Part 14 (2/2)

Not long after, the man with the dyed black hair would be dead, along with hundreds of his disciples in Guyana. A few days later, Dan White would a.s.sa.s.sinate Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, and eventually be found not guilty because he was under the supposedly mind-altering influence of Twinkies. Growing up, I didn't know that San Francisco was any different from any other place. Only when I was older would I realize how strange my city seemed to people from other parts of the country. To me, it was simply home, a place where you might wake up one morning to find that someone you knew had followed a cult to Guyana, or that someone else you knew had died of AIDS, or that your mayor had been murdered. Strange things happened here all the time: some were beautiful, some were horrible, all were part of life in the city by the bay.

Thirty-one.

THE THIRD SONG ON THE TAPE WAS ENt.i.tLED ”The Forest.” When Boudreaux sang the simple refrain, his voice was choked with emotion: Deep in the trees I'm on my knees Looking at you and not believing What have I done, my beautiful one What have I done The song gave me chills. I tried to be objective about it. One thing my mother had taught me during her years as an attorney is that, if you're looking for something hard enough, you can almost always find it. If we believe a thing to be true, we look for clues that will lead us to our foregone conclusion, filtering out anything that might contradict our beliefs. She'd seen it happen with juries. She'd even seen it happen with my father.

One night, about a year after Lila died, wanting to borrow a belt, I knocked on my parents' bedroom door. ”Come in,” my mother said, in a falsely cheerful voice.

My father was out that night, and when I entered the room I saw my mother sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping her eyes.

I sat down beside her. ”What's wrong?”

She smiled and put an arm around my shoulders. ”Just something your father and I need to work out.”

”Tell me.”

She plucked a Kleenex from the bedside table, blew her nose, and said, ”He's got this crazy idea that I'm cheating on him.”

”What? You've got to be kidding.”

”He says I've been distant lately. Maybe I have. If so, it's got nothing to do with your father. I'm just-” She paused, as if looking for the right word. ”Sad,” she finished. ”I've been sad for a while now. And your father is accustomed to a certain level of-” Here she paused again, then looked me square in the face. ”Attention, if you know what I mean.”

”Mom!” I said. ”How gross.”

”Well, you asked. Anyway, somehow he got this idea, and now he can't let go of it. Every time I have to stay late at work, he gets suspicious. Yesterday, I told him I couldn't have lunch with him because I had a meeting at noon that I expected to run for a few hours. Which I did, but at the last minute, it got moved to one-thirty. By then it was too late to call your dad and have him drive all the way across town, so I grabbed lunch across the street with Liam instead.”

Liam was one of the younger a.s.sociates at her firm. I'd met him a couple of times at the office. He was great-looking and had once come this close to making the U.S. Olympic skiing team, but when I tried to engage him in a conversation, I'd discovered that he was painfully boring.

”And?”

”And your dad, for some crazy reason, had been waiting outside the building, and he watched me go into the restaurant with Liam. We're sitting there eating our pasta, talking about the case, and your dad storms in and says he needs to talk to me.”

”Dad did that?”

”I excused myself,” my mother said, ”and we went to Dad's car to talk. He said he knew something was up, and seeing me at lunch with Liam when I was supposed to be with him was proof. So now he thinks I'm having an affair with Liam! Can you believe it?” She was laughing and crying at the same time.

After leaving Ben's house, I went home and listened to the song over and over again, for hours on end. I had to consider that I might be making myself crazy like my father had done all those years before, looking for something where there was nothing. After all, the lyrics were vague enough that they could have been written by anyone, and could have myriad meanings. But the song appeared to be laced with guilt-”what have I done”-and the reference to the trees unnerved me. The lyrics, taken alone, would have been perfectly innocent. And yet I had to consider the context: Boudreaux's car at Armstrong Woods.

During our first meeting, I'd asked Ben if he knew of any reason why Boudreaux might be there. I asked if he was into hiking, or if perhaps he had family at the Russian River. Ben didn't know about the latter, but as for hiking, he told me he got the feeling that Boudreaux wasn't much of a naturalist. ”He was more comfortable inside a bar or a recording studio,” Ben had said. ”The first time I met him, he looked like he hadn't been out in the sun in months. Which is why I was so surprised years later when he told me he was working at the dairy farm. It just didn't seem to fit his personality.”

Through my bedroom window I could see the muted lights of the city. A slender moon-the kind that Lila had dubbed a ”fingernail moon” as a child-hung high in the sky, and a swath of fog seemed to be hanging from its tip like a giant white overcoat. For perhaps the thirtieth time that night, I pressed the rewind b.u.t.ton on my portable stereo, waited for the whir and click of the tape, and listened to ”The Forest.”

”Deep in the trees, I'm on my knees,” Boudreaux sang, his raspy voice nearly cracking on the final word. ”Looking at you and not believing.” As the keyboard grew quieter and the song came to an end, I sang along: ”What have I done, my beautiful one? What have I done?”

THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED THE BOUDREAUX Family Dairy. A man's voice, gruff and sleepy-sounding, answered on the third ring.

”Mr. Boudreaux?” I asked.

”This is he.”

My heart did a little jump. But I realized that in my nervousness I'd forgotten to ask by first name. Could this be the same voice I'd heard on the tape, or was this the voice of Billy Boudreaux's brother?

”I was wondering if I could take a tour of your farm,” I said.

”This is a pretty busy time of year. You'd probably see more at one of the bigger farms, anyway. Stornetta does tours.”

”I was hoping to see how one of the smaller operations works,” I said.

”I tell you what. Farm Trails weekend is coming up at the end of the month. August 29. All the farms out here open up on a Sat.u.r.day so you can see what we do. There's a pumpkin farm, a goat ranch, a bee farm, you name it. We'll be partic.i.p.ating in that. You're welcome to stop by.”

After we hung up, I wrote FARM TOUR on my wall calendar in red marker.

Thirty-two.

I'M A BIT OF A NIGHT OWL,” DON CARROLL had said when I called to ask if we could meet. ”Can you come by late?”

Arriving at the math building at Stanford just after ten p.m., I felt a sense of deja vu. I remembered tracking McConnell down in this very building when I was twenty, sitting outside his office, listening to the students talk about him as if he were a celebrity. Now the building was empty, my footsteps echoing in the hallway. I s.h.i.+vered in my thin sweater, wis.h.i.+ng I'd worn a jacket. The place had a bland inst.i.tutional smell-floor cleaner and cardboard, a slight chemical odor that might have been dry erase markers. The smell of the world was changing, I noticed it every day. When I was in college, the buildings of USF smelled like chalk, old books, and mimeograph ink.

I turned down a couple of wrong hallways before finding the office number. The door was open, Carroll's back to me. He sat at his computer facing the window, a coffee cup perched precariously on the edge of the desk. He was so still he might have been sleeping. I tapped on the door, but he didn't seem to hear, so I cleared my throat and knocked more loudly. He turned to face me. He had gray hair and gla.s.ses, a kind face with light brown eyes.

”Ellie Enderlin?”

”Yes. Thank you for taking the time to talk.”

”Sorry about the strange hour. I find the older I get, the less I sleep. Did you know that Thomas Edison claimed to sleep only three hours per night? He invented the lightbulb so that humankind wouldn't waste its time in bed. He believed sleep was the enemy of progress.”

Carroll looked down at his hand as though he'd just noticed the large envelope he was holding. ”Pardon me, I have to go slide this under the secretary's door.”

While waiting, I glanced around the office. The walls were covered with plaques, cheaply framed announcements of various awards, and photographs-there he was with Jimmy Carter, hammer in hand, standing in front of a house-in-progress; there with Stephen Hawking; there with Paul Allen; there with Baron Davis. On Carroll's desk were more personal photos-an attractive woman in her sixties, probably his wife; a black c.o.c.ker spaniel; a little girl on a blue bicycle. One in particular caught my eye-a photograph of Carroll standing in the rain beside a young Peter McConnell, in matching white parkas. From the angle of the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, I could tell the photograph had been taken at Crissy Field.

On top of a stack of papers was a hardback book. When I saw the cover, I did a double take. The book was in German, so I couldn't read the t.i.tle. I was holding the book, staring at the cover, when Carroll came back in the room.

”Ah, you have an interest in topology?”

”Not exactly. It's just-this symbol on the cover. I recognize it.”

”Ah, the double torus.” Carroll took the book from me and placed it on top of a stack of file folders. ”This is a review copy, just came in the mail today. Apparently I coauth.o.r.ed a paper with this gentleman twenty years ago, but I've been racking my brain all day, trying to remember him. Complete blank. That's what happens when you turn seventy. Did you know that the lower mantle of a volcano flows in a double torus pattern?”

I shook my head.

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