Before He Finds Her (22 page)

“Have at it,” the man said, and went off to the showers.

It was a day for hearing hard truths. And this scholar/trucker/whoever-he-was—he was right: The tides weren’t the half of it. The book wasn’t long, under two hundred pages, but each paragraph was jammed with ideas, with long sentences in a small typeface. From the introduction alone, Ramsey knew that he wouldn’t be able to understand most of the science, and the charts were largely impenetrable, but the broader picture nonetheless soon began to emerge: There had never been a superconjunction as pure and complete as the one coming in September, and it was going to affect more than just the oceans. The tectonic plates, Mother Nature’s concrete slabs lying beneath the continents, were going to buckle and snap and cause unprecedented numbers of earthquakes and tidal waves. But most important, the gravitational effect of all those lined-up planets would be cataclysmic. As in, for a brief period—several hours, maybe as long as half a day—there would barely be any gravity. As in, kiss your ass good-bye.

There was far more to
The Orbital Axis
than Ramsey could absorb in thirty minutes. So when a half hour came and went, then thirty-five minutes, and the man hadn’t returned from his shower, Ramsey took his absence as a sign. He got up from the table with the book and returned to his truck. He didn’t feel much like driving and went only as far as the next rest area, where he used the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Back in the cab, he stripped down to his boxer shorts, and though it wasn’t even 8 p.m. he got into bed. He examined the book as if it were an exotic rock or seashell, turning it over in his hands, touching the surfaces. He opened the book and thumbed through it. Pages were dog-eared, much was underlined, and there were scribbles in the margins. He turned back to the introduction and began to read, unhurried this time, doing his best to understand, trying to free his mind of everything but the words and the sentences in front of him, working to be the best unschooled student that he could be.

Whenever his mind started drifting back to Allie, to the affair that could easily gut him like a fish, he forced his attention back to the book, the book. And the more he read—there went 11 p.m, there went midnight—the more relieved he felt by the notion that he, Ramsey Miller, wouldn’t have to do one damn thing about his awful predicament. On the night of September 22, in a little under three months, God would take his own tools out of the garage, sharpen them up, and set everything right.

Only, not God. The cosmos. The universe itself.

The apologies came a day later. So easy. She apologized for her words, he for leaving in a huff. They talked twice more that week, quick conversations from rest stops, and over the course of several days, his anger evaporated into the ether, just as the trees and rivers and beasts would all do in three months’ time. After the trip’s last drop-off, he deadheaded back to the Boaters World lot feeling purified, exchanged the truck for his Volkswagen, and drove home. Kissed his wife, his daughter.

“How was your week?” he asked Allie that night over dinner.

Her week was fine.

“Eventful?” he asked.

No, she said, not especially. How was his week?

“Remarkable,” he said, and took a bite of chicken. Sipped his beer. “I’ll tell you about it after Meg goes to bed.” And he did. He sat her down and told her about meeting up with the other trucker and reading his book and what it all added up to. He didn’t tell her that the book was still in his truck, didn’t want her reading it, taking on the role of debunker. He wasn’t looking for a debate or a confrontation. He told her because she was his wife. And despite what she’d done to him, to them, she had the right to know that her time on this planet was more limited than she might think. She could do whatever she wanted with the information. As for him, he was thinking of selling his truck. Why did he need it anymore? he asked her. What was the purpose of working to earn money? Also (and this he didn’t mention), Ramsey’s presence at home should be enough to keep Magruder’s hands off his wife.

Maybe for the same reason, Allie told him he ought to keep working. Then she suggested he see a shrink.

“I ain’t crazy, honey,” Ramsey said, and yawned. “What I am is dog tired.” He’d logged 800 miles that day.

So they went to bed with the matter unresolved, and to Ramsey’s surprise the resolution happened of its own accord. Hours of sleeplessness, despite his exhaustion, led to brief spells of frantic, sweaty dreams of cars and houses, trees, entire forests hurling upward toward the sky. By sunrise, the road was already pulling him back, the tug so strong it startled him. Since Meg’s birth, he was usually home for sixty hours between hauls, but he found himself making up some story about an urgent delivery, an important customer, and he was packing hastily and kissing his family and racing back to Boaters World. Shifting that diesel engine into gear was like surfacing from the bottom of a pool after holding your breath ten seconds too long.

He drove more and more, missing Allie and Meg with every mile—but he’d been a trucker enough years now that he’d long since massaged that familiar ache into a softer longing. Anyway, it felt good to long for them, because longing was the opposite of rage.

Before long, he was rarely driving fewer than seventeen hours in a twenty-four-hour period. The law called what he was doing an “egregious violation,” but nothing about it felt egregious. He cut back his coffee intake to almost nothing. He’d always slept best in his cab, but his sleep now—each night nothing more than an extended nap—was the most restful and dreamless of his life. He was rarely back in Jersey for more than a day, day and a half, before leaving the house again for Boaters World and his pre-trip inspection. And rarely out of arm’s reach was the beat-up copy of
The Orbital Axis
, his reassurance that he wouldn’t have to deal with Allie’s affair—because he didn’t trust himself to deal with it well.

He read the book cover to cover several more times, adding his own notes in the margins, his own underlining. Without trying, he memorized passages. He developed a habit of looking up at the sky, especially on remote stretches late at night when everything was dark and star-filled. And as the days turned into weeks and June became July and then August, Ramsey could swear he felt an electrical charge in the air all the time, as if a thunderstorm were always imminent, even when there were no clouds. And yet he knew that the charge wasn’t electrical at all, but rather the tug of galactic forces beginning to nudge everything into place, including him.

In Phoenix on the morning of September 17, he was about ready to start home again with his load of bicycles bound for Toys“R”Us when he saw, hanging in the warehouse bathroom, a framed photograph of the Grand Canyon. Like every photo he’d ever seen of it since being a boy, it didn’t even look like Earth.

“How far am I from the Grand Canyon?” he asked the dock supervisor when she handed him the forms to sign.

She squinted at him as if she couldn’t fathom a single reason to visit that pile of rocks. “Maybe three hours?”

It would set him back at least half a day, and he was already on a tight schedule. But it was now or never, and three hours didn’t seem so far to drive. New Jersey didn’t seem so far.

Hell, on the energy currently pumping through his veins, he could easily drive to Mars and back.

Part 3

13

September 28, 2006

Melanie sat beside Arthur Goodale in his bed in the critical care unit of Monmouth Regional Hospital and waited for his laughter to subside. It was a deep laugh that revealed a mouth full of yellow smoker’s teeth and finished with a cough that sent him grasping for the cup of water bedside.

Melanie had just told him, reluctantly, about her disastrous meeting the previous afternoon with David Magruder.

“You, my young friend,” he said, when the coughing had subsided, “are a truly awful interviewer.”

“It was bad,” Melanie said. She didn’t like being amusing to him.

“Bad?” Another laugh. “Your
second
question
was about Ramsey Miller?”

“He said he didn’t want to be bothered with the routine stuff.”

“Sure, but...” He shook his head. “Listen, moxie is one thing, but oh, boy. Your interviewing technique...”

“I get it,” she said. “I’m horrible at this, and I blew our only chance.”

“Now, wait a minute—who said it was our only chance?” He looked out the window. Still nothing but a brick wall. “No, it probably was.” He sighed. “Well, your options were limited from the start. You could probably try tracking down Eric Pace.”

“I think I know that name,” she said. Probably from one of the news articles she’d read online.

“He was a close friend of Ramsey’s,” Arthur said. Melanie must have given him a terrified look, because he smiled. “Relax—I interviewed him years ago. He’s totally harmless.” She found this hard to believe, but she needed to be willing to talk with anyone who might know something useful. “Not that he ever gave me anything useful, either. But you never know.”

“How can I find him?”

“He used to work for Garden State Electric, in their equipment warehouse. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out if he’s still in the area.”

She nodded. She would do it. She would steel herself and meet the totally harmless Eric Pace, who just happened to have been friends with a murderer. “Who should I be this time?” She wasn’t feeling ready for the return of Eager Young Coed.

He smiled. “I’d go with the
Star Ledger
cover.”

“I thought I’m not a believable journalist.”

“Oh, you aren’t. Not to me, anyway, but I am a journalist. He won’t know the difference. Just remember to
ease into
the conversation.”

She thanked Arthur for his help, but when she went to stand up to leave he reached for her arm. “Come on, Alice—what’s your interest in all this?”

And why not just tell him? Funny, she’d expected the pressure in her chest to tighten here in the town where the crime had occurred. Yet Ramsey Miller had last been spotted in Morgantown, not here. And in fact, away from West Virginia and the daily reminders that her whole life was constructed around a single secret, she found it easier to imagine that her secret didn’t matter or even exist. She was staying in a hotel. She had seen the ocean. She had traveled alone to New York City, had been one anonymous soul among millions. How could she be of any consequence to anybody? But she knew better.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“You can’t, huh? So you want my help, but you won’t be honest with me?” His expression was parental. He wanted her to feel guilty. “Do you know what I think, Alice? I think you’re selfish.”

“No, I’m really not,” Melanie said, heading for the door. “I’m not even doing this for me.”

Sometimes you catch a break. The woman behind the counter at GSE made one phone call and told her that Eric Pace supervised the utility warehouse across town. She wrote the number and address on a slip of paper. When she called the number from a gas station pay phone, Eric said she should come by at 4 p.m.

It was one o’clock now. So she returned to her car and drove toward the star she’d drawn on her map, the place that’d been pulling and repelling her since coming to town.

232 Blossom Drive was a white, two-story wooden house with a steep roof and columns in the front. On the front stoop, several flowerpots framed the red door. The flowers were in bloom, bright blues and yellows.

It all looked extremely ordinary, yet sitting in the car, pulled up to the curb across the street from the house, she felt her hands shaking. For several minutes she didn’t get out of the car. She watched the house and imagined, and the imagining nearly made her drive away. But she made herself step out of the car and onto this quiet street with mature trees and well-tended lawns. She couldn’t just stand there and stare, however, so she walked along the street—there were no sidewalks—until it ended in a T. One of the houses on this other street had belonged to David Magruder, but she didn’t know which. They were all nice houses, much larger than the trailer she lived in. Some of the houses had basketball hoops in the driveways. A couple of them had bicycles or tricycles out front. She walked back along Blossom Drive, this time on the even side of the street, and when she reached 232, she stopped again. It was one of the few houses with a privacy fence bordering the backyard. You couldn’t see out. You couldn’t see in.

She walked up the side yard to the fence, where there was a gate. By moving the gate a little she was able to peek through a gap by the hinges and see—a backyard. More lawn. More shrubs. A few large oak trees near the back fence. A cluster of smaller, scragglier trees. In a spot away from the trees, a chaise lounge. A soccer ball. It didn’t make sense. How could this place—

“Can I help you?”

A woman in faded blue jeans with a bandana in her hair and a baby on her hip was standing near the house and looking at her.

“Sorry.” Melanie immediately backed away from the fence. “No, ma’am. I didn’t mean to pry.”

The woman watched her—not angrily, just curious and maybe a little concerned.

“I’m sorry,” Melanie repeated, quickly walking to her car. She started the engine and drove toward the T, where she made a U-turn and left the neighborhood.

“Been a long time since anyone asked me about my friend Ramsey,” said Eric Pace, after Melanie had identified herself as Alice Adams, crime beat reporter for the
Star Ledger
. He was an obese man sitting in an armless wooden chair, behind a metal desk. On the desk were several wire bins filled with forms.

“You still think of him as your friend?” After slinking away from the house on Blossom Drive, Melanie had treated herself to a bacon cheeseburger from the diner, cable TV, and an hour-long nap. She’d driven to the utility company feeling restored and eager to talk with Eric, but uneasy, too, about meeting the man who knew her father as someone other than the subject of a lurid news story.