Mortal Fear (24 page)

 Lenz purses his lips and cuts across two lanes of traffic. The lights of suburbia are almost continuous now, so we must be getting somewhere.

 “How long did this erotic interlude last?” he asks.

 “Drewe called on the fourth night.”

 “Ah.”

 “Erin was lying beside me in the bed. In the time it took Drewe to explain that she was calling from the hospital and that a patient she was close to had just died, Erin became her sister again. Not some ethereal being—Drewe’s little sister.

 “She’d risen up and was mouthing
Is that Drewe?
while Drewe said something about a pulmonary embolism. I don’t remember what I said to get off the phone, but I knew I had failed Drewe in a time of emotional crisis. What I do remember clearly is what Erin said the moment I hung up.”

 “What?” Lenz asks.

 “‘How are we going to tell her?’ I wasn’t sure I’d heard right, so I asked what she meant. She leaned back against the headboard, exposing those perfect breasts, but for once I wasn’t looking at her body. She said, ‘How are we going to tell Drewe about
us
?’

 “I was in shock. I climbed out of bed and said something like, ‘Jesus, where did this come from?’ ‘Where?’ she asked me. ‘What have we been doing the last four days? Shaking hands?’

 “Before I could answer, she said, ‘Fucking?’ Then she jerked up the covers and let me have it. ‘I thought you were different. I thought you understood some things. About women. About
me
. What do you think I came out to the frozen wastes of Chicago for? Sport sex? I can get all of that I want anywhere on the planet, thank you very much.’ And so on.

 “I was more stunned by the pain in her voice than by her venom. I thought she’d come out because she was at a place in her life where she needed a friend. After hearing how dumb that sounded, I said, ‘What
did
you come out here for?’ She let the covers fall, stood up naked on my hardwood floor, and said, ‘To marry you, you asshole.’ ”

 “How unfortunate,” says Lenz, as if commenting on some distant village destroyed by a typhoon. With a smooth motion he exits from the interstate and turns into a broad avenue. “So, you had an affair with your wife’s sister while you were engaged.”

 “We weren’t engaged. Not technically.”

 “You’re splitting hairs. You had committed yourself to Drewe.”

 “Yes.”

 “But she never learned of the affair?”

 “No.”

 Lenz shrugs. “I’m missing something. This betrayal weighs heavily upon you? On a daily basis?”

 “Oh, you’re definitely missing something. That night, Erin left Chicago. Two months later I heard she had married a guy named Patrick Graham. He’s an oncologist now, but he went to high school with the rest of us. Everybody knew Patrick had been in love with Erin since we were kids. And by a seeming miracle, his dream girl had suddenly decided she loved him. Erin lost no time getting pregnant and plunging into a domesticity that would shame Martha Stewart. A few months later, I left Chicago and married Drewe. We weren’t sure where we wanted to settle, so we moved into my parents’ farmhouse in Rain. They were dead by then.”

 “Quite a detail to omit.”

 “Nothing Oedipal about it. Anyway, Drewe and I still live in Rain, while Erin and Patrick and Holly, their daughter, live in Jackson. That’s the state capital, seventy miles away. We see them a good bit, usually at Drewe and Erin’s folks’ place in Yazoo City.”

 “Did you resume your affair with Erin?”

 “God, no. I felt queasy from guilt whenever she was around. She seemed stable, but I knew she was capable of anything under stress. I thought she might even blurt out the truth one day in an argument with Drewe or Patrick, just for spite.”

 “Did she?”

 “No. But if I’d known the real truth, I wouldn’t have been afraid of that. You see, her child—Holly—is my daughter.”

 For once Lenz has no comment. He rubs his chin for a few moments, takes a deep drag on his cigarette, and blows out the smoke. “That is a serious problem.”

 “Try catastrophic.”

 “How long have you known this?”

 “Three months.”

 “Does Patrick know the child is yours?”

 “No.”

 “Does he know the child is not his?”

 “Yes. Erin told him she was pregnant before she agreed to marry him. But she made him promise never to ask who the father was. Patrick was so blinded by love that he agreed.”

 Lenz makes another turn, this time onto a wooded two-lane road. “But as time passed, the question began to prey upon his mind.”

 “That’s my guess. Who knows what their problems are? With Erin it could be anything.”

 “And for the last three months, you’ve lived in terror that their imploding marriage will spit your dark secret up into the light.”

 “You got it.”

 He shakes his head. “I’m surprised you haven’t developed hives.”

 “I’m having some pretty bad headaches. Drewe wants a baby, and she doesn’t understand why I don’t.”

 “You don’t want a child by your wife?”

 “Of course I do. But . . . I feel like taking that step while this other situation is unresolved would be the worst betrayal of all.”

 “How so?”

 “Well, you’re married, right?”

 “I have a wife and a son. But you don’t want to extrapolate from my marital relationship.”

 “You’ll know what I mean, though. You know how when you first get married, even though you’re totally in love, there’s still this tacit sense that if you both decided it was a horrible mistake, you could just shake hands and walk away? I know that sounds shallow, but my wife is as old-fashioned as they come, and I know she feels this too. Having that first child is the final step, you know?
That’s
the true marriage. It’s irrevocable. The two of you can never be truly separate again. You’re joined in the flesh.”

 “To wit, Erin and yourself.”

 “Jesus, don’t even talk about it like that.”

 “But this is why Drewe so passionately wants to have your child. She’s an intelligent woman. She senses a formless but disturbing threat. She knows a child will bind the two of you against that.”

 “I don’t think she senses the threat. Well, maybe, but not from Erin. No way. I’m sure of that.”

 “I think you would be making a mistake to underestimate your wife in any way.”

 “Hey, I know that better than anybody.”

 Lenz looks lost in thought.

 “Any great insights, Doctor?”

 “Well . . . unlike many psychiatric patients, you have a real problem. In the physical sense, I mean. That child is a living symbol of a secret relationship. You love the child, I’m sure. And the mother must—
must
—sometimes look at you and wish that you were the man raising her. In my opinion, the truth will eventually come out, regardless of what you do. You can choose the time, that’s all.”

 Lenz states his opinion with the conviction of an oracle, and the catharsis I’d begun to feel with the act of confession dissipates like smoke in a wind.

 “Let me change the subject for a moment,” he says. “Would you answer one question about Miles Turner?”

 “It sounds like he answered enough about me.”

 “When I asked him the worst thing he had ever done, he refused to answer. But he did say he would tell me the worst thing that ever happened to him. He said he once spent sixty seconds face-to-face with a pit viper.”

 I feel the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

 “That’s all he would say,” Lenz adds. “Can you supply any details?”

 “That old drug charge wasn’t enough to make him tell you?”

 Lenz looks genuinely surprised. “Is that what he told you?”

 “That you coerced him? Yeah. You didn’t?”

 “I did. But not with a drug charge. It was assault and battery.”

 I feel the nausea of a sudden descent. “Assault?”

 “Yes. I’ve reviewed the case file, but the details are sketchy. It happened outside a gay bar in Manhattan. Two men verbally abused a friend of Mr. Turner’s—a homosexual friend—and Turner abused back. The sequence of events is unclear after that, but the upshot is that both men were beaten severely by Mr. Turner. He apparently has some martial arts training.”

 My anger at Miles for talking about me is vanquished by a question that has badgered me for a long time. “Doctor, do you think Miles is gay?”

 Lenz smiles with bright irony. “Doctor-patient privilege, Cole. However, there’s no legal stricture keeping you from telling me what you know.”

 I start to refuse, but if Miles didn’t want me to talk about it, why did he mention it to Lenz at all?

 “We were kids,” I say. “Eleven or twelve. Best friends. Miles didn’t have many. He was hard to like. Some of the older guys actually hated him. He was twice as smart as they were, and he didn’t mind making them look like idiots in school. It was summer. The two of us were hunting for arrowheads on a little Indian mound out in a cotton field. Some kids had built a fort in a stand of trees on the mound. It was just a hole in the ground, with a foot-high wall of logs around it and a scrap-tin roof laid over. The hole stayed full of water most of the time. We were looking at the fort when four older kids came screaming up to us on their bikes. They started teasing us, especially Miles. Miles made a smartass remark, and that was it. They hit him a few times. Then the ringleader said he was going to teach Miles a lesson. He said there were water moccasins nesting in the fort, and unless Miles swore by his no-good daddy that he loved sucking nigger dicks, he was going into that hole. Miles was scared to death, but he wouldn’t say what they wanted. I think it was the part about his father that got him, not sucking dicks. Finally, they forced him kicking and screaming through the little entrance to the fort. I heard a splash, then nothing. The guy said if Miles came out before dark they’d break his arm.

 “It was bad, Doctor. I wanted to help him, but I knew if I tried they’d just throw me in there with him. I was hoping they’d get bored and go away when I heard a sound that froze my blood. There
was
a snake in that pit, but it wasn’t any moccasin. Moccasins don’t make noise; they just bite you. This was a rattlesnake. Two seconds after it rattled, those assholes jumped on their bikes and hauled tail.

 “I screamed at Miles to get out of there, but he didn’t come up. Then I heard a tiny little voice whimper, ‘I can’t.’ I jumped down beside the entrance hole and started whispering at him to back slowly toward my voice, but he just kept whimpering. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing. After about a minute, I got up my nerve and reached my hand into that hole. I mean
slow
. My whole arm was tingling. Even at eleven years old, I knew a rattlesnake was a pit viper, and they see
heat,
not objects. And I knew my hand was a lot warmer than the wall of that wet hole. I edged my hand along the dirt for what seemed like an hour. Then my fingers felt cotton. I grabbed Miles’s arm and yanked him up out of there. His face was covered with tears and his jeans were soaked with piss. He was shaking like an epileptic.”

 I wipe stinging sweat out of my eyes. “After he calmed down, he told me very quietly that one day those bastards would regret what they’d done to him.”

 “Are you all right, Cole?”

 Orderly rows of soft yellow lights passing my window finally break through, telling me we’re in a residential area. “Sure.”

 “Is there more to the story?”

 I consider holding back, but for whatever reason, I don’t. “Several years later, the ringleader of that little gang had a strange accident. He was bitten four times by a cottonmouth water moccasin. Or twice each by two cottonmouths. Anyway, he ended up losing a foot.”

 Lenz catches his breath. “How did that happen?”

 “The guy was going to college at Delta State, about a hundred miles north of Rain. He got into his car late one afternoon and these snakes just started hitting him around the ankles. Somehow they’d got into his car. They were lying under the driver’s seat, baking in the hot shade. The guy had left his window open. I guess they just dropped in from a tree limb. They do that, you know.”

 Lenz stops the Mercedes at a turn and looks at me. “Are you saying Turner put those snakes in that man’s car?”

 I choose my words carefully. “I’m telling you that if cops could trace snakes, they would have traced them right back to that little fort on the Indian mound.”

 “My God. How many years after the initial incident was this?”

 “Six or seven, at least. That’s one thing about Miles. He follows through. I’m not saying he’s a killer. After all, those guys had terrorized him. He was just giving back some of what they’d given him. Sort of a Southern tradition.”

 I crush my Tab can flat and drop it on the floor. “Look, are we there or what? I want to get this over with in time to make that SWAT plane.”

 Lenz turns onto still another residential street. The houses here are large, not as large as Bob Anderson’s, but undoubtedly more expensive. At last he swings the Mercedes into a bricked drive and parks.

 “Cole,” he says in the sudden silence. “You reported the missing women because you knew something was terribly wrong. Are you ready to help me make it right?”

 “Isn’t that clear by now?”

 He just sits, letting the engine tick. “Even if the trail leads to Miles Turner?”

 “Yes. But it won’t. Miles could kill, maybe. But not like that. I don’t think it’s in him. Do you?”

 “I’m afraid I haven’t ruled it out.”

 Lenz gets out of the car, and I do the same. But as I follow him around to a side door I see nothing of the house or grounds. I merely track his shoes, using the same trancelike vision that keeps my car on the road when my mind is a million miles from reality.
Can
Lenz count on me if the trail leads to Miles? I answered yes, but it was a reflex response. Because what I was thinking at that moment was how, after that Delta State guy was bitten by the cottonmouths, the state police showed up in Rain to question Annie Turner about her son. They’d heard some strange things about the kid and wanted to know his whereabouts on the day the guy was bitten.