Death Qualified (50 page)

    When he finished and said, "Come on," she followed him out of the house silently. He drove them to a restaurant and explained, just as if she hadn't heard: "I told Billy I'd call back in half an hour, see if he knows anything, and give him the number where we'll be for the next couple of hours. That damn fool's out of gas somewhere, that's all. He'd think nothing of striking out on foot, just leaving the car wherever he happened to go dry."

    In the restaurant, after he checked in with Billy Whitecomb at the sheriff's office, he ordered steaks for both of them. She still had not said a word.

    "Honey," Frank said, "he's a big boy. He's been around. He can take care of himself."

    She nodded.

    "We shouldn't have let him go get the disks," she said at last.

    "I shouldn't have talked about the case with him, included him in any part of it."

    "Ah, Bobby, don't start the should have" shouldn't have loop. It doesn't go anywhere and you just get tired. You trusted him, you still trust him, and so do I. Don't beat yourself over the head about it."

    "You don't understand," she said fiercely.

    "He's a mathematician, like Frobisher and Shumaker. Do you think he can resist seeing what's on those disks?" In her head she heard the infectious laughter of Lucas Kendricks, the way she had heard it on his tape, the way Nell had described it the last time she saw him. She blinked hard. Not Mike, she wanted to cry out. Not him.

    Frank was called to the telephone a few minutes later and came back to report that there was nothing to report yet. Mike had not been admitted to any local hospital; he wasn't in the slammer. Nothing.

    "I told Billy we're going home," he said. He eyed her steak morosely.

    "I don't like to pay for food that gets left on the plate. Come on, I'll make you an omelette or something."

    "You don't have to baby me," she said sharply.

    He chuckled.

    "Honey, don't you know I just want to?

    Come on, let's get moving."

    He made a detour to drive past Mike's house. He had turned off the lamp on their way out; it was still dark.

    THIRTY-TWO

    driving, frank asked, "How much of what the lady shrink said do you suppose is anywhere near the broad general truth that we all revere as such?"

    Barbara had to pull herself back from a void.

    "Some of it." She surprised herself then by adding, "A lot of it, actually. Even it if is pretty self-serving. I guess the truth can be self-serving at times."

    "Um. She's one scary lady. One hell of a scary lady."

    He passed a truck. He was a good driver. When Barbara was a child they had driven hundreds, thousands, of miles during summer vacations. She remembered how bad a driver her mother had been. They always joked about it:

    She couldn't drive and talk at the same time, or drive and listen to others talking. Frank had not allowed her to drive very often when he was in the car. He joked about that, too, said he was too susceptible to nervous breakdowns to deliberately put himself in harm's way.

    Now, having maneuvered around the truck and pulled away from it, he said, "I think she was leveling about a few things, anyway. One of them just could be that the disks should be burned. Will you promise blind, honey?"

    "You know I won't."

    "Yes, I guess I do.

    "Okay, let's compromise. If those disks turn up, let's do it her way, let me have a peep at them first. Deal?"

    "First after Mike," she said bitterly.

    "Let's decide if they turn up." She glanced at his profile, dimly red in the lights from the dashboard.

    "She said you would be safe because you know what you believe. Do you?"

    "Tough question, honey. Real tough. Maybe she sees a realist in me, more than in you. Over the years I've lowered my expectations so often that I finally reached a level where I got from people pretty much what I expected, and that's the end of illusion and disappointment, maybe the end of childhood. Pragmatism, realism, whatever it is, maybe that's what she sensed in me."

    Suspecting that she would not get more than that from him, she did not persist. But it was more than that, she was certain. He did know who he was, what he believed, and he was not afraid. That made the difference. He was not afraid. When her mother had been dying, he had provided the strength she needed to die with courage and even grace. Over the years Barbara had thought of him as simply lethargic or even fatalistic in his acceptance of what was happening at any moment, but now she thought it was not just like that. It was more as if he was able to say and believe, that was last year, or yesterday, or an hour ago, and this is now. She remembered what he had said about lowering his expectations, but that was not just right either.

    He had an acceptance of people that she lacked; their goodness, their evil, whatever he saw in them did not surprise him. He was unsurprised by Mike's betrayal.

    Barbara realized that she had come to view it as betrayal;

    the terror had subsided, leaving a dull ache in some part of her that was so deep that she didn't know if it had a name, if it could be removed and examined. Not the heart, she felt certain; the heart had become an organ that could be seen with instruments as it pumped, that could be dissected and examined for the fatal flaw when it ceased. The pain she was feeling would not show up with the instruments of science, she knew. What then? The soul? The soul, she thought, exactly that. She felt certain that Mike had taken the disks to a friend's house, or to his office, someplace where he had run through them all and realized that he needed time alone with them in order to understand the work, to follow it step by step.

    Also, she told herself, he would be in no more danger than Brandy wine or Schumaker. Young, naive people might be at risk, but not scientists or mathematicians, or elderly lawyers. No, Mike would be fine, happily at work. When he was finished, when he had made it his own in the realest sense, then he would show up again with his engaging smile. And then? She could not say what then. Her previous reactions to betrayal had been to immerse herself so deeply in work, or school, or something, that she had no time to spend on disaster; or else to run away.

    She knew she was to blame. She should not have sent him, used him, and again it came back to that, people using people for their own purposes. The people in Colorado using naive boys, using Lucas, using one another.

    She was as guilty as any of them. She had been willing to use Mike, to use Clive with her attempt to disprove that the forest ranger could have seen what he claimed. And he, the ranger, had tried to use circumstances that could have had deadly results. That still could have them. But that was how it worked when you used people, she went on inexorably; the consequences were of no importance.

    She had even used Ruth Brandywine, not with any real hope of changing the outcome of the trial, but rather to raise such clouds of dust that no one would be able to see clearly. She had tried to manipulate the jury, the judge, the spectators, Tony, everyone, because she had decided that her ends were worthy.

    She felt a great bitterness thinking again about Ruth Brandy wine's dismissal of the mutilation and death of the girl in the woods, her dismissal of Nell and her children, of Lucas and his ruined life, his death. Brandywine had said she, Barbara, had a gift for discerning the truth. She could have laughed at that.

    She gazed straight ahead; lights appeared, drew even, vanished; red lights "appeared, were passed, vanished.

    Truth, she was thinking; she had believed Nell Kendricks was telling the truth. She had said that to her father, who accepted that Nell had shot and killed her husband. She had believed Nell was innocent. Her intuitive self had believed until her rational self had started the "Yes, but" routine and killed the belief.

    They were driving along the winding shoreline of the reservoir. The surface of the water was black, as if a hole had opened there and the little bit of world bounded by its outline had dropped into it. She rejected that image immediately. It was like the black center of a Mandelbrot set, she thought then. If you turned the magnifying glass to any segment of the border there would be the complexity the mystery, the ever-expanding patterns that were unique and were also nearly like all the other patterns that might emerge at different places. She and her father were segments of one of the patterns, swirling about each other, touching, withdrawing, flying off in opposite directions, returning. And at Turner's Point there would be a hundred, two hundred other similar patterns; people in the houses that rode the ridge above the point generated their own similar yet different patterns. All held together, and kept separate by invisible links.

    The links that bound them were the same that had bound humans from the beginning of time: love, hatred, jealousy, greed.. .. Nothing changed even while everything was in the midst of change.

    She had flown out of this set, determined never to re turn, but the pull back was stronger than the pull away, and she had come home, just as Lucas had. Suddenly she realized with startling clarity that Judge Lundgren had been mostly right in limiting the scope of the trial. She had not really thought that hired detectives would gun down a man, but if she renounced that as a possibility, she had to eliminate Brandywine and her colleagues as suspects in the death of Lucas Kendricks. With this admission, she accepted that the pendulum had swung again; she had re turned to her original belief that Nell was innocent.

    Something in Nell's recounting of her story had made Barbara say, / believe, even though she had to admit later that the impossibilities had outweighed the probable truth. Her rational self had silenced the irrational believer, and now she could curse herself for offering up Brandywine and company, for casting suspicions that she, Barbara, did not entertain instead of trying to find a plausible alternative.

    But even if the judge had been right in saying no, he also had pulled the sides of the box too close. This particular box had to include the death of that poor girl in the woods. Janet Moseley belonged inside the box. Janet Moseley was not irrelevant.

    They drove through Turner's Point, where at least half the lights were already off; people took sleep seriously out here in the country. Then Frank turned onto the private, gravel road; when the fir trees closed in about them it was as if they had entered a singularly dark tunnel that their headlights could not penetrate. The only light was directly ahead, now on a wall of tree trunks and undergrowth, now on an open space that was too restricted. It was as if the darkness had to remind them that they were limited creatures in spite of their attempts to penetrate beyond their range with high beams. And then they were home again.

    Frank kept his word and busied himself with an omelette as soon as they entered the house. She called Mike's number, his office, and finally Bailey Novell. His machine took the call. With nearly savage fury she told the machine to tell Bailey to get his ass in to Frank's office at ten the next morning. When she stamped back to the kitchen, Prank began to whistle tunelessly. Good, she thought at him. Just don't say it, anything.

    The next morning when they arrived at the courthouse, Doc was in the corridor. He looked almost as wretched as Nell.

    "Will they decide today?" he asked.

    "Probably," Frank said.

    "You look like hell, by the way."

    Doc drew himself up straighten "I want to talk to you, Frank. Just you. Not about Nell or this trouble. But, first, if they come in with a verdict, will you have someone give my office a call? I can be over here in five minutes. She's ... she might go to pieces. I'm concerned. What it is, is I'm really frightened for her. If they are hung, will there be another trial? My God, she can't stand to go through it again."

    Frank took Doc's arm and shook it slightly.

    "You're babbling, you know? Go on to your office. Don't do any heart surgery today, okay? Go on. I'll call you when they callus."

    They started to enter the courtroom but were stopped again, this time by Clive.

    "I have to check in at work," he said.

    "I'll be back as soon as I can. Will you be at your office again, like yesterday?"

    "Yep," Frank said.

    "You still have a job to check in at? I'm surprised."

    "I'm taking sick leave," Clive said.

    "I'll be back in half an hour." He hurried off. He looked as if he qualified for sick leave.

    This time when they started to move again, they actually got inside the courtroom. Ten minutes later they were dismissed with the same instructions as yesterday.

    Back in the corridor, Nell said, "We want to hear the tapes, if that's all right. I brought a tape player. It's in the car." She looked as if she had not slept at all; the skin was tight across the bones of her face, and her eyes seemed to get larger and larger as she lost weight week after week.

    "I'll bring them around," Frank said.

    "Is there any thing else I can get you?"

    She shook her head.