“David,” I said quietly. “Your secret will die with me.”
Raymond found me in the bathroom this morning, sitting on the toilet seat, crying. His eyes looked down on me, those cutting dark blades, and I almost told him everything. Almost. But I diverted him again. I played into the one thing I can always get his attention with — and told him I was crushed for the millionth time that I couldn’t have his child.
Then it happened, what I had been craving for so long, what I needed to accomplish my plan. He reached down, pulled me up from the toilet, and kissed the tears off my miserable, slobbering face. He led me into our cold little bedroom and put me under the covers and climbed in naked beside me and covered with his tender mouth every inch of my body and made love to me. And when I looked up at him, Raymond — my husband, my brother, my man — he was crying, too, big tears spilling down onto my face, and I drank them into me along with everything else he had.
And when it was over, he said to me Ann, can we start again? Can we please start it all over and love each other like we used to? It’s been so long and I want you so much and there’s nothing in the world I love like you.
It is amazing how clear the answers can be, once the questions are put. From the very beginning of this whole thing, in my mind at least, there was never any doubt about what I wanted from Raymond, where I hoped that we would someday arrive.
“Please,” I told him. “Please let’s do that.”
I have never in my life uttered a sentence that I meant more, or that seemed more filled with the glorious scent of hope.
I will wait two weeks before I do another pregnancy test. We will run it together, so my surprise will be his surprise. We will have a party to announce the unannounceable!
Joseph marked his place and slid the journal under the bed. Outside, the night was at its tightest, the deep weave of darkness and silence at 3:00 A.M.
It’s amazing, he thought, that Ann didn’t see what was going to happen. Even I can tell, just from reading it.
Chapter 27
By the false light of dawn, Jim pulled his truck into Virginia’s garage and wearily climbed out. He had dropped Ray off at the station and Kearns at Lucinda’s. His body was aching; his thoughts were racing to no particular destination. They had spent four hours cruising the peninsula, the island, the mainland, hoping for a sight of Horton Goins, but the man had disappeared like smoke.
Jim let himself in through the front door and immediately sensed the emptiness of the big house. Mom will be at the Locker, he thought, getting ready for the breakfast crowd.
But the sign on the window of Poon’s Locker read CLOSED FOR THE DAY. Weir noted his mother’s hurried handwriting, looked through the smoked glass to the lifeless interior — chairs still up on the tables, salt and pepper shakers on a tray for refilling, the grill cleaned and waiting.
Back in the house, he found her note to him on the kitchen table: “Be back in a day or so. Patriots purloined this tape from the developers and I want you to view it and watch carefully. See if you can find why they decided to reshoot. Love, Mom.”
It was a standard videocassette. The label on top said “GROW, DON’T SLOW! spot for June 1–5.” Jim groaned, took it into the living room, slipped it into the machine, and hit Play.
C. David Cantrell — slender, groomed, wearing a white shirt, a striped tie, and an open cardigan sweater — stood atop an overpass on the San Diego Freeway. Behind him, a river of cars was stopped in both directions for as far as the eye could see. Cantrell, arms crossed in friendly adamance, said that this was the daily scene in coastal Orange County now, thanks to unexpected growth, a booming economy, a lifestyle coveted by the nation. Taxes paid for this highway, he said, and all the new people will be paying millions more for the privilege of living here. The road — like so many others — was earmarked for improvement. Which would happen on schedule, if Prop A wasn’t passed. Proposition A, he said, would do more to aggravate the traffic mess in Orange County than all the development put together: No new building meant no new business, no new taxes, no solutions to this kind of mess. Suddenly, the picture was changed to the same overpass at a different time of day — 6:00 A.M. — Weir guessed. Traffic was light, moving along behind Cantrell. He uncrossed his arms and put his hands on the railing, then leaned forward. Don’t be suckered, he said, vote no on Prop A. Grow, don’t slow. Leave Orange County’s problems to the experts, not the elite, not the bureaucracy that got us into all this. Cantrell smiled as the cars whisked by behind him. A voice-over said this ad was paid for by the Citizens for Sensible Traffic Solutions. The picture went to show and static.
Weir sighed, wondering when his mother would quit trying to convert him. She seemed too eager for life to conform to her dire predictions. Where was she now, out on the bay again, taking samples?
...view it and watch carefully.
He rewound it and played it again. So what? Big lies for gullible people. It was a story as old as the county itself: the land of dreams sold to too many dreamers. Maybe the committee was going to retape it because Cantrell’s hair was messed by the breeze.
Jim was sitting on the seawall with a cup of coffee in his lap when a Newport Beach cop car pulled into the alley behind him and stopped.
Raymond, uniformed and fresh for the day shift, stepped out and nodded to him. He slipped his stick into his belt and walked over to the wall.
“Any Goins?” Jim asked.
“We’re on the train stations and airport. OCTD has got the photos and a description. A lady down by Lucinda’s said her son’s bike was stolen off the porch sometime last night. My guess is that Goins used it.”
Raymond sat down next to Jim and slipped on his shades. “Look at all those animals. It’s a shame.”
Weir watched as a cormorant sloshed to shore, its dead webbed feet folded shut like little umbrellas. “How’s it feel to be back on the job?”
Raymond didn’t answer for a while. His radio squawked and he turned the volume up for a moment to listen, then back down. “It feels okay.”
“But?”
Raymond shrugged. “How about taking a little drive with one of Newport’s finest?”
Jim drained off his coffee and tossed the cup in a trash bin. “Just like the old days, Ray.”
“Well, we keep saying that, but it sure doesn’t seem true.”
They cruised down Balboa toward the Wedge, past the commercial district and then into the neighborhoods of the rich. Raymond was silent, locked behind his shades in that calm but alert way that he’d always had. For a moment, Weir was back ten years to his days on the Sheriff’s with Ray; they were both still shy of thirty, both still filled with eagerness and the belief that the only direction their lives could go was up. Youth, thought Weir, what a blessed thing.
Raymond glanced over at him. “Like I said, the idea was to get back on patrol and maybe just get too busy to think about things.”
“That doesn’t really sound like you, Ray.”
“Yeah, well lift up the ticket log there on the seat and take the bottom stack of papers out.”
Weir picked up Raymond’s log and slid out what was under it. The pile came apart in his hand like a new deck of cards: Horton Goins’s photographs of Ann. So, he thought, Raymond has spent his first two hours of patrol working on the murder. Was there ever any doubt that he would?
“I don’t blame you,” said Weir.
“Wouldn’t do you any good to, Jim. Check the top picture — tell me what it implies.”