Half Life

by Helen Cothran

  I walked toward him, closing the gap between us by half. I was now standing close enough to him that I could smell soap and sweat. “I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me the truth. Now, let’s have it.”

  He dropped his hands and looked at me, eyes tired and scared. “Okay, alright, I’ll tell you the truth, but then you’ve got to leave us alone. Yeah, I knew Pete, okay? We met at the first protest, we got into an argument. I kept seeing him at the other protests. That’s it.”

  I studied him with hard eyes and shook my head. “Cough it up.”

  “Really, that’s it. I only knew him like that, like an enemy, you know, on opposite sides of the issue. I wasn’t ‘seeing’ him. All that is behind me, Dr. Cornwell cured me.” His words came out in a harsh whisper, and I could see he hated talking about Pete in this place where God was, the God who said he was sick and needed to be cured.

  I felt a wave of pity for him, but I had to keep pushing him. “Cut the crap, Matthew. I don’t believe you.”

  He swallowed hard, I could see his Adam’s apple bob up and down as though he had swallowed a tennis ball. “I’m telling you, I wouldn’t do it. He was gay, I’m not anymore. Even his brother didn’t like him being gay and beat him up over it. And he was into drugs and I don’t do drugs. You’ve got to believe me.”

  I cocked my head, showing my disbelief.

  He sighed. “He came on to me, I admit it, but nothing happened. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  I snorted. “How come you know so much about a man you say you barely knew? People on opposite sides of a picket line don’t usually share intimate truths about drug use and family fights.”

  Matthew glanced behind him again, undoubtedly hoping Faith would burst through the front doors and tell him what to say or make me disappear. The doors remained stubbornly closed, and nobody stormed in to save him. He glanced back at me, eyes wide, jaw working.

  I tired of watching him struggle. So I asked a question that assumed the answer he had refused to give. “So, did Cornwell know you were sleeping with Pete?”

  His mouth flew open, but his voice got strangled in his throat and nothing came out.

  I pushed him harder. “Cornwell knew, didn’t he? That’s why he killed Pete.”

  Matthew gasped, his eyes huge. “No! Dr. Cornwell would never hurt anyone! I mean yeah, he knew about me and Pete, and he was upset about it, but I’m telling you, he didn’t kill Pete.”

  Ah, tacit admission. Finally. “So, how did Cornwell find out?”

  Matthew’s whole body deflated. Now that the truth was out, all the energy seemed to drain out of him. “I told him.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head, struggled to speak, but no words came.

  I answered for him. “You told him because you wanted help. You asked Cornwell to make it stop, didn’t you?”

  He stared at me like I was some supernatural being who had the ability to read minds and see into the past.

  Relentlessly, I went on. “So Cornwell killed Pete. And that made you angry. Cornwell killed the man you loved. So you killed Cornwell.”

  “No! That’s not how it happened!”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “So how did it happen?”

  He realized his mistake immediately and began to back away from it. He glanced around wildly. Finally, he said in one long hurried sentence, “That drug guy did it like you said before, he killed Pete and Dr. Cornwell both, because of drugs, like the police think.”

  He was getting mired in lies again, this whole thing was getting out of his control. I said, “Leaving aside the question of how you could know that, I ask the question, why? Why, especially, would ‘the drug dealer’ kill Cornwell? You said yourself that Cornwell wasn’t involved in drugs. But maybe you lied and Cornwell was.”

  “No! He wasn’t! He had nothing to do with drugs!”

  “Then why would a drug dealer kill him?”

  Matthew had gotten himself in so much of a tangle he was speechless.

  So Faith answered for him.

  “We told you to leave us alone,” she snarled, advancing down the aisle at last, exactly as Matthew must have felt she would. How had she come in without us noticing her? Did she always follow Matthew around, make sure he wasn’t getting himself into trouble? Or had she followed me? That was a creepy thought, and, I realized with a shiver, not an unexpected one. Faith went on, “Shame on you, questioning my husband like he is a criminal, and in the house of the Lord. You are despicable. We have nothing further to say to you. The next thing you’ll hear from us is that we’ve gotten a restraining order against you. Now, get the hell out.”

  Her curse echoed in the church like a damnation.

  I smiled at Faith because I had gotten what I came for. Without a word, I walked past her down the aisle and out of the church into the bright clean air.

  .

  I wasn’t surprised to get the text message.

  It was from Matthew. “I have to see you,” it said. “Alone. I have information for you. Can you meet me tonight at 10 at the rifle range? Please respond as soon as you get this. Matthew.”

  The only thing that surprised me was that it had taken two days after our meeting at the church for the message to come. I had spent the time trying to catch up on my book and second-guessing myself. I had pushed hard, and I knew the case was at the breaking point. What I hoped was that I didn’t get broken, too.

  .

  I typed back, “See you tonight at 10.”

  There was no going back now.

  36

  At nine o’clock Thursday night I parked my car ten feet from the lip of a vast sandy bowl and turned off the ignition. There were no other cars. That didn’t mean that I was alone. A person could park anywhere in the desert and walk here. I sat in the car for fifteen minutes, listening and watching. The moon was waning, but its bright light lit the scene clearly. I saw and heard no one. Taking a slow deep breath, I grabbed my sweatshirt and climbed out of the car. The air was unusually warm for nighttime in early May, but I knew it would get cold quickly. I pulled my sweatshirt on and walked to the rim of the bowl.

  I looked around. Desert Rock’s unofficial rifle range is located at the mouth of Rattler Gulch, so named because the place is crawling with rattlesnakes. The gulch’s inhospitable environs make it the perfect place for an unofficial rifle range. Only shooters come here, so there are no nature nuts to complain about the broken bottles and splintered cans used for target practice. To get to the rifle range one must drive up a dirt road for several miles. The road eventually terminates at the lip of the sandy bowl. Shooters stand or squat on this rim and shoot cans and bottles that they’ve lined up on rocks below. The echoes can be heard for miles.

  I looked down into the bowl. Stretched before me as far as I could see was a sea of splintered glass and shredded metal glinting in the moonlight. I saw rusty cans, shiny cans, bright clear glass, and green and blue glass polished by the wind. The bowl was not a good place to fall in, I observed, conjuring up visions of bloody gashes filled with glass shards and metal slivers.

  I turned away from the bowl and looked up. The half-moon looked huge hanging in the sky, its white face throwing off enough light to read by. The steep walls of Rattler Gulch looked blighted in the moonlight, gray and barren. I turned and looked south toward town. Desert Rock sprawled over the gentle valley, its twinkling lights warm and inviting. Somewhere down there was home. I pictured Connor watching some dumb TV show, Lacy lying on his feet. I felt an intense longing to be there with them, safe and loved.

  I came back to reality with a jolt. There I was, my mind a million miles away, standing on the horizon like a target. Stupid, Sam! You have to be smart! Awareness of where I was and what was going to happen made me feel suddenly sick. I needed to be on high alert, focus on what I had to do, prepare for what was coming.

  I had a job to do, and unless I did it well I would die. I pulled up the zipper on my sweatshirt, though it was
n’t cold, and trod back to my car, my hiking boots crunching on the coarse sand. The sound seemed loud in the silence. I leaned against the passenger-side door and crossed my arms. A quick glance down the access road confirmed that no cars approached. I looked at my sport watch, pressed the tiny button that illuminated its face, and saw that it was ten o’clock straight up. My palms began to sweat, and I thought I could hear my heart beating through my breast. My mouth felt dry, my throat closed up. I felt a sudden violent need for water. Then, just as suddenly, I felt the need to pee.

  I left the car again and began walking around, rubbing my arms, studying the bowl, the mouth of the gulch, the valley below. The air was still, the silence complete. All I could hear was the sound of my boots grinding on the sand and my heart pounding. I felt hyper-attuned, as if I could hear a pebble roll down the face of the gulch a mile off. I could almost feel the warmth from the lights in the valley and touch the face of the moon. I walked a few feet, then stopped, listening with my entire body as if I could pick up vibrations like a snake. I looked at my watch again, pressed the button to illuminate its face. Ten fifteen. What was taking so long? And why was I so eager to have it begin? Once it started I could die. But I wanted it to start so I could end it.

  Then I heard it. The sound of a shoe crunching on sand, sounding like a shotgun blast in the silence of this sinister place.

  I jerked toward the noise, faced the bowl with its cemetery of metal and glass. A figure stood on the rim, spectral in the silver light. I saw a glint of metal, a rifle, leveled at me, the moonlight shimmering off its shaft. A smell of rust filled my nose, and my mouth tasted like blood. My sinuses popped, all my airways cleared in a fraction of a second. I felt more alive at that moment than I ever had.

  Now that death stared me in the face.

  37

  “Hello, Faith,” I said. I stood still, pushed my shoulders back, faced her straight on.

  She advanced toward me, holding the gun chest high, its barrel level with my heart. An image of the gun case in the Thorntons’ living room came to me, the polished weapons all in a row, well used, lovingly cleaned and polished. Faith’s guns, given to her by her father, who taught her to shoot. I had thought of those guns when Bernard Cornwell was found shot to death in his car.

  “How lovely to see you,” I said, feeling that if I talked like I was not afraid, I could stop the terror. I was relieved to hear my voice sound strong and sarcastic. I might be delivering her my life, but I damn well wasn’t going to relinquish my soul to her.

  Faith advanced, and I saw that she still limped from the cut on her foot. It would be hard not to cut yourself out here at night. I guessed Pete had tried to run for it, and she had pursued him into the bowl of metal and glass. She probably enjoyed the chase, enjoyed seeing his fear, liked being the hunter pursuing prey—until she hurt herself. Then she probably got pissed and blew him away.

  The moonlight blanched her face. I saw its flat broad plain, her mouth like a straight black river cutting through it, her eyes protruding like monstrous boulders from its surface. I knew why she had lured me out here—she wanted to see my face before she killed me. I had known how far she would go to protect her family, but now that I was out here, now that it was happening, I felt stupidly shocked. She was really going to do this.

  While these thoughts flitted through my brain, Faith had advanced to within ten feet of me, gun still leveled at my heart. She growled in a voice filled with hate, “You are stupider than I thought.”

  I kept my eyes on the gun, tried to stay calm, rational. The sight of the weapon sickened me. It was going to be so easy for her, one pull of the trigger and I was dead. I felt small and weak, and a feeling of loss washed over me—I was going to lose everything.

  Get a grip! I had to swallow my fear and focus. I forced myself to look at Faith, concentrate on her face. Her protuberant eyes glowed in the moonlight with glinting fury. Her face was hard and taut. She held the rifle in a death grip, her strong fingers rigid and white, big shoulders hunched. She didn’t look nervous at all, she had killed before, twice, and had gotten used to it. Killing me was nothing.

  I said, my voice sounding dry as dust, “I knew it would be you showing up, Faith. Give me some credit.”

  “Liar!” She spat, and the gun lurched. She breathed heavily now, rapidly, I could hear her heaving plainly in the quiet gulch. “You thought it would be Matthew.”

  “No,” I said, my voice as level as I could make it, “I didn’t. I knew it was you the minute I got the text. You’re the one who’s always texting, not Matthew.”

  “Liar!” She snapped again, and again the gun lurched.

  It was completely irrational of me, childish and stupid, but I didn’t want her to think she was smarter than me, better than me. If I gave her that, I would become her victim, and I couldn’t abide that. So I said in a mocking tone, “Matthew probably doesn’t even know the rifle range exists. He doesn’t even like guns. You’re the shooter.”

  I saw her face go flaccid, and she lowered the gun slightly. What I said seemed to stump her. She had been so sure she’d tricked me, shown me once and for all who was calling the shots. For the first time, she seemed unsure. She saw me glance at the lowered gun and raised it again.

  “You’re the one who shot at me and disabled my car. Matthew wouldn’t know a distributor from a donkey. You’re the one who knows cars.”

  She growled, the animal sound raising the hair on my arms. “I tried to scare you off. But you were too stupid to realize what it meant. I told you and told you to leave us alone, but you wouldn’t.”

  In other words, I deserved my fate. How convenient for her. I stared at Faith, into the icy depths of her eyes, and felt my throat close up. Her hatred of me was boundless. I took a deep breath, blew it out carefully, took another. I clenched and unclenched my hands. Faith noticed, raised the gun a notch. I looked at the muzzle pointed at me, said, “How could I let you get away with it, Faith?”

  She made a sound between a snort and a growl. I took it as derision. She said, “You think I’m a bad person. Let me tell you, no decent Christian would have a problem with what I’ve done. I protected my family, my children. That is my moral duty. Pete was a sinner, preying on my husband, threatening to destroy our marriage. I had a duty to stop him.”

  I watched her, looked at the gun, tried to calm my fear with breathing and thinking. Keeping to the game plan I’d developed, I said, “And what about Cornwell? You made a mistake there. Up to then I wasn’t sure who had killed Pete. I thought it had to be Matthew or Cornwell, but when Cornwell showed up dead, shot with a rifle, that’s when I began to think it could be you. Matthew hates guns, he’s too timid and afraid to kill anyone. And he depended on Cornwell. Why did you kill him, Faith? Did he find out that you killed Pete?”

  “Ha!” she practically yelled at me, thrilled to have caught me in a mistake, to have fooled me. “Dr. Cornwell knew from the beginning that I killed Pete. He wanted me to do it.”

  This took me by surprise. I had not liked or respected Cornwell, but deep down I had struggled to believe he was bad enough to want someone dead. It just didn’t feel right.

  I had already guessed the answer to my next question, but I wanted her to confirm it. “Which one of you figured out first that Matthew was sleeping with Pete?”

  Faith clenched the gun as if it were threatening to pry itself from her grasp. Her eyes looked wild. She couldn’t bear to hear about her husband sleeping with another man. With a growl, she said, “Matthew told Dr. Cornwell in one of their sessions. And Dr. Cornwell came straight to me, said we needed to do something about it.”

  I pressed on, not yet getting everything I wanted from her. “So, explain something to me Faith. How did you and the good doctor go from a concern about Matthew having sex with Pete to the idea of killing Pete? Most people would have just run an intervention or something. You say Cornwell wanted you to do it, but I think that was your idea.”

  Her grip on the gun
relaxed and she even smiled, a wicked, self-satisfied smile. She liked that I recognized her as the smart one, the one brave enough to solve this problem. “Dr. Cornwell was a coward. He told me he tried to talk to Matthew, make him stop seeing Pete. But if he was any good as a therapist, Matthew would never have been with Pete in the first place. The man was a fake. I told him that Pete needed to disappear. He thought I meant that we would scare him off, and he’d leave town, leave Matthew alone. So he told me to go ahead and do it. Like I was waiting for his permission!” She laughed and the gun lurched.

  I wanted more from her, more words, more time, so we would never run out of words or out of time and have nothing left but the gun pointed at me, her finger squeezing the trigger. I coughed to get my voice working again. “So you went to talk to Pete. Only, as you suspected, he wasn’t going to be scared off. He loved Matthew, didn’t he, Faith?”

  Her eyes flashed as she thought back on that meeting, her rage at seeing that her husband’s lover—a man, of all wicked things—wanted Matthew enough to refuse to leave him. The gun barrel dropped, and if she were to shoot me now, she would take out my kneecap. But she snapped out of her trance all too soon. She jerked the gun back up and took a couple of quick steps toward me, her face quivering with rage. “He did not repent,” she growled. “He said he loved my husband, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. He said he would fight for him if he had to. What a joke. He was too stupid, he had no idea. He just stood there when I pointed the gun at him, looking shocked. Then he ran, like he could outrun a bullet. Did he really think I would sit back and watch him steal my husband?”

  I was almost done, the script I’d prepared nearly played out. “You lured Pete out here with a text ‘from Matthew,’ didn’t you Faith? And then you killed him.” If the ploy worked once with Pete, why not try it again on me?