فصل 05 - بخش 07

5

When Ralph came down, tucking his shirt into his jeans with one hand and holding his sneakers in the other, he found his wife sitting at the kitchen table. There was no morning cup of coffee in front of her, no juice, no cereal. He asked her if she was okay.

‘No. There was a man here last night.’

He stopped where he was, one side of his shirt squared away, the other hanging down over his belt. He dropped his sneakers. ‘Say what?’

‘A man. The one who killed Frank Peterson.’

He looked around, suddenly wide awake. ‘When? What are you talking about?’

‘Last night. He’s gone now, but he had a message for you. Sit down, Ralph.’

He did, and she told him what had happened. He listened without saying a word, looking into her eyes. He saw nothing in them but absolute conviction. When she was done, he got up to check the burglar alarm console by the back door.

‘It’s armed, Jeannie. And the door’s locked. At least this one is.’

‘I know it’s armed. And they’re all locked. I checked. The windows are, too.’

‘Then how—’

‘I don’t know, but he was here.’

‘Sitting right there.’ He pointed to the archway.

‘Yes. As if he didn’t want to get too far into the light.’

‘And he was big, you say?’

‘Yes. Maybe not as big as you – I couldn’t tell his height because he was sitting down – but he had broad shoulders and lots of muscle. Like a guy who spends three hours a day in a gym. Or lifting weights in a prison yard.’

He left the table and got down on his knees where the kitchen’s wooden floor met the living room carpet. She knew what he was looking for, and knew he wouldn’t find it. She had checked this, too, and it didn’t change her mind. If you weren’t crazy, you knew the difference between dreams and reality, even when the reality was far outside the boundaries of normal life. Once she might have doubted that (as she knew Ralph was doubting now), but no more. Now she knew better.

He got up. ‘That’s a new carpet, honey. If a man had sat there, even for a short while, the feet of the chair would have left marks in the nap. There aren’t any.’

She nodded. ‘I know. But he was there.’

‘What are you saying? That he was a ghost?’

‘I don’t know what he was, but I know he was right. You have to stop. If you don’t, something bad is going to happen.’ She went to him, tilting her head up to look him full in the face. ‘Something terrible.’

He took her hands. ‘This has been a stressful time, Jeannie. For you as much as for m—’

She pulled away. ‘Don’t go there, Ralph. Don’t. He was here.’

‘For the sake of argument, say he was. I’ve been threatened before. Any cop worth his salt has been threatened.’

‘You’re not the only one being threatened!’ She had to struggle not to shout. This was like being caught in one of those ridiculous horror movies where no one believes the heroine when she says Jason or Freddy or Michael Myers has come back yet again. ‘He was in our house!’

He thought about going over it again: locked doors, locked windows, burglar alarm armed but quiet. He thought about reminding her that she had awakened this morning in her own bed, safe and sound. He could see by her face that none of those things would do any good. And an argument with his wife in her current state was the last thing he wanted.

‘Was he burned, Jeannie? Like the man I saw at the courthouse?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re sure? Because you said he was in the shadows.’

‘He leaned forward at one point, and I saw a little. I saw enough.’ She shuddered. ‘Broad forehead, shelving over his eyes. The eyes themselves were dark, maybe black, maybe brown, maybe deep blue, I couldn’t tell. His hair was short and bristly. Some gray, but most of it still black. He had a goatee. His lips were very red.’

The description struck a chime in his head, but Ralph didn’t trust the feeling; it was probably a false positive caused by her intensity. God knew he wanted to believe her. If there had been one single scrap of empirical evidence …

‘Wait a minute, his feet! He was wearing moccasins without socks and there were these red blotches all over them. I thought it was psoriasis, but I suppose it could have been burns.’

He started the coffeemaker. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Jeannie. You woke up in bed, and there’s just no sign anyone was—’

‘Once upon a time you cut open a cantaloupe and it was full of maggots,’ she said. ‘That happened, you know it did. Why can’t you believe this happened?’

‘Even if I did, I couldn’t stop. Don’t you see that?’

‘What I see is that the man sitting in our living room was right about one thing: it’s over. Frank Peterson is dead. Terry is dead. You’ll get back on active duty, and we … we can … could …’

She trailed off, because what she saw in his face made it clear that going on would be useless. It wasn’t disbelief. It was disappointment that she could possibly believe moving on was an option for him. Arresting Terry Maitland at the Estelle Barga ballfield had been the first domino, the one that started a chain reaction of violence and misery. And now he and his wife were having an argument over the man who wasn’t there. All his fault, that’s what he believed.

‘If you won’t stop,’ she said, ‘you need to start carrying your gun again. I know I’ll be carrying the little .22 you gave me three years ago. I thought it was a very stupid present at the time, but I guess you were right. Hey, maybe you were clairvoyant.’

‘Jeannie—’

‘Do you want eggs?’

‘I guess so, yeah.’ He wasn’t hungry, but if all he could do for her this morning was eat her cooking, then that was what he would do.

She got the eggs out of the fridge and spoke to him without turning around. ‘I want us to have police protection at night. It doesn’t have to be from dusk to dawn, but I want somebody making regular passes. Can you arrange that?’

Police protection against a ghost won’t do much good, he thought … but had been married too long to say. ‘I believe I can.’

‘You should tell Howie Gold and the others, too. Even if it sounds crazy.’

‘Honey—’

But she rode over him. ‘He said you or any of them. He said he’d leave your guts strewn in the desert for the buzzards.’

Ralph thought of reminding her that, while they did see the occasional buzzard wheeling in the sky (especially on garbage day), there wasn’t much in the way of desert around Flint City. That alone was suggestive that the whole encounter had been a dream, but he kept quiet on this, as well. He had no intention of winding things up again just when they seemed to be winding down.

‘I will,’ he said, and this was a promise he meant to keep. They needed to put it all out on the table. Every bit of the crazy. ‘You know we’re having the meeting at Howie Gold’s office, right? With the woman Alec Pelley hired to look into Terry’s trip to Dayton.’

‘The one who stated categorically that Terry was innocent.’

This time what Ralph thought of and didn’t say (there were oceans of unspoken conversation in long marriages, it seemed) was, Uri Geller stated categorically that he could bend spoons by concentrating on them.

‘Yes. She’s flying in. Maybe it will turn out that she’s full of shit, but she worked with a decorated ex-cop in that business of hers, and her procedure seemed sound enough, so maybe she really found something in Dayton. God knows she sounded sure of herself.’

Jeannie began to crack eggs. ‘You’d go on even if I’d come downstairs and found the burglar alarm had been shorted out, the back door was standing open, and his footprints were on the tile. You’d go on even then.’

‘Yes.’ She deserved the truth, unvarnished.

She turned to him then, the spatula held high, like a weapon. ‘May I say that I think you’re being sort of a fool?’

‘You can say anything you want, but you need to remember two things, honey. Whether Terry was innocent or guilty, I played a part in getting him killed.’

‘You—’

‘Hush,’ he said, pointing at her. ‘I’m talking, and you need to understand.’

She hushed.

‘And if he was innocent, there’s a child-killer out there, running free.’

‘I understand that, but you may be opening the door on things far beyond your ability to understand. Or mine.’

‘Supernatural things? Is that what you’re talking about? Because I can’t believe that. I will never believe that.’

‘Believe what you want,’ she said, turning back to the stove, ‘but that man was here. I saw his face, and I saw the word on his fingers. MUST. He was … dreadful. It’s the only word I can think of. Having you not believe me makes me want to cry, or throw this skillet of eggs at your head, or … I don’t know.’

He went to her and encircled her waist. ‘I believe that you believe. That much is true. And here’s a promise: if nothing comes of this meeting tonight, you’ll find me a lot more open to the idea of letting this go. I understand there are limits. Does that work?’

‘I guess it has to, at least for now. I know you made a mistake at the ballfield. I know you’re trying to atone for it. But what if you’re making a worse mistake by keeping on?’

‘Suppose it had been Derek in Figgis Park?’ he countered. ‘Would you want me to let it go then?’

She resented the question, considered it a low blow, but had no answer for it. Because if it had been Derek, she would have wanted Ralph to pursue the man who’d done it – or the thing – to the ends of the earth. And she would have been right beside him.

‘Okay. You win. But one more thing, and it’s non-negotiable.’

‘What?’

‘When you go to that meeting tonight, I’m going to be with you. And don’t give me any crap about it being police business, because we both know it’s not. Now eat your eggs.’