Silent Witness (3 page)

‘
Cool
,' Tony said, and then no one was joking.

‘I love you,' he told her. Stacey smiled at him with her eyes.

They lay in the shadows of their bedroom, Stacey beneath him, sated, both of them, the moisture of lovemaking cooling on their skin. Tony still felt his warmth inside her, her breasts against his chest. His limbs had a pleasant lassitude.

‘How many times,' Stacey asked, ‘do you think we've made love?'

Tony smiled. ‘Not enough, lately.'

She kissed him, then said, ‘During a trial, it's as if you're in another place. Like acting, I guess.'

‘At least actors know what everyone else is going to say. And how the story ends.' Tony slid from inside her and down the bed, kissing her as he went, and laid his head on the hollow of her stomach. He saw her face turn to the window, absently gazing at the pastel sky of early evening.

‘I've been thinking about that script,' she said.

‘And?'

‘I don't know.'

Tony raised his head. ‘I can't decide for you, Stace. I don't even want to vote.'

She turned to him, raising her head from the pillow. ‘Not even for yourself?'

He shook his head, watching her. ‘You like this story. You don't, usually.'

‘I know, and they need an answer.' She frowned. ‘It isn't such a great time for me to give them one. I feel like you've just gotten back.'

Smiling, he said, ‘I'll take off work for a couple of days. Then you'll be ready.'

‘If you did, I might never be ready.' She turned to the closed door of the bedroom. ‘Maybe we can just raid the refrigerator and bring it back up here – wine, cheese – I don't really care. Whatever you want.'

‘Smoked oysters.'

Stacey made a face, and then the telephone rang.

It was their private line, reserved for close friends and emergencies. Tony felt himself tense.

‘Let it go,' Stacey murmured.

‘I can't. Not when we've got a seventeen-year-old running around in a car.'

Stacey gave him a look of understanding and then nodded toward the phone. Tony got it on the third ring.

‘Mr. Lord,' a man's voice said. ‘This is your answering service. . . .'

‘Jesus Christ,' Tony murmured in irritation.

‘We've had two long-distance calls,' the man went on. ‘From a Sue Robb. It's an emergency, she says. . . .' Tony sat up on the edge of the bed, instinctively turning from Stacey. ‘I have her on hold, Mr. Lord. Shall I say you'll call back?'

Tony hesitated. ‘No,' he said to the operator. ‘Put her through.'

Tony stood at the window. From the bed, Stacey watched him.

‘If you go back there,' she said, ‘the whole thing will come up again.'

He was quiet for a moment, feeling the truth of this. ‘I know.'

‘If I understand you at all, Tony, you've tried your entire adult life to put that time behind you. But you still have the nightmares, even now. And sometimes when I look at you, it's like you're
there
, not here.'

Tony did not answer. ‘Sam and Sue were my closest friends,' he said at last. ‘Part of me feels guilty about how I left it.'

‘As I recall the story, one of them was more than a friend.' Stacey made her voice softer. ‘Leaving was a matter of survival, Tony. Sometimes I don't know how you got through it all.'

Turning, Tony walked to the bed. ‘What's happening now could ruin them both. I needed a lawyer then, and they need one now.'

Stacey shook her head in dismay. ‘This is eerie. It's too much like before. . . .'

‘And that wasn't fair to me. This may not be fair to him. I know too damned well what that town can be like.' He paused, fighting his own dismay. ‘I have to go, lover. At least for a couple of days. Even if there's no part of me that wants to.'

Stacey looked down at the bed and slowly nodded.

He did not want it like this. ‘I can never explain. . . .'

She rose from the bed, putting her arms around his neck. ‘You never have to, Tony. The script can wait for a few days.' Stacey paused a moment. ‘If it comes to that, I'll watch after Christopher. Real life has its demands, I know. And the one you lived before me
always
has.'

On the flight that would take him to Lake City, Ohio, the home of his youth, for the first time in twenty-eight years, Tony Lord found himself remembering, like pieces of film, each moment of the night that Alison Taylor died.

The images were indelible – not just of Alison, or of Sam and Sue, whose crisis this was now, but of the months that had followed Alison's death. He owed this heightened clarity, Tony was certain, to what he had found in the grass of the Taylors' rear yard, and all that he had felt since that instant had bisected his life like a fault line. What was much harder to retrieve was who he had been in the hours before, still innocent of the knowledge that tragedy, like passion, could be summoned at random.

They were Christopher's age, seventeen.

Tony Lord stood in a bowl of light.

The night air was crisp and cold: it smelled faintly of burning leaves and Bermuda grass, popcorn oil wafting from the bleachers. Beneath the klieg lights, the football field was a fluorescent yellow green, surrounded by darkness. The cheers and the stomping of feet in the wooden stands carried the energies of a town of thirteen thousand, a place unto itself, thirty miles from the rust-belt city of Steelton, where fathers might work but their families seldom went.

Half the town was here – parents and grandparents and other adults and most of the kids in high school, as well as their younger brothers and sisters, in search of an excuse for milling and talking and finding each other. But for the rest, bundled in coats and wool caps and leather gloves, the Erie Conference Championship was about school pride and town history and bragging rights at Rotary meetings and on business calls and in Elks Club smokers. Their raucous screams were etched with anxiety: Lake City was losing ten to seven, and Riverwood had the ball on the fifty-yard line, with a minute forty left. It was third and five to go; the Lakers' last chance was to stop this play.

Riverwood broke the huddle, seven kids in red jerseys and white pants coming toward the line, their shadows moving with them, the quarterback and fullback and two half backs settling in behind them. Their quarterback, Jack Parham, set his hands between the center's legs as the seven bodies bent over the chalk that marked midfield. Opposing them were four bulky players in Lake City blue – the defensive line – with the linebackers behind them and then, protecting against the pass or the ball carrier who might break away from the pack, two defensive half backs and two safeties. One of the half backs was Tony Lord; the other was Sam Robb, his best friend.

Jack Parham barked his signals. At the corner of his eye, Tony saw Sam edging forward, catlike.

The center snapped the ball.

Parham stuffed it into his fullback's stomach. As the fullback hit the line, Tony saw Parham pull the ball back and tuck it under his own right arm – a quarterback sweep, meant to gain the last five yards and run precious seconds off the game clock.

Sam was already headed toward Parham as Tony called out, ‘Sweep . . .'

Parham ran alone along the right side of his line. But Sam was sprinting all out; as Parham turned down the field, he spotted Sam coming for him from ten yards away.

Trailing Sam, Tony could see Parham hesitate, wondering whether to run out of bounds. But that would stop the time clock; in the moment of indecision, Parham slowed and stood up.

Tony knew Sam Robb far too well not to know that this was a mistake.

Three feet from Parham, Sam leaped. His body was a taut line, which ended in his helmet crashing beneath Parham's face mask.

There was a sickening crack; Parham's head snapped back, and the ball flew from his hands. The crowd screamed as it flopped spinning onto the grass, five feet in front of Tony.

Tony dived. As his face hit the grass, Tony swept the ball in both arms and cradled it beneath his chest, bracing himself as three red-clad bodies hurtled into him, jarring his spine and rib cage and clawing at his arms and hands to steal the ball. Tony could smell their sweat.

The whistle blew.

Slowly, Tony stood amidst the sound of near hysteria, feeling the raw scratches on his arms, handing the ball to the referee with a calm he did not feel but felt obliged to feign. But Sam stood facing the Lake City stands, arms raised in the air, helmet in one hand so that his straight blond hair shone in the klieg lights. He did not seem to know that Jack Parham had not moved.

The crowd appeared to stand for Sam as one, their noise rising into the darkness. Only when Parham remained still, and the Riverwood coach and trainer ran toward him, did the cries die down.

Tony looked at neither the stands nor Parham but at the clock. Reading a minute nineteen, he wondered how to channel his fullback's aggression, what plays could win this game, how to keep Sam under control.

On offense, Tony was the quarterback. But the next minute, the last of their careers, belonged to them both.

They had been waiting for this moment since ninth grade, two weeks after Tony came to the public high from Holy Name – the parochial school where his Polish Catholic parents had sent him as long as they could – and the coaches had given Tony the job that Sam Robb thought was his.

At fourteen, Sam was already tall and fast, with a strong arm and an assertive manner that made most kids defer to him, a swift temper which made some a little fearful. It was clear that he expected no competition, least of all from this Catholic interloper.

For several days they drilled beside each other, barely speaking. Tony saw that Sam was the better athlete; what Tony had was quick reflexes and something he could not define but which the coach seemed to like. Among the team there was palpable tension; in the folkways of a small town with schoolboy sports at its center, everyone knew that Coach Ellis was picking not just the ninth-grade quarterback but the one who would be groomed to quarterback Lake City High.

At the last practice, George Jackson, who coached the varsity, watched from the sidelines.

Sam drove the team harder, favoring plays that showed his arm and running skills. At the end of the practice, Coach Ellis took Sam aside.

Tony was the quarterback.

In the locker room, he accepted the congratulations of some team-mates but not Sam, who seemed to have vanished, and then Tony went to the stands and sat alone, puzzling over his good fortune. He heard heavy footsteps on the wooden planks; looking up, he saw Sam Robb, climbing toward him with the arrogant carriage that was all his own.

Silent, Sam sat next to him. Tony braced himself for the suggestion that he get out of Sam's way.

‘These coaches don't know shit,' Sam said at last. ‘You're still throwing off your back foot.'

Tony turned to him. ‘How's that?'

Sam gave him a narrow look. ‘I've got a big backyard. I'll show you.'

After a moment, Tony nodded. ‘Okay.'

Quiet, they walked the few blocks to Sam's house, carrying their books and binders.

At first hand, Tony knew little about Sam's life. But in Lake City it was impossible to know nothing at all: though the Robbs belonged to the country club, where Tony's parents were never asked, Sam's father's hardware store was widely believed to be failing. So Tony was not surprised that Sam's white frame house, set in a spacious, oak-lined yard, was large but a little dingy. Nor was he surprised that the Robbs' living room mantel featured several trophies earned by Sam's brother, Joe, Lake City High's Athlete of the Year in 1962, a year before he went to Vietnam and died there. Tony knew that Sam's tall but somewhat paunchy father, an athlete gone to seed, was past president of the Lake City Athletic Booster Club. What startled Tony was Sam's mother.

Dottie Robb was a blonde whose smooth face, snub nose, and china-blue eyes were very like Sam's, though the faint ravages of her own lost youth showed in the slight sag of her chin and upper arms. She lay on the couch in a bright, incongruous sundress, and her gaze seemed blurred. Ignoring Tony, she said to Sam, ‘You promised me you'd mow the lawn today.'

Her tone was funny, slurred and demanding and a little pouty. Sam's body went stiff. ‘We were going out back, to practice.'

Dottie Robb raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh,' she answered in a somewhat derisive tone. ‘Football.'

Shifting from foot to foot, Tony noted the half-empty tumbler of what looked like whiskey on an end table near the couch. He stepped forward. ‘I'm Tony Lord.' Some cautionary instinct kept him from adding, ‘ma'am.'

She gave him a slow look, up and down. Then she rose from the couch quite smoothly and extended a graceful hand. Her skin was cool and dry, her blue eyes direct and somewhat mocking. ‘I'm Dottie. Sam's mother.'

Dottie Robb inspected him for another instant and then went to Sam, giving him a kiss on the cheek, which he neither fled nor accepted. As she hugged her son, his eyes were expressionless.

Sam was quiet as he led Tony to the backyard.

The grass was thick, the flower beds untended. Hanging from the branch of a buckeye tree was an old truck tire on a rope.

Without preface, Sam said, ‘Watch my feet,' and backed twenty feet from the tire. Sam danced on the balls of his feet; when he threw, Tony saw that his weight was on the front foot. The ball sailed through the tire.