Safer (34 page)

There’s not a person left alive on Earth who can prove otherwise.

Such a person asks himself: if the lie is so close to the truth, is there really a meaningful difference?

In the end, Brit Seward’s death does not go unpunished. A wolf in schoolteacher’s clothing does not go unpunished. James Webster, a probable monster- in- training, doesn’t live to repeat himself, as the experts say such monsters will.

Harmon gets a commendation.

My charges are dropped.

It’s still the raccoons who get into the garbage.

Isn’t it?

They buried Brit Seward the morning after Christmas. Sara and I wanted to be there, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to intrude.

I went to the house and packed up a box of Brit’s favorite books. I put the box on Pete and Melody’s doorstep, along with a letter I’d written to each of them. If I’d been Pete, I think I would have thrown away my personal letter from Paul Callaway without opening it. But I left it for him anyway.

Sara and I spent the rest of the day together, some in Douglas Bennett’s office, most in his guesthouse. We talked all morning. About Brit. About Melody. About Darius Calvin.

It got cold in the afternoon, and we started a fire. Bennett had a subscription to the Sunday
New York Times,
and he’d left the recent edition on the stoop for us. Sara took the business pages. I took the Book Review.

At one point, I dozed off reading and woke to find her watching me from the small couch on the other side of the room. The logs were still crackling in the fireplace. The fire was warm. She looked pretty in the light.

After a long, quiet minute, she said, “I wonder if I’ll ever be able to trust you again.”

I didn’t know how to answer.

“Of course, you appreciate the irony,” Douglas Bennett told me, a month after the national media had left town. They’d all wanted interviews, but I’d kept my word. Maya Lamb had the exclusive. She wasn’t long for Clark Falls.

“I’m a professor of English literature,” I said. “You’ll need to tell me the specific irony we’re speaking about.”

“All these cameras of Mallory’s actually helped save your bacon,” Bennett said. “Legally speaking.”

It was true. The possession of Timothy Brand’s pornography had been a sticking point in my case—at least until Roger’s surveillance footage showed Roger himself entering our empty home on half a dozen occasions. Not only our home but, at one time or another, the homes of everyone else in the circle.

Back when the tech guy from the university first set me up to log on to the campus network from home—a lifetime ago, it
seemed—the same tech guy had installed, as a standard policy, some kind of security software that kept a log of all activity on my computer. Because he’d also given me a password, all activity theoretically came from me alone. But Douglas Bennett’s experts, using date- and time- stamp information from Roger’s video archives, had been able to place Roger in our house on the day and time certain digital photos first appeared on my hard drive.

Bennett had made plenty of hay with these findings, particularly in combination with my own sloppy habit of recording online passwords on sticky notes, which could be found in the materials the police had confiscated as evidence when they’d searched my office. When it came to building a trial- worthy criminal case against me, the county prosecutor’s office, finally, had found cause enough to reconsider its charges.

“Ah,” Bennett said. “Okay, here we go. Watch.”

I leaned forward and watched the open video window on Bennett’s computer screen. When he clicked the play button, I immediately recognized what I was looking at: Trish and Barry Firth’s house. I watched.

Bennett played the video clips on a loop, each a snippet of footage from a different night. Each night, the same thing happened.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I thought you’d like that.” Bennett seemed pleased. “There’s a dozen more just like it.”

All I could do was stand there, shaking my head. “Un be lievable.”

“Just goes to show you.”

“Just goes to show me what?”

“Hell if I know,” Bennett said.

I pointed. “Play that again.”

Bennett complied happily. Once again, I watched the video footage of Barry Firth exiting his front door, disappearing out of the right side of the frame—the direction of Michael Sprague’s house—and returning with a Proposition 42 yard sign under his
arm. Ben Holland’s fight, it seemed, hadn’t been with Roger after all.

“Absolutely unbelievable.”

“I’ll have Debbie cut you together a highlight reel,” Bennett said.

I’ll bet I watched that disc Debbie made me a hundred times before sending it to Michael. He called and said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Just goes to show you,
I said.

We finally sold the house, at a loss, in April.

One Saturday afternoon, as I was packing up books, I saw a safety tip from the Clark Falls Police Department on the television in my office.
Make sure your kids know their full name, address, and telephone number,
the male uniformed officer said.
And remember,
the uniformed female officer added,
even young children should know how to use a telephone, and how to dial 911 in case of an emergency.
The commercial was paid for by the New Clark Falls Coalition of Neighborhood Patrols.

I immediately stopped what I was doing, found the address I’d written down months ago on a scrap of paper and tacked to my bulletin board. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d contemplated that address; one last time I debated the idea, then decided that I couldn’t stand the debate any longer. I took the address with me to the garage, got in my car, and drove.

Detective Harmon lived in a quiet cul- de- sac lined with shade trees in one of the older subdivisions on the east side of town. A nice house, big but not gaudy, with shutters on the windows, a basketball hoop in the driveway, and tasteful landscaping all around. A pretty blonde woman answered the door. The color drained from her face the moment she saw me.

“I’m Paul,” I told her, though it was obvious she knew my name already. “Is Tommy home?”

Before she could respond, a man’s voice said, “It’s okay, hon. Go on out back with Becky.”

The woman looked worried, but she stepped away.

Detective Harmon took her spot in the doorway. He wore faded blue jeans, an old Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt, and a pair of moccasins. He waited for his wife to withdraw beyond earshot, looked me over like a stray dog, then said, “Go home, Paul.”

I didn’t move from my spot on his stoop.

Harmon seemed to expect that I wouldn’t be smart enough to follow instructions. He brought me inside and took me up a flight of carpeted stairs to his study on the second floor, where he pulled the door closed behind us. He turned me around, kicked my feet apart, and frisked me from ankle to collar. Then he sat on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms. “I guess you wouldn’t be here,” he said, “if you hadn’t convinced yourself you had some kind of reason.”

“I just want to know one thing,” I told him.

Harmon’s face remained passive, promising nothing.

“The night we met. When you came over to our house, and you asked all your questions, and told us we shouldn’t worry, and put on the whole cop song and da—”

“I remember,” Harmon said.

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“About Darius Calvin.”

Harmon looked at me.

I looked back. “All that time you were sitting there in our living room, did you know?”

Harmon seemed to study the carpet for an answer. After a moment, he looked up again and said, “I don’t expect you’ll believe me, but no. I didn’t. Not then.”

“You’re right.” I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”

“I knew about the schoolteacher,” he said. “And how Roger had handled that situation. And when I caught the call to Sycamore Court the night of your break- in, I had a bad feeling.” He spoke calmly, informally. We might have been neighbors. “Later, after your golf club went missing, and I saw Van’s signature on the property sheet, we had a private chat, Van and I.” He sighed. “That’s when I found out about Darius Calvin.”

“The day I came to your office,” I said. “John Gardner was there.”

“I remember.”

“You knew about Calvin then?”

Harmon nodded. “We knew then.”

“But you didn’t do anything about it.”

“We talked to Roger. John and I. Thought he listened.” Harmon shrugged his shoulders. “Few months later, I hear about another call to where? Thirty-four Sycamore Court. Again.”

I thought of Roger’s video cameras. The day I’d stood with the police in his driveway.

“And we talked to Roger. Again.” Harmon nodded purposefully, in case I wasn’t listening. “Couple weeks after that, you were arrested. Gardner actually heard the call before I did, not that it matters. Caught it over his personal scanner at home.” Another shrug. “Anyway. Detective Bell was on his way to your place by the time I heard about it. And fifty- six hours later, we were fishing that girl out of the river.”

I stood there. Harmon waited impassively. I wanted more. But I didn’t know what, exactly, I hoped to get.

“I suppose I should thank you,” I finally said.

Harmon raised an eyebrow. “Thank me for what?”

I almost couldn’t bring myself to say it. “For saving my life.”

After a long, quiet moment, Harmon chuckled without seeming amused. “If that’s what’s been hanging you up, consider yourself clear,” he said. “I was protecting my family. You happened to benefit.”

I told him that I didn’t understand.

“John Gardner was a friend,” he said. “But I knew him well enough to know one thing for sure: if any of this mess had splashed back on him—then, or a year from now, or ten years down the road—he wouldn’t have taken it alone.”

I watched Harmon’s eyes while he spoke. They revealed nothing to me. I said, “So you murdered him.”

“I protected my family.” Harmon uncrossed his arms and
leaned on his hands. “If I was a murderer, Paul, you wouldn’t be here now. In my home.”

Was he making a threat? Or a simple observation? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

“That night in the woods,” I said. “Gardner told me he’d been your training officer.”

“He was,” Harmon said.

“Was James Webster part of your training?”

I imagined that I saw a muscle twitch in his jaw, but I couldn’t be sure. Thinking back, I realize that it might have been just that: my imagination.

“You said you wanted to know just one thing,” Harmon reminded me. He stood and crossed his arms again. “Your meter’s up.”

I looked out the window. Down below, on a flagstone patio in back of the house, I saw Harmon’s wife picking flowers with a little girl. The girl was maybe six or eight years old. Except for the wheelchair, she looked very much like her mother.

Harmon came over and closed the blinds.

Without thinking, I said, “How was your daughter injured?”

“She wasn’t.”

As he escorted me out of his office, I noticed a plaque from the Spina Bifida Association of America on the wall.

Later, I looked up spina bifida on the Internet. It’s a heartbreaking condition that occurs in various forms, in various levels of severity, and while every case involves a malformation of the spinal cord, no two cases are ever the same.

In the United States, nearly seven children in every ten thousand are born with it. There are preventative measures, things you can do to reduce the risk, but there isn’t a cure. Ap parently, there’s not one damned thing you can do about it.

I visited Brit’s grave before we left town. Sara had been there, but I hadn’t yet. The inscription on her headstone read:

I didn’t recognize the quotation, but according to Brit’s marker, it came from a poem by Emily Dickinson. I’ve always preferred prose to poetry, and it had been years since I’d looked at any Dickinson.

I stayed there for quite a while.

TWO YEARS LATER

MY WIFE, SARA, AND I are attending a New Year’s Eve party at her department chair’s home when Charlie Bernard notices that Sara hasn’t been drinking all evening.

He lowers the skewered cocktail shrimp he’d been preparing to attack, looks back and forth between us, and says, “Surely you must be shitting me.”

I look at Sara. She smiles and says nothing.

Charlie, for his part, has been drinking on pace. I’ve been working on a little scotch and water and keeping my eye out for the lobster balls. “Keep it under your hat, Charlie. We’re superstitious.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He raises his glass. “I heard on the radio the experts say we’ll have fourteen thousand people per square mile in the Boston metro area within five years’ time. But I’m sure you two know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks, buddy. That means a lot.”

Later, I catch him whispering something in Sara’s ear. I see her smile and pat his cheek.
Thank you, Charlie. We’re very happy.

Still later, Charlie and I smoke cigars outside. It’s a nice night. Clear sky, not too cold.