Finding David Chandler Read online

  “He might,” said Doreen, frowning at that one. “If he does, I know he’s never used it on our family laptop.”

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “Because our laptop tracks all of our internet activity in the “History” function. I clear all the history once a month, but otherwise it just accumulates. So I would have noticed something like that.”

  I wasn’t surprised. It had been the same for Marianne and me. Social arrangements, family communications, everything, had been handled by Marianne. The David I knew would have been the same.

  “Does he ever get online?”

  “No. I set up a Facebook account for him a couple of years ago, but he never ‘friended’ anyone.”

  “But he must’ve received hundreds of friend requests.”

  “Yes, at first he did, but he never friended back. Pretty soon, people kind of gave up.”

  “Does he have a laptop or a phone at work?”

  “I know he has a laptop. He brings it home with him every night, and brings it to work every morning. But I’ve never seen him use it at home. It just sits where he drops it, just inside the front door. The last time I saw it was on Thursday morning when he left for work with it. I’ve never seen him with a company phone, but I guess I can’t be sure.” I saw the frown again. Doreen was a woman who didn’t like uncertainties.

  “What about his car?”

  “What about it?”

  “What’s the make and model?” I said, grabbing a scrap of paper and a pencil from the counter.”

  “He drives an Audi. I think it’s an A6.”

  “You don’t know his plate number, do you?”

  “For heaven’s sake, no.”

  “What about EZ Pass?”

  “David doesn’t have one for his car because he never goes anywhere. Any time we take a trip, we use my car.” Or, he could have wanted the EZ Pass out of his car so that he could travel with less chance of being followed, but that didn’t fit the pattern based on what I was hearing from Doreen, so I didn’t bring it up.

  “Please keep checking the credit cards, okay?” I said, putting the scrap of paper aside.

  “Sure.”

  It was what I would have expected. David Chandler lived a life without secrets, and he had made no attempt to establish any type of a hidden life. I’d have to keep looking, but the David Chandler I’d known all my life was simply not a furtive man, and I sincerely doubted that I’d find anything. Off the football field, he’d always been deeply shy, and that seemed to have intensified over time. But the last time I looked, shyness wasn’t a crime.

  “Have you talked to Kenny?” I said.

  “I called him just before I came over here. He said he hadn’t heard a thing. I told him, by the way, that you were back in town, and I told him where you were living. You should give him a call.”

  “I will.”

  “So, are you going to help me?”

  “Of course I’ll help you, Doreen.” What else was I going to say? And it wasn’t like I was doing anything else.

  “Thanks, Matt,” she said, reaching over and touching my arm, giving me another one of those heartbreaker smiles. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “No problem.”

  “Of course, I insist on paying you. Just tell me what your fees are. Do you need an advance?”

  Yes, I needed an advance. And I knew Doreen could afford it. David was a vice president at the Orange County Bank and Trust, where he’d worked since he’d graduated from NYU. But no, I wasn’t going to ask for one. It was a guy thing, I guess.

  “We’ll talk about money later, okay? I’m fine for now.”

  “Okay,” said Doreen, “but just for now. I don’t want to take advantage of our friendship.” She reached over and touched my arm again.

  She stood up and picked up the empty coffee cups. She brought them over to the sink, rinsed them out and left them in the sink to dry. It was only a moment, but it was the first moment that the sad little place had felt like a home to me. Some small part of me, buried deep, was suddenly content, if only for an instant.

  “Now, I’ve got to go,” she said, giving me a look like maybe she’d felt the moment, too. Or perhaps I was just imagining that. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Stay in touch, okay?” I said as I followed her back down the hallway. I didn’t want the conversation to end and I didn’t want her to leave, but I wasn’t going to say it.

  “Don’t worry, I will,” she replied. “And give Kenny a call, okay?”

  “I’ll do that right now,” I said, holding up my new phone, but I knew I wouldn’t. I had to ease back into this.

  When she left I kept the front door open as I watched her walk to her car, a sharp looking, late model white Lexus with the top down. As she opened the door she turned to me and waved.

  “Not bad, huh?” she said.

  “Not bad at all.”

  I was pretty sure she was talking about the car. I was pretty sure I wasn’t.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WEEKENDS IN DEVON-ON-HUDSON CAN BE SLOW, and it had been a long time since I’d been in the area, so I got up on Sunday morning and decided I’d hop in my car, a 2005 Honda Accord with a five-speed stick shift and more miles on it than I cared to think about, and reacquaint myself.

  June is a beautiful time of year in the Hudson River Valley. The lush greens of the young leaves and newly planted fields hadn’t yet paled under the heat of the July sun. The air felt fresh and clear, and the blue sky hadn’t yet faded into its midsummer pastel. If my hard-topped Accord had only been Marianne’s BMW 3-Series convertible everything would have been perfect. I opened the moon roof and made the best of it. I pulled out of the parking lot, picked a direction, and drove.

  I headed over to West Point, but not to visit the United States Military Academy. The campus is beautiful, and there’s a first rate museum there that I’d visited often. But today, I just wanted to see the river, so I drove up a long, winding road that was famous for its numerous accidents and even more numerous make out spots. I pulled over where there was a sign that said, “Scenic View,” and got out of my car. The sign was new, but the view was timeless. This stretch of the Hudson is technically a fjord, where glaciers had carved out the valley and widened the river, leaving a spectacular vista. The Dutch had been the first settlers here, and the valley seemed to echo with the rich folklore they had left behind. I’d been away a long time, and I drank in the view the way a drunk drinks that first beer of the day.

  I used to come up here a lot as a teenager, but unlike most of my friends, I never brought girls up with me. I was a star football player; I didn’t need to impress girls with a view. No, I’d wanted to focus on the Valley, and I didn’t want to share it. I used to stare out at the river and imagine Henry Hudson sailing upriver on his tiny ship, the Halfmoon, on water that looked more like a sea, smelling and tasting its saltiness, convinced that he’d found the Northwest Passage to the East Indies, the Holy Grail of early maritime exploration. I’d tried to imagine the sense of satisfaction, of pride he must have felt knowing that he’d achieved his destiny, realizing that he had done what God had placed him on this earth to do. In my young mind I imagined it was something akin to the feeling I felt after I caught yet another game-winning touchdown pass from David. And then I would try to imagine how Hudson must have felt when the water no longer tasted salty, and the river narrowed, and he had to face the crushing fact that maybe his sense of destiny had been an illusion after all. But I had always put that thought out of my mind quickly. It was a feeling I could imagine, but in my youth couldn’t yet comprehend. But still, it had lingered, the Halfmoon never far from my mind, especially as football glory, and the youthful sense of destiny fulfilled, was replaced by professional, and personal, mediocrity.

  I could have spent the morning there. The sun was shining, wispy white clouds scudded across the Delft blue sky, and the river was mesmerizing; but I had more reacquainting to do. So I got back in
my car and headed back to Devon-on-Hudson, the only place I’d ever truly called home.

  As I pulled in to town I slowed down to reorient myself. It didn’t take long to realize that this was no longer the place where I’d grown up. Back then it was still a sleepy little village buried in the foothills of the Catskills, too far north of New York City to be a bedroom community, and too little local industry to generate any real prosperity. I’d grown up in a middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood in a barely middle-class town with a lot of middle-class friends. Our parents drove second-hand cars; we ate a lot of ground beef and chicken, and we wore handed down clothes. It had been a nice way to grow up.

  But inevitably, with the skyrocketing real estate prices in Westchester and even Rockland County, economic necessity, along with better roads, had driven people farther north. And now the slightly shabby little village of my youth was an affluent enclave for elite New York professionals. The modest house my mom and dad had bought in 1975 for $30,000 had sold for $450,000 when they’d moved to Florida two years ago. Franco’s, the pizzeria in town that had served as the official high school students’ hangout for decades, and which probably should have been closed down by the Board of Health, was now a trendy northern Italian trattoria called “Il Cuccina della Torino” that required not only reservations, but jackets and ties as well. It was now ostensibly owned and operated by Franco’s son, Anthony, a rather slow-witted classmate who had always smelled faintly of rising dough, and who served as living proof that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good.

  And there were the other inevitable changes along Main Street: Gray’s Fine Men’s Apparel, where we’d all gotten our first suits and rented our prom tuxes, was now a Verizon Store; the Tom McAn shoe store, where I’d gotten my first pair of dress shoes for twenty dollars, was now a CVS Pharmacy & Walk-In Clinic, and Ray Lutz Pontiac/Saturn on the far end of Main Street was now Ray Lutz Hyundai.

  And Devon Central High School was no longer the school I had attended, which then had housed grades 7 through 12. The exploding population of the town had necessitated the construction of a new school twice the size of my alma mater, and had clearly been designed by an expensive architect who had aspired to more than simply form following function. I hated it as soon as I saw it. It had been built on the far side of what was still the football field, and my old high school was now, a freshly painted sign informed me, Devon Middle School. I decided to park my car in the far corner of the old school parking lot right off the street, where kids used to hang out and smoke, and take a walk around.

  The old school looked the same, just smaller. When I’d first stepped onto the school grounds as a twelve-year old 7th Grader the place had seemed frighteningly huge. Now it seemed diminished and decidedly dowdy, especially in contrast to the new building.

  Even the football field was different, I realized, as I stepped onto the gridiron. This emerald green, perfectly manicured, uniform, lush sod warming in the early summer sun but still damp with the morning dew was not the lumpy, patchy, weed-riddled surface where I’d run my routes and caught David’s passes. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I trotted over to the 50-yard line and lined myself up off to the right. I said, “Hut!” out loud and took off down the field on a post pattern. David was the only quarterback in the county who could throw a post pattern that deep, and I was the only receiver in the county who could get there fast enough to catch the pass. We’d run a lot of post patterns, and nobody had ever come close to stopping us. I made it to the goal line after what seemed a longer run than I remembered and made an imaginary lunge for the ball.

  “Touchdown, Devon Central!” I heard a voice from behind me call out.

  I spun around, and there was Kenny Cooper standing at the 30 with a big grin on his face.

  ******

  Kenny was barely recognizable as the young man I’d last seen at our 10-year class reunion over a decade ago.

  Like both David and me, Kenny was about six-one, and his playing weight had been about 190. I was still within ten pounds of my playing weight and the last time I’d seen David so was he. But Kenny had blown up. I guessed he now weighed about 260, and it was all gut. His face had grown fat and was an unhealthy shade of red, like the hamburger that looks too pink under the lights at the butcher shop. A beer tan, I think we used to call it. His hair had thinned considerably, and what was left was going to gray. He looked more like fifty than the thirty-nine I knew him to be. I tried to keep the shock off my face.

  “Jesus, Kenny,” I said, more out of breath than I should have been, “what are you trying to do, give me a coronary?”

  “C’mon,” said Kenny, walking up to me and putting me in a bear hug, “you look like you could still suit up and play. I’m the heart attack on a stick.”

  “How’d you know I was here?” I said.

  “I didn’t, but I stopped by your new place and you weren’t there, so I figured you might find your way over here.”

  “It’s sure not the field we played on.”

  “It sure isn’t. Beautiful, huh? And speaking of beautiful, what do you think of the new school?”

  “It’s pretty impressive, I’ve got to say,” I said. It was only a small lie, and I didn’t want to insult Kenny if he liked it.

  “Have you been inside yet?”

  “No. I’ve only been back in town for a couple of days and, besides, I don’t know if there’s anyone left who would remember me.”

  “Yeah, we’ve still got a few teachers from when you and I were students, but not many. And anyway, summer vacation started last week, so it’s empty now. But, hey, come with me and we can take a look. Then maybe we can sit down in my office and do a little catching up. I guess it’s a little early for a beer, but I’ve got a fridge with soda in it,” he said, with a look on his face that said he hoped that I might disagree with him about the beer.

  “Yeah, I’d say 10:30 is a little early for a beer, but I could go for a soda.”

  “Great,” he said, turning toward the school.

  Kenny, probably the most bruising running back in Orange County high school football history, was a little winded just from the short walk from the football field to the school. The outside of the school didn’t look any better close up than it had from a distance, but it was nice enough on the inside, at least. We wandered through unfamiliar hallways until we eventually got to a door with white, stenciled lettering on the front that said:

  KENNETH R. COOPER

  Athletic Director

  Kenny beamed with pride as he opened the door and ushered me into what I had to admit was a pretty impressive office. At one end sat a massive desk, behind which stood an equally impressive trophy case. A spacious seating area furnished with a sofa and two chairs, upholstered with what appeared to be genuine leather, and a solid oak coffee table occupied the other end.

  And in the center of the wall, between the desk and the sitting area, hung a massive reproduction of The Picture, the one that had appeared in every local newspaper in the Hudson River Valley, and had adorned the cover of our senior class yearbook: Kenny, David, and me, taken just after our final football game together as Devon Central Gladiators, helmets dangling from the fingers of our right hands, uniforms stained with grass, mud, and blood, hair matted with sweat, and our faces wearing the proud, confident smiles of youthful success. It was an image of three seventeen year-old boys on the mountaintop, seeing nothing but clear blue sky on the horizon.

  We had been dubbed “The Triumvirate” by the local press, the three golden young men who, after years of mediocrity, had led the Devon Gladiators to three consecutive undefeated seasons, a perfect 30-0, culminating in the 56-0 crushing of our archrivals, the Cornwall Central Dragons. We were, quite literally, legends in our own time.

  Mr. Doerr, the European History teacher, a mild, well-meaning man we used to call “Dopey,” had hoped that our nickname, coupled with the school’s mascot, would inspire his students to take a more active interest in
the history of the Roman Empire. But when, on the final exam, he had asked, “Who were the gladiators?” and, “Name the three men who formed the Triumvirate,” fully seventy-five percent of the students answered, “Our football team,” and, “David Chandler, Matt Hunter, and Kenny Cooper.”

  “Pretty great digs, huh?” said Kenny, still beaming.

  “Pretty great digs, Kenny. I’m impressed.”

  “You know, the head football coach reports to me, Matt. To me.” He said it with the same immense sense of awe as if he’d said, “You know, the Pope reports to me.”

  “You’ve come a long way, Kenny,” I said, meaning it. “Congratulations.”

  “There’s not a single bar in this town where my money’s any good, Matt. There’s always a beer waiting for me before I even get a chance to ask for one. And it’s the good stuff, you know, Heineken. And there’s not a single event in this town that I go to, even if it’s not about sports, that people don’t know me as soon as I walk through the door. And you know what, Matt?”

  “What, Kenny?”

  “It has nothing to do with all this,” he said, extending his arm and taking in his office like Hector surveying the Trojan plain. “It’s still all about that,” he said, pointing to The Picture. “They still remember, Matt.”

  “We gave people a lot of nice memories, didn’t we Kenny.”

  “We sure did.”

  “We were good, weren’t we.”

  “Damn good,” said Kenny. He hesitated, but I knew what was coming next. “I still say you guys could’ve made the pro’s.”

  “Aw, Kenny, it just wasn’t in the cards, you know that.”

  “I just never understood how both of you could’ve just walked away from football like that, not after the careers you had here.” It was a conversation we’d had many times before, usually over far too many beers, but we were apparently going to have it again. Kenny possessed the persistence of a true believer, and like a Jehovah’s Witness standing at your door, it was tough to get him off the stoop.