Cal would always see him as someone who’d witnessed it.

The fence between them suddenly seemed to say it all. He himself had ended up on the far side of the continent from everything and everybody he could plausibly call familiar. The individual he knew best wasn’t even a person—she was only a dog, and she was old. She couldn’t be expected to stick around much longer.

All over the country people were being dislocated, heading off to places they didn’t belong, hoping to somehow find themselves another home. Some of them, like Andrew Saucer, probably couldn’t fit in anywhere. Cal was beginning to suspect he was yet another, that there was nothing left for him, that one wrong turn he’d taken a long time ago had landed him right here, trying to remember the stranger next door.

“Speaking of a good meal,” Vico was saying, “I believe you could use one. You’ve ingested a lot of lighter fluid over the last couple of weeks. My pals and I lost interest in the Series when the Yankees dropped the pennant and denied us the chance to root against ’em, but the Pats play the Vikings on Sunday, which means Randy Moss is back and we’ve got him to hate.
How about it? Want to come over? Game starts around four. We’ll drink all the way through it and chow down when it ends.”

Over many years of playing fiddle tunes on guitar and mandolin, Cal had learned to prize those fleeting instants when his wrists loosened up and his hands were moving at just the right speed: not picking so hard that he had to smear notes, instead allowing each one to exist as its own separate creation, according it the dignity it deserved. When this happened, the most wonderful sensation came over him, as if at least for a while everything was as it should be, the tune he was playing and the instrument he was playing it on both belonging to him and, even more important, he to them. It couldn’t last forever, but that’s exactly how he felt now.

“Sure, Vico,” he said, “I’d like that.”

donna taff
would’ve preferred to go through life thinking others wished her well, but she’d noticed that this notion often led people to become prey, losing their savings to Bernie Madoff or their cell phones to some young hoodlum because they’d stupidly pulled them out on the subway as the train neared their stop. Whereas if you were like her and regarded those around you with keen-eyed suspicion, you wouldn’t easily get fooled.

So she was suspicious of her husband, Charlie, who kept hatching schemes to improve their financial situation. A few years ago, after his best friend drowned in the
Starbound
disaster, he’d sold his trawler, taken out a second mortgage on their Gloucester home and opened a bar called the Screeching Gull. His reasoning went something like this: new groundfishing regulations, combined with reduced limits on a number of species, made it unlikely he’d see any growth in catch levels over the next decade or so, too many of his friends had died at sea anyway and he didn’t want to leave her a widow. Furthermore, the film version of
The Perfect Storm
had just been released about eighteen months earlier, and people were flocking to town wanting to see where the crew of the
Andrea Gail
had lived, worked and hung out. Since a great many of the scenes in the movie were set in a Gloucester bar called the Crow’s Nest, he was convinced that simply opening a pub named after a bird would draw tourists by the score.

The tourists never came. The pub was only a block off Main, but it was a block that few outsiders ever ventured into. While over time it developed its own clientele, primarily old friends from the fishing industry who’d tired of all the thrill seekers
continually crowding the Crow’s Nest, business had been slack now for at least a couple of years and even showed signs of getting worse. If she hadn’t been one of only three administrative assistants at North Shore State to receive a raise last year, she and Charlie might have shown up in the foreclosure stats.

She was suspicious of Finn and Cara Martone, who worked at the Screeching Gull and told too many stories that didn’t add up. They’d met in Kansas, Finn said when the two couples were sitting at a table after the bar closed, finishing off a keg. Yet another time, Donna overheard Cara tell a customer that she’d first laid eyes on her husband on a beach in Orange County, California. Surrounded by all that tan SoCal perfection, she proudly remarked, he’d still stood out. How could he not? Even in dank and foggy Gloucester his skin remained as bronze as a penny, his stomach was flat, and his biceps rippled when he reached for the tap to draw a pint. He’d earned a degree in PE, he said, and coached football for a couple of years at a Michigan high school. But Charlie, who seemed enamored with both of them, once noted that when he and Finn watched a Pats game together, his younger friend seemed stumped by pretty basic terminology like “cover two” and “skinny post.”

Her suspicion also extended to her boss. At first, it was rooted in her fear that a woman as well educated as Kristin Stevens, with her background at a top research university, would look down her nose at her from the moment she walked in. Happily, that hadn’t been the case. Grudgingly—because it was not Donna’s habit to give things away—Kristin earned her trust. She was kind. And you could sense she’d known her share of hardship.

As the semester moved into the middle of November and a number of nettlesome issues loomed, her boss looked far less stressed out than she had when she began work back in August. Rather than appearing each morning with her hair askew and bags under her eyes, she now came in with every strand in place,
her makeup carefully applied, her face relaxed. Some mornings she brought Donna delicacies she’d picked up at the bakery across the street from the Bradbury bus station: vanilla-custard babas, lemon
anginetti
. One day she even invited her to lunch at a small place called Café Polonia, which served three different kinds of pierogi and a tangy hunter’s stew.

Her current suspicion of Kristin was rooted in the belief that when a fifty-year-old woman stops looking miserable and harried and seems relaxed and happy, it’s usually for one reason only. If they’d ever had occasion to go out after work for a few drinks, she eventually might’ve looked her boss in the eye and said, “Whatever it is you’ve found for yourself, you better not let it come to light.”

What comes to light when you launch an investigation of academic misconduct is seldom surprising. People pad their CVs, listing as “publications” articles that are simply under review. They reward themselves with consultantships at companies in foreign countries. They claim membership in Phi Beta Kappa. They name themselves to leadership positions in professional organizations that, at best, they’re only members of. They list “presentations” at conferences they didn’t attend. Back when student evaluations were turned in on paper, they delivered forgeries; now that the process has gone online, those with the technical know-how hack into the system and replace poor evaluations with good ones, taking care to make at least a few of their students sound representatively inarticulate.

When Kristin was a professor, she hadn’t expected to qualify for tenure. Her teaching evaluations were spotty, and the book based on her dissertation had been turned down by several presses. Shortly before she would’ve had to stand for tenure, she’d been asked to join the administration on an interim basis. She accepted, since that would stop her tenure clock. If she’d gone through the process, though, she wouldn’t have lied about
her lack of accomplishment, so she’d never felt any sympathy for those who did. If they lied and she discovered it, they’d get what they deserved.

After John Bell delivered evidence damning Robert Dilson-Alvarez and Gwendolyn Conley, she went over it carefully, then pulled the professors’ personnel files and reviewed their CVs.

Dilson-Alvarez listed an undergraduate degree from Heidelberg, and a master’s and doctorate from McGill. Prior to his arrival at North Shore State, he’d held visiting professorships at SUNY Binghamton and Colgate, followed by a lectureship at Appalachian State. One could argue that his career had spiraled steadily downward. But so had Kristin’s.

According to Gwendolyn Conley’s vitae, she’d taken her B.A. at Cal State, Fullerton, then earned an M.A. at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. There was a gap of six years before she’d enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Nevada, Reno. During this period she’d taught for three years at a community college in Porterville, California.