The Wrong Man

O’Co

The telephone rang five times before he heard her sleep-groggy voice.

“Hello?”

He paused, just to give her a second or two to fully awaken.

“Hello?” she asked a second time. “Who is it?”

He remembered a cheap, white portable phone by the side of her bed. No caller ID, not that it would make a difference.

“You know who it is,” he said softly.

She did not reply.

“I told you. I love you, Ashley. We are meant for each other. No one can come between us.”

“Michael, stop calling me. I want you to leave me alone.”

“I don’t need to call you. I’m always with you.”

Then he hung up the phone, before she had a chance to. The best sort of threat, he thought, wasn’t stated, but imagined.

It was almost dawn when he finally made it back to his apartment.

Perhaps a half dozen of his neighbor’s cats were milling about in the hallway, mewling and making other a

O’Co

Or that she would miss one.

He rapidly bent down and seized the black-and-white roughly around the midsection. The cat squealed once, clawing at him in surprise.

He looked down at the sudden red scratch on the back of his hand. The thin line of blood was going to make what he had in mind much easier.

Ashley Freeman lay back in her bed.

“I am in trouble,” she whispered out loud.

She remained that way, barely moving until the sunlight moved steadily through her window, past the frilly, opaque shades that gave the room a little-girl feel. She watched as a shaft of daylight moved slowly along the wall across from her bed. Some of her own works were hung there, some charcoal drawings done in a life-figure class, one of a man’s torso that she liked, another of a woman’s back that curved sensuously across the white page. There was also a self-portrait that she’d done, which was unusual in that she had only drawn half of her face in detail and left the remainder in obscurity, as if it were shadowed.

“This can’t be happening,” she said, again out loud, but this time a little louder.

Of course, she noted inwardly, she didn’t know what this was. Not yet.

I called her later that day. I didn’t bother with pleasantries or small talk, but just launched into my first question: “Exactly where did Michael O’Co

She sighed. “That’s something you need to discover for yourself. But don’t you remember the electricity of being young and coming unexpectedly across that singular moment of passion? The one-night stand, the chance encounter. Have you gotten so old that you can’t remember when things were all possibility?”

“All right. Yes,” I said, perhaps a little too hastily.

“There was only one problem. All those moments are more or less benign, or, at the very most, simply embarrassing. Red-faced mistakes, or moments you keep to yourself and never mention to another soul. But that wasn’t the case this time. Ashley, in a moment of weakness, slipped once, and then, abruptly, found herself enmeshed in a briar patch. Except a briar patch isn’t necessarily lethal, and Michael O’Co

I paused, then said, “I found Will Goodwin. Except his name wasn’t Goodwin.”

She hesitated, a small catch in the words that slowly came over the phone line. “Good. You probably learned something important. At the very least, your understanding of Michael O’Co

“Okay, but-”

“I have to go. But you understand, in a way, you’re at the same point Scott Freeman was, before things started to get…well, I’m not sure what the right word is. Tense? Difficult? He knew some things, but not very much. Mostly what he had was an absence of information. He believed that Ashley might be at risk, but he didn’t know how, or exactly where or when, or any of the things that we first ask ourselves when we perceive a threat. All Scott Freeman had were several disturbing items to wonder about. He knew it wasn’t the start and he knew it wasn’t the finish. He was like a scientist, thrown into the middle of an equation, trying to guess which way to go in order to find an answer.”

She paused, and for the first time I felt a bit of the same chill.

“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll speak again.”

“But-”

“Indecision. It’s a simple word. But it leads to evil things, does it not? Of course, so can being foolishly decisive. That’s more or less the dilemma, isn’t it? To act. Or not to act. Always an intriguing question, don’t you think?”