Becky sighed, shook her head, and sat back.
Virginia asked about Raymond. She had already pieced most of it together herself from what Cantrell and Joseph had told her. “He listened to her phone calls, and read her mail and journal. The baby wasn’t his, and he knew it,” said Jim.
Joseph looked down at the floor. Again, the great yawning absence of Ann had visited them — Ann, the very center of all this — Ann, departed like a guest of honor summoned to a more important engagement.
“What about your... suicide?” Becky asked.
Joseph explained that Cantrell’s plan was to stage the suicide, close the case, let him disappear, and live with the fact that Ann’s killer would remain free.
Weir couldn’t figure it, until he remembered the old woman who’d spotted Joseph’s car down by the Back Bay the night she couldn’t sleep. “You knew it was Raymond, all along. You followed them down there that night. You’d been waiting around Cantrell’s to see her, the same way Raymond was waiting to get her into the patrol car.”
For a moment, Joseph’s eyes traced a pattern in the air, as if tracking an invisible fly. He looked down, pressed his fingers against his temples, then addressed his feet. “I didn’t think I could go to the police and tell them what I knew. And, well... the next day, when I read that Ann had died — I couldn’t really remember what I’d done after I left the Back Bay. I... sometimes things aren’t clear. I thought I should talk to Mr. Can... well, my father.”
And, as Jim foresaw even as Joseph told it, Cantrell had been unwilling to go to the police for the scandal his affair with Ann would cause — not to mention his fatherhood of an illegitimate child, a committed sex offender. Cantrell’s star witness was the one he couldn’t call. Weir could hardly believe, though, that Cantrell was desperate enough to kill one young man and try to pass his body off as that of Horton Goins.
“No,” said Joseph. “Dale arranged the body. He was a transient from a county morgue out in some desert town. No family, or friends. He was my size. Mr. Cantrell — I mean, my father — said that we could depend on Chief Dennison to influence the coroner’s findings. The handwriting was mine. I wrote the confession and signed it. I meant it, but not the way it was taken.”
Weir asked Joseph what was going to happen to him once he was officially dead.
“Montana,” said Joseph. “He has property there, where I could start over with a new name and be a different person. I agreed to confess to Ann — it was my father I was saving from suspicion. And the more I thought about a new life as someone else, the better it sounded. He was going to come visit often. We were going to fish and hunt and ride horses. I think he likes me.”
Jim let the statement sink in, fully realizing for the first time that this young man in front of him had come two thousand miles, only to lose the mother he had never known. The strange part was that Joseph’s expression now told him without question that he had been through things even more terrible than this.
Joseph looked at him directly. His eyes were windows to inner landscapes of immeasurable damage. Turning away, he seemed to know this.
Virginia stood and began unbuttoning her windbreaker. The shadows still hadn’t left her face. “My silence has been a lie. But I believed — I always believed — I was doing right.”
“Is that an apology or an excuse?” Jim asked.
“Both, son.”
“If you were a little weaker, you’d be pathetic.”
“What am I now?”
“Relentless. That’s all I see.”
She looked at him, then turned and climbed the stairs.
Weir lay on his bed. Becky had gone home, saying she felt spent and unclean. Jim wondered again as he lay there whether Becky’s statement had more to do with the blood on her hands earlier that day or the crushed expression on her face at the Wrecking Ball as she’d learned that George Percy was refusing to move forward against Cantrell. It was an expression confessing to Jim that she had offered more of herself to sway Percy than she could forgive, an expression that told him she had been bought for promises, then sold an hour or two later for nearly nothing. Becky, true to her spirit, had tried to dance it all away.
It was still before midnight. Jim could see a faint light coming from Ann’s old room, where Joseph was supposed to be sleeping. He rose from the bed, went to Joseph’s door, and knocked.
Joseph said to come in.
Weir stepped inside and shut the door quietly. Joseph was sitting in bed, fully clothed, with a leather-bound journal open on his lap. He was examining his fingers, which in the lamplight looked, to Jim, unremarkable. His electronic pillbox was on the nightstand beside him. His eyes shifted down, left, then right, as if Weir were a blinding light. He raised his knees. “I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was almost a whisper.
“I wanted to look at you.”
Joseph colored deeply, still looking down. He waited. Jim had the feeling that Joseph was used to waiting.
“Is that her journal?”
He nodded, glanced quickly at Jim, then down again. “I took it from her boat. I watched her rowing out there some nights when she came home from work. She wrote by candlelight. It was a beautiful light.”
Weir still hadn’t seen what he was looking for. “Read me something,” he said.
Joseph colored again, a tiny smile brushing across his face. “There’s a part in here that makes me feel better when I read it. It isn’t for me, but I take it that way. It’s the last thing she wrote.”
“Read it to me.”
Joseph gathered himself, centered the book before him, and quietly cleared his throat. “May fifteenth,” he said. “The night she died.”
“ ‘I have felt a sudden calmness come over me, maybe it’s the eye of the tornado passing over. In these last few hours, I’ve been sitting here on my boat, in my room, surrounded by the things that please me, and I’ve gotten a look down on myself from above, like God might have if he was watching. I love this time, these early evenings after Ray is gone and I have a few hours before work. And what I see is a life spent in earnest, in the relatively honest pursuit of what is good and fair and loving. I’ve made my mistakes. But when I look down on myself, I don’t see a tangled web of betrayal and tragic surprise; I don’t see a distant husband, a lover to whom I know I must say goodbye; I don’t see a crazy, mixed-up woman huddled on an old boat out in the middle of some unimportant little harbor on the edge of the land. What I see is someone who gave love her best shot, who accepted what cards she was dealt without bitterness or envy, who always tried to keep an eye out for the reality of the world around her and not just on the little whirling storm she called her life. I see someone deserving of forgiveness. At any rate, I am settled.’ ”
It was then that Weir saw just a hint of it, in Joseph’s jawline — the form and shadow of Ann.
“ ‘Tonight I am going to say my formal goodbye to David Cantrell, a man to whom I’ve been drawn, irresistibly, since I was little more than a girl. Now I see there was a reason for that — the reason is what I carry inside me. I believe in destiny. David begged me to come by one last time, and I will. I know it is not a goodbye in any final sense. He is your father, Dear One, and to him I will be forever connected, forever indebted. Have we loved? Yes. You were conceived in love. So will I crawl back to Raymond like a dog, curling and repentent? Never. I will walk on my own two feet back to him, one in front of the other, with my head held not high but level, and my eyes open to all the things that my life with him has given me, and all the things to come. I have a script to follow now, a deception to complete. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe my child won’t have enough of David Cantrell’s dark good looks, and Raymond will leave me when he realizes the truth. Then again, maybe he’ll see me in our child and that will be enough. But I will return to Raymond in spirit and body, offer myself to him again as a woman and a friend and a wife and a mother. What else can I do? I hope that I can find him again, waiting for me at the end of the great distance he has gone.’ ”