She wove tiny threads of hope in the dark. At the last possible moment Keith would catch himself and pull back from the edge.
The phone rang. Keith’s bed squeaked in the separate bedroom down the hall. He lurched awake. Thump, his feet struck the polished floor.
Slippers slapped down the hallway past her doorway and descended the stairs. Sounds. Light switches. More footsteps.
Ten minutes later, headlights swung through her windows.
Tangled shadows from the oaks spooled across the wall above her headboard. The lights switched off. The antique door knocker on the front door rapped three times.
Downstairs, the door opened. A brief muffled conver sation carried up the stairwell. Women circle and embroider their communication. The two male voices dumped their load of subjects and verbs like bags of sand. The door slammed.
In the crash of the shutting door Caren felt the jolt of his anger gather primal force. He was cold gravel and ice, a fast-moving glacier who took the stairs two at a time. The knob on her latched door rattled. When she didn’t respond, he hit the door with his heavy shoulder.
The door splintered on its hinges. “God, you make me sick,” he hissed as he pushed through the broken door. His breath smelled meaty with whiskey and rage. He wore his old Minnesota Gophers warm-up, with untied Nikes on his feet. Shoelace tips whipped the floor.
He pulled her off the bed, pushed her down the stairs into the kitchen and shoved her in a chair.
He was madder than she’d ever seen him. Her fear was emotional, psychological, moral. She still clung to the one truism that summed him up: He was the ice man, capable of anything except losing physical control.
Keith ran a hand through his thick yellow hair, a vain gesture she had once thought attractive. Now she shuddered when he pointed to a black and white photograph that lay on the kitchen table. Her. Hands out, steadying Tom James in the Christmas tree lot. The photographer had caught the moment so it almost looked intimate. She was impressed how fast they’d had the film developed.
“So now you’re having me followed,” she said.
“Not me. Them.” The words dropped from his lips. Clink-clink-clink, like three stacked coins.
The kitchen closed in around them, a silent aviary of tile, stainless steel and polished wood where unanswered questions came to roost.
Even now, if only he’d drop his damned arrogant front, she’d reach out to him. Try to understand. But he was too brilliant. And now he’d been seduced by the dark 48 / CHUCK LOGAN
ness of his own big dumb shadow. Destiny was too kind, but not too strong, a word for him.
“I have to know. Did you change or were you always like this?” she asked.
“What? What?” Not even language, just an angry grunt.
His eyes tracked around the kitchen and everywhere they touched she could imagine the red rampage of a laser, which, like Keith himself, was precise and destructive.
She raised her hand to shade her eyes against a glare, but the cold December dawn gave no light. The room was barely lit by a fluorescent bar over the stainless steel range. The hollow glare was in her head.
The slight movement tripped a hair trigger in him. His left hand whipped out-his hard cop’s hand with his shoulder behind it like a leg of beef-and the heel of his open hand caught her alongside the right cheekbone and sent her sprawling from her chair onto the hardwood floor.
Caren Angland was forty-one years old and she hadn’t been struck in the face since grade school. Lights went tilt in her head. Not just pain. Something fundamental broke.
“Low impulse control,” she said, a stand-up girl through the sting of tears and a bloody nose. During their early years, when he was a ball of fire working the streets, he’d regaled her with stories about how blunt and obtuse the “assholes”
were. How they’d go from zero to sixty on the stupid accel-erator at the drop of an insult because they had low impulse control.
He shook the picture at her and rolled his eyes. “Tom James? He’s an idiot. They used to call him One Call James at the courthouse. He’ll print anything.”
Caren’s smile. White teeth outlined in blood: “He asked me if the FBI was investigating you?” Her eyes focused through a knotted veil of pain and gave him such a look he should die right there.
“That little bastard,” muttered Keith, his voice vacant, trapped, fatal.
You dumb shit, she thought. Looking Medusa in the eye and you don’t know it. You’re stone. You’re dead. Drop.
How fickle the passion was that once wore the decorous chains of loyalty and commitment, and yes, love and sacrifice and everything they put in vows to make them stick. How agile it turned a somersault and bounced up spitting poison.
He ignored her and stalked from the room, slapping the picture against his thigh.
How one-pointed and inelegant was hate-now that she held it, unsheathed, in her hand. “You’re going down, fucker!” she screamed after him, through the open front door, into the night.
Mad. When the growl of his car had faded down the road, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, applied pressure and then packed tissue in her right nostril. Swelling and discoloration had already blurred the contour of her right cheek. She’d have a raccoon eye before lunchtime.
The battered face, by itself, was enough to cost him his job.
Stay mad. While she waited for the slight bleeding to staunch, she opened her prescription pills and methodically dropped the blue caplets one by one into the aquatinted toilet water.
The psychiatrist who prescribed the antidepressants was a nice St. Paul liberal with Inuit stone sculptures on her desk.
She believed in small dark corners in your past, and she’d kept probing for one in Caren’s. Caren had played along, looking for that faraway dark little corner when really she was stuck all alone in the echoing rooms of this big, pitch black house with Keith, who was playing Faust.
Dr. Ruth Nelson would have probably liked the Faust reference. She might have thought it an apt metaphor for the concessions her clients made to keep up in the 1990s. It would have been easier and cheaper if Caren had just told her, “Look, I was bad.”
Dr. Ruth believed in “disorders”; certainly she didn’t believe in evil. Or that the devil could sit in Caren’s basement in the form of Paulie Kagin and Tony Sporta from Chicago.
Caren tugged at her wedding ring. Wanting it off. Swollen knuckles, water retention; it stayed. She flushed the toilet, turned and trekked through the blue rooms, up the stairs, stepped over the broken door into her bedroom and stripped off the now blood-dotted T-shirt she’d worn to bed last night.
She pulled on jeans, a lined denim jacket. She resolved to keep it simple.
She had to warn Tom James, the reporter. She had to go to Phil Broker and tell the truth. Get his advice about what to do next.
Take her lumps.
But Phil would be standoffish. Keith and Phil disliked each other, but they had history, all the way back to that bad night on St. Alban.
She needed an intermediary. And this brought her back to Tom James. They could help each other. She could get him out of harm’s way and whisk him with her up north.
He could make the approach to Phil and explain it all. She could give James the information. The story.
Find a way to make it his story. That way, she could stay out of the loop. That might work. A standing wave of dread rose up and mocked her. She ground her knuckles into her swollen face to freshen the pain. Pain revived anger and anger conquered fear.