5
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2:05 P.M.
Caroline had risen late, then spent the morning grading papers, tweaking her lecture on George Eliot, and even spent half an hour memorizing a Weldon Kees poem. She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich for a late lunch, heating up some of the homemade tomato soup she’d put together at the beginning of the week. She brought the food out to her front porch, considered pouring herself a glass of wine, then decided not to.
It was warm, and slightly overcast, clouds stretched like gauze across the sky, or like a patient etherized upon the table. Estrella was on the porch with her, watching a cardinal through the screen. Fable was still outside; she’d seen him earlier stalking through the high grass of her neighbor’s wild lawn.
She’d brought her phone with her outside and looked back over the email thread with that strange guy from Texas. It had been such an odd encounter that she couldn’t shake it out of her mind. She supposed that for her students—for her contemporaries, probably, as well—having a long, flirty digital conversation was a regular occurrence, but it was new to her, and now she was consumed with thoughts of a man she’d never met. No, that wasn’t true. They had met, last night, even if it wasn’t in person. In some ways it was the most significant conversation she’d had in years, so much more interesting than her occasional flirtations with self-satisfied academics at conferences. She flipped from her emails to her internet browser and looked at the few pictures of Ethan Dart that she’d found. On a whim, she searched for videos and found one on YouTube of him alone with a guitar on a stage, singing a song called “Just Because.” It was from an event called Austin Showcase from a couple of years earlier. Ethan wore black jeans and a De La Soul T-shirt and he perched on a wooden stool while he played and sang. Caroline had limited knowledge of music, in general. She knew what she liked but didn’t necessarily seek out new acts or go to shows. Most of what she listened to were CDs she’d owned since college—girl folksingers, and string quartets, and some Icelandic ambient stuff she’d inherited after her split with Alec. But she was relieved that she liked Ethan’s song, the chorus repeating the line “Just because my boot was tapping didn’t mean I liked the song,” and she found herself unpacking that line for all its possible meanings.
As she was dipping the remainder of her sandwich into her soup, she noticed the police cruiser slowly turning into the driveway. A few random thoughts slipped through her mind: Are my parents dead? Has my cat been found on the side of the road? Have they come to question me about Ethan Dart? And that last thought made her realize they were probably there to follow up on the strange list. Two uniformed officers, one male, one female, one wide-hipped, one pigeon-toed, stepped from the cruiser and made their way to the porch.
6
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1:18 P.M.
An Austin patrol officer, just one, came to Ethan’s apartment at roughly the same time as Caroline let the Ann Arbor police onto her porch. Officer Resendez knocked on Ethan’s door while he was asleep. He’d already been up for a cup of coffee and three over-easy eggs, but he’d been so exhausted that he’d climbed back into bed and was still napping. The three sharp raps from Officer Resendez got incorporated into Ethan’s dream, one in which he’d had to return to college in Lubbock to take one last exam in order to graduate. The raps, in his dream, were made by a large black vulture outside of one of the exam room’s windows, pecking at a plane of glass. By the time Ethan had hoisted himself from the futon on his floor, and made his way to the door, peering through the eyehole to see a clean-shaven cop, the dream was gone.
“Hey,” Ethan said to the policeman after opening the door about six inches.
“Are you Ethan Dart?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and coughed to clear his phlegmy throat. Was he about to get arrested?
“Do you mind coming with me to the station? You’re being put under temporary protective custody. There’s a federal agent on his or her way to the station who can explain it to you.”
“Seriously? What’s going on?”
“Honestly, I have no idea, man. But I’d find some comfortable clothes to put on. You don’t know how long you’ll be in them.”
7
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 3:10 P.M.
Jack Radebaugh heard the unusually loud thump of his mail being delivered through the slot in his front door and got up from the kitchen table to go take a look. There was a package from his wife in a manila envelope. She hadn’t written a return address, but he knew her writing better than he knew his own.