Why take the chance? There was a Kinko’s three blocks away. They stay open twenty-four hours a day. When I reached the door, I saw why. It was midnight, and the place was packed. Lots of exhausted business-people carrying papers and slides and poster boards.
I stood in a maze line formed by crushed-velvet ropes and waited my turn. It reminded me of visiting a bank in the days before ATMs. The woman in front of me sported a business suit—at midnight—and big enough bags under her eyes to be mistaken for a bellhop. Behind me, a man with curly hair and dark sweats whipped out a cell phone and started pressing buttons.
“Sir?”
Someone with a Kinko’s smock pointed at Chloe.
“You can’t come in here with a dog.”
I was about to tell him I already had but thought better of it. The woman in the business suit didn’t react. The curly-haired guy with the dark sweats gave me a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. I rushed outside, tied Chloe to a parking meter, headed back inside. The curly-haired man let me have my place back in line. Manners.
Ten minutes later, I was at the front of the line. This Kinko’s clerk was young and overly exuberant. He showed me to a computer terminal and explained too slowly their per-minute pricing plan.
I nodded through his little speech and signed on to the Web.
Kiss time.
That, I realized, was the key. The first email had said kiss time, not 6:15 P.M. Why? The answer was obvious. That had been code—in case the wrong people got their hands on the email. Whoever had sent it had realized that the possibility of interception existed. Whoever had sent it had known that only I would know what kiss time meant.
That was when it came to me.
First off, the account name Bat Street. When Elizabeth and I were growing up, we used to ride our bikes down Morewood Street on the way to the Little League field. There was this creepy old woman who lived in a faded yellow house. She lived alone and scowled at passing kids. Every town has one of those creepy old ladies. She usually has a nickname. In our case, we’d called her:
Bat Lady.
I brought up Bigfoot again. I typed Morewood into the user name box.
Next to me, the young and exuberant Kinko’s clerk was repeating his Web spiel to the curly-haired man with the dark sweat suit. I hit the tab button and moved into the text box for the password.
The clue Teenage was easier. In our junior year of high school, we’d gone to Jordan Goldman’s house late one Friday night. There were maybe ten of us. Jordan had found out where his father hid a porn video. None of us had ever seen one before. We all watched, laughing uncomfortably, making the usual snide remarks and feeling deliciously naughty. When we needed a name for our intramural soft-ball team, Jordan suggested we use the movie’s stupid title:
Teenage Sex Poodles.
I typed in Sex Poodles under the password. I swallowed hard and clicked the Sign In icon.
I glanced over at the curly-haired man. He was focused on a Yahoo! search. I looked back toward the front desk. The woman in the business suit was frowning at another too-happy-at-midnight Kinko’s staff member.
I waited for the error message. But that didn’t happen this time. A welcome screen rolled into view. On the top, it read:
Hi, Morewood!
Underneath that it said:
You have 1 email in your box.
My heart felt like a bird banging against my rib cage.
I clicked on the New Mail icon and did the leg shake again. No Shauna around to stop it. Through the store window I could see my tethered Chloe. She spotted me and started barking. I put a finger to my lips and signaled for her to hush up.
The email message appeared:
Washington Square Park. Meet me at the southeast corner.
Five o’clock tomorrow.
You’ll be followed.
And on the bottom:
No matter what, I love you.
Hope, that caged bird that just won’t die, broke free. I leaned back. Tears flooded my eyes, but for the first time in a long while, I let loose a real smile.
Elizabeth. She was still the smartest person I knew.
20
At two a.m., I crawled into bed and rolled onto my back. The ceiling started doing the too-many-drinks spins. I grabbed the sides of the bed and hung on.
Shauna had earlier asked if I had ever been tempted to cheat after getting married. She’d added that last part—the “after getting married” part—because she already knew about the other incident.
Technically, I did cheat on Elizabeth once, though cheating doesn’t really fit. Cheating denotes doing harm to another. It didn’t harm Elizabeth—I’m sure of that—but during my freshman year of college, I partook in a rather pitiful rite of passage known as the collegiate one-night stand. Out of curiosity, I guess. Purely experimental and strictly physical. I didn’t like it much. I’ll spare you the corny sex-without-love-is-meaningless cliché. It’s not. But while I think it’s fairly easy to have sex with someone you don’t particularly know or like, it’s hard to stay the night. The attraction, as it were, was strictly hormonal. Once the, uh, release took place, I wanted out. Sex is for anyone; the aftermath is for lovers.
Pretty nice rationalization, don’t you think?
If it matters, I suspect Elizabeth probably did something similar. We both agreed that we would try to “see”—“see” being such a vague, all-encompassing term—other people when we first got to college. Any indiscretion could thus be chalked up to yet another commitment test. Whenever the subject was raised, Elizabeth denied that there had ever been anyone else. But then again, so did I.
The bed continued to spin as I wondered: What do I do now?
For one thing, I wait for five o’clock tomorrow. But I couldn’t just sit back until then. I’d done enough of that already, thank you very much. The truth was—a truth I didn’t like to admit even to myself—I hesitated at the lake. Because I was scared. I climbed out of the water and paused. That gave whomever a chance to hit me. And I didn’t fight back after that first strike. I didn’t dive for my assailant. I didn’t tackle him or even make a fist. I simply went down. I covered up and surrendered and let the stronger man take away my wife.
Not again.
I considered approaching my father-in-law again—it hadn’t escaped my attention that Hoyt might have been less than forthcoming during my previous visit—but what good would that do? Hoyt was either lying or … or I don’t know what. But the message had been clear. Tell no one. The only way I could maybe get him to talk would be by telling him what I saw on that street cam. But I wasn’t ready to do that yet.