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Ray and Marie had talked about the murders during the weeks preceding the visit, and they hoped the murderer, or murderers, would be caught by the time they got here.  The killings had been so astonishing, growing in number month-to-month, that Ray had tired of commenting about them.  Always there were new reports of a missing kid and a discovered body.  Or maybe Marie would bring it up late at night after he got home from work, or early in the morning as she left for her job, after she woke him up to do his assignments for school before leaving him grim in their apartment’s silence–until he could wash his face, turn on some music, put some other sensations over his nausea about the mysterious deaths, over the gloom of starting the day morbidly, and over the dread of needing to be responsible, to finish his homework.

By the time he had driven six hours from North Carolina, navigated the lanes of speeding merging traffic on Atlanta’s downtown connector, took the ramp for I-20 west, and exited onto Langford Parkway, he felt tense but relieved to finally be at his vacation destination with Marie.  It was 1981.  They had been married six months.  They were taking Memorial Day weekend to have a quasi honeymoon with Marie’s beloved cousin Teen and Teen’s husband Otis.  Ray had met them only once, the wedding weekend in Durham.  Teen was the maid of honor. Otis had pitched in to be principal photographer when the hired one suddenly got shingles.

They were older than Ray and Marie, in their late twenties, though closer to Marie’s age, twenty-one, than to Ray, who was nineteen.  Otis laughed a lot, even about getting ticketed for speeding during their drive to North Carolina for the ceremony.  And Teen had a motherly quality, a consoling assurance that everything would be all right, fascinating to Ray from a woman so young.

One reason Ray and Marie were visiting now was that Teen was pregnant for the first time.  This might be the only chance for Marie to see her in that fulsome condition.  When they parked in front of the house, a moss-green bungalow with purple shutters and a neat yard, Teen came out the glass front door smiling with her arms spread wide.  She wore a white, sleeveless maternity top and lavender shorts.  Marie unclipped her seat belt and ran into her cousin’s arms.  They did a little dance on the concrete walkway, bordered by red and purple impatiens, and Ray watched confused by this sudden eruption of happiness that, after such an exhausting effort to get there, didn’t seem to involve or include him.  It took a moment before he remembered to get out of the car, too.

Teen hugged Ray and then Ray petted her belly.  Then, as Marie was pulling their suitcase from the hatchback, Otis drove up in their midnight-blue Riviera.  He wore a red bandana knotted around his neck, under the collar of a denim, snap-button shirt. “What it is, Ray?”  He grinned at Marie. “What’s happening, good looking? You thought you were guests. but you’re home again.”

In the kitchen, Ray and Marie sat on stools at a polished concrete-topped island, and Teen took a cellophane-wrapped bowl from the refrigerator.  “I hope you can eat shrimp, Ray,” she said. 

“I can eat it,” he said.  “You made it, I can definitely eat it.” 

 “This is just an appetizer.  A shrimp salad.  We’re having steaks as soon as Otis gets the grill going.”

Otis took off his neckerchief and used it to wipe the tops of two cans of Budweiser he pulled from the refrigerator.  He gave one can to Ray.

Marie said, “Otis, take Ray somewhere tonight.”

“We can all go out,” he said.  He faced them from the other side of the island, rested his arms on the top.

“Naw. Teen and I want to baby-prep.”

“Oh yeah?  I thought I already did that.”  He winked at Ray.

Marie laughed.  She hugged Ray’s arm and leaned her head on his shoulder.  Her long hair, combed in the car, tickled his chin.  “You’re bad,” she said to Otis.  “We’re going to plan the nursery.  In two months you’re going to need a crib, a changing table, a diaper pail.  What else, Teen?”

“A babysitter.”

“Yeah, I wish that could be me,” Marie said.  “But for now I’m gonna help you decide how to decorate.”

“Don’t worry too much about that,” Otis said.  “Everything will be purple.  Some kind of purple.”

“So what?” Teen said, putting plates and forks on the countertop.  “I like purple.  When I can go back to work, I’m going to open a store that sells only purple things. I’m going to send out a call:  Where are all the purple-people at?  They will all come running to my store.”

From the kitchen door, which was open, Ray saw that they even had a purple backyard. Violets dotted the lawn, which was shallow but lush, the neighbors’ houses shielded by a high wooden fence fronted by glossy green hedges, new leaves as bright and shiny as fresh paint.  A deep-purple hydrangea bloomed in a corner.  Wisteria dangled over the back fence with fading lavender blossoms.  

Just as Ray was thinking how funereal the color was, Teen said, “If you guys go out tonight, be careful.  You know they found another body the other day.”

Marie said, “We read about that one.  He was older, right?  Not a boy.  Twenty-three. They think it’s the same killer?”

“He’s added to the list,” Teen said.  “The last few have been older.  One theory is that the killer’s appetite, or taste, has matured.”

“Do you think we can talk about something else for a minute,” Otis said.  He put down his beer can and frowned.

“Otis, they’re grabbing people your age.  That last guy was near your age.  Sometimes you stay out until four in the morning. I don’t know when it’s going to be you who never comes home.”

“I always come home, darling.  I’m home now.  I’ll stay home tonight if you want.”

“What are you doing out until four in the morning, Otis?” Marie asked.

“I have a buddy who runs a club off Old National. I help out sometimes.  Extra moola, you know.  It’s where I would take us tonight, or Ray since ya’ll want to hang tight.  Nobody is getting abducted from any nightclubs, Teen.”

“Not yet.  As far as we know.”

“We don’t have to go out,” Ray said.

“It’s cool, Ray.  Really.”

The guest bedroom was cozy–a high, iron bed painted silver, covered with a textured lavender spread and piled at the head with pillows of violet and silk. At the window against the bed, lavender blinds showed slices of yard and the sunny street.  Ray could see his brown Corolla parked at the curb.  He pushed their suitcase onto the rug and pulled Marie to the bed with him.  He stroked her arm.  Her brown skin looked warm and beautiful in the lavender light, against the lavender spread.

“Marie,” he said.  “You look valuable.  I believe Teen really, really likes purple.”

She snickered.  “She’s a purple extremist.  Remember, she tried to get me to use purple for our wedding color?  Lord, she had a purple wedding.”

“You make purple look all right.”  He snuggled closer to her, kissed her neck.

“We need to save this for later, Ray.”

“You smell too good.”

“Like lilacs?”

“Maybe, yeah. Grapes.  I don’t want to go anywhere tonight without you,” he said.

“You go and have a good time.  You deserve it, Ray.  Besides, I really want the girl time with Teen.”

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling fan.  It had iridescent bulbs.  He was thinking of the night before their wedding.  He and Otis had been a two-man bachelor party. Otis came to town and somehow found a hot bright club full of naked women, when all Ray had planned was to shine his shoes and try to sleep before the next night’s ceremony.  Ray watched the entertainment Otis paid for—a short brown stripper who sat at their table or brought them drinks when it wasn’t her turn to be on the stage.  Every so often she would get up and bend over in front of them where they sat, showing her wiggling bare butt, and Otis slipped dollar bills under the pink lace garter that strapped her thigh.  Ray had never seen a woman’s nudity from that angle, up close.  When he put money in her garter, it was like feeding strange food to a strange and needy animal.   He felt confused to be so publically aroused.  And guilty, too.   They stayed at the club until it closed.   And now, instead of being worried that someone would abduct and kill him, Ray worried that Otis would want to show off some Atlanta strip joint tonight. 

 “What about the honeymoon?” he asked Marie, embarrassed, because if this was a honeymoon, it was a pitiful one.  

“When you come back, sweetie.”

 Weeks before today, Ray figured out that the parade of deaths had been advancing since his marriage—that while he and Otis had been laughing with naked women on the wedding eve, and while he and Marie were shaking through their vows the next day, and for each month since, some child lay dead and undiscovered in Atlanta.  But he hadn’t told Marie about his calculation.  It disturbed him that he had made the connections, and he didn’t want the historical marker of their marriage to be serial death.  He thought he could ignore the correlation, and he didn’t want her to have to.  Not that she couldn’t figure it for herself. 

Besides, theirs wasn’t the only marriage begun during this time. And there were other atrocities occurring simultaneously around the world.  It couldn’t mean that all these new marriages were doomed.  But he sometimes wondered if he would ever remember their beginning without the memory of this revulsion.  Just yesterday, he had stared at the pictures of the dark faces of the dead boys in a news magazine and had felt a dreary nausea.  His head dully ached.  It was as if pain and evil were in the ink that told the story and formed the images of the children. He had thrown the magazine out.

That night, leaving Marie and Teen to baby furniture catalogues and books of meaningful first and middle names, Otis took Ray to a few clubs on the way to the one Otis helped to manage.  Each was a dance club, no strippers; at least no strippers stripping.  The women were dressed up, made-up, looking like models. The men looked like models, too, in suits, some flashier than others, with jheri curls, diamond jewelry. Otis wore a medium-blue suit with a pale pink spread-collar shirt.  Ray made do with a cheap sports coat he’d bought to vary his attire for church–a stiff gray jacket that curled up at the back hem as if it was made of construction paper. It was of a fuzzy weight too warm for this May weather, less than a hundred dollars, tapered cut.  Now he wondered why anybody would even make such a poor-quality coat, and why anybody would sell it.  Riding in Otis’s Riviera, he looked down at the purple handkerchief Teen had fluffed in his breast pocket before they left the house. “You look handsome,” she’d said.

They were on a wide boulevard with all the traffic signals synchronized and turning green as Otis sped under them.  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.  “We’re gonna run by my girl’s crib for a minute.  Might be somebody there for you to meet.”

“What?”

“A friend of my girl’s.  Her name is Ruth.  I’ve been calling but the line’s been busy.  I know she’s expecting us, though.”

“You have a girl named Ruth?”  He was trying to understand how Otis had a daughter that had never before been mentioned, and how she could be expecting them at this hour. It was already after midnight.  She’d be what, a baby?  Like, 6 at the most?

“My girl’s name is Cleo.  Your girl’s name is Ruth,” Otis said.

“Aw, Otis.” Ray said, understanding now.  “My girl’s name is Marie.  What about Teen?  What about them?”

Otis steered onto the interstate expressway.  He lit a cigarette.  He still had his drink from the last club, a plastic brandy snifter tucked between his legs. “I don’t know, Ray. I know you’re in love and everything.   I mean, I am, too. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.  It’s just that Ruth is a little freak and, you know, you might get lucky.”

“A super freak?” Ray laughed.

“I got a sense for these things,” Otis said.  “I can just tell.”

At the club they had just left, a woman had pranced all over the dance floor shouting, “Walk that dog. Walk that damn dog,” well after the song had ended, until a man in a lime blazer got her and sat her down.  Still, she hollered, “Walk that motherfucking dog.”  She was some kind of freak, tall and skinny in a glittering blue dress with a glittering blue beret on her head.  

But maybe this Ruth was a purple freak like Teen.  Maybe she liked to smell feet.  Maybe she had flippers instead of feet.

“Hey, Otis, I appreciate it, but that’s not what I need right now.”

“Hell, you need it.  We’re men, Ray.  I mean Marie is a pretty girl and no doubt a good wife, but…”

Ray cut his eye at Otis.  He could guess what Otis was thinking, that Marie was the first girl Ray had had sex with, and she could be the last if Ray persisted with this naive devotion to monogamy.

“You know what, Ray, and I don’t mean this as a criticism.  I admire you, man.  But you got married young, OK?  I mean, I thought I got married young.  I was 21, deep in love, too—like you.  Teen, she is my absolute friend, incredibly sexy, and fun.  Not to mention soon the mother of my baby.  But I can think of someone else besides Teen.  I always could.  You can still only think of Marie.  You just need to be prepared for when you don’t.”

“And you think Ruth-the-freak can prepare me?”

“You never know.  But hey man, I can respect your commitment.  Don’t be afraid, that’s all, when and if you need to step out.  We’re going over there just the same.”

“It’s already late, man.”

“I don’t want Teen to start expecting me home by midnight.  Besides, we’re supposed to stay out late.  I’m entertaining you, right?”

“Right.”

For the first time since marrying Marie Ray felt that his youth was a liability.  He had argued to his parents and hers, to anybody who had questioned him, that both he and Marie were old enough, mature enough, responsible enough to be in love and to be married.  During an adolescence of anxiety and uncertainty about just why he’d been born, it had come as a relief to know that he was meant to be her partner.  On the other hand, he had not, it seemed, lived long enough to experience anything Otis was talking about.  He’d read about it, of course, relationships in literature, works that, as his English professor asserted, “probed the mysteries of extraordinary and desperate human hearts.”  In real life such a heart just seemed sleazy.  That anybody he knew, or that he, could actually move toward someone other than his wife was surprising.  And he was not prepared for it.  He rode wondering about his father, and Marie’s father, his English professor, and the minister who had presided over their wedding.  Was this why they had said he was too young?  Did they expect he should learn first that he might cheat on his wife?

“Otis, how do you know Ruth is a freak?  What about your girl, Cleo?”

“Radar.  Teen and Marie have a little freakiness, too.  Also, their mamas.  I can just tell.  But I have this theory that every woman freaks for the right dude.  Some are just more ready than others.”

It was 12:40 when Otis wove through short streets behind some public housing and pulled up at a boxy house on a lot below street level. They parked at the curb and walked down the driveway to the front door.

A plump, freckled woman opened the door. She seemed breathless. Tears spilled from her light brown eyes when she grabbed Otis by the arm. “Oh, Otis, thank you, thank you for being here.  I don’t know where Jeff is.  He’s just not anywhere and I’ve been calling everybody.”  She tugged him into the house and Ray followed.  “He’s missing.”

“What do you mean, he’s missing?” Otis said.

“I’m about to go nuts.  I’ve got the damn police on the phone now.   Shit, shit, shit.  I should have—I don’t know what I should have done.  I mean he was supposed to go home with his school friend.  And his fucking, asshole daddy is nowhere to be found.”

She led them quickly down a hall to the kitchen, where she picked up a phone from the counter and started talking, apologizing to the person on the line, saying, “No, sir, that wasn’t him at the door. It was a friend of mine.”

Otis hugged her from behind, stopped her from wrapping herself in the stretched white cord from the wall. She wore a loose green dress and yellow flip-flops. She had long, coarse reddish hair braided into pigtails that curled forward under her ears.  Otis rested his chin on top of her head.

Ray listened while she explained to the policeman that Jeff, her son, was supposed to have gone home with a schoolmate, but for some reason did not.  When she got home from work about nine, and the boy didn’t call her as they had planned, she called the schoolmate’s family but got no answer.  She guessed they had all gone to a movie, or skating, and maybe to eat. But when she called last around ten, the family was home but Jeff wasn’t with them.  Jeff had told the boy at school that the plan had changed, that he wasn’t spending the night with them after all.  For the past two hours she’d been on the phone trying to find him, calling his teachers, schoolmates.  She said she hoped now he was with his father, but she couldn’t reach him either.

Ray looked at an opened address book on top of an opened city directory on the counter, a glass of dark wine by the yellow enamel sink, a chrome breadbox, shiny ceramic canisters in the shapes of a rooster, a hen, and a chick.  The house was cold from air conditioning.

The doorbell rang, followed quickly by a knock.  Cleo turned to Ray, seeming to notice him for the first time.  Otis gestured with his head, and Ray said, “I’ll get it.”

At the door was a thin, dark woman holding a small paper bag. She didn’t seem surprised to see Ray.  “Did you find Jeff?” she asked.

“No. Not yet.”  He backed up to let her in.

“You must be Ray.  I’m Ruth.”  She held out her hand and Ray shook it.  Bangles jangled on her wrist.  “I’m glad you guys got here.  Cleo was about to lose it.  I went home to get something to calm her.”  She showed him the bag, pulled out a prescription bottle.

“Oh,” Ray said.

They stepped into the hall to see Cleo and Otis in their kitchen embrace, Cleo still on the phone.  Ruth led Ray into another room, the living room, where she sat on a sofa and Ray took a chair opposite.

“So, you know what’s going on?” she asked. “Cleo’s been calling all around and fearing the worst.”  She hugged herself and seemed to shudder.

A 5×7 framed photo of a boy was on the table next to Ruth, as was a glass that she quickly picked up.  The glass held melting ice and a stranded slice of lime.

“I’m sure Jeff s OK,” she said, “probably with his dad—if we could locate him.  But right now Jeff’s just gone.”

Ray nodded.  “Is that him?”

She looked toward the door. “Where? Oh, this.” She touched the photo.  “Yes.  He’s a good boy, you know?  A good kid.  I mean willful, but good.  So maybe he just ran away or something.  But he ought to know what this is doing to his mama.”

He was a regular-looking kid, wearing a red rugby shirt with a white collar, smiling. His image looked much more clear and vivid than those black-and-white pictures of murdered boys in the newspaper and magazines.  Those pictures had a blurred quality, as if taken entirely for the purpose of expressing death.  But Jeff looked alive.

Ruth said, “Every kid they’ve killed was somebody’s son, and the son of somebody’s friend.  I mean, there is reason to be hysterical if we choose to be, or if we can’t help it.”

Ray didn’t say anything. He gazed at Ruth, who looked down into her watery glass.  She had on a satin black tank top and black pants, and black patent leather loafers.  Her silver bangles glinted.  She wore eye makeup and lipstick, and perfume.  Not a lot, but Ray noticed.  Had she made herself shiny and fragrant for him?

He could hear Cleo’s voice as she spoke on the phone, but not exactly what she was saying.  Finally, he said, “I didn’t know Cleo had a son,” as if he had even known Cleo.

“Yeah.  He’s just 11.”  She walked to the door, looked down the hall, then sat again.  “I got here a while ago and found her like this.  I mean she’s trying to control the panic, as you would imagine.  Kids are just stupid.”  She laughed.

“She’s talking to the police, now.”

“I think that’s the right thing.  I mean it’s the best thing.”

After a moment, Ray got up to look down the hall.  Cleo was off the phone and crying softly on Otis’ chest.  He held her, seemed to be whispering to her.

“You want a drink?” Ruth said.  She moved to open a door on the wall-length entertainment cabinet.  A television and stereo system sat above a shelf of liquor bottles and glasses and a red ice bucket.

Ray took a moment to assess his sobriety.  He’d drunk a couple of beers out with Otis.  He felt okay, though—fear for the missing kid, and the earlier fear of Ruth, seemed to have dissolved the buzz he’d been feeling.  He wondered if the police were on the way, and if Otis intended to be here when they came. He wanted to go home.  He wanted the boy found and he wanted to get back to Otis’ house.

Ruth dropped ice in the glasses.  Her dark shoulders were smooth and toned.  She had a short Afro.  He tried to see the freak in her, but he didn’t know what to look for.  Her walk was ordinary, little movement in her hips that flared out from her small, belted waist.  Her eyes shone.  Maybe it was the bangles.  He couldn’t know—didn’t have the radar, he decided.  He wondered instead, Where is that boy?  He wondered if Marie was asleep or awake.

Ruth gave him his drink and sat again across from him.  They were silent for a while.  She said, “Is your drink okay?”

He said that it was, although he hadn’t tasted it.

She asked, “So you are Otis’ cousin?  From Carolina?”

“Yes. Actually, my wife and his wife are cousins.”  Then he wondered if he should have mentioned their being married.  But surely she knew about Otis.

“It’s a shame this horror that’s happened to this city.  Everything is tainted with gloom and suspicion.  When Cleo invited me over I was pretty excited to get to meet someone new, from out of town.  Maybe break this spell.  My husband—well, I’m married, too.  But he doesn’t love me. You know, I mean, we’re not very happy.  I mean to say that it’s OK if you’re married—I knew that.  Believe me, I understand now that it means nothing, necessarily.”  She got up and went to the stereo.  “God, I hope Jeff is all right.”

“It must mean something,” Ray said.

“I said necessarily.  Almost everybody I know is messing around.  Maybe you love your wife.  And she loves you.  Yet you’re here, meeting me.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“It’s an accident, huh?”

“Otis set it up. I didn’t ask him to.”

“Fair enough.  I’m glad, though.  But you look too young to be married.”

He recognized the music: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.  The tune was “So What?”  He almost said that title aloud in response to Ruth’s comment about his age.  It’s what Teen had said about her liking the color purple.

Ray swirled his drink, pushed the lime slice down into the liquid with his finger.  He felt a sudden disassociation.  He thought about guys he used to be friends with but, since he’d been married, never saw anymore.  It seemed just as easy now to break from any relationship.  He wasn’t related to Otis.  He wasn’t related to Teen.  Marie, in Ruth’s eyes, was probably a strange girl attached to him, a girl that he found himself having to defend being with.  

He said, “It’s not like I’m a hobo traveling with crocodile luggage.”

“What on earth does that mean?” Ruth asked.

He laughed, shook his head.  He sipped his vodka.  Even his parents, who had sobbed at his wedding, seemed separated from him, arrayed against him as they were when he said he wanted to get married, and seeming still to reproach him.  And he felt no compelling attraction to Ruth.  He had a thought about the missing boy—either kidnapped or run-away, feeling too the easy disconnection, that no relationship was real, defined him, or determined his fate.  Was the kid feeling elated and free or terrified, Ray wondered?  It seemed almost like clairvoyance.

Ray got up again to peek down the hall.  Otis and Cleo were no longer in the kitchen. They came out of another door in the hallway, finding Ray standing there.  Otis introduced her to Ray, and Ray said he believed everything was going to turn out fine.  “Are the police looking?” he asked.

Cleo shrugged, sobbed, “They’re supposed to come by here and get a picture.”  She was short.  Her face was shiny.  She held a wad of tissue with both hands against her chest.

“We’ll look for him,” Otis said.  He kissed her forehead.  He then leaned into the living room to wave to Ruth, who leapt up and walked with them to the front door.  Ray couldn’t say, “It was nice to meet you,” and Ruth couldn’t say, “Enjoy the rest of your visit.”  They didn’t say anything.  Ray drained his drink, and he and Otis got back into the car.

Otis revealed that they were headed to Cleo’s ex-husband’s house. “The prick’s not answering his phone,” he said.

“Where is that?”

“Not too far.  Besides, we needed to get out of Cleo’s before the cops came. Next thing you know, we’re suspects if anything really bad has happened.  Cops calling at my house, getting Teen upset.  Can’t have that.”

The dashboard clock read 1:12. They drove a long way out on I-20, into Rockdale County, and got off in Conyers, at the Salem Road exit.  After a few more turns Ray couldn’t say where they were.  They slowed in front of a dark, brick house with a ragged, weedy yard.  Broken cement pocked the empty driveway.  The garage door was closed.  No lights anywhere.  Even the streetlight in front of the house went out as they parked.

“I’m thinking he should be home,” Otis said.  “If he was gone, he’d probably have left a light on somewhere. Wouldn’t you?”

Ray and Marie had left two lights on at their apartment.  They had delayed leaving that morning because they couldn’t decide which lights.  “Yeah,” he said.  “A small light inside somewhere.”

“Right.  Something that a thief might see if one was looking.”

“A porch light, maybe.”

“At least.”

“The doorbell button is lit, though.”  It was an amber dot in the darkness.

Otis turned toward him, and laughed. “Good eye.”

“Thanks.”

Otis turned back to study the ex-husband’s house.  Ray looked over at a house across the street. As he watched, a light in the backyard came on. “The light over there just came on,” he said.

Otis grunted.

“Do you know Jeff s father?”

“Poke?  Yeah.  But he doesn’t know about me.  I mean he knows me, but—you know what I mean.”  He took the keys from the ignition and dropped them in his jacket pocket.  “Cleo married him when she was still in high school, pregnant.  He was older than us, in the army.”

He opened his door, and the overhead light illuminated the car’s tan interior. “I’m gonna check it out.”  He shut the door quietly, pushing it with his hip, and moved down the slight slope of driveway to the garage, where he peered through that window awhile, then made his way to the front door and peeked in the small window there.  Ray did a quick calculation:  If Jeff was 11, then Cleo must have been no more than 15 when he was born, when she got married.  And the daddy, Poke, was probably a Viet Nam vet.

Ray adjusted the rearview mirror to see behind the car.  Someone was walking toward them, a distant figure moving in the shadow between streetlights.  Ray turned back to look for Otis but didn’t see him anywhere; he had moved away from the front door.

The figure behind him moved into the bluish light pouring from the nearest lit lamp.  It was a black man in a white lab coat, a small white dog on a leash in front of him.  “Walk that dog,” Ray thought, remembering the woman at the club.  The man came out of the light into the darkness that extended to and enveloped the car.  Ray ducked down in his seat.  Why was anyone walking a dog at this hour? he wondered.  Why was he wearing a lab coat?  Then he thought, “Where is Otis?”  

Ray had read a disturbing theory that the Center for Disease Control was responsible for the murders, using blood elements from the young males to research a cancer-fighting drug.  Something about sickle cell and interferon.  It was a wild theory published in the letters section of his college newspaper.  But boys were being killed for some reason.  And Ray entertained the fantasy that maybe the man walking his dog had abducted Jeff.  The man was a mad scientist, taking a break from killing boys and extracting from them valuable genes and tissue.  Maybe his associates had grabbed Otis.  Or maybe Otis had broken into the house.

When Ray raised up, the backyard light of the house across the street was out again.  A motion light, he decided.  A cat or squirrel triggering it?  It went on again.  Otis was not visible at the ex-husband’s house.  The dim white lab coat disappeared down the street.  Ray got out of the car.  He stood against it, peering at Poke’s house.  The white paint in the dark-morning mist looked ghostly.  Then he stepped into the driveway.

A netless basketball goal listed in grass to the left of the garage.  He peeked into the garage window as Otis had done.  A car—a dark Honda—was parked there.  He looked through the window of the front door and saw nothing at first, and then barely made out a long mirror hung over a pale fireplace. The mirror reflected bits of light from the backyard across the street, and allowed Ray to see dark furniture in the room.  What if Otis had broken in?  But Ray could detect no sign of—activity, the word he settled on, to avoid “no sign of life.”

He turned to the street.  They weren’t going to find Jeff out here tonight, he realized.  If he were really a victim, dead, they wouldn’t find him.  Ray wouldn’t even be able to tell Marie that he knew the boy’s mother—that he’d searched for him.  He’d be required to protect Otis.  He wondered about Otis, a guy could have a mistress without guilt, with a sense of entitlement, who could maybe know personally a victim of the serial killer.

It seemed that Ray knew only teachers and churchgoers in Durham.  He didn’t know his college classmates at all. His co-workers at the country club were mostly older, career waiters who talked about their own children in college.  And the people they served were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, architects—some who drank too much but whose money and privilege made them simultaneously mysterious and boring.  Maybe they, too, had affairs, but everybody he knew at home seemed predictable and tame, doing exactly what was expected of them.  

He couldn’t believe he was here, standing at a strange door in the cooling wee hours, looking out at a dark, monochromatic street, caught in this absurd search.  Caught in history, he realized.  That the boy could actually be a victim of a killer took his breath.  His chest felt squeezed.  Everything about this seemed unreal.  He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in bed with Marie.  He should be feeling warmth from her sleeping body in its blue cotton gown, on those lavender sheets.  Her skin was an unsurpassed comfort for him, as if it alone were the source of her life, her love, her heat.  He felt cheated now, manipulated and guilty—guilty because this absence from her was important, if useless.

He hoped Otis hadn’t broken into the house.  That would make Ray an accessory somehow.  He could be arrested, implicated in the boy’s disappearance—or murder—though he was innocent.  To erase that thought, he focused on breathing.  He breathed deeply, and imagined Jeff doing the same thing.  Where was he?  Soaked in piss on some car’s back seat?  In the trunk?  Wet and cold and curled against a muddy riverbank?

Otis made a scraping noise at the corner of the house that made Ray jump. “Damn, Otis,” he gasped. “Where’d you go?”

“You all right?”

“Where were you? I thought you had gotten inside.”

“Out back.”  He walked over to where Ray stood at the front door. “Dude’s got two sheds out there.”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.  Junk.”

“We’re not really helping, Otis.  We should be home, and the police should be looking for Jeff.”

Otis didn’t respond.  He rubbed his eyes.  He said, “This worries me.  The best case is that Poke kidnapped him, but Poke could be at some club, or anywhere.  If Jeff’s not here, I don’t know where he is.”

“Did you ring the doorbell?”

“Of course I rang the doorbell.”

A car turned onto the street a block away.  It stopped at the corner, its headlights seeming to stare.  Then, it made its way slowly up the street, accelerating a little, slowing again.  It finally pulled to a stop beside Otis’ car, backed up and moved forward beside it again.  Suddenly, something came flying over the roof of the Riviera and landed on the yard.

“Jesus.  It’s just the fucking paper man,” Otis said.

“The dewy news,” Ray said.

“The daily news,” Otis corrected.

“Yeah.  I was joking.”

“OK.”

“You think we ought to get out of here?”

They watched the car’s tail lights diminish to red points before they stepped away from the stoop.  Ray stared at the newspaper, sheathed in plastic, a fat pale lump in the dark weeds.

Back in the car, Otis drove slowly around the neighborhood.  After a couple of turns, they saw the man in the white lab coat walking his little white dog.  The man wore glasses, and he looked at them as they drove by.  “Insomniac,” Otis said.

He kept driving, roaming the blocks, as if they would find Jeff walking along at this hour.  Ray looked out on the dark houses, the dim lawns, the dull cars in the driveways and parked along the curbs.  He tried to picture Marie in Cleo’s place, alone and distraught with a missing child and absent, horrible husband.  But he could only see Cleo like that.  He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, they were speeding on 1-20. Actually, they were quickly decelerating as Otis exited at Cascade. It was 2:59.  Ray wasn’t sure he had slept.  He remembered the sound of wind, thought he’d been conscious of it all the way.  Before long they were cruising up to Cleo’s house where all the house lights were on, and two police cars claimed the curbs. Otis kept driving past. “I should call,” he said.

He drove to a nearby gas station and used the pay phone near the street.  Ray watched him for a while in the light of the bulb in the telephone booth, the red traffic signal bleeding onto the booth’s blue glow, Otis bathed in an imperfect purple.  It meant either royalty or death.  King Otis and dead Jeff?  Yeah, maybe this town was full of freaks.  Ray’s insight went no further, stopped at the blunt wall of being up all night.  Marie, Ray thought, would be swathed in those significant sheets now, maybe dreaming of being a doctor, closing wounds, resuscitating hearts.  That was her ambition.  How necessary she was.  Otis had one hand in his pants pocket, his coattail pushed back so that, head bent over the receiver, he looked like a man in an ad, purposeful and poised, candid and posed—What Sort of Man Reads Playboy. It occurred to Ray, I’m the freak in this town.  

Ray closed his eyes again.  He felt an extraordinary struggle in his heart; he felt a hard hope that the boy had been found, amid a reluctant hatred for Otis.  He had a vision of the phone booth swarming with wasps, with Otis maddeningly untouched and unconcerned.  Yet Ray didn’t want Otis to be punished. Not really.  He wanted to get out of the car, back to Marie, or back to somewhere familiar.