Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  He tried to smile. “Hi, Marcie. What’s up?”

  She gave the smallest shrug of her shoulders, eyes not moving from his. “I wanted to say thank you.”

  “For what? You won the races.”

  Slowly, Marcie shook her head. “You made me win.” Her voice was soft. “Please, can I close the door?”

  Sam felt a constriction in his throat. How many times, he wondered, had he told his teachers never to meet with students behind closed doors—with how paranoid parents were these days, the dangers of sexual harassment charges, the risks of privacy were too great. “All right,” he heard himself say. “If you think you need to.”

  Head bowed, she closed the door behind her. When she faced him, Marcie hesitated for a minute.

  “I’m in love with you,” she said.

  Blood pounding in his head, Sam ventured another smile. “Just like Jennifer, my daughter. Until she saw through me.”

  Her eyes did not accept this; where had she learned so much, Sam wondered, and how had he given himself away? Calmly, she answered, “Like a woman, Mr. Robb.”

  He should have smiled at that last. But all he said was, “Oh. Like that.”

  She was by his chair now. He could see the crucifix around her neck, the delicacy of her collarbone. “I’ve never slept with a man,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Neither am I. And when you are, Marcie, it’ll be someone more age-appropriate, like they say at teachers meetings.”

  “No,” she said. “I want it to be you. Just not now.”

  The blinds beside him were open, he realized. From the inner yard, some janitor might see them. “Then what is it you want?” he asked.

  She had followed his eyes. When she lowered the blinds, he did not stop her.

  Kneeling, she unbuckled his belt.

  “Marcie, for God’s sake…”

  She looked up at him. “I know how,” she said. “Not from experience. But people talk, you know.…” Then she paused, and the crown of her head bent forward.

  Sam stopped thinking.

  He raised himself slightly. When he looked down, he saw what he had already felt. Her black hair grazed his thighs.

  For a time, he did not move, or make a sound.

  * * *

  To Tony, it sounded wrong: the seductive student, the aging man.

  “Have you just finished Lolita?” he asked. “It’s classic male fantasy.”

  Sam shrugged, staring straight ahead. “I guess that’s why it happened.”

  Pausing, Tony reviewed his incredulity. “This sixteen-year-old just came to you like that? No come-on from you, no double entendres, nothing to tell you that she was a little off? Just out of the blue?”

  “You wanted the truth, dammit.” Sam turned on him. “This wouldn’t only get me run out of Lake City, or even just cost me my license to teach anywhere. If a teacher told me that story tomorrow, I’d be obliged by law to take this to the county prosecutor. I don’t know about San Francisco, but in this state, statutory rape and oral copulation with a minor are good for time in prison.” His voice was soft with bitterness. “As an assistant principal, I’m a perfect object lesson for some judge. I’m already on administrative leave because I might have had sex with her. So my ‘classic male fantasy’ is way too dumb to be a lie, Tony. Even before the part where Sue walks out and my kids can’t stand to look at me.”

  Tony sat back, gazing at the football field where, twenty-eight years before, with Sue and Alison watching, he and Sam had achieved together the moment they had always imagined. “All right,” he said softly. “Tell me about the night she died.”

  THREE

  They met at twilight, around eight-thirty, in the parking lot of a defunct gas station. It was the second time they had done this; as before, Marcie left her car and slipped into the passenger seat next to Sam. On the first night, six weeks before, the risk had lent a sense of danger to a novelty that, Sam confessed to Tony, aroused him—a willing girl for whom everything they did was new. They had gone to Taylor Park; hidden by bushes, Marcie had undressed. As Sam had slipped on the condom, she lay back on the sleeping bag, legs open for him, waiting. He was careful not to hurt her; when he entered, Sam could feel the light skipping of her heart, her soft breath against his face. Then she had whispered, “I love you,” and her voice had been so wispy, so young, that his own climax had filled him with shame.

  As Sam told it, the night she had vanished was to be the end. The lawyer in Tony could not assume that Sam’s story was true. But Sam had the storyteller’s gift: from the beginning, Tony could imagine the silence in the car—a man hoping to pull back from self-destruction, a girl lost in fantasy, oblivious to the gulf between them.

  Tony sat back and allowed himself to envision the night as Sam described it and even, at some moments, to believe him.

  * * *

  The evening was cool, clear. It was a school night, and the lot at Taylor Park was empty. When the car stopped, Marcie moved close. Softly, she asked, “What do you want tonight?”

  Sam glanced at his watch, already anxious. He had forgotten some papers, he had told Sue, and so would work at school. That gave him roughly an hour to leave Marcie still adoring, still committed to secrecy.

  “No one knows you’re here?” he asked.

  A quick bob of the head, a kiss on his cheek. “Right now, people wouldn’t understand.”

  The sad thought struck Sam that this girl, who had given him her innocence, did not know what name to call him. Then her meaning hit him hard: in some illusory future, Marcie Calder imagined that Lake City would understand.

  “Let’s just talk for a while,” he said.

  With a trust that touched him, Marcie slid into his lap, nuzzling her head against his face. She felt more slight than ever; Sam had the jarring memory of Jennifer, wearing a cotton nightgown on Christmas Eve, nestled in his arms as Sue read aloud from “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

  “I think we should get married,” Marcie murmured.

  Holding her in the dark, Sam was speechless with surprise. How could he have missed that this girl was so young, even for sixteen; that her feelings were so like an adolescent’s fixation on a movie star—or, as bad, a father substitute.

  At last, Sam answered, “I don’t think we ever could.”

  She leaned back, gazing into his face. “Why not?”

  Where to start? he wondered. “There’s my wife,” he said simply.

  As he watched her absorb this, Sam’s sense of the grotesque overwhelmed him—he was discussing Sue, his wife of twenty-four years, with a teenage girl who imagined replacing her. “There are a lot of things,” he went on. “Your parents, my job, the way people would look at me. The way they should look at me—a middle-aged guy who betrayed his student’s family, her school, her natural affection for him—”

  “No.” Sam heard sudden tears in her voice. “My feelings for you are so much more.…”

  “Then I’m lucky.” Desperate, Sam called on his gifts of flattery. “I’m lucky even to have been a part of your life—”

  He stopped abruptly. Headlights had appeared in his rearview mirror; turning, Sam prayed that it was not a cop. Then he saw the car park some distance away, extinguishing its lights. When he held Marcie close again, heart racing, her body felt wiry, resistant.

  “I want you to be my life.” Her voice became strong, eerily certain. “Once we get married, people will accept it. I can finish high school and go to college, just like my parents want—”

  “Marcie,” Sam cut in, voice rising. “I’ve met your parents. Can you imagine your father with a son-in-law older than he is—your track coach?” He caught himself, fearful of angering her. “It’s possible for us to love each other, Marcie. But I’m too far along to ever become your life. You’d have ten years with a guy way too old for you, and then throw away the next twenty taking care of an old man.”

  She was very still now. In a different voice, cooler
and older, she said, “You can’t leave your wife, then.”

  The undertone in her words worried him, but he seized on their bracing realism. “No,” he answered. “I never could.”

  Tense, he hung on Marcie’s silence. “All right, Sam.” The name, used for the first time, held a note of youthful contempt. “I won’t tell anyone. Is that what you want?”

  Sam’s next breath was almost a sigh. “Yes. It would be the best thing for you, Marcie. And it would help me too.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said coldly. Then her face appeared in a sliver of light; her skin was pale, her tears like streaks on marble. Abruptly, she pulled away, jerking open the car door. “I’ll start helping you right now—”

  Sam grabbed her sleeve. “Wait—”

  Marcie jerked it away. “For what?” she asked with vehemence. “For you to give me more precious memories…?”

  Her voice caught, suddenly she was out the door, running away.

  Sam opened his door without thinking. As the cool air hit his face, he squinted to spot her, a swiftly moving shadow, outlined by the moon above the lake. He started after her; as he stopped, remembering the other car, Marcie vanished in the darkness.

  He froze, irresolute. And then he felt his real life pull him from this precipice—he had to leave, put himself somewhere where he could be, once again, the Sam Robb whom people expected. Marcie’s car was parked less than a quarter mile away: when her emotions had subsided, she could find her way back, become a sixteen-year-old girl with a curfew. By tomorrow, at school, Sam could begin the edgy work of pretending she had never been anything else.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he got back into the car.

  The seat next to his seemed too empty. Leaning over, he shut the passenger door, turned on the radio for reassurance. He was still shaken; driving from the park, the last thing he saw in his headlights was a shadow of the parked car, a single head, barely visible above the dashboard, which seemed to watch him leave.

  He could not go home. Instinctively, he drove to school, where he had told Sue he would be working—the easiest lies to tell, Sam knew, contained an element of truth. He needed time to think.

  Beneath the bleak fluorescent light, Sam slumped in his chair.

  His thoughts were jumbled, fretful. All that he could do was try to reenter his life, step by step.

  The first step, he decided, was to call Sue.

  He dialed, bracing for the sound of her voice. When, instead, he heard his own voice on the answering machine, he had the sudden fear, as piercing as superstition, that Sue had somehow followed him—that it was her head in the shadowy car, that she, even now, was confronting Marcie Calder in Taylor Park.

  On the telephone, his last taped words were followed by a beep.

  “Hi, honey.” He tried to make his voice sound normal, perhaps a little tired. “This stuff took longer than I thought—staff evaluations. Another few minutes, and I’ll be home.…”

  Putting down the telephone, he felt a moment’s peace—this would be his last lie. And then, riding the roller coaster of anxiety, he wondered again why Sue had not answered.

  The drive home, perhaps two minutes, was shadowed by his imaginings of Marcie. Perhaps she was still in the park. Sam wondered if he should go back. Then, more vividly, he envisioned Marcie with her parents, telling them—in a sudden, hormonal outburst—everything Sam Robb had done with her. He found himself opening his own front door, a coward.

  Downstairs was dark and quiet. In this mood, the silence made him nervous.

  Slowly, he walked upstairs.

  Voices came from the bedroom. Softly, he walked down the hallway, pausing with his head to the bedroom door. And then, heart pounding, he entered it.

  Sue was in bed, filing her nails, half listening to the eleven o’clock news.

  “I tried to call you,” he said.

  She looked up at him, incurious. “I must have been in the shower,” she said, and then frowned. “Broke another nail—my hands look like a washerwoman’s.”

  Sam stood there a moment. “You’ve got beautiful hands, babe. Long fingers.”

  Sue smiled a little. “Well,” she said, “they’re not as beautiful as Jenny’s.”

  Somehow this made Sam want to kiss her. But he stopped himself; he did not know what behavior might seem odd, or repentant. He changed into his boxer shorts and crawled into bed.

  “I’m tired,” he said, content to tell the truth.

  Sue reached for the remote. “Go to sleep, then,” she answered, and turned off the TV.

  Another step taken, Sam thought. Reflecting on Marcie, dreading their first meeting tomorrow, he lay awake in the darkness of their bedroom, very still, so as not to draw attention to his restlessness.

  * * *

  The next morning, three cups of coffee feeling like acid in an empty stomach, Sam Robb, the assistant principal of Lake City High School, sat waiting in his office for the homeroom attendance sheets.

  Jane Moore, his old classmate’s wife, was the front-office secretary. He poked his head out the door.

  “Have the attendance sheets come in yet?”

  She turned to look at him, brow furrowed. “No,” she said. “But we just had a call from Nancy Calder, Marcie’s mother.…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I hope. But they don’t know where she is.”

  Sam cocked his head; at this worst moment of his life, with the ground slipping out from under him, he was proud of how professional he sounded—concerned, not panicked, just the right note of worry. “When was the last time Nancy saw her?”

  “At about eight o’clock last night. Marcie said she was going to a friend’s, but she never came back. Nancy’s called the police.”

  Watching her, Sam felt the weight of his own silence. “Keep me posted, all right?”

  * * *

  At nine-thirty, no one had seen Marcie.

  Leaving the office, Sam sat in the parking lot, alone. In the worn felt of the passenger seat he imagined seeing the smallest indentation, the imprint of her body.

  Moments of calculation passed. With every minute, Sam saw his cowardice more clearly. Desperate to reclaim himself, reckless of consequence, he drove to the police station.

  Two detectives, Jack Seed and Carl Talley, stood holding cups of coffee. Somehow this was a relief: both had sons in high school, knew Sam as someone who liked their boys. Jack Seed raised his eyebrows. “Hi, Sam. What can we do for you?”

  “I’m here about Marcie Calder. I saw her last night, after her parents did. From around eight-thirty to maybe ten.”

  “Ten?” Jack Seed sounded relieved. “Where?”

  “Taylor Park.”

  For the first time, Sam noticed how keen Seed’s eyes were. “Taylor Park,” the detective repeated. “Think you can go there with us?”

  * * *

  The squad car stopped in the parking lot, Sam in the back seat. Sometime in the night, it had rained; the park looked slick, and a chill mist hung over the lake.

  Sam leaned over the front seat, pointing. “There,” he said. “That’s where I last saw her, running.”

  Jack Seed turned to him, his thin face reflecting only mild curiosity. “At night? Know why she was running here?”

  “We’d been talking. She was … upset.”

  Seed pursed his lips. “Oh,” he said, and turned to Talley. “We’d better take a look.”

  It was a moment before Talley stopped watching Sam’s face. They got out of the car; when Sam followed, neither protested.

  Crossing the grass, Seed looked around him. “Shitty day,” he said.

  “Shitty night,” Talley answered. It was as if Sam were no longer there.

  A few feet from the cliff, Seed stopped, staring down at the ground. Turning, he murmured, “Can you stay back, Sam.” Stopping, Sam saw the two detectives change direction slightly, as if not wishing to step in something.

  The two walked to the edge of the cliff, peerin
g downward.

  It was Talley, Sam saw, who slumped a little; Seed became quite still. “Damn,” Seed said softly.

  Sam walked over. When he stood between them, gazing down at Marcie, no one spoke.

  She lay near the foot of the cliff, face turned up, still wearing the track team sweatshirt she had worn the night before. It hid her secret, she had said flirtatiously, sliding into Sam’s car—no bra. From here, she looked tiny, a rag doll.

  Sam sat at the edge of the cliff, numb. Above him, he heard Seed murmur, “Better call the EMTs.”

  Only then did it strike Sam that his life, as he had known it until now, was over.

  * * *

  For a long time, Tony did not speak; the narrative, he realized, had taken him deep into the past, to Alison. He could imagine Sam as himself—innocent, horrified, trapped by circumstances. And yet Tony was more touched by Marcie’s tragedy: he could remember too well the operatic emotions of a teenager, felt without warning. Even taken as true, much of Sam’s story—the self-indulgence, the betrayal of trust—was selfish and despicable.

  Tony stood, feeling the stiffness of sitting too long on hard wooden bleachers. Next to him, Sam remained sitting, his gaze abstracted. “I was responsible for her,” he murmured. “I knew it, and now there was nothing I could do.”

  It was clear to Tony that Sam could not look at him. “What did you tell the police?”

  Sam seemed to gather himself. Softly, he said, “I told them bullshit.”

  “My question was what kind of bullshit.”

  It came out harsher than Tony had intended. Sam sat straighter. “About what you’d expect. That she’d had a crush on me and that I’d rejected her. That it was stupid to be alone with her, especially there, but she’d been so damned irrational that I thought she must be in terrible trouble—drugs or something. All I could think of, I told them, was to help her. But all I could really think of was to somehow save myself.”