When Chief Sutter opened his eyes again, he felt better. He didn’t feel any richer, but he definitely felt better.
“Good man, Chief. When you talk, God listens.” Trey sipped his coffee in some seeming assurance. “He listens to me, I can tell ya that. I ain’t braggin’, but let me show ya something.” He slipped out his wallet and withdrew two slips of paper. “Now, I make less than you, and if anything my wife, Marcy, eats even more than your wife, but look at this.”
He passed the slips of paper to Sutter.
Holy . . . shit! They were bank balance receipts. “Trey, I say you sure do manage your money proper. Jiminy Christmas.” Trey had five grand in his checking and eight in his savings.
Trey took back the papers, nodding. “It’s ’cos God listens when I talk to him. God looks at me and ya know what He sees? He sees a man who’s had plenty of chances to go astray but chose not to. He sees a cop, same as He sees you. He sees a man bustin’ his ass to uphold the law and maintain peace and decency. So God don’t leave a man like that out to dry. Instead, He helps him out every so often. Just like He’s gonna help you.″
Sutter reflected on the words. He remembered Trey back in his younger days, before marriage, before typical social and domestic responsibilities had come into his life. The man had been an absolute nutcase, a hard-drinkin’, hard-partyin’ character. Gals would follow that boy down the street, Sutter thought. Spent mos a’ his money on bar-hoppin’, hot rods, and women. . . . But life had changed Sgt. William Trey—a change for the good. He’d used the force of his will to change himself into a good man, and now good things were befalling him.
Would the same good things befall Sutter?
He needed some good things now.
It was almost as if Trey were reading his mind when he said, “Good things, Chief.”
“What’s that?”
“Good things happen to men who put their trust in God.”
Sutter stared out the window. What Trey was telling him just made him feel better and better. He shook his head. “Trey, I known you for goin’ on thirty years, and in all that time I had no idea you had so much religion in ya.”
“Ain’t no secret; ain’t no big deal.” Trey calmly sipped more coffee. “Live by God’s laws, and He will grant blessings upon you.” But in that same moment, Trey’s eyes shot wide out the window at a figure at the side of the road. It was a woman, a woman flagging them down, and that was when the very God-fearing Sergeant Trey exclaimed, “Holy sufferin’ shit, Chief! Would you get a load of the tits on that piece of ass?”
(I)
Patricia, of course, had forgotten. It had been five years, hadn’t it?
Five years since her return to Agan’s Point.
The Cadillac cruised silently, comfortingly, but as the city had faded behind her, and the interstate highways had eventually given over to long, winding, and very rural county roads, the words began to haunt her:
Oh, my God, girl. How could you let something like that happen?
They were her father’s words, less than a week after her sixteenth birthday. . . .
The look in his eye, and the words he’d chosen. Like I let it happen, she thought now in an overwhelming mental darkness. Like I wanted it to happen . . .
She’d never been more hurt in her life.
She’d felt good, hadn’t she? Her wonderful, if selfish, love session with Byron last night might have had something to do with it, but when she pulled away from the condo, knowing full well where she was going, she felt good, and that was something she didn’t expect. Watching the sun bloom as she drove, opening the Cadillac up on Interstate 95, and moving forward . . . It seemed to clear her head of all the city’s stresses and the endless intricacies of work. Indeed, Patricia felt clean, new; she felt purged. Until . . .
Her mood began to wilt in increments. She knew what she was doing. Putting it off. But I can’t put it off. All I can do is dawdle, procrastinate. She wound up driving through the historic district in Richmond, and blowing an hour looking for a place to have breakfast. Same thing through Norfolk, for lunch. She was turning the three-hour drive into an all-day journey, as if getting to Agan′s Point later would ease some of her distress. But she knew it wouldn’t. I’m torturing myself, she thought.
Hours later familiar road signs began to pop up, signals that she wasn′t so much driving away from her exhausting lifestyle in Washington, but instead driving to something much more stressful. The far less traveled Route 10 seemed to throw the signs in her face as she raced past, towns with names like Benn’s Church, Rescue, and Chuckatuck. More and more of her frame of mind began to melt. Then a sign flashed by:
DISMAL SWAMP—10 MILES.
And more signs, with stranger names:
LUNTVILLE—6 MILES.
CRICK CITY—11 MILES.
MOYOCK—30 MILES.
Oh, God, Patricia thought.
She was beginning to feel sick, and with the sickness came a resurfacing. She hadn’t thought of the psychologist in a long time, a keen, incisive bald man named Dr. Sallee. And she’d seen him only once, just after her return from her last trip to Agan’s Point five years ago, when her despair seemed insurmountable.
“We bury traumas,” he’d told her. “In a variety of different ways, but the effect remains the same. Some people deal with their traumas by confronting them immediately, and then forgetting about them, while others deal best by forgetting about them first and then never confronting them because there’s no apparent need. That’s what you’re doing, Patricia, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no apparent need because you relocated yourself from the premises of the trauma.”
The premises of the trauma. She thought over the odd choice of words. But he’d been right. I moved away as fast as I could. . . .
“What happened to you will always be there,” he continued, fingering a paperweight shaped like a blue pill that read STELAZINE. “I’m a behavioralist psychologist; I’m not so liberal in my manner of interpreting human psychology. Other professionals would tell you that it’s unhealthy to leave your traumas because they remain in your psyche whether you know it or not. That’s not true with regard to how we must function in our lives, in our society, and in the world. If not living in Agan’s Point restores you to that kind of functionality, then you’ve done the right thing. Your trauma becomes neutered, ineffectual—it becomes a thing that can’t affect you anymore. It no longer has any bearing on your life, and never will . . . unless you let it. You don’t need a regimen of antidepressant drugs and costly psychotherapy to deal with your trauma; all you need is to be away from the area of the occurrence. Your life right now is validation. You’re a fabulously successful attorney enjoying a fulfilling career and a wonderful marriage. Am I right?”
Patricia splayed her hands on the couch. “Yes.”
“You aren’t traumatized by what happened to you when you were sixteen, are you? You aren’t a psychological basket case; this event in your past hasn’t ruined you. You can’t tell me that this twenty-five-year-old tragedy still rears its head and exerts a negative force in your existence, can you? Can you tell me that?”