Nine Lives: A Novel

Nine

1

Wednesday, September 14, 5:13 p.m.

Jonathan Grant, unless he let her know ahead of time that he couldn’t make it, always visited on Wednesday evening. His wife had a standing girls’ night out on Wednesdays—occasionally in the city, but usually in New Jersey—so Jonathan would leave the office by five and be at Alison’s one-bedroom apartment in Gramercy Park by five-thirty at the latest.

Alison Horne was ready when the doorman buzzed up to let her know Jonathan was on his way.

She met him at the door, and he presented her with a bottle of Sancerre, a Bulgari scarf she didn’t think she’d ever wear, and that day’s mail that he’d picked up from the doorman. She started to flip through the mail, but he stopped her and led her to the bedroom. She was in a white satin robe—it was how he liked to be greeted—and she slid back onto her bed while he undressed. He looked great for a man in his early seventies, full head of hair, fairly trim, but the muscles in his chest and arms were beginning to sag. He slid next to her on the bed, already erect, and with the red mottled skin on his face and neck that was a telltale sign he’d taken some kind of ED pill as soon as he left the office. Sometimes he took it just after he arrived, in which case they’d drink the bottle of wine first while the pill kicked in.

Afterward, while Jonathan dozed, Alison took her second shower of the day, then dressed as though they were going to go out for dinner later, although that hadn’t been confirmed. She opened the wine and poured herself a glass, then looked through her mail. Two catalogues, an Amex bill, and an envelope with no return address. She opened it, curious, and pulled out a single folded sheet of paper, and stared at a list of names.

Matthew Beaumont

Jay Coates

Ethan Dart

Caroline Geddes

Frank Hopkins

Alison Horne

Arthur Kruse

Jack Radebaugh

Jessica Winslow

She frowned and pressed the sheet of paper flat onto the coffee table, telling herself that she’d show it to Jonathan. A shiver went over her skin, and she shook out her limbs to make it stop. There was something vaguely threatening about receiving a list of names with no explanation. It occurred to her that it just might have something to do with Jonathan. Although she knew relatively little about him, considering the time they spent together, she did know that he had a lot of money. And people who have money usually have enemies. It made her wonder if he would recognize any of the names on the list, besides hers.

He emerged from the bedroom fully dressed, accepted a glass of wine, then looked at the sheet of paper Alison handed to him. This mean anything to you? she asked.

He shook his head. What is it?

I just got it, in the mail.

Was this all?

Yeah. Strange, huh?

Strange.

He handed the list back to Alison. She asked: We going to dinner?

I would if I could, but I got roped into dinner uptown with some hedge fund guys. Sorry, Al.

She shrugged. When they’d first begun this relationship—a year and a half ago—she used to make a fuss when he had to leave her. She did it for him, mostly, till she realized that he didn’t need those kinds of reassurances. He was in it for the sex and the company, and she was in it for the money, and, she supposed, the sex. Before he left, he gave her a prepaid Visa card, telling her it was an anniversary gift, in case she didn’t like the scarf.

How much is on it? she asked. Again, something she would never have asked when they were first together.

I’ll let you be surprised. Don’t try to buy a car with it, though.

After he left, Alison Horne called her best friend, Doug, and asked if he’d like to have dinner that night. On her.

2

Thursday, September 15, 10:05 a.m.

It was the most interesting piece of mail that Arthur Kruse, having just returned from physical therapy, received that morning.

He opened the envelope, not expecting anything of note, and was surprised to find a short list of names, including his. He didn’t recognize any of the other people on the list.

There were three hours in the day before Arthur was due for his shift as an oncology nurse at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton. He’d just begun reading A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester. Since reading A Distant Mirror over the summer, he’d found he didn’t want to leave the Middle Ages. Something about those past lives, the constant suffering, the search for God, acted as the only balm to Arthur’s state of mind since the car accident, nearly a year ago, that took the life of his husband, Richard, their cocker spaniel, Misty, and most of the function of Arthur’s left leg. He couldn’t quite believe it had been a whole year. Joan, his minister—and Arthur’s closest friend—told him it would be at least two years until he began to feel some semblance of normality, of happiness, of a return to his life, but Arthur wondered. The past endless year felt like it was just going to be repeated ad infinitum. Nothing helped. That wasn’t entirely true. Medieval history helped. He gingerly slid into his reading chair and picked up where he’d left off in Manchester’s book, not nearly as good as Tuchman’s. He read two pages, then drifted off, waking an hour before he had to be at the hospital.

His leg was always at its worst after midday napping, and he found himself limping to the kitchen to put on hot water for a cup of tea. While waiting for the water to boil, he looked out the window over his sink and caught a glimpse of the fox—the one he’d named Reynard—skirting the edge of his property. It was moving fast, and just before it ducked into the trees, it turned its head and Arthur thought he saw something—a small rodent maybe—in its jaws. It inexplicably made Arthur happy for the moment. The last time he’d seen Reynard he’d been worried about how skinny and ragged he looked.

The day was overcast, and the willow tree down by the brook had just begun to exhibit a yellowish cast. He drank the tea at his computer and thought of the list he’d gotten in the mail. What had it meant? Some strange automatic mailing, a computer screwing up somewhere in the middle of the country and sending out some random names. It was a possibility. Ever since Richard’s passing he’d taken to giving small amounts of money to multiple charities, ensuring that his name was on about a hundred different mailing lists, probably specified as an easy touch. That was okay. There were worse things to be, and getting mail was actually something he looked forward to. He’d been one of those children who sent away for catalogues just to receive them, until his father found out and put a stop to it.

He finished his tea, returned an email to Joan to let her know he was available to do the flowers for church that Sunday, and prepared to go to work.

3

Thursday, September 15, 11:00 a.m.

Ethan Dart heard the mail flop through the slot in his apartment door. He spotted the mysterious-looking envelope right away, and opened it instantly, hoping that it was a response from an agent. He’d recently gone through a period of unprecedented productivity and sent his demo tapes out to about a dozen agents who represented songwriters. It was a stab in the dark, he knew, but he figured it couldn’t hurt. Inside the envelope (the postmark was from New York City, and that was promising) was just a single sheet of paper with a list of names, nine in all, including his. He wondered if it had been sent to him by mistake, possibly because he’d made some sort of short list for representation.

He took the list, plus his mug of coffee, back to his bedroom and fired up his laptop. Ethan punched in the first name from the list—Matthew Beaumont—along with songwriter to narrow the results. Nothing came up, at least nothing that indicated Matthew Beaumont was another songwriter seeking representation. He tried a few more names, but lost interest. It clearly wasn’t a list of other songwriters or artists. It sparked an idea for a song, though, the chorus something like, I want to be the last one on your list. He grabbed a pencil, flipped over the sheet of paper, and began jotting down lyrics for a country song. List was both a great rhyming word—so many options—and a crappy one since the options were all clichés. Missed. Kissed. Insist. Still, he wrote three verses, and even began to hear the melody in his head. He got another cup of coffee and his guitar, and, after smoking the day’s first bowl of weed, began to work it out.

He didn’t think again about the list of names until much later that night, when he was sitting at the bar at Casino el Camino on 6th Street in Austin, trying to come up with something clever to say to Hannah Scharfenberg, who’d been sitting with him for the past hour.

I got a list in the mail today. Eight names I didn’t know, plus mine.

What do you mean?

Ethan took a foamy sip from his just-cracked bottle of Lone Star. Just like I said. I got an envelope addressed to me. Inside was a sheet of paper with nine typed names on it, in alphabetical order. And mine was one of them.

They were typed?

No, not typed, but not handwritten. They were printed. From a computer.

Strange.

I guess so. Good thing was I got a song out of it. ‘Last on Your List.’ Wrote the whole thing in about an hour. Kind of an Eric Church thing.

Hannah, a pharmacist and a rabid Longhorns fan, did not have a whole lot of interest in Ethan’s songwriting hopes and dreams, and he watched her eyes glaze over at the mention of his song. He bought her, and himself, a shot of George Dickel, then talked her into letting him walk her home. Ashley, her housemate, was away visiting her parents in Dallas, so Hannah invited him in. They smoked some pot, then watched half of The Royal Tenenbaums before having sex on the futon couch.

We have to stop doing this, Hannah said, coming back from the bathroom, wearing one of her old softball jerseys and nothing else.

Why?

"Because you’re seeing Ashley. And I live with her."

We’re not exclusive, at least that’s what she tells me.

"No, but I live with her, and if she finds out it’s going to make life around here very awkward."

I think I like you more than I like her.

It doesn’t matter.

It matters to me.

Trust me, things that matter to you don’t matter to anybody else. You haven’t learned that yet.

He convinced Hannah to let him stay over. This was after he’d made them both a cheese omelet they ate at the Formica breakfast table in the kitchen. In Hannah’s bed—a mattress on the floor, actually—they’d fooled around a little till Hannah told him the Ambien was kicking in and she had to sleep. She curled away from him, and Ethan, his hand still pressed up against her hip, thought about his day, wondering if Hannah was on to something when she told him how the things that mattered to him didn’t matter to anybody else. It would explain a lot about his life.

Before finally falling asleep himself, he thought again about the list he’d gotten in the mail. He recited seven of the names to himself—he had a near photographic memory—but couldn’t remember the final one, probably because he’d barely looked at it. Then he recited the lyrics to the new song, decided they sucked donkey dick, and fell asleep.

4

Thursday, September 15, 1:44 p.m.

The name that Ethan Dart couldn’t remember belonged to Jessica Winslow. On Thursday she received the list of names in an envelope that was addressed to Special Agent Winslow at the Albany field office of the FBI. There was a single Forever stamp in the right-hand corner of the envelope, and the postmark indicated the letter had come from New York City, mailed two days previously.

It was unusual for her to receive any mail at the office, particularly something so cryptic. Just a list of names. She instinctively held the letter at the very edges, then dropped it gingerly onto her desk. She called her immediate supervisor, Aaron Berlin, asking him to swing by her office.

Do you know the other names? he asked, five minutes later, peering at the letter from over Jessica’s shoulder.

Even though she’d read the names on the list several times, she reread them silently to herself one more time.

Arthur Kruse is the only name that’s familiar to me, but only because my dad used to mention a friend of his named Art Kruse, or maybe I’m imagining it. I always assumed the last name was spelled Cruise, like Tom Cruise, though.

You never met him?

No, my dad just talked about him. Whenever anyone mentioned a lake house, or living on a lake, my dad would always say something like, ‘Back in college I spent a summer at Art Kruse’s lake house.’ We used to make fun of him for it, and that’s why I think I remember.

It’s an unusual name.

What, Kruse? Not really. Not if you’re German. I’ve already looked it up on Google and I found some Arthur Kruses but they were all German. Germans from Germany.

Hmm.

Jessica swiveled in her chair to look up at Aaron. She’d never really seen him from that angle and noticed how much dark hair he had in his nostrils.

What do you think? she said.

He shrugged. Get it analyzed if you want. Could be nothing. Could be some computer glitch somewhere spewing out junk mail.

Could be.

After Aaron left, she put the envelope and the letter in separate plastic bags, then moved them to her out-box. She went back to studying the file on the William Brundy murder trial she’d been called to testify at the following week. She kept waiting to hear from the prosecution that it was going to be settled before heading to trial, but now it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. William Brundy was a patrol officer in Stark, New York, who had killed his ex-wife by staging a break-in at her split-level ranch. Blood evidence and crime scene photographs had been forwarded to their office and Jessica had been given the job of lead investigator. She didn’t particularly mind testifying at trials, but Brundy’s defense attorney was a dickwad named Elliot Skenderian who always somehow managed to get under Jessica’s skin. If she owned a dartboard, she’d put a picture of Skenderian’s face on it.

Before leaving the office at just after five o’clock, she took another look at the mysterious list of names and wrote them down using the Notes app on her smartphone. Maybe that night she’d catch up on The Good Wife while doing some more googling. If there was a connection between her and these people, she’d find it. The internet liked to give up its secrets.

She wasn’t surprised to see Aaron Berlin at the Club Room after work, but she was surprised that he wasn’t alone. He was sitting at a booth with Roger Johnson, the outgoing special agent in charge. Roger spotted her entering the bar and asked her to join them.

I’m going to have dinner with Anthony at the bar, but thanks, anyway.

Anthony, the bartender, had a glass of Pinot Noir already poured and waiting for her when she slid onto the padded leather stool. She wondered briefly if it looked bad that she’d shunned her colleagues in favor of eating alone at the bar, then shrugged it off. Johnson was moving to the Schenectady office, and Berlin, well, fuck him.

She drank her wine slowly, doing the Times crossword, Anthony helping her out when he wasn’t busy. She asked for a second glass plus a half order of penne with puttanesca sauce and a garden salad on the side. When she’d finished the crossword, only unsure about one of the answers, she slid the folded newspaper back into her purse, paid the bill, and prepared to leave.

Two Belvederes please, Anthony. On the rocks. Aaron deposited himself onto the stool next to her.

Uh, no thanks, Aaron. I was about to go home. Jessica looked over Aaron’s shoulder and saw Roger making his way to the exit.

One drink, Jess. Please.

She agreed, and, surprisingly, he asked her several questions about her recent life before starting in on his favorite topic: their affair and why it had ended.

You’re married, she said.

Sort of. Not really. My wife has affairs. I know she does.

That’s not really the point.

Then what’s the point?

Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to be in a relationship, but if I did want to be in one, it would be with someone closer to my age, someone unattached, someone without kids, someone I don’t work with, someone who isn’t a narcissist . . .

I already don’t trust this guy.

Jessica smiled, even though his attempt at humor was the type of thing she had grown to dislike about him. When they’d first gotten involved, there had been a real intensity between them. Aaron was a little bit of a jerk—she’d always known that—but he took his job seriously, he had empathy, and there had been a week early on when she thought they might be falling in love. She sipped at her vodka with slightly numb lips and knew she’d made a mistake by agreeing to one more drink. She decided to change the subject. You really didn’t think there was anything strange about that list I got in the mail?

Aaron was signaling Anthony with just his eyes, trying to get two more drinks. What? That list of names? That bothered you?

It didn’t bother me. I was just interested. It was unusual.

I guess so. If you want, I’ll get Rick to cross-reference them in the database. Maybe there is a connection. Maybe you all won three free days at a timeshare in Fort Myers.

Maybe you’re right. Just some glitch in some mass mailing system.

Two more vodkas arrived, and Jessica eyed the glass, knowing that the difference between drinking it and not drinking it was the difference between a full night’s sleep and Aaron winding up in her bed tonight.

She slid off the stool and began to put on her coat. Sorry, Aaron. I need an early night.

He pursed his lips, but said, Okay. Lunch soon?

Sure.

Anthony glanced over at Jessica, and she thought she saw a little bit of approval in his eyes. Although he’d never said it out loud, Anthony was not a huge fan of Aaron. You leaving so soon? the bartender asked, a crooked smile on his face.

I am, Anthony. Thanks again, and tell Maria that I loved the penne.

Anthony was reaching for the extra vodka on the bar when Aaron stopped him. That’s okay, T, we’ll keep it. He poured her drink into his as Jessica knotted her scarf around her neck. She turned and left before she changed her mind. She really did need an early night.

5

Thursday, September 15, 2:00 p.m.

Thursdays were Caroline Geddes’s office hours, two hours that she had begun to rely on as quiet writing time, due to the low number of students who stopped by to see her. That Thursday there was only one, Elaine Cheong, who dropped by unannounced, while two students who had previously arranged meetings didn’t show up. Caroline had taught long enough—a dozen years now—to see how email had transformed the student-teacher relationship. Today’s students went out of their way to do everything via email, or via the wiki she’d set up for some of her larger courses. They sent their late papers, their excuses, and even their grade-grubbing compliments, all via email. One of her male students from last year might even have sent a sexual proposition to her, although, despite twenty years spent parsing text, she still wasn’t sure what he’d meant by Wish you were my teacher aide, know what I mean? jk. It took her half a day to realize that jk stood for just kidding.

Elaine, with tears in her eyes, explained to Caroline that she was late for the second class of the semester because of a problem with a faulty alarm clock and that was why she’d missed the pop quiz. It’s not fair that I can’t make it up, she said, for the second time.

It was a pop quiz. It’ll be a very small part of your final grade.

I need to get an A in this class.

Tell you what, Elaine, I’ll give you a new pop quiz right now.

Caroline pulled a piece of paper out of one of her notebooks and quickly jotted down three new questions on one of the Wordsworth poems that they hadn’t gone over in class that morning but which had been assigned. Caroline pushed the sheet of paper across to her student and told her she had ten minutes.

This isn’t the same quiz, Elaine said, two distinct lines appearing on her otherwise flawless forehead.

No, it’s a new pop quiz.

Caroline pulled out a book and pretended to read it while watching the girl bite at her lower lip so hard that she left little teeth impressions in it. I didn’t know we were supposed to memorize dates.

Just do your best, and at least you’ll get better than a zero.

Elaine hunched herself over the paper and scrawled some answers, and just before Caroline was going to announce that time was up, she pushed the paper across the desk. I still don’t think it’s fair, she said, but almost so low that Caroline couldn’t hear it.

I’ll see you in class next week, Caroline said, and Elaine left in a huff, her phone already in her hand. Caroline imagined she was texting someone about what a bitch her English professor was. It didn’t matter; there were twenty minutes left in her office hours. She glanced at her emails and there was nothing pressing to respond to, so she opened the email she’d received two weeks earlier from David Latour, the professor from McGill University whom Caroline had met when she’d delivered her lecture on Joanna Baillie at the Scholarly Theories Conference in Toronto over the summer.

He’d written to say how much he’d enjoyed her talk, but also to share a poem he thought she might enjoy by Louis MacNeice, called Wolves. Its opening line was I do not want to be reflective anymore, and Caroline had had that particular line trapped in her head ever since she’d read it. She reread the poem now, nearly wrote David to tell him again how much she loved it but stopped herself.