He was smiling, and he snorted a small laugh. A policeman’s satisfaction in once again learning that the world occasionally works the way it is supposed to.
I was less sure I would have reached that same conclusion.
45
Hope drove north, through the tollbooths at the border to Maine, heading toward a spot near the shoreline she remembered from a summer vacation, many years earlier, shortly after she and Sally had first fallen in love. They had taken the young Ashley there on their first trip together. It was a wild spot, where an overgrown park of dark trees and tangled underbrush went straight to the water’s edge, and the rocky shoreline caught the breakers that rolled in from the Atlantic, sending sprays of salt water into the air. In the summer it was magical, seals playing against the rocks, a dozen different species of seabirds crying against the onshore breezes. Now, she thought, it would be a lonely and abandoned spot, and it was the only place that she could think of that would be quiet enough for her to figure out what exactly she was to do.
She tucked her elbow down, keeping pressure on the wound in her side. This helped stymie the flow of blood, and the injury itself had slid into a constant throbbing pain. On more than one moment, she thought she was going to pass out, but then, as the miles slid beneath the wheels of the car, she had gathered some strength and, keeping her teeth clenched against the hurt, believed she could tough out the entire trip.
She tried to imagine what had taken place within her. She pictured different organs-stomach, spleen, liver, intestines-and like playing a child’s game guessed which ones had been sliced and creased by the knife blade.
The countryside seemed darker even than the night that enveloped her. Great stands of black pines, like witnesses by the side of the road, seemed to be watching her progress. When she exited the turnpike, she gasped with a sudden pain as she gently turned the wheel, steering the car down the ramp, then twisting through back roads that reminded her of her childhood home. She tried to measure her breathing, telling herself to take cautious pulls of the night air.
She let herself imagine that she was really on the road to the house where she had grown up. She could picture her mother years earlier, hair up, in the garden, wrangling with the flowers, while her father was in the back on the field he’d built for her, trying to juggle a soccer ball in the air. She could hear his voice calling for her to put on her cleats and come out and play. He sounded strong, not at all as he was later, in the hospital being stalked by disease.
I’ll be right there, she thought.
Small brown signs every few miles pointed her in the direction of the park, and now she could smell a little salt in the air. She remembered a hidden parking lot, which she knew would be empty on a cold November night. A single, yardwide pathway thickly padded with pine needles led through the stands of trees and brush, past a picnic area, then another three-quarters of a mile to the ocean. She lifted her eyes and saw the full moon. She knew that she might need its meager light. Hunter’s moon, she thought. It was rimmed with yellow, and she imagined that the first snows and ice weren’t far off. She doubted anyone else would come along; she did not know what she would say if someone did. She did not have the energy left to lie even to the most mildly inquisitive policeman or park ranger.
Hope saw another sign, a blue background with a large white H in the middle.
This was an unfair temptation, she thought. She had not remembered that the park was only a couple of miles from a hospital.
For a moment, she envisioned turning in that direction. There would be a large swath of bright light, and a sign in neon red spelling out EMERGENCY ENTRANCE. Probably an ambulance or two parked nearby, on a circular entry. Right inside there would be a nurse, behind a desk, doing triage.
She imagined the nurse: a sturdy, middle-aged woman, unfazed by blood or danger. She would take one glance at the wound in Hope’s side, and the next thing Hope would be aware of would be the fluorescent lights of the exam room, and the murmured voices of a physician and nurses as they bent over her trying to save her life.
Who did this to you? someone would ask. They would have a notepad handy to record her words.
I did it to myself.
No, really, who did it? The police are on their way, and they will want to know. Tell us now.
I can’t say.
We have questions. We need answers. Why are you here? Why are you so far from your home? What have you been doing this night?
I won’t say.
That’s not the same as you can’t say. We are suspicious. We have doubts. If you live through this night, we will have many more questions.
I won’t answer.
Yes, you will. Sooner or later, you will. And tell us, why is there someone else’s blood on your coveralls? How did that get there?
Hope gritted her teeth and kept driving.
Sally pulled her car into almost the same spot opposite Michael O’Connell’s apartment that she had occupied earlier that evening. The street was empty, save for the cars parked up and down the block. It was urban dark, where the night blackness tried to creep into corners, join shadows together, fight against all the ambient light that crept out from more vibrant parts of the city.
She looked down first at her wristwatch, then at the stopwatch, which was keeping a running time for the entire day. She breathed in slowly. Time was moving far too slowly.
Sally stared up at the façade of Michael O’Connell’s building. His apartment windows remained dark.
Gazing up and down the street, Sally could feel heat building within her. How close was he? Two minutes? Twenty minutes? Was he even heading this direction at all?
She shook her head. Proper planning, she told herself, would have designated someone to follow him out of his father’s home, so that every step he took that day was monitored. She bit down on her lip. But doing that would have endangered them all, for it would have put one of them in closer proximity to O’Connell than she wanted. That was why she had created the gap-between his exit and his return. But Scott had been dangerously slow at returning the weapon, and now she had no real grasp on where O’Connell might be. Did the air seep from his tire as Scott had promised it would? Had he been sufficiently delayed? Maybes screamed at her like a dissonant symphony of out-of-tune instruments.