The Wanting Read online

  “I slept okay. I guess.” Louise smiled. A frail expression.

  Frog rattled a spoon in his saucer. “You look—how shall I say—a leetle weary.”

  “I swear I’m fine.”

  Frog was quiet a moment. “Where’s Dennis? Don’t tell me. Lemme guess.”

  “It’s becoming a habit.” Louise rubbed her eyes.

  “Do you disapprove?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  “I guess I feel that he should be here with us.” Louise listened to the rattle of the upstairs shower a moment. “He should be doing things with his parents. His father especially. When I got up this morning Denny was already gone.”

  She spread her hands on the table, examined her wedding ring. It isn’t just Denny, she thought. Not entirely. She got up, fetched the coffeepot to the table. She refilled Frog’s cup. Then she sat down again, closing her eyes and tilting her head back out of the sun that came streaming through the kitchen window. She was thinking about Max, about the phone call he’d received last night at bedtime. A patient, he’d told her. Somebody with a problem the replacement physician, Stallings, couldn’t deal with. She’d heard Denny call out Some woman, Dad. What kind of patient was it who called so late at night? Why hadn’t Stallings been able to deal with it? She had lain awake a long time, turning these questions around in her mind. But it wasn’t just the questions that dogged her.

  It was something else. The intuition that Max was lying. Why did she feel that? And what could Max possibly have to hide? He had looked awkward when he’d come back upstairs to bed, reluctant to discuss the phone call. And even when he’d done so it had seemed to Louise that he was spinning a complicated tale about some neurotic woman she’d never heard of, somebody he’d never mentioned before. She needs a shrink, Max had said. But why hadn’t Louise ever heard of this particular patient before? Max always discussed the most interesting people who came to his office. He always regaled her with stories of hypochondriacs and neurotics and the plain loonies who sought him out to cure their imaginary ailments. But she’d never heard of this Mrs. Harrison before. And, as far as she knew, Max had never lied to her before either. Was he lying now? Or was she simply reading complexity into something innocent?

  She tried to push all this aside, but it kept returning to her in the most unwelcome fashion. She opened her eyes and smiled at Frog. He was saying something about Dick and Charlotte and Dennis—and she hadn’t been following a word of it. She focused in on him.

  “I’m sorry, Frog. What were you saying?”

  “Sigmund Frog, erstwhile analyst, was simply saying that young people can contribute immeasurably to the lives of the old, and vice versa. It’s a give and take proposition. Your son obviously offsets some of the emptiness in the lives of the Summers. And the Summers offer him something—”

  “Something he doesn’t get here? Is that what you want to say?”

  Frog puffed on his pipe. “Hold, Louise. I wasn’t going to say that. Aren’t we touchy?”

  “Just a little. I’m sorry.”

  Frog gazed at the woman a moment. He took his pipe from his mouth—the goddamn thing always made him feel pompous. “It can be a learning process for young Dennis. Where else would he get the chance to try out his mechanical yearning on a classic Dodge truck, for instance? He can’t run down to the local auto shop in San Francisco and say, Hey, lemme work on that classic car, can he? They’d laugh at him. The Summers don’t do that. They accept him. And obviously they don’t give a damn about letting a kid loose around their property.”

  Dear Frog, Louise thought. He was trying very hard to cheer her up, but he was coming in from quite the wrong angle. She patted the back of his hand. Max couldn’t have a woman somewhere, that was just too absurd, too ridiculous; Max wasn’t a philanderer. “Speaking of the Summers …” she said. She stood up and paused.

  “Speaking of the Summers,” Frog prompted her.

  “I’ll show you something.” She went inside Denny’s bedroom and came back carrying the bait in the glass jar and the photograph. “The old folks give him peculiar things. Such as this so-called amazing fish bait, which stinks like you wouldn’t believe. And yesterday they gave him this picture. I assume it’s shortly after they married. Dennis says it was taken at the start of their honeymoon.”

  Frog studied the bait first. He held the glass jar up to the light and made what he thought of as the noises a mad scientist might make. Mmmmm I see mmmmm ah-hah. He reached for the stopper.

  “Be warned before you open that,” Louise said.

  “Is a genie about to escape?”

  “Less pleasant than that.”

  “Who knows? Maybe I ought to make some wishes anyhow. Just in case.”

  He stared a moment at the dark brown goop in the jar and then took off the stopper. The stench assailed him at once, making him dizzy. Whatever was inside came reaching out to crowd his senses and make his eyes water. He thought of a dead dog putrefying in a hot midday sun. He thought of a very old soup that had lain rotting in a covered saucepan for years.

  He rammed the stopper back in place.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “It’s no way to start your day, is it?”

  Louise wrinkled her nose. “Denny doesn’t seem to mind it. He keeps the stopper off the damned thing. Can you believe that?”

  Frog shook his head. “What the hell is in that stuff?”

  “Mainly rancid cat food, I believe. According to Dick Summer, fish apparently go bananas over the bait.”

  Frog put the jar down on the table. He stared at the brown stuff behind glass. It had the shape of a malformed fetus.

  “Sinister,” he said.

  “Very.” Louise slid the photograph across the table and Frog reached for it.

  “Dick and Charlotte,” she said. “Can you believe that?”

  “When, I wonder. The middle of the eighteenth century?” Frog smiled, turning the picture around in his hands. He brought it up close to his face and squinted.

  “I suppose it was taken in the 1920s sometime,” Louise said.

  “If they married in 1925, that would make this their sixty-first year of bliss. And if they married real young—say in their late teens—that would mean Dick and Charlotte are hovering around the eighty mark.”

  “That would be right, I guess,” Louise remarked.

  “It bogs the old mind,” Frog said. “Sixty-one years of married life! They must have run out of conversation forty years ago. No wonder they enjoy having your son around.”

  Louise smiled. “You take the cynical view of marriage, huh?”

  “Cynical? Not entirely. I speak for myself. All my relationships have petered out into silences,” Frog said. He tilted the photograph a little. “If you look real closely at this, you can make out the name of the steamship.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Look.”

  Louise took the picture back and peered at it. For a second she imagined herself inside the thing—standing on that sepia quay, smelling the dark brown ocean. For a second she became the photographer, asking the young couple to smile, framing them in the lens of her camera.

  “You see it?”

  “Just,” Louise said. There it was, in small blurry letters: The Cosima. She set the picture down. “Dick and Charlotte must have sailed off in that ship. I wonder where they honeymooned.”

  “They don’t look too happy, do they?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “He seems puzzled by something. And her smile is kinda glassy,” Frog said.

  Louise finished her coffee. The sound of the shower had stopped upstairs; she could hear Max move around. A closet door opened and closed. Frog stood up.

  “Are you leaving?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I checked your weeds on the way in. They’re not coming back fast enough for me to make a profit.” He stretched his arms, yawned, and placed a hand across his mouth. “I think
I’ll have to go on hands and knees to the Summers and beg them to put me to work. Will you give me a reference? Say how honest and hardworking I am.”

  Louise smiled. It seemed to her just then that she’d known Frog forever. “Do you really need to make some money?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Okay. I’ll look around the place and see if I can come up with something to keep you busy.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Frog moved out of the kitchen. “I really think I will try Dick and Charlotte again. I get a kick out of refusals.”

  She watched him go, heard the front door close. Then she carried the empty coffee cups to the sink. She rinsed them just as Max appeared—showered, shaved, shining—in the kitchen doorway.

  “Dennis gone?” he asked.

  “Long gone.”

  Max came up and kissed her on the back of her neck. She felt his hands against her hips.

  “I love you,” he said.

  25

  Metger’s office was a windowless, white-walled tomb at the heart of a series of partitioned rooms in the Carnarvon City Hall, a building that had once been the enormous home of a prosperous mine owner in the early 1900s. Now it housed Ted Ronson’s office, the Tourist Board, the Chamber of Commerce, the County Assessor’s office, the Registry of Births and Deaths, and the Sheriff’s Department. It was the aorta of Carnarvon, the central pump through which the town’s blood flowed. Metger spent as little time as he possibly could in the place because he believed bureaucracy was a contagious thing and once a man was stricken by that particular virus he became plump and contented with paper shuffling and rubber stamping and something vital went out of his soul.

  What he longed for most in his room was a window, a few panes of glass, a view. Instead he had stark white walls and a solitary cork bulletin board and a large desk strewn with files and folders, many of them related to the trivia of his work. Traffic offenses. Domestic disputes. Every time he opened one of these folders he imagined he detected the sound of snoring rising out of the paper.

  But there was one folder on his desk that was different from all the others. A blue label attached to the manila cover had the words ACKERLEY, ANTHEA.

  Metger opened it, turning the pages slowly.

  History, he thought. Fading notes on the death of a young girl. Miles Henderson had been the coroner then.

  Metger scanned the pages, his eyes glazed—he had looked inside this particular folder more times than he cared to remember. Over the years, in idle moments, he had turned these same pages. And they had never yielded anything to him—almost as if the entire file were written in a code for which he didn’t have the key.

  Now, tilting his chair back at the wall, he turned his eyes to the telephone. In keeping with the contemporary feel of the place, it was one of those skinny white push-button numbers that had a penny-whistle sound whenever it rang. Just as he longed for windows, so he had a lust for a good old-fashioned solid black phone with a rotary dial.

  He leaned forward, picked the telephone up, dialed Directory Assistance, and asked for the number of the University of Washington in Seattle. He scribbled it on the cover of the Ackerley file, then put the phone down.

  Now that he had the number, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it. He got up and walked around the room. He beat the palms of his hands against his thighs as he moved, like a man fighting an attack of cold weather.

  Earlier it had crossed his mind that he should pay a call on Florence Hann because of the enigmatic remark she’d made yesterday outside the Alpha Beta, which still haunted him. He should go ask her some questions—but he had the feeling that she wasn’t going to add anything else to what she’d already said.

  There was a definite edge of madness to the woman, a slippery thing Metger knew he couldn’t quite grasp. The real trouble with madness, he thought, was how it ran off into hundreds of tangents, areas you couldn’t altogether follow because sequential thinking had no place in that kind of mind.

  And he needed logic. He needed a sequence. Something he could understand and examine. He didn’t need further enigmas.

  If he had to, if he needed to, he could go back and tackle Forence Hann later, but right at this moment he had the number in Seattle and that was what occupied his mind. What was he supposed to say? Even if he managed to get through to the man, what was he supposed to talk to him about?

  Remember me? Metger? We met some time back?

  He stopped circling his office and sat down behind his desk. He picked up the lightweight phone and punched in the number. A woman answered.

  “University of Washington,” she said, a singsong voice.

  “Professor Ackerley,” Metger said.

  “One moment pun-lease.”

  It was a start. At least the guy was still there; he hadn’t wandered off like some academic nomad. Metger twisted the telephone cord around his fingers. There was a slight burning sensation around his heart. Something I ate, he thought.

  A man’s voice now. “This is Julian Ackerley.”

  “Professor Ackerley?”

  “Yes …”

  Metger gazed up at his bone-white ceiling. “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me, Professor. My name is Jerry Metger.”

  “Metger?”

  There was a long silence. For a while Metger thought the line had gone dead.

  “Metger. Yes.” The voice, which had been warm and somewhat pleasant before, contained a chill now. An edge of ice.

  Metger rubbed his eyes. It comes back, he thought. It just comes rolling back at me—he could see Ackerley’s face on that rainy afternoon, Ackerley and his wife standing up there on the sun deck, he could feel the damp trees press against him as he called out a child’s name, the spray that rose from pine needles each time he brushed against a branch.

  “I know it’s been a long time, Professor—”

  “Yes. It has. I don’t understand why you’re calling me, Metger. I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “It’s a loose end, nothing important—”

  “A loose end, Metger? How can there be a loose end after twelve years, for God’s sake?”

  Metger bit his lower lip. This was leading him nowhere. There were just long corridors with shut doors and the echoes of his own footsteps. A loose end, he thought. He was making up fictions to justify his obsession. He felt like a man trying to weld together substances that wouldn’t respond—wood to water, fire upon ice. Something impossible.

  “Really, Metger. You talk about loose ends. Have you any idea how long it has taken me to put my life together since then? Have you?” There was a heartbreaking catch in the man’s voice.

  Metger felt a deep sympathy. Metger, as sheriff, tried to ignore the pain. “I was going through my old files, Professor Ackerley—”

  “I can’t help you with anything, Metger. I don’t want to talk to you—”

  “It’s only going to take a moment.” Now Metger felt like a salesman hawking magazine subscriptions, the pushy guy who gets one foot inside the door and won’t go away. A figure moved across his line of vision a moment, the plump shape of Deputy Shannon, a man whose insensitivities would have qualified him admirably for the task of telephoning Ackerley. Let me call him, Sheriff. I got a way of opening old wounds …

  “I don’t have the time,” Ackerley said.

  “A moment, that’s all …”

  Silence. At least the line wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  Ackerley could be heard sighing. Far away in damp Seattle a man sighs because a closed box of his life is being forced open. Metger picked up a Bic pen and drummed it nervously on his desk. “I know this is difficult for you,” he said.

  “How did you know that, I wonder,” Ackerley remarked. The throaty catch had gone out of his voice and the coldness was back.

  “It’s about the coroner’s report,” Metger said.

  Ackerley made no response.

  “I was trying to close some old files and
I notice in the report written by the physician, Dr. Henderson, that there’s no mention of your daughter’s symptoms—”

  “What symptoms are you referring to? It’s a long time ago, Metger. I’ve become an expert at not remembering things.”

  “I appreciate that,” Metger said. “But my problem is that I don’t understand why Dr. Henderson didn’t remark on those symptoms in his report.”

  “What is it you want? What exactly do you want, Metger?”

  Metger felt the folder in front of him. “It puzzles me, Mr. Ackerley. That’s all. It puzzles me why Henderson didn’t mention the girl’s condition. Wouldn’t a physician say something about that?”

  “I don’t know what a physician would or would not mention, Metger. I’ve never been one.”

  Metger let the pen slide from his fingers and it rolled across his desk. He wasn’t going to get anything here, he knew that. It had been an act of foolishness even to make this call. Ackerley wasn’t going to be sucked back into the past, into the tragedy.

  For one terrible moment Metger imagined that he was all alone in the world, and quite demented. That he perceived things nobody else did, that he imagined events which had never taken place. The rainy afternoon, the dead girl, everything else.

  “Mr. Ackerley, did your daughter have any symptoms before you came to Carnarvon that summer?”

  “Why do you keep going on like this, Metger? Can’t you leave this goddamn thing alone?”

  “I’m sorry,” Metger said. And he was. “I don’t mean to drag up something you understandably find depressing. It’s just one of those bureaucratic loose ends, like I said.”

  There was a long silence. Then Ackerley said, “I have bad dreams, Metger. Every one of them is set in a place by the name of Carnarvon. I wake up sweating. I wake up panicked. It doesn’t matter that I take sleeping pills. It doesn’t matter. I still wake up and my mouth is dry and I’m shaking and I’m back in Carnarvon again—and you have the gall to ask me to remember something about that place! About my daughter!” Another pause. “I wish with all my heart I hadn’t come to your town that summer, Metger. That’s what I go over again and again. Would my daughter have been okay if we’d stayed here in Seattle or if we’d gone some other place? I ask myself that. I’ll tell you one thing—my daughter changed in that place.”