The Wrong Man by John Katzenbach Page B

thing pretty effortlessly. In the days after the divorce, when Sally and Ashley had come to live with her, Hope had been greeted with all the impassiveness that a sullen seven-year-old could muster. All the anger and hurt Ashley felt had pretty much been ignored by Nameless, who had been overjoyed at the arrival of a child, especially one with Ashley’s energy. So Hope had enlisted Ashley in exercising the puppy with her, and training him, which they did with mixed results—he was adept at retrieving, clueless when it came to the furniture. And so, by talking about the dog’s successes and failures, they had reached first a détente, then an understanding, and finally a sense of sharing, which had broken through many of the other barriers that they’d faced.
    Hope rubbed Nameless behind the ears. She owed him far more than he owed her, she thought. “Hungry?” she asked. “Want some dog food?”
    Nameless barked once. A stupid question to ask a dog, she thought, but one they certainly liked to hear. She walked into the kitchen and grabbed the dog bowl off the floor, as she began to think about what she might prepare for Sally and herself for dinner. Something interesting, she decided. A piece of wild salmon with a fennel cream sauce and risotto. She was an excellent cook and took pride in what she made. Nameless sat, tail sweeping the floor, anticipating. “We’re the same, you and I,” she said to the dog. “We’re both waiting for something. The difference is, you know it’s dinner, and I’m not sure what is in store for me.”
             
    Scott Freeman looked around and thought about the moments in life when loneliness appears completely unexpectedly.
    He had slumped into an aging Queen Anne armchair and stared out the window toward the darkness creeping through the last October leaves on the trees. He had some papers to correct, a class lecture to prepare, some reading he needed to do—a colleague’s manuscript had arrived in the day’s mail from the University Press and he was on the peer-review panel, and there were at least a half dozen requests from history majors for advice on course selections.
    He was also stymied in the midst of a piece of his own writing, an essay on the curious nature of fighting in the Revolutionary War, where one moment was endowed with utter savagery, and another, with a kind of medieval chivalry, as when Washington had returned a British general’s lost dog to him in the midst of the battle of Princeton.
    Much to do, he thought. Out loud, to no one except himself, he said, “You’ve got a full plate.”
    And in that moment, it all meant nothing.
    He considered this thought and realized instead, it might all mean nothing.
    It depended upon what he did next.
    He looked away from the fading afternoon light and let his eyes scour across the letter that he’d found in Ashley’s bureau. He read each word for the hundredth time and felt as trapped as when he’d first discovered it. Then, he mentally reviewed every word, every inflection, every tone, in everything she had said to him when he’d called her.
    Scott leaned back and closed his eyes. What he had to do was try to imagine himself in Ashley’s position. You know your own daughter, he told himself. What is going on?
    This question echoed in his imagination.
    The first thing, he insisted to himself, was to discover who’d written the letter. Then he could independently assess the person, without intruding on his daughter’s life. If he was skillful he could reach a conclusion about the individual without involving anyone—or, at least, not involving anyone who would tell Ashley that he was poking around in her private life. When, as he hoped was true, he discovered that the letter was merely unsettling and inappropriate and nothing more, he could relax and allow Ashley the freedom to extricate herself from the unwanted attention and get on with her life. In fact, he could probably manage all this without