How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  “Thank you for the coffee, ma’am,” he says, though I think his eyes are starting to run.

  “You are very welcome,” Marjani says. “Travis, would you like a cup?”

  “You know I could probably use one, see,” Travis says, and he’s not kidding. I do not remember the last time I saw him before 11:00 a.m. He looks like the Crypt Keeper. “But I think I might be better off snorting rat poison, right?”

  Officer Anderson turns his head slowly to him.

  “Oh, I don’t snort anything. I didn’t mean to say that. I’m clean. Clean living. Just say no.”

  “I think it would be wise for you to stop talking, Travis,” Marjani says.

  “Totally agreed, Mar’,” Travis mumbles, and stares intently at his suddenly quite fascinating left thumb. “Right there with you.”

  Officer Anderson clears his throat. It makes a huge rumble that echoes throughout the room. “OK, so I talked to Travis last night at the rally, before everything went down, and he told me you had some information for me that I was, uh, unable to procure on our last visit,” he says. He’s big, but seriously so young. I notice that his beard covers a not-inconsiderable amount of acne, and his face is round, almost roly-poly. I am definitely older than he is.

  Marjani takes some bread out of the toaster, butters it, and puts it in front of Travis and the officer. He nods thank you but doesn’t even glance at it. His eyes are darting all over the room. I can’t be the first disabled person he’s ever met, can I?

  “So, what can you tell me, Daniel, about Ai-Chin?”

  I look at Travis.

  So how do we do this?

  How about I just talk, and you nod if you agree and shake your head if you don’t?

  I am not sure we should introduce anything you say into official police evidence.

  Laugh it up, shithead.

  “All right, so here’s the deal, see,” Travis launches in, and it’s sort of charming to watch him attempt to give this presentation, like he’s a visiting lecturer with a slide projector or something. But only momentarily.

  “Daniel’s all outside, on the porch, see.”

  “This porch?”

  “What?”

  “The porch at this house.”

  “Yes. Yeah. This porch. This house.”

  “What day?”

  “What?”

  “What day?”

  “The day she vanished?”

  “So, Friday?”

  “Friday! Wait, Friday, right? Is that the day she disappeared?” Travis looks at me. I nod. Jesus, man. “Yes, Friday.”

  “What time?”

  “The morning.”

  “What time of morning?”

  “Breakfast time.”

  Officer Anderson sighs heavily. “What time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looks at me. I activate my voice recorder: “SEVEN TWENTY-TWO.”

  “Is that an exact time?” he asks.

  “YAWS.”

  “What’s that?”

  Shit. “YES. YES. YES. EXACT TIME.”

  “Thank you.” He turns back to Travis. “OK. He’s on the porch.”

  “And he sees her walking down the street.”

  “Was that the first time he saw her on the street?”

  “Yes. No, wait, no. Wait. Shit, I don’t actually know. Daniel, was the first time you saw her? Did you tell me? I might have forgotten. I’ve had a lot going on, see!”

  I see Officer Anderson, exasperated with Travis already, look at me. I nod. Maybe we can just eliminate the middleman here.

  “Look,” Officer Anderson says, “maybe I’ll talk directly to Daniel, and you can chime in when I need, um, clarification.”

  It’s probably for the best that I take over here. You’re gonna get arrested for something if you keep talking.

  Shut up.

  Don’t tell him you have weed on you.

  I don’t have weed on me.

  You always have weed on you.

  Shut up.

  “So, Daniel, can you tell me: Did you see Ai-Chin that Friday morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see her every morning?”

  “Most.”

  “Did she ever see you?”

  I look at Travis.

  Just that morning.

  Just that morning?

  Just that morning.

  “Just that morning,” Travis says, very proud of himself.

  “OK,” Officer Anderson says. “Are you sure it was her?”

  Yes. Finally. “Yes.”

  “At seven twenty-two.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Travis says you then saw her get in a vehicle of some sort?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see what kind of car?”

  “Yes.” I pause to type out Camaro a couple of times. My phone keeps wanting to make it Crayola for some reason. “A tan Camaro.”

  “Did you see the person driving it?”

  “A little.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I saw a hat. And a chrome-tipped boot.”

  “But not his face.”

  “No.”

  But I have more information than even Travis knows I know.

  Marjani cuts in. “Daniel believes he saw the man on the television last night,” she says.

  “What?” Travis says. “Does he have a show?”

  Yeah, it’s Jimmy Kimmel, dumbass.

  Again: Shut up.

  Officer Anderson has had enough of this slapstick. To me, Travis and I are communicating in the way we have since we were children, a system we have mastered, sort of our version of twin language. But yeah: to him it’s just a confused stoner staring at a disabled man lightly bobbing his head left and right. He slaps his hand on the table a little harder than he meant to, snapping us all to attention.

  “Wait, what?” he says, pushing his coffee mug to the side. “You saw him on television?”

  I tap furiously into my speaker.

  “News. Vigil. Boot. Hat.”

  Marjani coughs and starts to pour Officer Anderson more coffee before realizing his cup is still full. Apparently coffee beans do eventually spoil.

  She clears her throat. Officer Anderson is scribbling furiously in his notebook.

  “We were watching the news last night after Daniel’s incident,” she says, “and he says the man in the car was at the vigil and captured on video.” I notice a hint of skepticism in her voice, which I don’t like.

  “Did you see his face in the video?”

  “No. Far away. But him. Boots. Hat.”

  Officer Anderson folds up his notebook and puts it in his pocket. He has had enough of this. “Well, this is certainly more information than I got when I was over here the other day,” he says. He starts to stand up. “I am very appreciative of all of this. We’ll get a copy of that tape—maybe that’ll tell us something.”

  He looks at me. “Um, you’ve really been very helpful. We now know what time she disappeared. We wouldn’t have had that information without you. So thank you.”

  But I’m not done giving information. He can’t leave yet. “Wait. Wait. Wait.”

  I look at Officer Anderson. “Email. We email.”

  He frowns, sneaks a fleeting, perturbed look at Travis, and shifts in his chair. Travis coughs.

  “Yeah, um, your friend told me about that. He forwarded me the emails. We know all about that guy.”

  I look at him, baffled. What?

  “Yeah, that’s a man named Jonathan Carpenter. He lives out in East Athens. We’ve dealt with him before.”

  I wheel my chair toward him, and he jumps back a bit. I think he forgot I can move.

  “Jonathan. Carpenter.”

  “Yeah, this is, um, this is kind of what he does,” Officer Anderson says. “He’s known all around the department for trying to pretend he’s involved in crimes. We’ve been dealing with him for a couple of years now. He claimed responsibility for two soror
ity break-ins last year. He also tried to convince the guy a few desks over from mine that he was going to rob a bank. None of it was true. He’s just a disturbed individual who lives by himself and, I think, just wants police to pay attention to him. I actually went out with my old partner and visited him after he called a tip line claiming that his neighbor was abducting high school girls and hiding them in his shed. His neighbor didn’t even have a shed. He just calls to feel important. I think he is lonely. He’s a sick individual.”

  I think he is a lonely individual.

  “Travis told us . . . you made some sort of post on the internet about this case?” he says, looking at me for the first time in a while. “For the record, it’s always best to call the police if you know something rather than just blogging about it, or whatever it is you were doing. Anyway, he must have just seen your post and decided that if he couldn’t convince us he was some criminal mastermind, maybe he’d try it with you.”

  So Chrome Boot Tip Man and Jonathan are not the same person? I was just duped by an internet stranger?

  God.

  I have never felt so stupid in my entire life.

  “I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it,” he says, and immediately looks guilty, like that wasn’t the right metaphor to offer me. “Cases like this bring out all the crazies. And as I said: every lead is important. We know more now than we did before we heard from you. Seriously. Thank you.”

  He at last stands up from the table and gives Marjani his card. “If Daniel thinks of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me,” he says. “Maybe before he goes on the internet, OK?”

  He walks to the door and looks back at me. “Thank you for your coffee and your hospitality, Daniel,” he says. “You’re a brave young man, I mean it.”

  I’m sure I’m older than he is. But I don’t feel like it right now.

  33.

  Marjani slept in my room last night. I feel terrible about it. She has so much to do on a football weekend, I should be the least of her worries. She has to get to Sanford Stadium first thing to start cleaning up and setting up the catering for all the rich alums who sit in the skyboxes, getting drunk and popping shrimp.

  After that, she has to run over to the student center by Stegeman Coliseum to help them cater the big pregame meal for all the players, mostly washing all the slop from their trays and then hauling huge bags of trash into the dumpster and then driving them out to the landfill in Oconee County. Then she has to return to campus and get over to the ZBT fraternity house, where she passes out hors d’oeuvres to sloshed alumni and underage undergrads. This is all before 3:00 p.m., mind you, and the day before there is an actual game. Saturday will be even worse. Marjani has never had a sip of alcohol in her life, but she stinks of beer like a Supreme Court justice in college when she comes back to check on me Saturday nights. People always talk about college sports as an “economic driver” on game days, and I suppose this is what they mean: poor first-generation immigrants like Marjani following behind an endless queue of trashed southerners, picking up all they thoughtlessly leave in their wake.

  It’s such a full weekend that she usually takes Thursday nights off and lets the orderlies or Travis put me down, and she rarely stays over here. But this Thursday, well, we were all in a bit of a state this particular Thursday. Such was my manner and mood after turning on the television last night that we all sort of forgot that I almost died a few hours earlier.

  It was him.

  I have no question about it. It was him, down cold. Same reedy neck. Same hat. Same boots. Same innocuous, sad sack shoulders, the sort of shoulders that made Ai-Chin think it was OK to get in his car.

  The guy on the TV is the guy. The guy on the internet is just not the guy. They are two different people.

  I feel relief being just a bystander again rather than an active participant. I saw her. And I saw him. And . . . jeez. What in the world was he doing at that vigil? If you had done something horrible to the exact person everyone is there to pray for—and it dawns on me, just saying this, that I in fact have no idea what he did to her, or where she is, or any of it—why in the world would you show up at her vigil? There are cameras everywhere. Everyone is crying. Her parents are there. Her parents are there.

  What kind of sociopath does something like that?

  The type of sociopath who would lure a college student with ill intent. Theoretically.

  Look: I have done my part. They know when she got in the car. They know that because of me. I hope that helps catch him. And my work here is done.

  Which means I’ve just been emailing back and forth with another loner without much else going on who was just fascinated with this case. Like I was. I hear ya, pal.

  His email sits in my mailbox, waiting for a response, waiting for someone else to listen to him. It’s pretty messed up to pretend to be a guy who abducted a girl just to feel important. But I don’t have any scorn for him. He seems sad. I don’t want to indulge the fantasy. But I do want him to know someone is listening.

  34.

  jon—

  youre right, this is a nice neighborhood. the students arent around here too much. only on game days. one dude a couple weekends ago barfed in the bushes outside my house. i just sat and watched him. he never noticed i was here. kinda like you hahahahaaha.

  i agree, its hard to meet people on a college campus. everybody is so young and goodlooking and yeah theyre all looking at their phones all the time. but i dunno. everybody looks at their phones all the time. im not goodlooking enough to get them to look up i guess hahahahaaha. girls everywhere none talking to me nope.

  so have you been watching the news? this thing is all over the place. even the football coach is talking about it. you gotta be a little nervous about that. im a little nervous about it and i didnt do anything. are you ok? scary. i havent been able to tell anybody about this. first i didnt really see you not really and second there aren’t many people to tell anyway. this is probably my longest email chain in a year. guess i need to get out more hahaahahaaha. whole things crazy.

  so what happens next? like whats your plan?

  i just want you to know that you can always be honest with me. im glad we have this and itll all turn out ok just know that we cool. well get through it. it gets too much for me sometime too. its nice to have someone to go through it with.

  also my name isn’t tom. i was just making sure you werent gonna hurt me or anything. but i trust you now man. my name is really daniel. nobody ever calls me dan. but you can if you want to.

  —daniel

  I am impossibly tired. The weight of all this does a number on me a little more each time. Travis has gone and Marjani has gone and Officer Wynn Anderson has gone and it’s just me in the house, staring at my computer, not working, not sleeping, just blankly, mindlessly gaping at the screen.

  This is probably how it will happen, when it happens. It won’t be dramatic or violent. My nightmare/dream scenario of Jonathan being a psycho murderer who strangles me in my sleep isn’t how this is gonna go down, turns out, not that it was ever going to. I won’t die in the heat of passion. It probably won’t even be in public like last night. I’ll be in this chair, scrolling through Twitter on a weekday afternoon, whittling away hours, knowing I should be either sleeping or doing something at least slightly productive but lightly snorting at TikTok videos instead, when all of a sudden I stop breathing, and there’s no one here to help, and then that’s it, it’s over. No one will notice me until Marjani comes in to put me to bed. She’ll gasp, and maybe cry a little, I’m not sure, and then she’ll turn off my computer, grumbling that Daniel is always spending too much time on that thing.

  There would be something fitting about dying in front of the internet. My cousin Scottie died last year. I didn’t know him that well, but I liked what little I knew. Most of the time when relatives came over to our house, they acted like they’d just put something in the oven and needed to hurry back lest it burn. They would hug my mother a little
too tight, they’d speak to me like I was a four-year-old child when I was well into my teens, and they’d shuffle out the door, their obligation fulfilled, checking in on Angela and Daniel so that they didn’t feel like they were terrible people.

  Scottie wasn’t like that. Scottie always came over with his mom Julia, whom he lived with through his mid-thirties. Actually, Julia was not actually my aunt, which means Scottie wasn’t actually my cousin, but she and my mom had worked together at some restaurant before I was born and didn’t get to see each other that much, so they just called her my aunt to make sure that she knew Mom considered her important. Scottie had a tough job on these visits, because Mom would go off in the other room with Julia and drink margaritas and gossip and laugh and cry and just talk talk talk. Scottie’s job was to sit with me. I can be a tough sit, but Scottie just went about his business. He just chilled. He was a little overweight, and he always wore this floppy old-man cap that made him look like he was dealing poker in some seedy speakeasy somewhere. One time, when we were watching some old Clint Eastwood Western, he even let me sip one of his beers. He put a finger over his lips and grinned. Even though that beer tasted terrible, I smiled as widely as I had in weeks.

  Scottie wasn’t married and never seemed to be too far from his mother, who fretted about him and constantly complained about his weight and how his hair was too long, but it was pretty clear that he was taking care of her more than she was taking care of him. Scottie wasn’t living in his mother’s house because he was a layabout. He was living there because she needed him. I never heard either of them say a word about this. It was just understood. One day he woke up and complained to Julia about having trouble catching his breath and a splitting headache. She gave him an aspirin and sat with him on the couch. He inhaled deeply, exhaled deeply, cracked his knuckles, stretched his neck out, took a drink of water, and said quietly, “Ma, I think something might be a little wrong.” Five seconds later his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell onto the floor. Two minutes later he was dead. He’d had a massive heart attack, right then and there in the family room. He was thirty-seven years old.

  Mom came down here and picked me up and drove me back to Illinois for the funeral. There were about a dozen people there, fewer than I would have thought. It was an open casket: he was wearing that dumb hat. Julia stood next to the casket, dressed in her finest blue dress, which my mother had bought her years before, and she didn’t say a word the entire time. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She just stood there the whole time until they closed the lid and buried him. Then she let out a wail that sent birds scurrying out of the trees.