I suppose we could sit out on the back porch and look at it, if you prefer.” Something inside her was waving its hands in frantic negation as the words came out of her mouth. Simon plus moonlight equaled incredible danger to her emotional equilibrium. Such as it was.
“Yeah, I prefer,” he said.
It’s just a glass of iced tea, you big sissy, so act like a freaking grown-up. She pushed the screen door open. They took their places on the top of the steps, a decorous couple of feet of space between them.
The moon floated high and brilliant in the sky. Gus’s roof was a square of reflected moonlight lost in a sea of moving leaves. Crickets chirped. The wind rustled and sighed. Ice cubes rattled. The butterflies in her belly fluttered so desperately, she could feel the frantic roar of their wings in her chest, her legs, her face.
Simon gestured towards Gus’s house. “Hank Blakely told me in his letter that you found him after…” He trailed off.
“Yes. I was heading over with a loaf of banana bread,” she said. “I brought him goodies every week or so. I got halfway through the meadow, and…saw him.”
“Christ,” he muttered. “I’m sorry that happened, El.”
“I kept my cool,” she said. “I just turned around, went home and called the police. They told me later he’d been dead for almost a week by then. He was lying in the meadow, about ten feet from the house.”
The wind had picked up, tossing and bending the branches.
“Thanks for doing that,” Simon said.
“For what?” she asked. “For calling the police?”
“For the goodies,” he said. “For being nice to him.”
“I’m surprised that you would feel grateful on his behalf.”
He shrugged. “And I’m surprised that you would bring him banana bread.”
Ellen set her glass down and hugged her knees. “I felt sorry for him. He was so alone. He was always polite, but I wouldn’t say we were friends. I could never be friends with anyone who had ever hit you.”
Simon let out a sharp sigh, and hunched down between his shoulder blades. “Whatever,” he said wearily. “I’m still glad that you were nice to him. I don’t know why.”
“Probably because you loved him,” El said.
Simon made a sharp gesture with his hand. “I don’t feel any need to analyze it.”
His curt tone silenced her for a moment, but curiosity prodded her on. “Were you in touch with him after you left?”
“Not until a couple of months ago. I got this weird e-mail. Out of the blue. He’d sent it care of a news magazine that had run some of my photo spreads. It got forwarded all over the place until it found my inbox.”
“What did it say?” she asked.
Simon stared out into the moonlit night. He took a final swallow of his iced tea, drained the glass and set it down on the step. He pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans.
He fished a slip of folded paper out of it, and handed it to her.
Ellen unfolded it. Simon had torn off the unused half of the page with all the forwarding e-mail addresses. She held it up to catch the light that shone through the window in the kitchen door.
Not a word, not a keystroke wasted. She could hear Gus’s laconic, whiskey-roughened voice in her mind as she read the terse message.
To: whom it may concern:
From: augustus riley
pls forward this private email from a close family member 2 any address u may have in yr files for Mr. Simon Riley, Photojournalist.
Simon
i send u this c/o the mag where i saw yr photos. will be brief.
today i got proof that i am not crazy. now i can tell the truth 2 everyone, including u.
can’t say more as this forum is not private.
pls contact me at above address. will tell u the story if u want 2 hear.
if something happens 2 me, yr mother guards proof.
am sorry i was not a better uncle 2 u.
have seen yr fine work in magazines.
yr mother would be proud.
i am 2.
yr uncle, augustus riley
The letters blurred. She bent forward so her hair would screen her face. Her throat ached for everything the battered scrap of paper revealed about both men. Simon carried it in his wallet, like a precious artifact. The paper was limp, the creases soft from having been unfolded and refolded so often. Where most people would have photographs of family to treasure, Simon had only this cryptic note from a dead man.
Nothing and no one else in the world.
The knot in her throat swelled. Simon’s stoic loneliness and Gus’s tragic solitude spoke to her own. She ached with it, amplified it like a resonating chamber. The wind in the trees was mournful. The crickets’ song said too late, all gone, never again. It broke her heart that Gus had condemned himself to loneliness when love was there for the taking. But he had found no way past his anger and fear. He had lost himself.
It made her sick and sad. Even the moon sailing across the sky looked solitary and remote. And she was working herself into a state. She had to cut it out this second, or she would start blubbering. Simon would not appreciate that. God forbid he think that she pitied him.
She blotted her runny eyes on a hank of her hair and sniffled very quietly. She refolded the piece of paper and handed it back to him. She didn’t trust herself to speak for several minutes.
Simon was in no hurry, either. He tucked the piece of paper back into his wallet and stared up at the moon.
When she could count on her voice not to shake, she tried again. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about in the e-mail?”
Simon shook his head. The wind ruffled the hair that dangled around his jaw. “Not a clue,” he said. “No idea what story he wanted to tell me. No idea what the proof might be, or how my mother could possibly guard it, being as how she’s been dead for twenty-eight years. The timing is so strange. Why send me that, after all these years, and then stick a gun in his mouth? It doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed.
“I’m so damn curious, you know?” He laughed softly. “It’s like a kind of torture. Gus used to love to tease me like that. Dangle the bait, make me beg for the punch line. But as contrary as he was, he wouldn’t kill himself without telling me the story just to spite me.”
“Good Lord,” she murmured. “I should think not!”
“I’ve
