But since then, it had only been me. Was there an image? I realized that I hadn’t checked the CCTV across from the parking lot at Ferber Humanities Hall. I made a mental note to suggest that someone from campus police do that, if they preserved the surveillance tape that far back and didn’t tape over it. What did I care if they thought I was nuts? They probably already thought I was nuts.
The other thing I thought about were those cases, maybe not even a dozen, but I’d read about them. All you had to do to find out about them was to open the trap door under human doings and drop down into the darkness. They were those cases in which the police had photos of a suspect, perhaps even video, even a few seconds of voice recorded on a victim’s phone, and they still couldn’t identify the person. They had eyewitnesses who could describe people well. The eyewitnesses watched as a short middle-aged man with cropped ginger hair sprinted across a picnic park to grab two fourteen-year-old cousins, by the shoulder and force both of them into a minivan (silver, with a tan interior, possibly leather). In yet another unsolved case, at least two observers heard an eighteen-year-old girl cry out for her father and the shriek of her personal alarm when it deployed. The witnesses saw two men, both of them wearing stocking caps with Chicago Bears logos, both of them wearing navy-blue quilted jackets. One of the women, whose big German Shepherd was roaring and straining at his leash, and who said she would regret the rest of her life that she didn’t let the dog go, was close enough to heard a man’s rough grumble instruct “Jerry” to “get her to shut up.”
Yes, those witnesses told police; yes, that drawing the sketch artist made looked like the guy who was shorter. Yes, the guy who seemed older was over six feet tall. They would tell police about that summer evening near the old dam in detail—but not until two days after the teenager’s body was found. They didn’t come forward. They didn’t want to get involved in somebody else’s business.
* * *
The next day, I called Pete Sunday, knowing that I would sound at best paranoid, at worst institution-ready. I was sure the hooded figure was after us.
“If nothing was taken...”
“Nothing I know of.”
“It’s clear that somebody’s trying to scare you, Mrs. Christiansen...”
“Thea.”
“Thea, thanks. Still, I would say the same thing to you as the police down there told you about the car fire and the photographs. Yes, someone was watching you. Now, yesterday, you were alone, you were unarmed, so you were vulnerable. If...whoever it is wanted you dead, or badly hurt, you’d be dead or hurt now.”
I’d thought of the same thing. If he wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. He could have killed us that first time he harassed us on the highway. He could have killed me in the rest area. He could have killed me here in my own driveway. He didn’t have to play games. That he was playing games meant he wanted something else, that there really was another story, no matter how adamant Stefan and Jep were. That guy had followed us down the highway from prison, and to my office, and then the cemetery and then to Black Creek again. He might even have been the one to set Stefan’s car on fire.
“True, of course. But isn’t threatening to scare somebody a crime?”
“Harassment is a crime. But it’s hard to prove, like stalking, on the basis of just a few events. Menacing is a crime of assault. But nobody has attempted to directly hurt you, correct.” He paused. “There has to be something else he wants and the big riddle is what, but the even bigger riddle is why.”
I thought the same thing. “Why me? If my son is the one who’s being warned, why scare me?”
“No idea.”
I pointed out that hearing a detective say “no idea” was not reassuring.
“I assume it has something to do with the murder, but that crime is over and Stefan has been punished. So what is the loose end?”
“You’re the detective.”
“Yes, but not a psychic.”
So I had to be content with wondering, for now. The question simmered in my mind day and night, leaving me restless, exhausted, snappish with everyone. I felt an odd foreboding, even as ordinary days slipped past, a sense of someone hunting something invisible that was hunting me too. I tried to banish the notion. It was so fanciful, so unlike me.
I found myself anxious at the thought of opening the box from Detective Sunday and so I avoided it. It left me gripped with fear. That was unlike me too. I could feel the box, under my bed, pulsing like the telltale heart.
Instead, I stacked and sorted reference materials for my new book.
I stacked and sorted them again.
My sabbatical would be ending soon and I had been thinking of extending it. I was happy with the progress I was making with my book and didn’t feel ready to be back on campus just yet. I spoke with Jep about it and its impact on our finances. He told me to do what I wanted, that we would be fine. For tenured faculty at Thornton Wilder, there was an option to extend a sabbatical for up to another full year, if you were willing to do that extension without pay. So I called Keith to bring up the idea. I wasn’t sure yet but promised to give him an answer very soon. He seemed glad to hear from me and equally receptive, maybe even relieved, to my keeping my return date open for the near present. Adoche was doing well with my classes, really coming into her own as a lecturer. I didn’t particularly need to hear that part, but I maintained a cordial tone.
I didn’t leave the house, or return calls, even as Julie’s texts and phone messages crossed over from concerned to annoyed. I found myself paralyzed to move forward, but unable to go back and live in the space where I had blindly accepted Stefan’s guilt. Stuck and on my own, I tried to distract myself.
A few nights later, I tried to make a fuss of Jep, pouring champagne and digging out a satin nightgown he’d given me one long-ago anniversary; but he could tell that my ardor was compensatory. Sweetly, he assured me that our life as currently construed left him feeling no more lustful than I did—with no offense to my charms.
“I can’t find out anything about who is stalking us,” I told him. “I can’t protect Stefan.”
“Stefan has to protect himself, Theaitsa. He managed to do that in prison; he told us how. He’s alert and he’s smart. How could he be in any more danger now than he was then?”
“I don’t mean protect him like he was a child,” I said. “I don’t mean hold his hand, though I would hold his hand if I could. There’s something more I’m supposed to know.” This becalmed state was unprecedented in my life. There was a process, and when I followed my process, it always led to resolution—not always the resolution I wanted, but some resolution.
“If you don’t know, it’s probably something you’re cooking up in your mind,” Jep said. “You’re like a dog with a bone. You can’t let go. Probably all those threats were just a bunch of hot air and not connected to the car fire or the photographs. And I would bet that this radio silence is just another way for this sicko to keep you off balance, too. A sick way to get his kicks.”
Maybe he was right. Certainly, Julie was right when she said that a crisis was by its nature an event of deepest challenge bracketed in time. What was a crisis that kept unrolling?
I caught myself striding around in front of my desk, unable to perch longer than the interval it took to write a sentence. I had received a modest contract for my book about obsessed women in fiction, now titled The Haunted Lady. My editor, who’d worked on my previous book, Sad-Eyed Lady, was effusive.
“I hope our Tess is among your subjects,” she said, referring to Thomas Hardy’s ill-used heroine—a murderer, no less, from the he-had-it-coming school of fallen women.
“She is indeed,” I told her. “I’ll be including her. All of the greats.”
“You have such an engaging style, I can’t wait to read the finished manuscript.”
A few days later, I signed on the line. The advance was a chuckle, about what it would cost to spend on a weekend at a great hotel, but I had just paid off my car, now six years old, and the last of the radioactive credit card bills, and money still seemed to vanish like water into sand.