This realization had triggered a severe attack of depression, in the course of which she not only lost all interest in her work but also came down with a bad cold. It was only when the physical symptoms appeared that Kristine did what she should have done right away, and applied for two weeks of the leave she had coming. Since the weather was good, she had decided to get away not just from work but from the city itself, away to this remote beach on the Olympic Peninsula, the very edge of the continent.
They were only staying a few days, but already the change had done her some good. Thomas, too. He was in mourning for Brent Wallis, who had finally left for Europe with his parents. For a while Thomas had been inconsolable, but in this different environment he finally seemed to have accepted the loss of his friend.
Looking up to check on him, Kristine was relieved to see that he had teamed up with an older boy. The two were busy whipping a beached log with lengths of the tough, snakelike seaweed with which the tideline was littered. The boy’s parents, a hearty couple with a red Jeep four-by-four, had gone off jogging along the beach. If only a family like that would take the Wallis house for the summer, Kristine thought wistfully. But the chances were almost nil, although she’d mentioned it to Paul Merlowitz at the lunch they’d had when she got back from the east. That had been one of the few good things that had happened to her since then.
She’d forgotten just how funny Paul could be, and how closely connected laughing and loving were in her mind. No sooner had she sat down than he’d launched into a story about some guy he knew, a state prosecutor who’d been questioning a child witness in court during a sexual abuse case. The point had been to establish whether the kid knew the meaning of the terms involved, and the prosecutor had led her gently through a verbal multiple-choice exam.
“Is this a penis?” he’d asked, pointing to his ear.
“No,” the girl had replied.
Pointing to his nose, “Is this?”
“No.”
Paul Merlowitz had broken off to order a glass of Oregon pinot noir.
“Then he points to his head, says, “Is this a penis?” And the kid nods and goes, “Yes.” Result, he not only lost the case, he’s now known around the DA’s office as Dickhead.”
While she was still laughing, Merlowitz suddenly demanded, “OK, what did the guy do wrong?”
Feeling put on the spot, Kristine shrugged. Merlowitz smiled and answered his own question.
“He broke the oldest rule there is in this business. Never ask a witness a question if you’re not sure what answer he’s going to give.”
“Maybe we should worry a little less about the rules and a little more about justice,” Kristine replied, nettled by his condescending tone. “If the jury system means anything at all, it means ordinary people working out the truth for themselves.”
Paul Merlowitz closed his eyes.
“Kristine, Talmudic scholars teach that every verse in the Torah has forty-nine different interpretations, each equally valid. Truth isn’t some commodity you buy at Fred Meyer. We’re talking about an exercise in damage limitation. The best we can hope to do is to recognize and control our ignorance.”
And to make a damn good living off of it, thought Kristine as the first course arrived. But she didn’t say anything, and the lunch had passed agreeably. When she mentioned the Wallis house, Paul-punctilious as ever-had promised to see what he could do. As she watched him noting down the details with his Mont Blanc pen, Kristine had felt a stab of pain at the contrast between his organized, methodical efficiency and her own sketchily improvised existence. Paul Merlowitz would never have wasted his time agonizing over something he couldn’t control the way she had with the Dale Watson fiasco. If he had a failure, as even he must occasionally, he would forget it and move on.
Trying to shake these gloomy thoughts, she rooted around in her beach bag for something to read. She had brought a novel along, but wasn’t making much progress with it. Eventually she found a copy of the local paper they had given her at the motel, or “Inn” as the place called itself. Besides the expense, another good reason for not staying longer was the management’s attempts to give the place what they imagined to be an upscale feel. Every item on the menu came “complemented” with something or “served on a bed” of something else. If she hadn’t had to look after Thomas, Kristine would have taken her chances at a bar in the hard-bitten logging community a few miles down the road.
The best thing about the newspaper was that it had no time for such ingratiating gentility and mock cosmopolitanism. The tone was that of the reader board she’d seen at a cafe in Hoquiam on the drive over: WE DON’T SERVE ESPRESSO. The lead stories concerned a crisis in the logging industry, the ongoing political fight about the threat to the habitat of the spotted owl, and a controversial proposal to upgrade the coast road by building a short cut through an Indian reservation. Buried on an inside page were short items off the wire about the situation in Bosnia and the Republicans’ proposals for balancing the budget.
On page 6, in a border around a huge ad for a local furniture store, she found a follow-up piece about the shoot-out among that religious cult on the San Juans. Kristine had been following this vaguely-it had been big news for a few days-but she found it hard to get interested. It sounded like one of those Waco-style things, or that guy in Guyana who got all his followers to kill themselves. You knew these people were out there, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with real life. She felt sorry for the children who’d been dragged into it, but apart from that it was like the drug cartels or the Mafia. Let them kill each other off as much as they wanted. It just saved the taxpayers money.
Kristine raised her eyes from the paper. Someone else had said that to her recently. Of course, it was Dick Rice, talking about the shoot-out in Atlanta. Well, it was cynical, no doubt, not the kind of thing you could admit to in public, but nonetheless true. Ideally criminals should be brought to trial and sentenced according to the law, but in practice the police were overextended, the jails bursting and the streets unsafe. Despite Paul Merlowitz’s Talmudic wisdom, anything that helped even the score was welcome as far as she was concerned.
She returned to the story. Two women who had escaped from the blazing building were said to be cooperating with the authorities. The police didn’t seem to be giving much away at this stage, beyond saying that the killings had been the result of a power struggle for control of the cult. One other survivor, a man, had initially been detained but then released pending further inquiries. Forensic work was continuing, but was hampered by the fact that none of the victims had as yet been identified. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been living on the island in the first place, let alone who they were.
Kristine Kjarstad folded the paper up and stuffed it back into her beach bag. It was time to forget all about stuff like this and just veg out. She should make it a rule not to read the paper or watch the news, maybe not even answer the phone once they got home. The good weather was supposed to hold up through the next week. She would just lounge around the yard, maybe do a little gardening, bask in the sun and try to forget all about the violence that her work brought her into daily contact with. She needed to put things in perspective, to get centered again. And when her vacation time was up, she would go back healed and strong, ready to tackle the cases that came her way one by one, not obsessing about any of them, no longer feeling that it was her business to solve the problems of the world singlehanded.
She checked her watch and called Thomas, who turned, eyeing her warily.
“V?r sa god!” she called, using her mother’s Norwegian expression for calling people to the table.