She threw her jacket and backpack on the bed and went straight to the telephone. Within seconds, she had dialed Michael O’Connell’s number.

His voice sounded sleepy, disconnected, when he answered the phone.

“Yes? Who is it?”

“You know goddamn well who it is,” Ashley said in a voice that was on the edge of a shout, filled with bitterness.

“Ashley! I knew you’d call.”

“You bastard! You’ve screwed up my work at school. Now you’ve cost me my job. What sort of creep are you?”

He was silent.

“Leave me alone! Why can’t you leave me alone?”

He remained silent.

She picked up momentum. “I hate you! God damn you, Michael! I told you it was over, and it is! I never want to see you again. I can’t believe you would do this to me. And you say you love me? You’re a sick and evil person, Michael, and I want you out of my life. Forever! Do you understand that?”

He still didn’t reply.

“Do you hear me, Michael? It’s over! Ended. Finished. Completed. However you want to understand it, but it’s all over. No more. Got it?”

She waited for a response and got none. Silence slithered around her, enveloping her like a vine.

“Michael?” She suddenly thought he wasn’t there, that he’d disconnected and her words were simply disappearing into some immense electronic void. “Do you get it? It’s over.”

Again, all she heard at first was silence.

She thought she could hear his breathing.

“Please, Michael. It’s got to be over.”

When he did finally speak, it took her by surprise.

“Ashley,” he replied almost brightly, a little laughter in his tone, as if he were speaking a different language, one that was utterly foreign to her. “It’s just wonderful to hear your voice. I’m counting the days until we can get back together again.”

He paused, then added, “Forever.”

And then he hung up.

“But something happened?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Something, actually many things, happened.”

I watched her face and saw that she was struggling with the details of what she wanted to say. She wore reluctance in much the same way that someone puts on a warm sweater in the winter, in anticipation of some wind and cold and a shift in the weather for the worse.

“Well,” I said, a little exasperated by her oblique manner, “what’s the context here? You got me into this story by saying that I was supposed to make sense of it all. So far, I’m not sure what I’ve really gathered. I can see the games that Michael O’Connell was working. But to what end? I can see the crime taking shape-but what crime are we thinking about?”

She held up her hand. “You want things to be simple, don’t you? But crime isn’t so simple. When you examine it, there are many forces at work. Do you wonder, sometimes, whether we help create the psychological or maybe emotional atmosphere in which bad things, terrible things, take root, flourish, and then flower? We’re like a hothouse for evil, all in ourselves. Seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t answer this. Instead, I watched her as she stared down into her cup of coffee, as if it could tell her something.

“Doesn’t it seem to you that we live these incredibly diffuse, disjointed lives? Once upon a happier time, you grew up and stayed where you were. Probably bought the house down the street from your folks. Helped run the family business. So we all remained linked, in the same orbit. Naïve times. The Honeymooners and Father Knows Best on television. What a quaint idea: Father knows best. Now, we get educated and we depart.”

She paused, then asked, “So, what would you do then, when it became clear to you that someone had decided to ruin your life?”

She added, “And don’t you see? From our perspective, looking at the story from our safe spot in this world, it’s easy to see that there is this person out there trying to ruin their lives. But they couldn’t see that.”

“Why not?” I blurted out.

“Because it’s not reasonable. Because it made no sense. I mean, why? Why would he want to do this to them?”

“Okay, why?”

“Not yet. You need to find that out for yourself. But some things are clear: Michael O’Connell, with half their education, half their resources, half their prestige, had all the power. He had twice their smarts because they were like everyone else and he wasn’t. There they were, caught up and entwined in the midst of all his evil, and yet, they couldn’t see it. Not for what it was. What would you do? Isn’t that the question? Awful things have happened, but what is the real threat?”

I didn’t directly answer. Instead, I repeated myself, trying to get an answer, “But something changed?”

“Yes. A moment of lucidity.”

“How so?”

She smiled. “A lucky phrase. In what was fast becoming a most unlucky situation.”

19

At first, Ashley was overwhelmed by rage.

Seconds after Michael O’Connell’s voice disappeared from the cell phone, she threw it across the room, where it exploded against a wall like a gunshot. She bent over at the waist, her fists clenched, her face contorted, flushed, teeth grinding. She picked up a textbook and threw it in the same direction, where it slammed on the plaster and thudded to the floor. She paced into her bedroom, seized a small throw pillow from the bed, then pummeled it, like a boxer in the last round, throwing rights and lefts recklessly. Seizing the pillow and sinking her hands into the fabric, she pulled it apart. Bits and pieces of synthetic stuffing flew into the air around her, landing in her hair and on her clothing. Her eyes were filling with tears, and she finally let out a wail of despair, sliding into a complete black depression.

Ashley threw herself down on the bed, curled into the fetal position, and cried piteously, giving in to everything that was flowing in torrents within her. Her body racked with frustration, she heaved and gasped, as if her frustration had stretched into every fiber of her body, like some errant infection.

When she had no more tears, she rolled over, staring up at the ceiling, clutching pillow shreds to her chest. She breathed in deeply. She understood that tears didn’t solve any problem, but she felt a little better nevertheless.

When she could feel her heartbeat returning to normal, Ashley sat up.

“All right,” she said out loud. “Let’s get your shit together, girl.”

She glanced over at the shattered cell phone and decided that her burst of anger was a blessing. She would have to get a new phone, and with it, a new number. One, she promised herself, that Michael O’Connell wouldn’t have. She looked over at the desk, with the landline phone. “Cancel that.”

Next to the telephone was her laptop computer. “All right,” she said, again speaking to herself in the same way she would to a young child, “Change your Web service. Change your e-mail account. Cancel all bill-paying services. Start over.”

Then she looked around the apartment. “If you have to move, you have to move.”

She sighed deeply. She could go into the graduate-school registrar’s office in the morning and get her transcripts corrected. She knew this would be a major hassle, but she had paper copies of her grades somewhere, and whatever mischief Michael O’Connell had managed, she could sort her way through it. The current courses-and the nonexistent absences-might be impossible. But it was only one class, and although it was a setback, it wasn’t fatal.

Getting fired was a bigger problem. She had no confidence that the assistant director wouldn’t prove to be an obstacle in the future. He was a rigid dilettante and a closet sexist, and she would hate to have to deal with him again. She decided that the best course of action would be to try to get one of her undergraduate professors to write the assistant director a letter, simply telling him he’d been mistaken in his assumptions about her, and that her employment record should reflect this. She was pretty sure that she could get someone to do this when she explained the circumstances. It might not correct her firing-but it might at least neutralize the damage done.