At length, he shook his head. “It's not how much more she has than I have. You must know by now that I'm far too arrogant to be cowed by a woman's net worth. That's not it at all. It's the wastefulness involved. She doesn't need all that space, and neither do I. Not even both of us, orâIt's grotesque. I ⦠I just worry that we live on different scales is all. No, let me say it directly: It is not in my philosophy to live beyond the carrying capacity of this planet.”
Oh. I had not realized Tom was such an environmentalist, but on contemplation, it fit. He was Zen through and through, to the point of parsimony, and everything had to integrate with that principle. I said, “Don't you think you guys could get past that, Tom? I mean, have you discussed it?”
Tom made a fist out of one hand and ground its knuckles into the space between his eyes.
I said, “I'm sorry. I'm really intruding. Iâ”
He sighed again. “No, it's okay, Em. God knows, I do it to you. Yes, we could probably get past this, or I fervently hope
so. The thing is, it's kind of a delicate time to be discussing such things, don't you think?”
It was, and I didn't have a ready answer that would make it anything other. So I said, “Okay then, back to the other stuff.”
“Anytime you're ready.” He sighed.
“Did the police find Pet's cell phone?”
“Why? Did she call you on it? Hell, then your number would be on it! Christ, if our killer picked it up ⦔
“Yes,” I said, relieved that he understood. “And if the police got it, they'll already know.”
“Know what?”
“As I said: I think I know who killed Sidney and Pet.” I felt my resolve slipping away. My bubble of detachment burst as I contemplated all that I had hoped would bloom between Ray and me, in the garden of the life I had hoped to build with him.
“You have proof?” Tom asked.
Proof. That was always the problem: The game of detection was played on a field that was tilted in favor of the person willing to forgo any semblance of ethics. “I ⦠I'm sorry. I'm just not sure yet.” In a smaller voice, I added, “I think I should talk to Ray.”
Tom indicated the telephone on his desk. “One call. Then I am putting you under wraps so you can't test your damned hypothesis the hard way.”
I bit my lip. “This will be personal.”
“I thought that was
over,
” he said. “I thought you'd finally gotten yourself clear.” He clipped his words, exasperated, unwilling to tell me how little he thought of my relationship with Ray, or the fact that I still seemed to think I had one.
“I owe him this much, Tom.”
“Why? Because he's a cop? You think he's got to save face? He's not even working Homicide; what are you trying to save him from? You're afraid that Hayes is going to embarrass his precious family? Or is it the humiliation that you've figured out
something he missed again? You want my opinion? He's not even that talented at walking the beat. He's quick, yeah, and athletic, but he gets the blinders on every time it comes down to seeing what's really going on. Em, youâ”
I held up a hand. “That's enough.”
Tom looked like he was about to burst.
I thought of telling him that he had it wrong, that it was Ray's personal entanglements, not the professional or financial ones, that had me wanting to warn him, but telling Tom would have been ⦠telling. “When I know, you'll be the very next to know,” I said. “I promise.”
Tom shook his head in disapproval. He said, “I'll get Jack to take you home. And he will stay with you.”
I can handle earthquakes intellectually, but emotionally, when the ground wiggles around ⦠that's bad.
âDave Greene, engineer, recalling various earthquakes in Long Beach and San Fernando, California
JACK TOOK ME TO MY APARTMENT AND LEANED AGAINST THE refrigerator while I dialed the phone, doing his best impression of a mild mannered unassuming refrigerator magnet.
Ray answered on the first ring. He sounded breathless. “Em! You got my call.”
“What call?”
“On your machine. How soon can you meet me?”
I pushed aside the book that I had set down on my answering machine early that morning as I prepared to stare at the ceiling. Sure enough, the message light was blinking. It had not occurred to me to check for a return message from him. That meant that I had not really expected him to call me back. Or that a significant part of me had hoped he wouldn't.
What was going on inside of me?
I pushed the message button. Ray's voice came out of the mechanical memory. “Em? Honey, IâI'm sorry about last night. Please, I need to talk to you right away. Call me, okay?”
He was sorry? I had wanted to meet with him, for reasons of
unraveling things in a civilized manner. I wanted to cleanse myself of him, and, even more, of his family, of Enos and Katie and all the rest. But now he wanted to meet with
me?
What did that mean? Wariness flooded through me.
Best to get it over with.
“Em? Honey?”
I said, “I can meet you now. Where?” There it was, the usual issue: no privacy. He wouldn't come to my place, and I wasn't to go to his. No wonder we'd never sorted things out.
Ray said, “Are you home? I'll come by and get you.”
A car date. I looked up at Jack, who was now standing at my tiny stove, pouring himself some coffee, looking at ease and at home. I said, “Okay ⦠.”
Â
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JACK SAT ON Mrs. Pierce's porch glider, swaying gently. “So let me get this straight: Yâall 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 wantâ”
“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 justâ”
“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 sheâ” 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?”
“About Enos. And Pet Mercer. And Sidney Smeeth.” As I said this, I finally realized why I had felt so compelled to tell Ray of my suspicions. I wanted to see his reaction, know if I was correct.
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'sâand, 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 numberâor Hayes Associatesâwould 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 thoughtâ”
“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.