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I stepped away from the camera to check the end of the driveway next to the house. Only her car was parked there, a power cable ru
I heard locks being buzzed open, then the door opened a few inches. “Gerry?” I heard her say. “Are you out there?”
“Right here.” I quickly stepped away from the porch railing. Even when she was practically somnambulant, with her shoulder-length hair in knots and wearing a ragged terrycloth robe, Maria
Not that she was in any mood for compliments. “Gerry, what are you doing here?” she repeated. “For chrissakes, I just went to bed … and what are you looking at the driveway for?”
“Just seeing how the car’s holding up,” I said quickly. “You renewed your plates, didn’t you?”
Her expression became puzzled. “You didn’t come all the way out here to check my renewal sticker,” she said. “What’s going on, Gerard?”
She called me Gerard. When she used my full first name, it usually meant she was pissed off. No wonder; for Maria
She let out an exasperated sigh and sagged against the door frame. “Let me guess,” she said. “One of them is money, and the second is sex. What’s the third? The car?”
It might have been fu
“Hey, if you want to have sex with me and give me some bucks and the car in return-” I began, and she started to slam the door in my face until I pushed my hand against the knob. “Wait, I’m just kidding. Seriously …”
Again the sigh as she opened the door again. “Seriously what?”
Now was no time to bullshit my wife, even if she hated my guts. “I need a place to crash,” I said. “Just for tonight, I swear … and I need to use the computer.”
“Uh-huh.” She gazed at me indifferently. “A bed and the computer. Yeah. What else?”
“Hey, I can sleep on the couch-”
“Damn straight you’re going to sleep on the couch,” she replied. “What’s the third thing, Gerard?”
I hesitated; this was probably the biggest favor of all. “The third thing is no questions asked.” I took a deep breath. “I’m in trouble, kiddo. Big trouble.”
“Oh, Christ.” She sighed as her eyes rolled upward. “You’re ru
I almost broke down laughing. “Babe, a cop gave me a lift out here-”
“Uh, huh. Sure …”
I raised my hands. “Believe me, Maria
She sighed again, closing her eyes as if she was carrying the burdens of the world on her shoulders. “Jeez, Gerry, why can’t you go bug John for this?”
Because John is dead, I almost blurted out, but I held my tongue. Telling her would only have prompted all the questions I wanted to avoid, and it was far safer for her to remain ignorant. I was lucky that she obviously hadn’t seen the late news on one of the local TV stations or hadn’t yet received a call from Sandy Tiernan.
“Please,” I said. “Just do it for me, okay?”
She gazed at me for another moment, then she pushed the door open a little wider and stepped aside. “All right,” she said. “But remember … you’re sleeping on the couch.”
The house was a little cleaner than it had usually been before I moved out, yet otherwise everything was much the same. She hadn’t changed the living room furniture or taken any of the prints from the walls; although she had removed our wedding photos, there were still baby and toddler pictures of Jamie on the fireplace mantel. Maria
The office was located in the rear of the ground floor, in what had been a den before we had put in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Before the quake hit, we had shared that space; she had used it during the day to telecommute to her insurance company’s home office in Kansas City, and when she was through at five o’clock it became my study for the writing of the Great American Unreadable Novel. I noticed that she had removed my books and mementos from the shelves, but I didn’t want to make an issue of it. Right now, I was interested in only one thing.
I found the plastic CD-OP filebox on a small shelf beneath the desk; the particular disk for which I was searching was contained in a scratched, often-opened case marked FAMILY. Maria
Starting shortly after we became engaged, Maria
We had gotten bored of the novelty after a while, and thus there were large chronological gaps on the menu until Jamie was born, when we had rediscovered the camcorder and started making the inevitable baby pictures. As a result, the submenu screen showed a lot of filenames marked JAMIE.1, JAMIE.2, JAMIE.3, and so forth, one for each birthday he had passed. Yet there was one piece of footage in particular, lodged in JAMIE.6, that I now needed to see.
After we had moved back to St. Louis, there had been a rash of kidnappings in the city. Children were vanishing from schoolbus stops and playgrounds and shopping malls, rarely to be seen again by their parents, and then sometimes not alive. The police never caught the evil bastards who had stolen these kids, and only God knows what happened to the ones who were not found, but Maria