KATHLEEN HAD FINALLY PERSUADED ME TO LEAVE her office—“I have a lot of things to take care of,” she’d said as she propelled me gently into the hallway—and I’d made my way in a daze back to the dark quietude of my private office, where I sat staring out the window at the stadium’s crisscrossed scaffolding of gritty, rusting girders. My own scaffolding—the underpinning of my life—suddenly felt old and rusty, too, though in hindsight the rust had been eating away at it for quite some time.
Through the grimy window, a faint flicker of movement caught my eye: a small, oblong shape twitching slightly atop a grayish-white lump. I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. On the other side of the glass, six inches from my face, a paper wasp was scrabbling around, atop a small nest suspended beneath an I-beam. The wasp’s antennae and mandibles and forelegs twitched as it bustled across the shallow structure. The nest, about the same size as the face of my wristwatch, contained several dozen open hexagonal cells. Inside the nearest cells, I saw small, glistening larvae, and as the wasp moved from cell to cell, it darted its head briefly inside cell after cell, dispensing tiny taste treats: a dollop of chewed-up caterpillar, perhaps, or a masticated maggot—maybe even a maggot plucked from a corpse across the river, at the Body Farm. To one side of the nest, a dozen other wasps sat motionless, like airplanes parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Just beyond the small nest—no more than six inches from it—hung the prior year’s nest, empty and abandoned, like some entomological version of a blighted suburban strip mall. As I watched, I heard a sharp hissing sound, and suddenly a powerful jet of water shot up from somewhere below, swooshing and fanning across my window. Every few years, the university’s maintenance crews pressure-washed the windows of Stadium Hall, and today, it seemed, was the appointed day. The stream made several passes back and forth, sending sheets of muddy water cascading down the glass and off the sills. As the view cleared, to the extent that the view from these windows ever cleared, I looked out at the girder I’d been studying minutes before. The wasps—along with their new nest—were gone: swept away in the blink of an eye. Six inches from the obliterated construction site, the old nest hung, dripping but undamaged. In my mind, I seemed to hear the words of some Old Testament prophet, his voice as harsh as wormwood and gall and my own bitter heart: Vanity, vanity—all is vanity—and we are as dust in the wind.
MY CELL PHONE RANG FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME OF the agonizing afternoon, and for the umpteenth time I reached for the “ignore” button. A moment earlier, I had ignored a call from Carmelita Janus—I felt bad about that, since I had promised to try to help her, but I also felt as if I were drowning in a sea of my own troubles, unable to haul her to safety. I glanced at the display, to see if Mrs. Janus had hit “redial,” but the display showed me a different name: “KPD Decker.” I had already ignored two calls from Decker shortly before lunchtime; I didn’t think I should ignore a third, given how precarious his mental state had seemed the last time I’d seen him. Feeling edgy, I answered the call. “Hey, Deck. How you doing?”
There was a brief silence on the other end, then a male voice I didn’t recognize said, in an oddly businesslike tone, “Hello? Who is this, please?”
“This is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I answered. “At the University of Tennessee. Who are you, and why are you calling me on Captain Decker’s cell phone?”
“Dr. Brockton, did you speak with Captain Decker this morning?”
The question seemed to come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”
“I asked if you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”
“No, I didn’t. Why?” I felt confused, and in the back of my head, an alarm was beginning to sound.
“His cell phone shows that he called you twice. First at 10:23 Central Time, for twenty seconds, and again at 10:54, for five minutes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling testy now. “Who are you? Why are you calling me? And what business is it of yours who calls me, and when?”
There was another silence, then: “Dr. Brockton, this is Special Agent Henry Fielding with the TBI. I need to know whether you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”
“No,” I said. “I think he tried to call me, but we didn’t talk. I have a backlog of voice mails I haven’t listened to yet. There might be one from him. I can check, and call you back, if you want.”
“Not right now,” he said. “Right now I need to ask you a few questions.”
The alarm bell in my head was almost deafening now. “Tell me what’s happened,” I demanded. “Is Deck hurt? Has he been in an accident?” The word “suicide” flashed into my mind, but I didn’t want to say it, because the act of saying it might somehow make it real. Suddenly a phrase the TBI agent had used connected with a circuit in my brain, and I felt a jolt that was almost electric. “You said ‘Central Time.’ Decker was calling me from Middle Tennessee this morning?” I prayed that it wasn’t so, but deep down, I knew that it was.
“Yes, he was.”