The Great Divide (50 page)

Logan dropped his arms, patted the sides of the podium, gathered himself for the final blow. “The last point I want to leave you with are the words from our very own United States Attorney General. This incredibly powerful and busy woman came here of her own volition to speak with us, simply because she found this trial so vital to our country’s interests. She said something very important, and I want to draw your attention to this. She said this trial was a mistake from the beginning.” He leaned across the podium, his entire body clenched with the purpose of driving home the point. “I commend this expert intelligence to you. I ask that you consider this very seriously. The Attorney General could not have been any more definite or direct when she told us that this case should never have come to trial.” He nodded his conclusion. “Let’s wrap this up, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Let’s shut this circus down and allow all of us to return to the real world. Thank you for your time and for your patience with this miserable excuse of a trial.”

W
HEN DARREN STOPPED for gas on the way home, Marcus walked across the street to the liquor store. He walked straight over to the inexpensive blends and pulled down a bourbon with a name so cheap it mocked the buyer. He ignored the pricier malts that glittered behind the cashier. He had no interest in anything that spoke of celebration or good times ahead. He wanted something foul and burning and acrid. Something that would smite him hard and hurt him the next day. It was the fate he deserved.

Darren and the man pumping gas both watched his return in silence. He said nothing to either of them, just climbed back into the Jeep and sat there waiting. He did not want any argument. He wanted oblivion.

Darren took his time driving home, meandering through the streets as though seeing them for the first time. Eventually they arrived, however, and pulled in past the SBI car and halted in the drive. Only then did Marcus wish for something to say, some words of thanks for all Darren had done, even an acknowledgment of the comfort Marcus had found in the young man’s hulking presence. But there were no words worthy of the man.

Marcus left the brown paper bag on the front hall table as he climbed the stairs and changed his clothes. But when he came back down, it was to the sound of another car pulling into his driveway. He walked out onto the veranda, not feeling much one way or the other, even when he recognized the blond head behind the wheel.

Kirsten climbed the steps in the breathless manner of one pretending not to hurry. She stopped on the third step when his face was
clear in the veranda’s weak light. Whatever it was she saw there on his features, it stilled her smile of greeting before it had formed.

Marcus said, “I can’t even begin to guess how you’ve come to be here.”

“Darren called Deacon.”

“Let’s see. That must have been on my mobile while I was still in the liquor store.”

“Deacon called Alma. Alma started to come herself, but Austin said I should go.” She moved one step closer. “Austin said to tell you that sometimes solitude is just another name for death.”

Marcus was still trying to frame a reply, one that would keep his way open to temporary amnesia, when the phone rang. He walked back inside, picked up the receiver, and felt as much as heard Kirsten’s presence there with him.

Deacon Wilbur’s deep, honeyed voice asked, “You all right over there?”

“No.” He could almost smell the contents of that unopened bottle. “Not yet.”

“The good Lord above tells us He’s gonna look after His own.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Now you just hold up there. Don’t you go looking for fair. Don’t you expect a painless life. Don’t go hunting for an easy road. Just you settle for wisdom.”

The vision of the bag and the first scarring swallow wavered slightly, though Marcus tried hard to hold on. “I’ve failed. Gloria is lost, the case is lost, it’s all over.”

“Sometimes the hardest thing a man can do is accept his own humanness,” Deacon’s tone rumbled soft enough to make the words almost palatable. “Sometimes there ain’t no harder road to walk than the one that turns away from the past. Yes, cutting the cords that tie us to what was and never will be again, then turning toward what is yet to come.”

Marcus found the pastor’s voice rubbing out both the bottle’s image and his own desperate hunger. He wanted to hang up, to turn away from this kind man and his painful words, but he merely sighed his defeat and settled into the chair behind his desk.

Deacon waited a moment, and when Marcus remained quiet, he concluded, “Don’t know what’s harder, saying farewell to the dead-and-gones or hello to what’s coming. Sometimes hope is the worst
burden of all. One you’ll never be able to carry alone. You just think on that, now. Think hard. Try to find some way to take that first small step.”

As Marcus hung up the phone, Kirsten walked in and sat in the client’s chair. Marcus was angry that they would care so much as to keep him from oblivion. Bitterness over the distance between him and the bottle turned his mood foul. “Gloria knew the whole time she wasn’t coming back.”

Kirsten nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“She went to China planning to place herself in harm’s way. She went
expecting
to destroy her parents’ lives.” He planted his good elbow on the tabletop and aimed a shaky finger at her. “And you knew it all along.”

Another slow nod. “Yes.”

“She had it planned down to your handing me the documents. She learned that from Dee Gautam, I imagine. Feed the information to the poor dumb slob of an attorney. Do it slowly. Let him hook himself good and hard, then reel him in bit by bit.”

“That’s right.”

Bile rose in his throat. “Shame she didn’t mention to Alma and Austin that they needed to find somebody better. Somebody who wouldn’t let them crash and burn.”

“Nobody could have done a better job,” she said, her voice too soft to vanquish even a flickering flame.

Yet it was enough to ignite his fury. He smashed his fist down on the table, but she did not flinch, did not even blink. “Gloria is dead, Kirsten. She’s dead. And the case is lost.”

Kirsten’s gaze seemed made from the same fabric as the night, empty and endless. “She was dead before she left.”

He leaned back, searching for a hold on his anger, feeling it seeping away like water through a fist. “What?”

“It’s the only thing that has kept me going. Knowing how she was. She was dead inside. She told me that a hundred times. A thousand. She was just looking for a place to lay her body down.”

It came to him then, the filtering down from the realm beyond logic. “The boyfriend.”

“Gary Loh was finishing medical school when they met. He was brilliant, he loved life, he loved Gloria. They were made for each other. Seeing them together gave you hope for love in a world …”
She stopped, breathed hard, looked out the window. “Before he started his internship, Gary went to Hong Kong. That was, oh, eighteen months ago now. It was his second trip. There was a missionary group working there, one partnered with our outreach program. They worked in the red-light district down by the docks, mostly with prostitutes and homeless and addicts. They were Hong Kong’s only outreach program among the heroin addicts. Gary loved the work. He talked about it all the time. That was just a part of how he was, this mercy he felt for the helpless.”

Marcus nodded, not understanding yet, but knowing it was coming. “Britain gave Hong Kong back to China.”

“Hong Kong’s takeover occurred the year before Gary arrived. The Beijing government treats all addicts as capital offenders, the same as pushers. First they warned the clinic, then they raided it. Gary fought back. We heard about this later, from one of the survivors. He had a number of patients who were too ill to move. He tried to bar the soldiers’ entry into the clinic. They beat him with their rifle butts. His skull was crushed. He was flown home in a coma and died three days later.”

“And Gloria took it hard.”

“She just withered up inside. She was kept so sedated I doubt she even knew there was a funeral at all. For days and days she only said one thing to me that made any sense, one thing you could recognize as real words: Don’t tell my parents, I don’t want them to know. A week or so after the funeral, she called to tell them she and Gary had broken off the engagement. She had to say something. They knew the instant they heard her voice that she was torn apart.” Her gaze revealed a trace of the agony that had emptied her. “I made a terrible mistake then. I should have ignored her and told them everything. They would have stopped her. Had her committed or forced her to get help. I don’t know. Something. Then she wouldn’t have …”

Marcus waited until he was certain she could not go on. “But you didn’t.”

“She was my friend. As soon as she came off the sedatives, she grew so determined. I mean, the very same
day
. Over and over she said she had to find some way to make them pay. It was like some kind of chant, I heard it that often. Some way to give meaning to Gary’s death. She talked about it all the time. I didn’t mind so much, at least
she was eating again and making sense and getting better. At least she was involved with life. Or so I thought.”

“Then she found out about the joint venture.”

“Gloria had been working for almost a year on her thesis about New Horizons’ labor practices when Gary died. The company was a natural target for her. She had friends from church in almost every corporate department. New Horizons is a foul breed, always had been. Just the kind of group to suck money from kids.” She stopped for a breath. “Gloria had pretty much stopped work on her thesis and was spending all her time protesting against the Chinese. Then two things happened at once. An assistant manager at the company heard from somewhere that Gloria was fighting the Chinese on human-rights issues. She handed over documents about the joint venture.” Another shaky breath. “And then came the first rumors about New Horizons’ wanting to demolish the church.”

“You mean the cemetery,” Marcus corrected.

She gave a minute shake of her head. “It was never about the cemetery. That was just their opening salvo. Gloria knew because the secretary to the board has a sister in the congregation. Randall Walker appeared before the New Horizons board and said, Complain about the cemetery and ask the city council to condemn it. Do it just before you leave for the conference in Switzerland and let the lawyers take the heat.”

“Randall,” Marcus said. “I should have smelled his hand in this.”

“Once the cemetery was condemned, the plan was to move immediately to include the church as well. They needed the land for further expansion. It was all mapped out. The city council knew and approved.”

“Of course they would.” The thought of his grandfather’s land being handed over to those vultures on the hill sharpened his outrage. “It meant more jobs.”

“Jobs and investment and development. The works. Then you showed up, bypassed the council and the local judges, and had a new federal judge overturn all their carefully laid plans.”

Marcus rose from his desk and went to inspect the darkness without. “Back up to Gloria and her plan.”

“She worked at it night and day. Six months, eight, all the time I was waiting for her to find some reason to live. Something that would
keep her here. I thought at times that she’d found it in this battle. But I was wrong. Then she discovered something new, something so urgent and exciting she dropped all her work in my lap and said, I’m going and I’m not coming back.”

Marcus said to the night, “General Zhao.”

“I should have said something. I should have stopped her. I should have warned her parents and called the police, something.”

Marcus shut his eyes to the agony of wrong choices. “The bed in the guest room is made up. You’re welcome to stay if you like.” When she did not answer, he felt driven from the room by his own lack of answers. “Good night.”

F
OR ONCE it was an idea that woke him, and not the nightmare. Marcus was on his feet and moving before he was even fully awake.

He was halfway down the stairs before he registered the change to his home. He sniffed the air, turned, and walked back to the top landing. Marcus walked down the hall, and stood staring at the closed door. The fragrance was stronger there, a taste of softness and light that rested easy on the palate. Marcus knocked on the door. A clear soft voice said come in. Marcus opened the door and stood looking down into eyes that spoke of a heart that was wounded yet still found the strength to care. He found himself thinking of words old Deacon had spoken on the phone the night before, utterances drifting through his mind in time to the faint trace of Kirsten’s perfume. Words like
turning
and
hope
.

He said to her, “I’m flying up to Philadelphia. There’s something I need to do.” When she merely nodded her response, he added, “You need to tell Alma and Austin what you told me.”

Clearly this had occupied her thoughts and kept her there the previous night. The pain of resignation was clear in her voice. “They’ll never forgive me.”

This time Marcus felt certain enough of the people involved to know he was offering more than just words. “Kirsten, they already have.”

M
ARCUS HAD NOT BEEN
to the Rice estate in two years, not since the last time he had come to pick up Carol and the kids. He had never
been welcome there. After four years of futile attempts to enter his in-laws’ good graces, he had accepted defeat and restricted their meetings to dinners on neutral territory. The manor had not changed in his absence. The same gardener stooped over the same immaculate flower beds; the same butler opened the door they had stripped off some castle in France. The entrance hall was flagstoned and the arched ceiling rose four stories over his head. Sounds mingled with the scents of furniture polish and fresh-cut flowers. It might be autumn outside, but seasons made little difference within this tightly controlled and sterile universe.

Carol’s mother appeared in the doorway beside the curved stairway, dressed in silk and gold. Her gaze was as coldly furious as it had been in court. “Get out of my house.”