The Guilty One (8 page)

“All right,” she said briskly. “I'll take it. If it's okay with you, I'd like to get the mattress taken care of now.”

Norris returned moments later with a box of black plastic lawn and leaf bags. “You can have these,” he said, handing the box to her like a gift. “Trash pickup's not until Monday, but whatever you can put out tonight, my guy will haul it off.”

Maris was glad Norris didn't offer to help her clean. She didn't want help. She stuffed the comforter into a bag while he pulled off the sheets, trying not to think about her hands touching the fabric. A cloud of dust lifted into the air. Maris imagined the tiny motes, the furred mounds under the bed—dead skin, whiskers, pubic hairs, who knew what else—and fought off a faint wave of nausea. She picked up the pillow by a corner and dropped it into the bag, then tied the top tightly. A double knot.

Norris stood with his own lumpy, half-filled bag in hand. He had lost momentum. “I'll take this end,” Maris said, finding the plastic handles along the mattress.

They made several trips, working in the awkwardly polite way of people who don't know each other well. With your own husband, you anticipate his moves—some people fold sheets together multiple times, some want the other person to meet them, an origami dance. “To your left a little,” Maris said.

“I think we'll have to turn it sideways,” Norris replied.

After the third trip, the trash bags sat on top of the mattress and box spring on the sidewalk. In the front of the house, a single light burned through Pet's windows. She'd closed the curtains before she left for work, so Maris saw only the haloed glow through the bright fabric.

Norris opened the front door with a key. They went up the stairs to the left of Pet's door. Another key, a neat shiny brass lock. Inside wasn't what Maris expected. The furniture was tidy, simple, almost Danish-looking. The floors were refinished, and there was an Oriental rug that looked, if not valuable, at least hand-knotted of real wool. A hutch held row after row of fussy cut crystal and teacups hanging from little hooks.

“Down here.” Norris was back to being gruff. They passed a small, tidy kitchen, two closed doors. At the back of the apartment, the second bedroom, as spare as a convent. Two twin beds, the mattresses still in their plastic. The headboards would look at home in a little girl's room, curved and painted cream with pink rose bouquets. There was nothing else in the room except an entire wall of neatly sealed and labeled moving boxes.

Mom Dining Room.

Mom Pictures.

Mom Papers 2001–2003.

Like that.

Another two trips down the stairs. Maris insisted they lean the mattress and box spring against the kitchen wall where the sofa was. On closer inspection they looked like they'd been purchased long ago, the labels yellowing, the plastic cracking. At least the plastic would protect them from the filthy floor until she could get the little bedroom cleaned. “I'll be able to get them onto the bed myself,” she said, needing Norris to leave so she could be alone, and he didn't argue.

“There's some cleaning supplies in the garage, if you want to use them,” he said. “Just remember to put them back when you're done.” He wrote down the code to the padlock on a pizza flyer that he found on the counter, using a pen from a drawer.

“Just one thing,” he said, on his way out the door. “Seeing as this is just short term, anything you buy for this place, I can't reimburse you.”

And then Maris was alone, the kitchen finally cooling off as the sun slid down across the bay.

RON HAUNTED THE
halls of the office as people left for the day. The company had been renamed after he sold it, and half the current staff had been hired since, but his presence still had the power to intimidate. It was Karl too, of course; he had been forced to accept that no one ever looked at him anymore without the knowledge of what his son had done in their eyes. Instead of making him a pariah, though, it seemed to have had the opposite effect: people were deferential, even awed.

Ron alone knew how little he actually did anymore. That was a result not so much of any intention on his part but of the shell game of responsibility in the upper reaches of the company, especially since they had acquired two smaller competitors in the last eighteen months. After the arrest and during the trial, Ron had been excused from many responsibilities and given credit for work others had done. But even after he'd made it clear that he was back full time, people treated him gingerly and made allowances he never asked for.

Sometimes he was grateful for this extended recess. It allowed him to participate in the rituals of the workplace and, more important, keep him out of the house while what he was really doing was . . .
processing
, he supposed, to borrow a term from the airy-fairy folks in human resources, people he'd personally put in place because he knew the supporting statistics even if he'd never personally felt the need for such coddling and hand-holding. His involvement in the various team-building and workplace enhancement exercises was genial, even avuncular, popping in occasionally but always slipping away before he could be called upon to share, to feel, to emote.

So he walked the halls, tapped at his keyboard, dropped in on meetings, kept his door open for consultation. A part of him was present—was even, occasionally, the nimble strategist he used to be. And the rest: a gentle, quiet, whirr; a damping down, a wall carefully maintained.

At six fifteen on Tuesday, the only people left in the office were a small team working together in the conference room. Ron waved to them as he left, his stomach already tightening with the prospect of going home. He stopped on the way for a bag of shockingly expensive peaches and a bunch of delphiniums. These gifts for his wife were a regular habit, and well compensated, but today they were also a defense, a bribe.

When he walked in the door, Deb took the packages from him with barely a comment, clearly distracted. “You said you were going to be late,” she said, and he remembered that when they talked before lunch, he'd mentioned he might get a beer with Frank—but Frank had to be at his kid's band concert.

“Sorry,” he said, bending for a kiss on the cheek which she did not return.

“It's just that Kami's here.”

Now
he heard the soft cough from the living room, registered that the car in front of the house didn't belong to a stranger. “Oh,” he said carefully.

“We were almost done—”

“You know what, I need to make a call anyway. I'll do it upstairs.”

He went up without waiting for her to answer. There was no call; they both knew that. Ron's relationship with Kami had started well enough, in the early days when he'd still been able to make himself imagine a version of events where it was all just a terrible misunderstanding, where Karl had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, confused with the other, the
real
killer. Back then, he'd drunk down her zeal, her practiced rhetoric, as greedily as Deb. Now, though, he couldn't look at her without wondering what sort of woman would do this sort of poorly paid, hopeless work on purpose.

The Youth Innocence Project was connected with Cal State Dylon Beach, and nearly all of the youth they were trying to exonerate were black, poor, and had been questionably represented by state-appointed defenders. Moreover, their staff consisted mostly of law faculty and interns. Kami was the exception: a program coordinator, a glorified office manager who had taken a personal interest in Karl and offered her help outside the official scope of the program but with their hazy, tacit approval. Or so she had claimed, and so Deb had chosen to believe.

Soon after Karl's arrest, Ron had begun to understand the hopelessness of the cause. Despite Karl's insistence (and on this he had never wavered; Ron had to give him credit for that) that there had been another man there that night, a stranger, someone that a neighbor named Gloria Kirsch (seventy-eight years old, hard of hearing, self-reported insomniac) had reportedly seen peering into windows around the neighborhood and had even called the police about the prior week, the evidence against Karl had been too damning. He and Calla had left the party together, after multiple people reported seeing them argue and Karl pushing or shoving Calla. Two of Calla's best friends swore that she had said she was “afraid of” Karl in the days leading up to her death, and one said that when she broke up with him, he'd threatened her. And most damning of all, Karl's car—the eight-year-old Explorer that Deb and Ron had bought when he passed his driver's test—had traces of mud in the wheel wells that matched the makeup of the soil at Byron Ranch.

The more impassioned Deb's insistence on Karl's innocence, the more convinced Ron became that he was guilty. The divide seemed a natural if tragic one;
it was a mother's job to defend her offspring, just as it was a father's job to provide expectations and consequences. In this, Deb could be said to have succeeded where Ron failed, and it was perhaps this knowledge that led him to support his wife without agreeing with her.

But even so, he couldn't tolerate Kami, with her shapeless hand-dyed clothes and her head wraps (ridiculous, on a middle-aged white women) and her maddening habit of holding on to his hand too long and staring into his eyes as though she were trying to bore holes into them with her gaze.

For twenty minutes, Ron sat on the love seat in the master bedroom, attempting to watch an episode of
Ice Road Truckers
. When he heard the front door close, he shut off the television and steeled himself. A few moments later Deb appeared, her cheeks flushed, smiling tentatively.

“Ron. It's—” She gestured, taking in the whole room. “It's amazing, really. With what's happened to Arthur, and I mean, I wouldn't wish it on him, he's not a bad man, but now we can start over. With everything we've learned. Kami says—”

“We're not appealing.”

She looked as though he'd slapped her, her smile quivering out like a snuffed candle. After a moment she came and sat on the love seat, as far from him as possible, leaving several inches between their thighs. “You know it's not our decision, if it comes to that.”

“It is if we're paying for it.” He knew what she was saying, a threat she'd circled before but never presented head-on: Karl, at almost twenty, was a legal adult, entitled to make his own decisions.

“I have my own money.”

Ron raised an eyebrow, surprised—even if it was an argument that didn't even bear considering. The paltry inheritance Deb had received when her mother died a few years back wasn't even enough to warrant a review with the accountant. Still, it wasn't like her to come back at him like that.

“But it isn't
about
money,” Deb said, recovering. “It's about
our son
sitting in jail when he didn't do this thing. When he should be getting on with his life, putting all this behind him.”

“Deb.” Ron raised his hand, let it drop weakly. Once, only once, he had told her exactly what he thought, that while it might have been the result of a moment of unchecked emotion, even an accident, he believed his son had taken his former girlfriend's life on a warm June night the prior year. Deb had been so devastated by what she considered to be a betrayal that she barely spoke to him for a week and a half. Since then, this gulf between them went unnamed and unspoken.

“It won't cost anything to at least
talk
to them,” she said, the doggedness returning to her expression, the manic brightness to her eyes making Ron uneasy. It occurred to him that maternal protectiveness might, in the end, prove a stronger impulse than marital loyalty. “Kami has two lawyers in mind. They're both interested, according to her. The opportunity is a good one for them, they might be willing to—”

“A good opportunity?” Ron interrupted, recovering. “You know what that means, Deb. It's just publicity for them. You seriously want to go through that all over again? Reporters at the door all hours of the day? Chasing you around the Safeway parking lot?”

“But we're in a gated community now, we've got—”

“I
know
we're in a gated goddamn community,” Ron said, biting off each word. “I was the one who sold our home and took a huge goddamn loss on it, frankly, just so I could come home at night and not worry who was following me. But you think Vashi's going to be able to stop them at the gatehouse this time, if things get stirred up again? Or Pearl? You think they're any match for Calida Beale and her goddamn tank driver?”

Tears welled in Deb's eyes; Calida Beale was a Channel 2 reporter who'd brought a crew to the house the day before the verdict was read: one of the “cameramen” broke through the police barricades and somehow got away before he could be identified and charged. Channel 2 had run the footage of Deb with her arms over her face, trying to get to the car, her purse falling to the ground.

“Vashi can . . . Pearl isn't . . .” Deb's voice petered out as she struggled to compose herself. Ron felt bad: Deb had worked hard to cultivate a good relationship with the security guards who staffed the entrance to Cresta Hills, but even she had to know that the sixty-something, arthritic Vashi, and Pearl, with her long acrylic nails and mountainous hips, had little power to protect them.

“Deb,” Ron said gently, after several moments had ticked by. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, her head nestled against his shoulder. She didn't resist. They were still good, he thought, for a couple that had been through what they had been through. They soldiered on, in spite of everything. He had to be grateful for that. “Look. I'm sorry if I overreacted. I just don't want to see you hurt again.
All
of us . . . hurt again.”

She went stiff, then pushed him away. “
Hurt
.” She practically spat the word.