Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
T
hat Sunday afternoon, Archie asked to use a telephone. A nurse was happy to help him out, in fact it looked like Archie could leave the ICU for a regular bed sometime very soon. His vitals were stable, there was no infection, and the edema had come down dramatically! He'd been regularly conscious for a day and a half. Just that morning they'd removed his heparin lock and replaced it with a small neat stitch. He'd been eating like a wild boar since Saturday morning.
When Archie was done with his call, he asked to shower. He didn't seem to need help to and from but they helped him anyway. He smile and thanked them for the plastic shower cap to keep his dressing dry. None of the staff had realized what a large, strong man he was during the five days he'd spent flat on his back with them. And they were amazed at how he'd come in with seemingly so little chance of living only to be shuffling around five days later like someone raiding the pantry. Life was a tenacious miracle.
At ten minutes past five, an attractive young woman who had visited several times before brought Archie a small suitcase. She was Gwen Wildcraft's sister, the one who had brought him the small framed painting of his murdered wife. Over the questions of the nurse Archie took the suitcase into a bathroom and a few minutes later came out dressed and smiling, smelling of aftershave and toothpaste. He checked himself out of the UCI Medical Center at five-forty. The nurses and doctors couldn't talk him out of it, the orderly and security guards were afraid to use force due to the bullet in his head. Not even Archie's doctor, Stebbins, who by phone ordered Archie back to his bed, had any effect at all.
At six, Archie and the young woman were down in the medical center pharmacy getting his prescriptions filled. Four Sheriff's Department deputies clunked into the pharmacy waiting area, but they had no warrant to arrest him, suspected him of no crime and found him to be in decent physical and mental condition. There were smiles, handshakes, pats on the shoulder and a lot of quizzical looks. One talked on the radio for almost five minutes.
At six twenty-five, the woman drove him away in a white four-door Saturn she'd left in the red of the curving main entrance.
Two Sheriff's Department black-and-whites fell in behind them, running without color, giving the Saturn plenty of room.
Archie felt a cool wash of sweat break over his forehead as Priscilla turned onto the street. Up the hill. Past the big Norfolk Island pine tree on the corner, past a blue house with the riding arena and hot-walker, then up to a vaguely familiar stretch of street. The sun was lowering and it shined bright yellow beyond the trunks of the date palms. He looked at Priscilla and her face was neither blue nor red, but a believable shade of violet. Funny how some colors registered as he knew them to be, while others were wild but convincing.
His driveway? Must be. It was distant but familiar. He couldn't remember a lot of particulars from those last few hours, not as many as he should. But he remembered enough of them—and had been told enough of them—to feel a dread of this place and of what had happened here.
Gwen.
"Thank you, Priss."
"I'll come in for a while if you want."
"I'm going to do this alone."
"What exactly are you going to do, Arch?"
"I don't know," he said, not taking his eyes off the closed garage door in front of them. "I'm not sure. But it's important that I be here isn't it?"
"I think I understand. I'm going to call in one hour. Here, I had this made after you called. It wasn't easy, getting the locksmith out on a Sunday."
He took the shiny new house key and smiled. "I do need this."
With that, Archie got out and retrieved his suitcase. He felt oddly strong as he pulled it from the trunk and set it down, which made him wonder if his pain receptors were damaged, as Stebbins said they might be. Or if it was just the strength that a week of bed rest can give you. He pulled out the long handle and started up the walkway.
He turned to watch Priscilla back out of the drive. When her car disappeared down the street, the two Sheriff's cruisers pulled along the driveway entrance and parked end-to-end so no cars could get into the Wildcraft driveway and none could get out.
Two of the deputies hustled down the drive to him. "Need a hand Archie?"
"I've got it."
"Rayborn told us it's still a crime scene. She's on her way. She said we can keep you out, legally."
"It's my home, guys."
As at the hospital, they smiled and nodded and looked at each other uncertainly.
"I'll talk to her," said Wildcraft, starting toward the front door. "Don't worry."
They were right. The house was designated a crime scene by notice in a clear plastic envelope from the Orange County Sheriff Coroner Department. It was taped to the front door. There was no barrier ribbon or sentry. Archie saw the fingerprint dust heavy on the shiny lock and plate. He felt the roughness of the newly cut key in the lock, saw the little flash of sunlight play off the alloy and onto the varnished oak. He stood in the living room and looked at the loose pile of gift. Gwen's birthday, he knew, and remembered that there had been party. Then his eyes moved to the black electrician's tape marking rough circle in the middle of the room, where the rock had been. The window was still broken and the wooden blinds still splintered where the rock had come through. It startled him. It all seemed so long ago, another age entirely, but everything looked so fresh, as if it had just happened.
Leaving his luggage upright beside the presents, Archie walked down the hall and into the bedroom. He stepped down into the room and looked at the big sleigh bed. He saw the tangled sheets and blanket and felt a dizzying descent into the blackness where Gwen had gone. He could not picture her here, in this bed. He couldn't clearly picture what she would look like. Or how it would feel to be here with her. He could feel the powerful emotions of being with her at the Kuerners' in Norco, or in their old place in Santa Ana, or on their honeymoon, but not here in this big and new—for them—house. The bullet had blown them away. He wondered if such large and wonderful emotions would ever come to him again, except in the diminishing potencies of memory. His breath went shallow and his heart sped up.
A picture
, he thought:
please show me another picture of her. A big one.
Easy. There she was on the wall of the little sitting room off the bedroom, a photo portrait of Gwen in a low-cut black evening dress, her hair up and earrings dangling and her smart eyes staring back at him with conspiracy and desire. The long and elegant neck, the pearl choker. That was Gwen. He knew it.
Gwen.
The reason. The beginning. The original.
He stared at it for a long time, remembering Gwen at sixteen and eighteen and twenty and even twenty-two, trying to project these hard memories forward to create Gwen at the age of twenty-six, just five days ago, before she died. According to the date at the bottom, the portrait was done just last year. Still, even this wasn't quite enough to bring her most recent face into his mind's eye.
It's to protect you, Archie.
Gwen's voice again. Unmistakable. So actual and alive he felt her breath on the back of his neck. He turned and looked around the room. Then up behind his shoulder.
"But I couldn't protect
you"
he whispered.
But there was no voice then, just the happy chatter of a mockingbird in the coral tree outside their back patio.
"Gwen?" he whispered again. Then felt a little embarrassed, because he knew she was dead and he knew the dead don't speak except maybe to each other.
The air around him suddenly felt hot and spoiled so he pushed open the French doors to the patio.
He turned to face the bedroom again. When he saw the bathroom he understood that the center of what had happened that night had happened there. From this angle all he could see was the half-open door and part of the big tiled shower. He walked over and looked at the doorjamb ripped loose from the doorway frame. They must have broken this in, he thought. He pushed the door open with the tip of his finger and looked inside.
The smell of spoiled blood tapped him softly at first, then hit him hard. The flies lifted up around his face with brief interest and began to settle back to the hard black pool down by the toilet. Archie looked at the drag marks and shoe prints. Like a battlefield. He saw the blood splatters on the wall and the glass shower door. More on the counter tile. And the little handwritten labels with a strip of adhesive to keep them true: 08/21/02/7:49 a.m./bathroom #3.
He pulled the door closed hard, turned and walked outside, his eyes burning and his heart beating clear up into his throat. The mockingbird in the coral tree bent forward accusingly to face Archie, flipped his tail into the air and shot off a warning.
So Archie walked a wide arc around the tree and then across the backyard to the window where the rock had come through. The break in the glass didn't look like much from here. In the bright light of the lowering sun he could hardly make it out.
He picked up the walkway and followed it past the pool and then around the side of the house toward the front. When he went into the shaded tunnel made by the Chinese flame trees he could feel memories trying to come back to him. It was like facing a closed door and knowing there were people on the other side, waiting for you to let them in. But where was the knob?
He stopped at the big bloodstain on the concrete walk, dried to rust-brown now and just beginning to fade. He thought of the bright light in his eyes and remembered that this was where he had seen that light. Yes, right here, as he walked back toward the front door.
Then he realized this blood was his. He knelt and looked at it, touched it with a finger.
The detectives came briskly down the walkway toward him, like workers late from lunch. For the first time, Archie did not mistake the woman for Gwen, even for a second.
"Deputy Wildcraft," she said. "Exactly what are you doing here?"
He stood and wiped his finger on his pants. The tone of her voice grated on his nerves. It was condescending and bossy. And he didn't trust either of them because they very clearly did not trust him. They had treated him like a suspect.
"Looking at the blood," he said.
"You've got a bullet in your head."
"I can't feel it."
"You can't stay here."
"Why? This is where I saw the bright light."
Rayborn stood there with her mouth half open, her head shaking slowly in disbelief, but said nothing.
Zamorra simply waited with his arms crossed, looking like an undertaker, Archie thought.
"Priscilla brought me some clothes," he said. "I showered and shaved and signed out. I got my prescriptions. I think everything's in order."
"Damnit
, Archie," said Rayborn. "You can't stay here."
He saw the anger in her eyes and knew she was serious, but immensely flustered. Even Zamorra, who always looked so calm, had a look of mystified doubt.
"Why not?"
Archie watched Merci step up close to him and hook her dark unhappy eyes into his own. Like they had claws in them.
"You need to understand just two things, Deputy Wildcraft. One is that your wife is dead, murdered in this house. Your gun killed her. Your prints are on that gun. The gunpowder was on your hands, blood is on your robe. There are very powerful people who want see you charged with that murder. This is the first thing. Am I getting through to you with this concept, this concept of you being charged with killing Gwen?"
"You are."
"You're clear on it?"
"I am."
"Good. Because you're about one breath away from being arrested. If you say or do the wrong thing, you're going to end up in Mod J, in the protective custody of your own jail."
Archie's anger jumped. He said the first thing he thought of, way of hiding it. "I used to work Mod J."
She shook her head and thinned her lips, like somebody had forced her to taste something bitter. "Number two is
this,
Archie—someone shot you in the head, right here, five days ago. He left you for dead. He wanted you dead, Archie. Chances are pretty good that he hasn't changed his mind about that. When he hears you're here, it's possible he'll come back and shoot you some more. How's that sound?"
"I'll keep a weapon ready."
"That didn't help you the first time. Are you even close to hearing me, Deputy Wildcraft?"
"Very close."
"Close but not quite hearing me?"
"I hear you very well."
"Are you close to
thinking
straight?"
"I think so, yes. There are the black-and-white cars out front. Nobody would come after me with them around. I'm not under arrest, Detective. I'm a sane adult with no criminal record, occupying own residence. I'm a man whose wife just died, and I came back here to this house because it was our home. I came here to think about what happened and to remember her."
"Wait until the reporters find out you're here," she said.
Archie had no firm opinion on how he should feel about reporters. "Would you mind leaving me alone now? I want to spend sometime here, trying to remember my wife.
"She still had a disbelieving look on her face. "Archie, do you even know what day it is?"
"Sunday."
"Do you remember how to tell time?"
"Look at my watch."
"And whether you're hungry or not?"
Archie felt his anger stir. "I'm not hungry."
"Or what to do if that bandage of yours starts to show blood?"