‘What did you do, John?’
‘I waited for a while. I tried to put the thing into some frame of reference. I tried to understand the decision my father had made. And then I went upstairs and called the local doctor. He came with a policeman and the coroner, and they took them away.’
I was quiet for a moment. I could see myself standing there in the hallway, waiting for a little while before I went down to the basement again. It was cramped. Me and the doctor, the policeman and the coroner.
‘They had to lift my father out of the coffin to get him upstairs. I remember how my mother’s hand rose as they tried to maneuver him out of the coffin. He was holding her hand, you see? Holding it tight, and rigor mortis had set in . . . and when they realized they’d have to pry his grip loose, they asked me to go back upstairs.’
I saw Catherine’s expression change as I spoke.
‘They thought that the sight of a policeman and a doctor wrestling my mother’s hand out of my father’s might upset me, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay and see them. I knew this would be the last time and I didn’t want to turn my back. They prised her hand away, and I stood quiet while they tipped his body up and lifted it from the coffin. The stairwell was narrow. My dad’s jacket caught on a nail and it looked like they might drop him . . .’
Catherine leaned forward, an almost intangible gesture that was a desire to reach out, to extend herself towards me.
‘They kept it together. They got him upstairs, put him on a stretcher in the upper hallway, and then carried him out to the car. And then they came back for my mom. And she didn’t weigh so much, and she wasn’t so tall, and they took her upstairs without any difficulty really. I waited down there until I heard the coroner drive away. The doctor came down and said I should go upstairs, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay down there amongst the wood shavings and pots of varnish, the coffee cans of nails and screws - all the smells and sounds of the basement, the last place I had seen my father alive, the last place I would remember him.’
I paused to breathe. I felt the emotion, the tension, of remembering.
‘The doctor tried to be sympathetic, but he couldn’t hope to understand what I was feeling. I think he decided not to try. He wished me the best, told me to call if there was anything I needed. There was that thing in his voice, you know, when someone says to call if you need them but they really hope you won’t? What could he say? He was just a doctor. He fixed broken bones and delivered babies and signed death certificates. So he told me to call, and he hoped I wouldn’t, and I shook his hand and told him I’d be fine, not to worry, everything would be okay.’
‘But it wasn’t,’ Catherine said.
‘I don’t know . . . it was, it wasn’t. I try not to think about it.’
‘And then?’
‘The funeral. They buried them together in the coffin I helped
him build. I put the house up for sale. Someone bought it. I paid off the mortgage and all the creditors; I paid for the funeral and settled up the overdue bills and bank loans, everything my father had managed to keep at arm’s length. And when it was all done I put seven and a half thousand dollars in a bank account in Salem Hill and I went back to college.’
‘When was that?’ Catherine asked.
‘March of 1980.’
‘And then you met Lawrence Matthews in August?’
‘September.’
Catherine was silent.
‘So that’s what you wanted to know, right? You wanted to know
about my parents.’
‘Are you sorry you told me?’
‘Sorry? Why would I be sorry?’
‘I don’t know . . . you seemed so reluctant to speak about them.
It was—’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said, and I realized that something
had gone. A dark weight - small, but dark - was gone. For that I was grateful.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ’I’m okay . . . how about we go get something to
eat?’
‘Sure, John, I’d like that.’
I rose from my chair and looked around for my jacket, my overcoat, my scarf.
As we left her apartment she took my hand. I did not feel it for a moment, and then I did. It was a good feeling . . . a feeling I had not experienced before.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said when we reached the street.
‘Thank you for listening.’
Later I stood silently in the hallway of my apartment. It was not complicated. She pre-empted any reservation I might have had. She reached out her hand toward me. I was impelled, drawn, magnetized almost. She seemed to fold in toward me as if she was without muscle or bone or strength. I pulled her tight, my arms around her shoulders, her head against the side of my neck, and I could hear her breathing, could smell the faint citrus of her perfume, and beneath that the smell of her skin.
We stayed there for perhaps a minute, and then she walked through to the front and sat down. She held my gaze unerringly, and it was the most transfixing and enchanting thing she could have done.
I wanted her to come back; I wanted to hold her again.
‘I don’t want you to thin—’ she started.
I raised my hand and she fell silent.
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘it is better to have someone than no-one.’
‘You are a good man, John Robey,’ she said, and though her
voice was barely more than a whisper I heard every word. Her eyes were brimming with tears. She fingertipped them away.
‘I have to go now,’ she said, and started to get up.
‘I want you to stay . . .’
‘I know, but I can’t . . . I shouldn’t.’
‘Shouldn’t?’
‘You understand exactly what might happen if I stay . . . and I
don’t want to—’
‘You don’t want to what?’
‘If we ... if we get involved then there would be another reason
to go out there together, and I couldn’t do that to you.’
‘Isn’t that a decision I should make?’
‘Whatever you think . . . our lives will be complicated, John. Secrecy doesn’t buy happiness, it buys fear and jealousy and possessiveness. I’ve arrived at the point where if I care for someone, or think I might care for them, I am compassionate enough not to involve them in my life.’
‘Seems to me I’m already involved,’ I said.
‘You are knee-deep in the water, John, walk any further and you
might drown.’ She started down the hall to the front door.
I followed her.
Catherine opened the door, paused for a second, and when she turned I was right there in front of her.
She raised her hand and touched the side of my face.
I leaned forward to kiss her.
She withdrew, silently, gracefully, and when it was clear to her that I would not push the issue further she touched her fingertip to my lips.
‘No,’ she whispered. ’I can’t.’
I shuddered. A moment of anticipation. I felt the skin tighten across the back of my neck.
‘You ever lonely, John?’ she asked. ’Really lonely, like there’s no-
one
else in the world but you?’
‘Of course I am . . . aren’t we all?’
‘And how d’you deal with it?’
I watched her profile, the way her hair was tucked behind her ear, the way her ear so smoothly dissolved into the line of her neck, how that line traveled on toward the curve of her shoulder. Michelangelo would have been proud of that line.
‘Sometimes I cannot believe what has happened,’ she said, ’and
sometimes I get to feeling that perhaps I wished it all upon myself. And sometimes I know that can’t be the truth, but I can’t help it. Like some of us are put here just for other people and we are never meant to live our own individual lives.’ She looked away toward
the window. ‘My father . . .’ she started, but her voice trailed into
silence.
She closed her eyes, and without speaking another word she took a single step towards me.
I breathed in slowly, breathed out. I felt it coming like a thunderstorm, felt the tension racking up inside me, and even as I stepped forward, even as I felt the warmth of her body against me, I knew that this was perhaps the greatest and most profound mistake of my life.
I felt her fingers against mine. I closed my hand around her wrist. I felt the tension inside her, could feel the pulse in her wrist. I could feel her defenses rising . . .
I could feel her sadness and loss and heartache and loneliness all tightly bound together. I wanted to untie it all, spread it out and see what was there and decide which to keep and which to cast aside.
She pressed her hand against my chest as if resisting this, as if warning herself that this was no solution, but in her eyes I could see exactly what she felt, and what she felt was a mirror image of what I was feeling. And as my lips brushed against her cheek, as my hand touched the side of her face, as my fingers closed around the back of her neck and pulled her tight, I felt as if I was being consumed by something altogether more powerful than both of us combined.
I could hear her hurried breathing, could feel her heart beating in her chest like a frightened bird, and I felt strength in my arms sufficient to crush her into pieces.
̒̒John,’ she urged, her tone a plea for something, a plea for
forgiveness, for sanctuary, for respite.
I reached up and closed the door. I stepped back, she walked with me, and then she was ahead of me, almost pulling me down the hallway to the bedroom.
Catherine stumbled, almost fell, and then her arms were free and she took off her coat, was tugging at her tee-shirt, pulling it loose from her waistband . . .
She leaned against the edge of the dresser and kicked off her shoes.
I pulled my shirt over my head, walked after her as she crossed the room, and even as she reached the edge of the mattress she was loosening the button on her jeans.
She stood there for a moment in nothing but her underwear, her skin pale and smooth. She held out her arms, received me, pressed every inch of her body against mine.
I felt her fingernails in the skin of my back, felt her tug at my jeans. She pushed me back onto the bed and dragged off my jeans, and then she unhooked her bra and, for a split second, she seemed to hover at the edge of the mattress.
Then Catherine seemed to explode over me, her hands everywhere, out of control, her movements sharp, almost violent, angry
and hungered. She punched and tore and grasped and threatened -
and I tore back like a man possessed.
And when she came she screamed, and I screamed with her, and it seemed the windows would burst outward and let the world know where we were hiding.
Then later, labored breath, bodies fired like engines, muscles tensed, nerves shredded, sounds of passion, and triphammered hearts like trains, like drowning and dying and being born, and everything was meaningless yet profound, like poetry in war . . .
And then silence for a time.
A vast silence. Chest fit to burst, but holding it all inside until we mustered sufficient stillness to fold into one another like the pattern of a fingerprint.
The feeling of her warm breath on my neck, her fingers turning small concentric circles in the hairs on my chest, the pressure of her breasts against my back, her leg between mine, the tightening of skin as sweat dried and cooled, and the smell of sex and perfume and bodies blessed with rest.
TWENTY-FIVE
Lassiter shook his head. ‘A few,’ he said. ‘Nowhere near as many as I expected, and so far they’ve come to nothing. We’ve e-mailed the pictures to Annapolis, Baltimore, Fredericksburg, Chesapeake Bay . . . Metz and the others have fielded about three hundred calls, but the vast majority have been crazies.’
‘And how long for the warrant on this bank account?’ Miller asked.
Lassiter glanced at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t be much longer now.’ He walked to the window, talking as he went. ‘Aside from this picture we have nothing much at all, right?’
Miller looked at Roth. Say nothing, his expression said.
‘This bank account business, this cop . . . what was his name?’
‘McCullough,’ Miller replied.
‘Like I said, Bill Young was captain down at the Seventh when your man was there. I called for him, found out the son-of-a-bitch had a stroke last May. Bad apparently, real bad, so whatever you manage to find down there . . .’ Lassiter shook his head. ‘What the hell use is this cop anyway? What do you think he has to do with this?’
‘We don’t know,’ Miller replied. ‘He’s connected to Darryl King, King is connected to Sheridan, Sheridan is connected to the mystery guy in the photos. Right now McCullough and the photo is all we have.’
Someone knocked at the door.
‘Yes!’ Lassiter barked.
A department courier came through with a manila envelope.
Lassiter took the envelope, withdrew the warrant, signed for it, returned the envelope to the courier. ‘Get the fuck outta here,’ he said, handing the warrant to Roth. ‘Go see whether McCullough’s bank details shed any light on what the fuck is going on here.’
Nine blocks west, on past Carnegie Library and the Convention Center, crossing Massachusetts at Eleventh, Roth making small talk about nothing consequential, Miller driving, keeping his eyes on the road, wondering somewhere in his myriad thoughts what might come of all of this. Thinking of Marilyn Hemmings, how it might be to take her out to dinner, see a movie; trying to remember the last time he did something like that, trying and failing to have any clear image of Marie McArthur, the last girl with whom he’d had a relationship. How had he hooked up with her? Did someone set them up? He couldn’t remember. Felt stupid that he couldn’t remember. He was supposed to be able to recall details. He was a detective after all. And then back to Marilyn Hemmings. Attractive woman. She was one of the good people. Miller’s mother used to say that. You’ll like him, she’d say, referring to someone she’d met, a neighbor, a friend of a friend. He’s good people. That’s what Miller’s mother would have said about Hemmings. You should take her out, Robert . . . that girl, she’s good people. He smiled at the thought. Wondered if he should call her. But when would he have time to take her out?