“Like you said, we all have our own treasures.”
She shot him a hard glance. “You weren’t just looking for treasure, you were looking for a way out... of everything.”
Same old scratchy record, he thought. Becky had never understood why he quit the Sheriffs. To an ambitious young woman dedicated to the grindstone, his jump from full-time employment into the speculative waters of salvage and treasure hunting was the very pinnacle of whimsy, reeking of adolescence and insolvency. Becky’s family had been poor — not dirt poor, but lower-middle-class poor — always on the edge of a utility shutoff, a car repo, an insurance cancellation. Becky’s first deal with herself as an adult was to keep that from happening to her. The more Jim had talked about things like his freedom and his time, the tighter-mouthed Becky had become. She had made him doubt himself, when doubt was a luxury he couldn’t afford. To Becky, doubt was something you live with every day, something you listen to with respect — the point scout of conscience. Her marriage to a hotshot Newport lawyer had lasted less than a year. Becky, he had always thought, was a more complicated animal.
“I was looking for the same thing you were,” he said finally. “You were wrong to think any different, and you still are. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never know me better than I do, Becky.”
She studied him, retreating invisibly. Her eyes said, I don’t know about that, but her words were, “I guess we’ve been through all this before.”
“I thought about you a lot in Mexico.” He placed his shaking hands on his knees and looked into the fireplace.
“I thought about you, too.”
“Did you come up with any answers?”
Becky’s hand found the back of his neck and her fingers twisted a lock of his hair. A warming surge came up through him.
“No answers. Just questions. Sometimes I think it’s all behind us, then I think about something and it feels like it never ended. It’s like looking back on a battlefield, wondering if you’ve got the balls to jump in again. Come to think of it, I did come up with one answer. The answer is, I want someone who’s going to stay, stick it out.”
Jim nodded, realizing how little the description fit him.
“Tell me about Mexico,” she said.
He did, from the promising blue-water dives to the frustration of trying to cover so much bottom alone, to the surprise of being found with marijuana that wasn’t his, stuffed conspicuously in the engine compartment of Lady Luck, to his thirty-four days of hell in the Zihuatanejo jail, then his sudden and unexplained release.
For a while, they talked about Becky’s run for mayor of Newport Beach, the practice, the Slow Growth proposition on the coming June ballot. It was a walk through. Becky sighed, took a deep drink, and stared into the black fireplace.
Weir stood, took another look at the big FLYNN FOR MAYOR banner on the far wall.
She walked him to the door, the polished hardwood floor creaking in the same places it always had. “I want to leave you with something, though. I saw Ann about five-thirty that... last day. I was walking down the bayfront, taking a break from the mailers, and she drove through the alley. She was going to work. Why did she drive it when she could walk?”
Weir had been wondering the same thing himself. He could think of only one earthly reason for Ann to get in her old car and drive the three blocks to work, then spend ten minutes looking for a parking space when it would take two minutes to just walk. She was wearing street clothes when they found her. Provocative street clothes. Had she changed at work? In the car? Somewhere else?
“Because she wasn’t going home after work,” he said.
“I wouldn’t think so.”
Into the air around Weir settled the fact that Becky had done just this thing to him once, years ago, the first official pivot point upon which their relationship began its long and anguished descent. “Did she ever say anything about another man?”
“No, that’s not something I think Ann would talk about. She had her private side — the Weir trademark. It’s possible. She was attractive, alive... oh, you know, all that kind of thing.” Becky wiped away a tear, glaring with a certain fierceness out the window toward the buildings of Newport Center on the mainland.
Weir leaned against the doorjamb. Things kept welling up inside him. There didn’t seem to be any end to them. For a blessed, frightening moment, he felt stripped of pretense. “I don’t know what to do, Becky.”
She held him for a long while, then straightened him by the shoulders and wiped some hair off his forehead. “Fight, Jim. Stay and fight it out. Be kind to your heart.”
Jim stepped onto the porch and let the screen door bounce shut behind him. It was strange to him how quickly the old antagonisms could reappear, along with the feeling that he’d love to take Becky in his arms again and press his face against the soft, fragrant plane of her neck and lose himself in her.
Walking down her steps, he had the feeling again of being isolated on the bow of some great ship, wind on his face, gliding from one dark shore to another in search of something he was yet to identify. He was tiring, even in his own visions, of being alone.
Raymond’s room at Hoag Hospital had a view of north Newport and a glimpse of the Pacific. Weir found him deeply asleep, with his hands crossed over his stomach and his mouth slightly open. He had on a light blue smock that tied in the back and a plastic wristband with his name and some numbers on it. There were flowers on the counter and bed stand, and taped to the walls a collection of get-well cards made of construction paper and crayons by his young cousins.
Weir pulled up a chair and poured Ray some water from a blue pitcher. For a while, he looked out to the dull gray horizon and the glimmering sea. As Jim watched his friend sleep, the idea hit him that Raymond might not make it through this. Ray was strong, but he wasn’t flexible. He was married to routine, laws, procedures, clear delineations of right and wrong. They kept him ordered, and Jim understood why. Weir had noticed in his training at the Sheriff Academy that, among others, a certain type was drawn to law enforcement — people who needed to belong to something, to be told who they were. Rather than slog their ways through life, trying to figure things on their own, these few needed to have the questions answered for them, needed the clear definitions set out by the uniform they would wear, the gun they would carry, the code — California Penal — by which they would live. And although Jim never considered Raymond to be one of those people, he had often wondered whether Ray didn’t adhere too closely to the job he had taken, didn’t see things in the simple black and white picture suggested by the words guilt and innocence. That was fine. The trouble is, what happens when life betrays you and the law can’t help? What happens when the foundations fall away? In the absence of belief, what rushes in to replace it? Jim said a brief prayer for Raymond, that he would have enough strength to build a new belief, and enough love to build a new strength.
He went to the nurse’s station and managed to find someone not too busy to talk. She told him what they’d already told him — that Raymond had apparently neither eaten nor slept in three days, and that he had finally just passed out. He was taking food now, and sleeping the rest of the time. None of this was uncommon to the grieving, she said. He’d be out soon. “I’m so sorry about your sister.”
Chapter 7
Jim Weir, hunched down in his jacket against the fog, walked south along the bayfront toward Ann’s house. It was just before nine o’clock. His joints felt old again and his fingers were clenched tight on the handle of Brian Dennison’s briefcase. He had not been in Ann’s house since that night, and he felt some duty to enter it, to show her it held more for him than horror, that in his memory Ann was more than her end. Besides, he wanted to be alone. He entered with an extra key that Ray had given him, and quietly closed the door.