Life Sentences (35 page)

In late October, Jack's wounds
had mostly healed. His eyebrows had grown back, and the scars around his
throat had faded. He still had nightmares, but he was getting better
every day. He wanted to be healthy for the baby's sake. He wanted to provide
Noah with a good role model.

Jack had tendered his resignation
six months ago. He was no longer a cop, no longer a proud member of the
LAPD. He called Tully occasionally, and his ex-partner would update
him on old friends in the department, the cases he was working on, the politics,
the bullshit. The weather in L.A. was always beautiful. Tully's wife
and kids were doing great. He spoke nostalgically about the
Stier-Zellar's
Strangler case. "You're a hero,
Jack. Everybody in the unit regards you as a goddamn hero."

It played to the secret reason
that most cops became cops in the first place. Every once in a while, you
came across a genuine monster, and you just wanted to put him away forever.
Every cop harbored this fantasy in his heart. The dream case. But life
wasn't a TV show. Sometimes bad guys did good things and good guys did surprisingly
stupid things. Real life was a lot murkier than Freddie the Fuzz could've
ever imagined.

Jack started a pot of water boiling
on the stove, then checked his watch. Half past five. He was running late.
He plunked the baby's bottle into the pan of water, then took the big
frying pan out of the cupboard, put it on the front burner, got out the cutting
board and started chopping onions. The baby was in his Johnny Jump Up, playing
with his numbers board. He dropped the plastic board on the kitchen floor
and began to whimper.

"Noah, Noah," Jack crooned,
his voice oscillating between sympathy and comfort. He picked up the board
and said, "Your mom's a whiz with numbers. The only time I use math is
for tipping waitresses."

The baby howled. He'd had his immunization
shots today, and his arm was still sore. At six months, Noah had a lot of
restless energy. He wriggled and rolled around a lot. He was constantly
moving his head back and forth, following the sound of their voices.
He'd discovered his feet and liked to chew on his toes. He knew who his
mother and father were, and he'd often burst into tears when either one
of them left the room.

Now Jack got the baby his favorite
stuffed animal from the bedroom-a fuzzy white duck with an enormous yellow
bill that made a sick moo-cow sound when you hugged it. He knelt down to take
off the baby's hat. The funky soft knit hat had bells attached, and Noah liked
to wear it indoors.

The baby screamed, his voice rising
in an operatic crescendo of despair. "
Ahh
…
ahh-ahhh
…
ahh-wahhhhh
!"

"Okay, big guy. Keep it on.
But don't tell Mommy, okay? She thinks I spoil you."

Noah stopped crying and squeezed
his toy duck. Moo.

"That's the big news of the
day. Moo."

Noah laughed. He liked the funny
faces Jack made. He could sit up without assistance and was beginning
to vocalize. Those former cooing sounds were starting to distinguish
themselves to Jack's ears.

"What's your opinion,
huh?"

The baby pooped his pants.

"Phew. Your opinion smells
pretty ripe."

Noah eagerly reached out to be picked
up.

Jack lifted him out of his Johnny
Jump Up and changed his diaper. He took his metal badge out of its hiding
place in the diaper drawer-it felt surprisingly heavy-and gave it to
the baby, who gummed the leather holder.

"You like that, huh?"

The baby smiled, the tips of his
new teeth like glistening white barnacles trying to break through the
pink and healthy gums.

"Okay, big guy. Listen up. I
believe in fair play," Jack told his son. "I believe in honesty
and justice. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. That's why I became
a cop in the first place. To protect and serve. To be noble. Do you think
that's arrogant? It's pretty arrogant."

The baby's dark blue eyes hooked
Jack with their eagerness. He had a head of silky red hair, and Jack liked
to think he had the Makowski nose and the Makowski
jawline
,
but fortunately for everyone, Noah had Daisy's lovely eyes and pretty
ears.

"Hey, Noah," he said in
a voice as light as dust motes. "Let's call Mommy."

The baby gazed up at his father,
captivated by his tone, by the pleasant cadence of this suggestion.

Jack held the bottle, which the
baby accepted greedily, his soft pink cheeks mushrooming. "Whoa,
slow down, tiger. It'll last longer." Jack smiled at his son, then took
out his cell phone and dialed Daisy's number at work.

“Department of Clinical Trials,"
Daisy answered.

"Hello, wife."

She smiled. "Hello, husband."

"Guess who got his shots today?"

"
Ow
.
Poor guy. Did he cry much?"

"Only when he saw the needle
coming."

She was in love with Jack Makowski.
She loved his blind spots, his annoying little habits, his emotional rawness
and availability. She loved the brown moles on his back, the ones she sometimes
played connect-the-dots with. Often he'd be so exhausted by the end of
the day that he would leave Noah's toys scattered all over the-house, and
her evenings would be spent picking up after them while Jack slept with
the baby in front of the TV. But that was okay. She wouldn't have it any other
way.

"So guess what? We're in perfect
health," he told her. "We weigh nineteen and a half pounds.
We're twenty-nine inches long. We
can.start
eating solid foods, if by solid you mean strained beets. You coming home
soon?"

"Six o'clock."

"Good. Because I'm making something
special for dinner tonight."

"Spaghetti again?"

"How'd you guess?"

Daisy laughed. "You need a
new cookbook, guy. Did you pick up those baby wipes?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact. I
had the most embarrassing shopping cart today. I suddenly needed all
this humiliating stuff at once. Odor destroyers for my feet, arthritis
cream for my shoulder, wart removal for the plantar wart on my big toe,
hair coloring for me touch o' gray. I made sure there weren't any
pretty girls standing in line when I went to pay for it."

"Well, I like you, Jack Makowski.
Plantar warts and all."

"And you're a very pretty girl.
So I must be doing something right."

"See you at six." She hung
up, a warmth radiating from her breastbone. The days were growing fitfully
colder. She loved this time of year. They were going to buy a pumpkin
next weekend and carve a jack-o'-lantern for the baby's first Halloween.

She turned off her computer and
frowned, a shadow moving across her good mood. Six months ago, the police
had fished Roy
Hildreth's
body out of the river.
They'd found him two miles downstream from where he'd fallen in, and
Jack had made sure that the fingerprints and dental records matched so
there could be no question as to his identity. It was over. The bogeyman
was dead.

Still, there was one unanswered
question that remained to be resolved. Daisy had seen the spray-painted
END 70 that Jack discovered in the old house on the island. They'd both assumed
that Anna had put it there. Not years ago, but recently. And the question
remained, why? What was she trying to tell them? END 70. Something had ended.
The molestation had ended after Mr. Barsum had gone away. After Lily
had kicked him out of the house on that gloomy January day, nineteen years
ago.

Daisy wrote the date on a legal
pad. Anna had dabbled in numerology once. Did the numbers add up? She
did a quick calculation, but they didn't add up to seventy. Another dead
end.

She sighed and capped her pen. Taped
to the wall above her workbench were drawings from some of the young participants
of the first clinical trial for
Stier-Zellar's
disease. Daisy's clinical trial. She smiled at the crayoned rainbows
and roses and bumblebees. The news couldn't have been better. Half the
patients had shown dramatic improvements over the past six months. Daisy's
team had been able to measure substantial gains in head control,
alertness, muscle tone and cessation of seizures. Her one regret was
that her brother hadn't been around for gene therapy. Now she put her paperwork
away and fetched her backpack from the bottom desk drawer.

"Congratulations, Daisy."

She turned.

Truett stood in the doorway with
a bottle of champagne in his hands. Cuvee Williams
Duetz
1990. "Forty-seven percent of the candidates have shown remarkable
improvement," he said. "It's a blazing success."

She smiled, enjoying his praise.
"Almost a miracle."

"No miracle. Science."
He held out two long-stemmed glasses and waggled his eyebrows at her. Marlon
Truett could be a dangerous man to contradict. He wasn't called enfant
terrible for nothing. "I thought we'd start with a toast," he said,
but she shook her head and smiled. They had worked through their awkwardness
together, and he'd stepped aside gamely in the name of science. Now she
viewed him with great tenderness and respect.

"I'm going home, Truett,"
she said.

"Already?" He checked his
watch. "Whatever happened to burning the midnight oil, Daisy?"

"We can celebrate tomorrow.
Over lunch. Okay?"

He frowned. "So how's the
baby?"

"Fine." She drew on her coat.
"Save me some champagne."

His face was damp near his hairline.
He stepped aside to let her pass, then said, "Do you want to know what
I dislike the most about you?" He paused before answering his own
question. "You have a life, Daisy."

She kissed him on the cheek and headed
out the door.

On the ride home, traffic slowed
to a crawl near Kendall Square, and Daisy turned on her radio. Mozart's
Requiem in D Minor was playing. The storefronts were decorated with
cardboard witches and Halloween masks. The car's heater was broken.
It was getting darker much earlier lately, and she had Popsicle toes.
The bumper-to-bumper traffic inched along, and the sweet smell of ozone
wafted into the car. Just then she noticed a big orange road sign up ahead.
Her stomach dropped. It hit her all at once.

The moonlit road unraveled before
them, the autumn corn on either side so tall and leafy that Daisy couldn't
see the tops of the trees beyond their tassels. She felt swallowed up by
these amazing Idaho cornfields. Jack was driving. The baby was back in
Vermont, spending the weekend with his grandmother, and they were somewhere
south of American Falls, taking this neglected farm road past endless
golden rows of corn. They'd been driving since early that morning, when
they'd watched the meadow mists turn pink in the rising sun. They'd driven
for hours in the hot sun, listening to one another complain. They'd watched
the day fade and the sun melt into a puddle of gold along the horizon. Now
Daisy was sweaty and tired and just wanted it to be over with. She turned
to Jack with a fluttering heart. "Are we there yet?"

"Almost."

She hunched into herself, concerns
about the baby lingering in her mind. Tormenting her. But she refused to
dwell on what might be. Genetic predisposition hadn't been proved yet.
She would not torment herself for years to come, watching for the telltale
signs of mental illness-inability to think clearly, personality changes,
aural hallucinations, visual hallucinations. Instead, she would
do everything within her power to make sure that her son was a healthy,
happy, active child. She would not live in fear of the future. She would
celebrate Noah for who he was.

Daisy listened to the hum of the
pavement beneath their wheels. The moon had a yellow ring around it.
The radio promised rain tomorrow. She glanced around nervously. The
corn had swallowed up most of the town of
Punkin
Wells, Idaho. It had gobbled up farmhouses and barns and pretty much everything
else in its path, and there was just the two of them tonight, and the road
and the corn and the moon.

Jack braked. "We're here,"
he said.

The old county highway ended at
the cornfield's edge. In the headlights' glare, she could make out two
road signs posted in a field. The county signs were dwarfed by the towering
cornstalks. One said END, the other said 70.

Daisy caught her breath.

"Where the old county highway
70 ends." Jack parked by the side of the road and said, "You ready?"

She nodded.

He handed her a flashlight.
"Let's go."

"The question is, what are
we looking for?"

"I guess we'll know it when we
find it."

They got out and walked over to the
signpost, then aimed their dueling flashlight beams into the cornfield.
She closed her eyes, the lids scalding hot, and recalled Anna's words
: It's a gift for you. You '11 find out when
you get there
. Taking shallow, anxious breaths, she swung her flashlight
in an all-encompassing arc and waded fearlessly into the corn, moon
shadows stretching across the hard-packed soil, dry stalks rustling in
the breeze. She walked along the dirt path, shining her light between
thick rows of corn. Farmers in these parts liked to turn their fields into
Halloween corn mazes. She'd seen signs posted along the highway, advertising
flashlight night