Big Goodbye, The (17 page)

I was inclined to believe him. “How long has she been coming to see you?”

“About a year.”

“Why’d she start?”

“She had an epiphany,” he said.

“A what?”

“An epiphany,” he said. “It’s a sudden, unexpected special revelation of God.”

“And she had one?”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, a big smile spreading across his face.

“And became religious?”

“Not exactly, no,” he said. “She became curious. She was slowly becoming more spiritual, more open to the transcendent aspects of life. She was never interested in anything formal—not doctrine or dogma, she just wanted to understand what happened to her.”

“And what was
that
?”

He looked at me with astonishment again. “You don’t know?”

“I haven’t been a part of her life in quite a while,” I said.

He shook his head. “This is so amazing. I just can’t get over it. You really don’t know.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know,” I said. “I’m used to it. It’s why I’m here. What I’m not used to is some old priest looking at me like I’m silly.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I’m just . . .”

“Amazed,” I said. “I know.”

“Like so many people, she experienced God though another person.”

“Another
person
?” I asked, instantly jealous.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “A priest, a rabbi, a musician, an artist. For kids it’s usually their parents at first, then some sort of hero.”

“Who did she—”

“You,” he said. “That’s why I find it so amazing you don’t know.”

“
Me
?”

“
You
,” he said. “Well, actually it’d be more accurate to say your love—the love the two of you shared. She was convinced it could have only come from somewhere beyond the two of you.”

“What? I don’t think . . .”

I shook my head. I just couldn’t believe it. It was so incredible. Of course, I had had similar thoughts and feelings about the way we loved each other. I just didn’t see them the same way, didn’t attribute them to the same thing.

If what he was saying was true, I had been wrong about Lauren, and if I were wrong about this, what else? Were all my perceptions wrong? Just couldn’t be. Wasn’t possible. I hadn’t recovered from the shock of July yet. This was just too, too much.

“You became a metaphor for God for her,” he said. “Her epiphany.”

I laughed.

“It’s true,” he said. “Strange, wild, unexpected, unlikely, but profoundly true.”

“Not sure what you’re selling or why, but I ain’t buying.”

“You won’t even consider what I’m saying is true?”

Could it be? Was it even possible? It seemed more likely Lauren was pulling one over on him.

When I didn’t say anything, he added, “It happens more than you think.”

“With adulterous lovers?”

“Actually, yes,” he said. “Though we’d rather that one not get out. But in a way, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Paradoxically, it was you—your love—that made her unable to be with you. It changed her—
God
changed her through you.”

“She felt guilty.”

He nodded. “And confused. It was a very profound experience and it took her totally by surprise.”

“You’re saying God took her away from me,” I said.

“Well . . .”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t believe that if I wanted to—and I don’t. I just want to find her.”

“And you need to,” he said. “As fast as you can. Lately, it wasn’t just her epiphany that brought her to me. It was the fact that everything else she tried had failed her.”

“Such as?”

“Psychology. Medicine.”

“Is she sick?”

“I can’t break the seal of the confession,” he said, “but—”

“You’re doing all right so far,” I said.

“So far I haven’t told you anything she told me in confession.”

“Think about all the times you’ve spent together,” I said, “what she told you about what was going on in her life, in her head. Where did she go? What did she do? Think back to all of that.”

“Okay,” he said, narrowing his eyes and furrowing his brow in concentration.

“Now,” I said. “Where is she?”

Without hesitating, he said, “If anyone else were asking, I’d have said with you.”

Chapter 37

The little house on Grace Avenue where Ann Everett had spent so many hours listening to dopes like Lauren and me was easier to break into than I had thought it would be, and I was inside within a minute.

Entering through the back door, I walked down the dark hallway, my flashlight illuminating recently mopped linoleum and reflecting off the glass of the framed diplomas that touted her qualifications.

I was still haunted by the things the priest had said. How could I process it? What could I do with it? There was nothing to do but find her.

Inside Ann Everett’s office, I went straight to the filing cabinet I had seen her withdraw and return my file to so many times, picked the lock, which took a lot longer these days, and rifled through the folders until I found one labeled: Lewis, Lauren. I could tell the minute I tugged on it that it was empty, but I pulled it out and looked in it anyway. I was right. Its contents had been removed.

I sat down at Ann’s desk and thought about where she might have hidden the accumulated materials from Lauren’s sessions. I let my mind drift, keeping it open and unfocused, concentrating on nothing, listening to everything that passed through it. Random thoughts of Lauren, sweet and surprising, counterbalanced images of July’s death pose and the enormous hole in me the absence of both women had created.

After searching all the drawers of Ann’s desk, I wandered around the small house in the dark, beginning a room by room search.

As I looked around, my mind continued to roam.

What if the person who killed July had Lauren? Did July see, hear, or uncover something about Lauren’s real stalker—who had not been Freddy or Carl—that we missed? Was she killed to avoid exposing someone? Would solving the murder reveal the abduction? Or were we dealing with two murders and just hadn’t found Lauren’s body yet?

I had checked with Ray before coming here. Lauren wasn’t at the sanatorium and Rainer had yet to make an appearance either.

As I continued to search, I thought about how helpless Harry had looked sitting there in his estate on the Bay, his millions unable to solve his problems or save his wife. I felt sorry for him, guilty for hitting him.

Thinking of Harry and Lauren forced me to face how utterly inane my perceptions, assumptions, and deductions had been. I had misunderstood, misperceived, and just plain missed everything. A woman who worked for me had been killed and the woman I loved had been kidnapped or killed, and I was stumbling around in the dark as impotent and imperceptive as ever.

I wasn’t sure I believed what Father Keller had told me, but I couldn’t shake it either. Just the possibility of it haunted me like few things in my life.

Near the back of the house, I found a closet filled with built-in cabinets. As I moved the beam of my flashlight over them I saw they all had hasps and padlocks on them.

A few minutes later, when I had picked the lock, I discovered what was inside. Every cabinet was filled with the recordings of her sessions—not just the early sessions she had asked me if she could record for her project, but every session, all labeled and dated, coded to missing case notes. There weren’t enough records for her to have recorded the sessions of all her clients, but she had secretly recorded every session Lauren and I had ever had inside her office.

Taking all the records from our sessions, I walked back into the front room next to the office and placed one of Lauren’s on the phonograph.

My eyes stung as Lauren’s voice filled the room.

“Have you ever been in love with someone so much that you finally understood what God meant by all of this?” Lauren asked.

“This isn’t about me,” Ann said. “But all what?”

“Everything,” she said. “Life. I know this isn’t about you, but how can you help me if you’ve never experienced what I’m talking about?”

“No, I haven’t,” Ann said, “but I don’t doubt that that kind of love exists.”

There was a long pause, and then Lauren said, “That might be enough.”

“I think it’s more than you’ll get from most counselors,” she said. “Why don’t we give it a try? If it doesn’t work, you can try to find someone else who has experienced such love.”

“Okay,” Lauren said.

As glad as I was to have found the recordings, and as good as it was to hear Lauren’s voice, it was also eerie and unnerving to hear it alone in the dark, empty house.

“I am right in assuming you’ve experienced such a love?” Ann asked.

“Very recently, yes.”

“And you’ve lost it even more recently?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Not lost as much as gave up.”

“Why?”

“I love him,” Lauren said, as if that explained everything.

There was a long silence, then a phone ringing, and then nothing. There was nothing else on the record.

Hoping the others contained far more material, I put another recording on the player.

“I don’t know,” Lauren was saying, “I just seem to get it now. And it’s beautiful. Everything works together so well. It’s not the same as the eyes of infatuation. I’m aware of the suffering and the horror—but I see the big picture now. Besides, most of the really unspeakable things, we do to each other.

“It makes me want to do something with my life,” she continued. “To be a light. I tried to be that for Jimmy, but he wouldn’t let me. He doesn’t want anything from me—well, actually, I guess he wants everything. I feel so bad. I’ve started to explain a dozen times, but he’s so angry he won’t even speak to me. I was doing this as much for him as for me, but it didn’t turn out like I had planned.”

“Whatta you mean
for him
?”

“He was so possessive, so obsessed. I knew he had experienced what I had, but he thought I was responsible for it. He thought it was me.”

Hearing Lauren’s voice filled me with a warmth I couldn’t describe, but it also heightened my awareness of her absence. It was as if the part of her that had been inside of me had been ripped out, leaving only an empty cavernous ache at my center.

As I gathered together all the recordings, turned off the phonograph, and prepared to leave, I thought,
I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to have her back or—

There was no
or
. I had to find her.

Chapter 38

“It’s not just that Harry saved my life,” Lauren was saying, “I love him. I was so young when we started dating. He’s the only man I’ve ever been with—except for Jimmy. And he’s a good man, he really is—especially for one with so much power and money. And he’s getting better all the time. I think my experience is having an effect on him, too.”

I shook my head in self-disgust as I recalled all the lovers I had pictured Lauren with.

Still unable to sit at my desk in the chair where July was found, I was on the floor of my office listening to Lauren’s sessions on my phonograph.

It was the middle of the night, downtown as dark and abandoned as an amusement park in off season. I sat just outside of a small pool of light created by the desk lamp on the floor next to the speakers, trying to be as close to Lauren’s voice as I could. My back was to the wall, eyes on the door, hand near my gun at all times. As much as Lauren’s voice warmed and comforted me, I knew July’s killer or more men where Cab and Mountain had come from could walk in any moment.

“I just feel so schizophrenic,” Lauren was saying now. “Sometimes I’m filled with such guilt and regret, other times with pure gratitude. Sometimes I feel so close to God, others I don’t think he even exists, that I’ve made this whole thing up because I need meaning in my life. Sometimes I want to confess everything to Harry and beg his forgiveness, other times I want to finally leave him forever and be with Jimmy.”

What would’ve happened if she had done that? I would have had no idea of who she really was, of the sacrifice she would have been making, the gift she would have been giving.

My office was intermittently washed in red light as the neon sign for the bar next door cycled on and off against the dark night sky. I stood and walked to the window. When the sign was on, I could see the neon night in light and shadow and nothingness. When it was off, I could see a dim reflection I didn’t recognize in the mirror-like glass. The solitary figure looked like the last soldier standing in a world without warmth and light.

The street below was empty except for a few scattered couples, the men in uniform, the women in short, straight skirts. The night was quiet. When there was no sound coming from the recording, the only noise beside my breathing was the low hum and flicker of the neon sign.

“What should I do?” she asked after a long silence.

“What do you think you should do?” Ann asked.

Lauren laughed. “Should I tell Harry?”

“What?”

I walked back over and sat down again.

“That I love Jimmy. That I had an affair. That I’m sorry or I’m leaving or—I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Should I tell him anything at all?”

“Shouldn’t you decide first what you’re going to do?”

“I guess,” Lauren said. “I don’t know.”

They were both quiet a moment, then Lauren said, “What if I stay with him?”

“Who?”

“Harry,” she said. “Should I tell him about Jimmy, about how I felt, how I feel, if I’m going to stay with him?”

“Do you think he’d want to know?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you think his reaction would be?”

“That of a patient parent,” she said. “It’s how he treats me most of the time. He’s like an indulgent father with me.”

“Would he still want to be married to you if he knew how you feel about Jimmy?”

“I can’t,” Lauren said. “I just can’t tell him. He’d still want to be married. We don’t have that kind of relationship, but I think it would hurt him. I could no more hurt him than I could Jimmy.”

“But you have hurt Jimmy,” Ann said.