JACK SAT ON Mrs. Pierce’s porch glider, swaying gently. “So let me get this straight: Y‘all want me to let you get a head start with Joe cop, and I’m a s’posed to follow a fair distance back. You think Tom would like that?”
I was antsy, nervous. I would have been jumping from foot to foot if I’d had two feet to stand on. “Yes,” I answered. “I want your protection. Get it?”
“This is your almost fiancé, and you need protection from him?”
It stunned me to realize that that was entirely the case. On some level, I was now afraid of Ray, and it wasn’t just because of Enos. I said, “Come on, he’s going to be here any moment! I think you’d better make yourself scarce.”
Jack grinned, a toothy “bubba with a bad attitude” grin. “Disappear? Naw. I was thinking of doin’ the big brother act, kinda scare him a little.”
“Look, I can’t explain this, expect to say that even though I almost … married this guy, and, um, we had a fight and all, the thing is, I think I owe it to him to … you know …” I couldn’t say, I owe it to him to warn him that I think his brother-in-law is a murderer, because warning people of such things isn’t quite smart. So why was I in such a heat to tell him?
Jack said, “Maybe you aren’t all that done with him yet.”
Just then, Ray drove up. He was in his own vehicle, his Ford Explorer, but he was dressed for work, ready to go on shift. I swung my crutches out and hobbled down the porch.
Jack followed. Opened the car door for me. Helped me up. As I buckled myself in, he draped one meaty arm along the roof of the car and leaned in to give Ray an ominous grin. “Hi, bub. Jack Sampler’s the name. I’m with the FBI, and I’m assigned to baby-sit this peach. Just so’s you know, I’ll be following. And I don’t like jokers.”
Ray’s eyes were dark as midnight. In classic Ray form, he gunned the engine rather than express himself in words.
Jack made kissy lips at him, then backed away and shut the door.
Ray pulled away from the curb rather more quickly than was usual or necessary, then drove up to the top of the university campus, where we could get a view. There, he turned the Explorer around to face the Salt Lake valley, parked, and cut the engine.
I looked over my shoulder. Jack had taken up a position about a hundred feet away.
Ray closed his eyes and bowed his head. His lips moved briefly. Praying. Then he spoke aloud. “Em. I apologize for last night.”
“I forgive you,” I said. The words came out surprisingly easily, yet they didn’t seem right. I felt immediately that I had betrayed myself.
“So we’ll go on from here,” he said.
The moment took on the surreal quality of deep, wordless dreaming. The kind with dark holes and falling. Ray and I had broken up. I had stayed awake all night to prove it. So what were we doing here?
“I’ve asked you to marry me,” he continued. “And I want my answer now.”
My eyebrows rose so high, I could have worn them as barrettes. “You still want me to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“Mormon-style.”
He shook his open hands toward me in frustration, as if I were being purposefully stupid. “Yes.”
My pulse quickened. Part of my mind careened sideways as I tried to sort out the source of my fear. “Ray, I have no interest in joining your church. I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head again.
“Is that what this is about?” I asked, my mind stumbling for connections. “You want to know if you’re a free man, so you can go after Jenna?”
Ray opened his eyes and shot me a “Huh?” look. He seemed genuinely surprised.
That rocked me. Had I misunderstood the whole situation? I fought internally to reassert what I had seen with my own eyes, but my bubble of detachment had been hit by a hurricane, and suddenly my reality was only a shrinking subset of a partial truth that was rapidly falling apart. My words coming out so stridently that they sounded defensive even to me, I said, “Come on, Ray. I told you that Katie switched your channels on those radios so I’d hear. And I saw you flirting with Jenna up at your mom’s. You were doing dishes with her, for crap’s sake!”
Ray stared at his hands. Took a breath. Let it out. “Em, I’ll admit that I’ve noticed Jenna. She’s very sweet. But I want—”
“You want some kind of an Em with a Mormon retrofit. Sorry. No can do. No adapter plug. No, it goes even further than that. Your religion is incidental. I don’t belong in your family, because the part they have in the drama for me is cast for a blonde who does dishes. Ray, you and I are friends, but I can see now that that’s as far as it’s ever going to go with us. You’re an inextricable part of your family, and I … I’m not interested.” Once I got started, the words had just tumbled out. They fell away from my lips. They were gone.
Ray’s eyes had gone wide and vacant.
I felt like I’d just killed a fly with a baseball bat, which is as much as to say, Ray looked so tender and crushed that I couldn’t understand why I was so angry at him.
Struggling for control, I forced the conversation back onto the rails I had intended. I said, “But I do need to talk to you about your family. I feel I owe it to you.”
He didn’t reply. I wasn’t even sure he was still listening.
I started to open my mouth, but he stopped me.
“No,” he said. “You do belong. Everybody belongs. God’s love is great enough. You just—”
“No, Ray. God isn’t running your family. Your sister made that clear to me.”
Ray clamped his hand around my wrist. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “Em, you’re always picking on Katie! She loves you. She’s willing to have you as a sister!”
He had never before touched me in anything but kindness or affection. A coldness shot from my wrist to my heart. I said, “Oh come on, Ray, she hates me!”
Ray let go of my wrist and set his face in a remote and shallow smile, as if he was remembering some petty, nearly forgotten affront he had proudly ignored. He said, “Oh, now, Em, Katie doesn’t hate you! Where did you get an idea like that? Really, I think you’ve spent too much time alone.” His voice was oddly cheerful. It didn’t even sound like him. It was as if someone else were speaking.
“Ray, she’s taken a dim view of me from the start. And she—” I stopped. What was the point of debating this with him? He had denied my gut sense. Denied it out of hand, without a moment’s consideration. It was as if the Ray I loved and admired had become a polyp extending from something large and unthinking. I felt sick, as if he’d hit me in the stomach. I wanted to get out of the car and run as fast as I could, wave my hands, get Jack to catch me on the fly as he accelerated from the parking lot. But I did none of this.
And that scared me most of all.
I closed my eyes, blotting out his smile. I didn’t want to see him anymore. Didn’t want to want him any way. Because I knew now that he didn’t know me. Couldn’t acknowledge my knowing, or my intelligence. At the same time, I felt like groveling at his feet and begging him to understand me, to accept me.
I felt Ray’s hand on my wrist again. It slid up my hand and closed around it. With his other hand, he uncurled my clenched fingers, and slipped a ring on my third finger. He leaned close and kissed me on my ear. His breath was warm, and I could smell the scents I had come to associate with love at its most painful. I said, “I can’t.”
“My family would miss you. I would miss you.”
I opened my eyes and looked into the indigo blue depths of his own. I began to tremble. He had installed a ring, the symbol of eternity, completeness, love, inclusion; and with it, a burden of guilt and rigidity under which I could not stand. I wanted to wear that ring, and at the same time, I wanted to rip it off, even if it took my finger with it. The shock of that loathing brought me to my senses. Fighting mentally to free myself, I said, “Ray. I have to tell you something. But I think you already know it.”
“Know what?”
Ray’s pallor turned red, then white. In a tight, frightened voice, he asked, “How did you find out?”
My heart constricted. I suspected Enos Harkness of murder. I had thought that Ray suspected him, too, but I had not wanted to believe that he knew. The ring felt hot and tight, as if it were shrinking down, threatening to cut my finger. I began to cry. “Pet told me she knew him. Figuring out the connection with Sidney Smeeth was tougher. Her house is just downhill from your mother’s—and, well, there are so many ways to slip in and out of that place unseen. But still I couldn’t see the involvement. I mean, it didn’t make sense. But I put two and two together. You said he hasn’t been coming home. The cost overruns on their new house. Katie’s … Pet called him the afternoon before she died, Ray. I was sitting right there. His phone number—or Hayes Associates—would be on her cell phone. They hold the last ten or more numbers dialed. Did the police find it at the scene?” I wanted to ask, Does Enos have the phone, and her notes? Will he come for me next? But I despaired that Ray would answer me even if he knew.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” he said. Ray had closed his eyes. He let go of my hand and grasped the steering wheel, rested his forehead on it, too. This was the real Ray, the familiar Ray, even if it was a Ray who was harboring a deadly secret. “No, Em. No cell phone.”
As I saw the depth of his pain, my loathing slipped away as I remembered the love I had felt for him. I felt mean and guilty. Apologetically, I said, “Then I heard that you two were at the funeral together, and I … began to wonder.”
“Enos and I weren’t there together,” he said, his voice constricted. “I was tracking him. I suspected.” Then he said, “Are you sure, Em? Did you see something?”
“No,” I said, honest to a fault. “My evidence is circumstantial. That’s why I brought it to you. I thought—”
“You did the right thing, darling.” He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it.
“So you’ll take care of it?” I asked, almost begging.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I was going to do it this afternoon, on my way to work.”
With relief, I thought, You were looking for proof before you’d turn in your brother-in-law. And with sadness, I realized, Before your tear your family to pieces. “I underestimated you,” I said. “I’m sorry. Oh, Ray, I’m so sorry.”
He lifted his head and looked out through the windshield at the falling snow. His face was wet with tears.
28
When the Loma Prieta quake struck, I was in the BART tunnel, underneath San Francisco Bay. The train stopped. The lights went out. I was alone in the dark with strangers. No one knew what to do. Nobody came.
Time passed. We decided to walk out. We didn’t even know whether we were closer to Oakland or San Francisco. The only illumination was from emergency lights spaced so far apart that I had to walk into deep shadow from one before I reached the light of the next.
I can never ride the BART again. I feel that Mother Earth personally betrayed me.
—Anonymous, a very shy woman who suffers extreme claustrophobia, who, three days after the earthquake, found the courage to unburden her soul to a roomful of strangers
“GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!” I SOBBED.
“Hold still, damn it!” Faye commanded. “A little soap will do it, but you have to quit thrashing!”
We were standing over the sink in the bathroom of her master bedroom suite, she holding my finger, the one with Ray’s constrictive ring on it, under running water, and I—well, I was flailing. Out of control. Losing it.
I fought to hold my hand still while she soaped it. It took everything I had.
Gradually, Faye worked her fancy facial soap under the ring, into the swelling that was causing the pain. She turned the ring, working the stone back to a position where it wasn’t going to gouge my flesh as she worked the offending circlet of metal off my hand. “How’d he get it on there in the first place?” she asked, grunting slightly with the effort. “I mean, this must have been a humdinger of a struggle to get on.”
“It was cold out, and I hadn’t worn my mittens,” I explained. “So my fingers had kind of shrunk. It went on easily enough, but then I—well, I had my hands balled up into fists trying to … ah, deal with Ray, and then when I finally got out and, you know, made my excuses—shit, Faye, the guy had just asked me to marry him again! I couldn’t just run away. I got into Jack’s car and tried to get it off, but it wouldn’t come. I started yanking at it, and … the damned knuckle swelled up.”
“Well, what else do you need to know? I’ve never seen such a perfect metaphor for ambivalence when it comes to marriage.”
I started to cry again. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to marry that guy!”
“That much is clear. But some little bitty part of you seems to be a-hangin’ on, darlin’.” She regarded the ring. “Hmm. I could cut it.”
“Oh, that would go over nicely. I can just hear myself. ‘Here, Ray; here’s your ring back. Sorry about the nicks I put in the diamond while I was breaking your symbolic circle with my trusty hacksaw.’”
Faye pursed her lips in appraisal. “I was thinking of tin snips. Hacksaw might take your hand with it. Hey! That’s perfect! You can give him your hand in marriage, and keep the rest of you for you!”
I started to growl.
Faye looked me in the eye. “Now you’re talking. That’s wolf for ‘Back off.’ It gets the message across nicely and gets that ‘scared woolly lamb’ look out of your eyes. Let me get some ice.” She disappeared down the hall to the kitchen.
That left me staring at myself in the mirror, checking out the new, predatory Em Hansen. The effect seemed more lunatic than canid to me, but then, wolves have always been fond of howling at the moon.
The image of wolves in the high mountains in winter formed in my mind. Snow. Cold. Hunger. Resolve crumbled as I felt the frightened lamb underneath, saw her fear looking out through my eyes in the mirror.
I looked at the ring. Was Ray the hunter and I the hunted? How had he found me in the frozen landscape of my life?
As I asked the question, I saw its answer. He had followed the trail of my longing. My longing for stability, for family. For that elusive sense of fitting in and being part of what seemed normal. He had followed me as easily as a predator follows the blood of a wounded animal through the snow.
But was fitting in truly normal, or simply what most people do? Was I most people? Or was I born to a separate path, a life beyond the obvious?
Yes. My challenge lay off that map, on a territory dimly lighted, and it was my job to break the darkness as best I could. Perhaps that would stop my bleeding.
Certainly it was time to quit whimpering and take the leap out of known territory.
In the mirror, I saw a new Em, a traveler in a land where anything was possible, even bliss.
Jack poked his nose around the corner. “Having trouble?” he inquired.
I smiled. “Got a ring stuck. They teach that in paramedic school?”
“Sit down on the floor. No, better yet, lie down. Now hold your arm up. Fingers straight.” He stepped around me, sat down on the toilet lid, and grasped my wrist, holding my arm at full stretch. “Relax,” he said. “Jack-o gonna make you a free woman again.”
“You were listening,” I said.
“It’s my job,” he replied, his attention politely centered on my swollen digit. “Occupational hazard when it hurts peoples’ feelings. Hmm, baby, you really done it to this one. I was wunnering what you was up to in the car. Looked like you was tryin’ to open a bottle of champagne, only you didn’t have no bottle.” He leaned forward and rubbed my hand up against his cheek.
I laughed hesitantly, choking on all the goo that was still sliding down the back of my throat from
crying. With my right hand, I took a swipe at my nose.
“Use your sleeve,” Jack said. “It’s much more absorbent.”
I began to see why Tom Latimer felt he could trust this guy with his life. He was like a sentinel at the gate, with a no-guff, nonchalant attitude.
Faye came back with a package of blue ice and began to pack it around my hand, which Jack had moved away from his face the moment he heard her coming.
A few minutes later, Jack had the ring off my finger, and I stood up and rinsed my hands. Faye cleaned the soap off the ring and took it out into her bedroom, where she found a velvet box to put it in so I could return it in style. She produced a jeweler’s loupe from a drawer in her bureau. This, she put to the rejected bit of jewelry, taking its measure. “Good-enough quality,” she declared. “Modern cut, no family heirloom here, but at least Ray’s no cheapskate. Wait—hold the phone.” She had turned the band, read the inside. “Oh, great. This has another woman’s name in it. ‘Lisa, love for eternity, Ray.’ So he’s into wash-and-wear engagement rings, is that it?”
I covered my face in embarrassment.
“You got any beers in your fridge?” Jack asked Faye, beating a well-timed retreat.
“You know the way,” she replied.
When he was out of earshot, I told Faye, “Lisa was his first wife. She died.” The words seeming to stick to my tongue like lumps of dry plaster. “They’re practical, these Mormons.”
“I wonder what Lisa was like,” Faye mused.
“Pretty,” I said. “I’ve seen pictures at Ava’s house. Average height, brown hair, a little heavy through the thighs.”
“Like you.”
I turned away. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like how you’re going to give this back to him?”
“Parcel post,” I suggested, the image of the wolf reassembling in my mind. “Seems I can’t communicate with this guy worth beans, so why make another scene? He’ll just tell me I’m nuts and push it back on me.”
Fault Line (Em Hansen Mysteries) Page 26
