"And that was essentially it," Dana says.
Caroline looks back at her notes. There seems to be so much missing, and yet she's not sure what it could be. "Did you talk to Clark at some point that evening?"
"Yes," she says. "He called right after I got home. He must've heard from Eli. He was quiet. He seemed concerned. I asked him to make sure that Eli got some help, and he promised that he would."
So Clark didn't tell her that Eli was dead, or about the plan he'd set in motion between Eli and Michael.
It seems funny to her: Clark is sure of what he knows, and Dana is sure of what she knows, and yet we all live in a world that is partly imagined. We see some things, and the rest we fill in – motives and reasons as imagined as a joke shared between newlyweds on a wedding day forty years ago.
Caroline sets her pen down. "Can I ask you something personal?"
Dana hesitates. "Of course."
"Why didn't you and Clark get together?"
There is a long pause; Caroline is sure this woman must be wondering what kind of police officer would ask such a question.
"I don't know," Dana says. "Maybe it was timing. Or maybe it was just safer to imagine that we could have been good, without actually taking the risk. Sometimes I think we blew our only real chance back in high school."
"Why – what happened in high school?" Caroline asks.
There is another hesitation. "It was at the prom," Dana says. "Eli and I went together, but at the end of the night Clark and I ended up kissing in a hotel room."
"Eli was jealous," Caroline says.
"Clark and I just felt so badly that I think we stayed apart. It seems kind of ironic now, that Eli kept us apart and then later brought us together."
"Do you think that's why Eli let you go on Friday?" Caroline asks. "Because he still had feelings for you?"
"For me?" Dana seems confused. "Eli doesn't have feelings for me."
Now it's Caroline's turn to be confused. "But I thought-"
"Eli loves Clark," Dana says. "Always has."
And suddenly there it is: Eli turning Empire into a computer game to appease Clark; pushing Clark into politics to get close to him, then trying to defeat him when Clark married Susan; and the cruelty of that final note, on Eli's e-mail when he returned from taking Dana to the airport.
"Did Clark know how Eli felt?"
"I don't know," Dana says, and she chooses her words carefully. "Sometimes Clark could miss things like that. It's another reason we never got together, I think. He doesn't always see what's right in front of his face."
When they are done Caroline thanks her, and hangs up without telling her that Eli has killed himself and that Clark tried to engineer the death of her husband. By all rights she should tell Dana, but something – maybe just fatigue – prevents her from doing it.
She thinks about how many times as a police officer she's had to deliver news like that, telling parents that their children aren't coming home, telling a wife that her husband has been in a car accident. For a while she would just blurt out the bad news because she couldn't stand the look in their eyes as they tried to think of some good reason that a cop would come to visit. Then she learned to go slowly, to let the person gird himself for what was coming. But this time… hell, she just doesn't want to do it.
When she sees Spivey go to the bathroom, Caroline walks into his office and takes the four yellow legal pads. Then she returns to her desk and takes the picture of her parents. Caroline stares at it for a moment, her mother's hand on her father's chest, everything she dreamed as a little girl, and then she slides the photograph into her bag and walks out the door. Spivey has just returned from the bathroom; she hears his voice behind her. "Caroline?" But the door closes and she is outside.
It's still dark, an hour before sunrise, and the air has a February chill, but it will be warmer this morning than yesterday, and warmer, she supposes, tomorrow. She climbs in her car, starts it, turns off her radio and cell phone, drives quietly through the dark city and up the South Hill to Eli's house. She parks on the gravel between the house and the garage. The scene has been processed, the body removed; she imagines it in the slick plastic bag, cold and dark. Everyone has gone home. Police tape still blocks off the stairs to the carriage house. By tomorrow, even that will be gone.
She goes past the carriage house and walks up to the main house, shines her flashlight on it and catches dark wood and gabled eaves. The back doorknob turns in her hand and Caroline steps inside. She's not sure what she's looking for, just that there is one shot to account for. Her footfalls echo in the empty house and she shines her flashlight around – dusty hardwood and old flowery wallpaper, bookshelves and pillars. She comes into the living room and is amazed at the view through the picture window, the city lights laid out full beneath her.
On the wall behind her, then, she sees what she came for and starts to put it together: Eli in this room with Dana, nervous, paranoid, and yet still the same odd, shy kid who can't even bring himself to show his gun to the woman he's supposed to be kidnapping. As they talk he loses his nerve, sees that she is telling the truth, that there will be no money. He drives her to the airport, and when he arrives home he goes up to his apartment and checks his e-mail. And there he finds the message that Clark sent from San Jose – I lied about everything. There is no more money.
And then-
Caroline shines her flashlight above the fireplace where a bullet hole – round and jagged, unmistakable in the plaster – is framed by the square dust outline of a picture frame.
She finds the picture itself on the floor in front of the fireplace, blown off the wall by the gunshot. The glass is shattered but the frame is intact. Caroline picks it up and turns it over in her hand, expecting to find the nickel-size bullet hole through Clark's young face. But his face is still there, smiling, his arm thrown around the eighteen-year-old version of Eli Boyle, whose head is now gone, a small, ragged hole in the crisp paper of a faded photograph.
Jesus, even at the end, after all he'd done, Eli didn't have it in him to hate Clark as much as he hated himself. She can imagine him staring at the photograph on the floor, then walking back outside, his arm limp at his side, going upstairs to the carriage house, sitting at the computer and reading Clark's message over and over: I lied about everything. Is it spur of the moment, a shudder, a frenzy, a delirium, a dream? She tries to imagine it; maybe it's because she hasn't slept all weekend, but Caroline can only see it as a kind of fatigue, of giving up, the gun falling against his cheek, eyes pressed shut. Enough.
Rest now.
She is close, too close to stop now. And only one more thing to do. Caroline slides the prom photo into her bag next to the legal pads and walks toward the door. And she thinks maybe it's all we can do sometimes to save ourselves.
2
She finds him at dawn, sitting on a ledge atop the Davenport Hotel, staring out at the city. She sees him from the car as she drives up, sees his feet first, dangling from the terra-cotta molding that rests like a crown on the twelfth floor of the old brick hotel. Apparently he doesn't see her, and in Spokane on a Sunday morning there is no one else on the street to see him; no movie crowd has gathered to crane their necks to see if the loon really jumps, no firefighters stand below with nets, no priests or uniformed cops lean out the window to console, cajole, and capture. She sees only a single man, hair licked by the wind, 130 feet off the ground, staring out from the top of a building.