A Darker Place (5 page)

“No, Anne. Oh, no. Not again.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I thought you were finished with that nonsense.”

“So did I.”

“Let someone else do it.”

“They don’t have anyone else.”

“Make them find someone.”

“Antony, I have to do it. It’s the only reason I’m here.”

“My dear Anne, you cannot continue to feel responsible for the world’s actions. You have done your part—more than your part—and at great cost. Let it go.”

“I can’t, Tonio. I thought I could when I saw him yesterday. I tried all night to pick up the phone and tell him to go to hell, but I couldn’t.” She said nothing about her sure conviction that Glen McCarthy had handled her with his usual Machiavellian skill, putting her off balance from the beginning by deliberately appearing without warning and in the one place where she could not scream at him to fuck off—and by bringing the young
policewoman along to distract Anne and keep her polite. He had even taken care to put his telephone number on the inside of the manila envelope, so she would be forced to open it and handle the papers even if she had already decided to refuse the case. From any other man, she might have thought the actions accidental, but not McCarthy: He was quite subtle enough to have planned his attack meticulously. And, he was very determined.

Makepeace did not know this, of course, and although the knowledge of the FBI man’s manipulation might have armed him for another round of argument, all he heard was the flat commitment in her voice and the affectionate use of his nickname. He looked into his mug for a while, then rose to brew another of his endless cups of Earl Grey.

“You don’t have to go immediately? It’s usually a drop-everything rush when Agent McCarthy shows up.”

“Two weeks won’t matter one way or another—or if they do, then the thing was moving too fast for me to interfere with anyway. I’ll finish up the quarter, hand in my grades. I will tell the students there’s an extra ten points for getting their final projects in on Monday. That should help.”

“But you don’t think you’ll be finished with this… what do you call it, anyway?” His burst of mild irritation would be another man’s fury.

“Case, investigation, mess, disaster, bit of primal chaos—whatever you like. No, it’ll take at least two or three months.”

“You will be back by September, though?”

“I hope so, but it’s best not to count on me.”

“God, Anne. I don’t know what to say.”

“‘Good luck,’ maybe?”

“I will pray for you every day.”

Anne had to smile. “Antony, when will you learn
that professors of religion are not supposed to actually believe in it?”

“When you learn to enjoy Earl Grey tea, I suppose. But seriously, Anne. You can’t allow them to use you forever. And they will if you permit it, you know that. Do it this time if you must, but tell them it’s the last.”

“When I can’t face it anymore, Antony, they’ll be the first to know.”

Makepeace had to be satisfied with that. The talk turned to mundane matters, of replacement lecturers for one of the classes and the probable cancellation of the other, arranging for Antony to take over her three graduate thesis projects, the choice between leave-without-pay or trying for a last-minute paid sabbatical. Finally, Anne made a move toward gathering her things.

“Come home for dinner,” Makepeace offered suddenly. “Marla would love to see you.”

“I can’t, Antony. I have to get home for the dogs.”

“Another night, then. Before you go.”

“I’d love to.” She put on her coat and pulled a pair of gloves out of the pocket, and then she looked up with a faint trace of mischief in her eyes. “Oh, and I should warn you, rumors may start up when I fail to appear next quarter. Glen and his policewoman made quite an impression on some of the students. They’ll probably work it up into an arrest for drug smuggling or white slavery.”

“Agent McCarthy is fairly unmistakable, isn’t he? I can’t imagine
him
doing undercover work.”

She heard a clear note of rather catty pride that she should be better at the wicked and dangerous job he so disapproved of than the hateful man who dragged her into it, but she hid her amusement. “He’s actually not bad at it, given time to grow his hair out a bit.”

Makepeace shot a glance at Anne’s own thick hair,
but did not say anything. He let her go and prepared to leave himself.

It was only much later that evening, as he sat in front of a dying fire brooding over their conversation, that it struck him there might be a second, darker meaning to Anne’s not being able to face it anymore.

For two days Agent McCarthy and Inspector Farmer cooled their heels, Farmer impatiently, McCarthy with the resignation of a man who had done this before. On Thursday afternoon, McCarthy was seated on a park bench, his arms spread out along its back and his face lifted to the weak sun, while Gillian Farmer paced up and down on the gravel pathways between rows of brutally pruned roses. As chance would have it, she was at the farthest point in her circuit when McCarthy’s cellular phone chirped in his pocket, and she did not hear it. She saw it in his hand, however, the moment she turned, and broke into a trot in her eagerness to get back to him.

It was a very brief conversation; McCarthy was folding the telephone before she reached the bench. He stood, putting the phone back in his pocket.

“Was that her?” It was.

“Christ. About time.”

McCarthy glanced at her sharply, but he did not speak until they were in the car and on the freeway out of town.

“Anne doesn’t have to do this, you know. She’s under no obligation; she doesn’t even take a salary beyond expenses.”

“So why does she?” Farmer demanded, still impatient. Three days was far too long, and her department had begun pressing for her return after the second.

“Eighteen years ago, Anne Waverly’s seven-year-old
daughter and thirty-one-year-old husband died in a mass suicide in northern Texas. The child drank a glass of cyanide-laced fruit juice, probably given to her by her father. You may have heard about it—they called it Ezekiel’s Farm—but it was only in the news for a couple of days because there was a plane crash and then some enormous political scandal just after they were found that knocked them off the front pages. A lot of comparisons were made to the People’s Temple suicide in Guyana two years before, and I suppose their reasons were much the same although there were only forty-seven people instead of nine-hundred-and-some. The bodies were not found for nearly a week. In early summer. You can imagine what they looked like.”

Gillian grimaced; she had been a cop long enough to know.

“Anne herself was a member of the group, but she had begun to question the methods and beliefs of the community. Her doubts were serious enough for her to take a leave of absence, as it were, to go away and think about things for a few days. She left the child, Abby, with her husband. Three days later the leader Ezekiel had a final revelation, and broke out the cyanide.”

“Christ.”

He added in an unemotional voice, “Anne believes that her departure triggered the suicides. It is quite possible that she is right.”

They drove in silence for a long time, until Gillian stirred and asked, “So this is, what, some kind of penance? Or revenge?”

“Neither, as far as I can tell. I believe it’s her own form of suicide.”

“You mean she goes into these situations with a death wish? Jesus, McCarthy, how could you possibly allow—”

“Not a death wish, no. She’s sensible and cautious, and she does her part very, very well. She goes in, she
looks around, she comes out and tells us what the community looks like and gives us her opinion concerning its internal stability. It’s just that on a very deep level, she’s made her peace with death, and she doesn’t really care if she comes home or not. A lot of people who do long-term undercover work have it to some degree, and with Anne it’s never interfered with getting the job done. Up to now, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Probably nothing. It’s just that her reaction to me this time was different. She was angry.”

“Pretty normal reaction, I’d say.”

“That’s exactly it. She seems to have gotten used to the idea of living again.”

Their rental car had problems with the first section of Anne Waverly’s road, but at the end of it—up the rutted gravel track, through the gate, and around a mile or more of narrow twists and turns—she was waiting for them. She watched them get out of the car, saw the woman, Farmer, look around her with a sudden delight in the dappled sun and the clean silence that followed the laboring engine sounds of the last ten minutes, and waited with neither movement nor expression while her guests metaphorically brushed off the dust of their journey and came toward her.

They stopped when they saw Stan at her knee, then Glen came on with Gillian Farmer following cautiously. Ten feet away Glen stopped and spoke to the dog. “Hello there, Stan. It is Stan, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Anne said.

“C’mere, boy.” McCarthy dropped to his heels and held out a hand. “You remember me. I’m a friend, right?”

The dog shot his mistress a glance, and at her gesture
went forward to snuffle with his flat nose at the man’s hand. Something tickled his memory, because his tail wagged briefly before he turned his attention to Gillian. With dignity he walked up to her and examined her feet and the hand she ventured out; then, without expressing an opinion, he returned to Anne.

The incident with the dog confirmed Gillian’s suspicions that McCarthy knew Anne Waverly as something more than just an occasional colleague. His intimate acquaintance with the road had been obvious from the time they left the blacktop, for one thing. He knew the dog, knew that the door they would enter was not the one behind Anne Waverly but the kitchen door around the side of the house. He seemed unsurprised by the sharp difference between the dusty, rustic log exterior and the rich simplicity inside, and when he sniffed the air, it was more with the welcome of homecoming than puzzlement at the peculiar combination of the rich, yeasty odor emanating from two pans on the sideboard underlaid with the raw bite of cordite. The cap was put on her confirmation by his first words to Anne.

“Target practice?”

“I thought it might be a good idea,” she said. “I was getting rusty.” She walked past them and pulled shut a narrow door to what looked like a pantry.

“You shoot indoors?” Gillian asked in disbelief.

McCarthy laughed—actually laughed. She hadn’t thought him capable of anything beyond a rueful chuckle. “Like Sherlock Holmes picking out the Queen’s initials on the wall?” he asked, which reference meant nothing to Gillian. He looked at Anne and asked, “May I show her?” When she nodded, he went to another door and started down the open wooden stairs heading into a basement.

The bare bulb lit only the immediate area, but McCarthy reached over and flipped a series of switches, and
to her amazement Gillian found herself at one end of what could only be called an indoor shooting range, complete with a man-shaped paper target hanging at the far end.

It was also, incongruously, a farmhouse cellar lined with cupboards and shelves, bearing canned goods, economy-sized packages of toilet paper and soap powder, odd shapes wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and an array of hand tools and power saws—all the necessities of life in the woods. McCarthy called her over to a low table on which lay a pair of ear protectors, an automatic pistol, and the equipment for cleaning it. Standing next to him, she surveyed the panorama of bottled foodstuffs, the fruit on the top shelf, red tomato sauce below, a neat display of jams and preserves and shelled nuts that ended three-quarters of the way down the room at an arrangement of hay bales, tightly laid up to the ceiling. They were tired and dusty-looking, and no longer gave out enough odor to stand up to the gunpowder; they had been in place for years.

Bemused, Gillian studied the odd juxtaposition of home canning and the hanging target with the cluster of shots in its center until she realized that the FBI man seemed to expect a reaction.

“Wouldn’t want a ricochet to smash your peaches, I suppose,” she commented.

He looked a little disappointed at her lack of amusement, but personally she thought it a bit crazy. The woman lived in the middle of nowhere; why not shoot outside, where she could practice at distances of more than twenty yards? Or at a proper shooting range?

“Bring up a bottle of tomatoes when you come, would you, Glen?” the voice at the top of the stairs asked prosaically. “And don’t forget to shut off the lights.”

Back in the kitchen, they found Anne Waverly at the stove, lighting the gas under a big saucepan. McCarthy
closed the basement door, put the quart bottle of tomatoes on the counter, and took a chair at the wooden table. He sat watching Anne Waverly’s back, strong and straight with the lovely graying hair, caught up in a clip, that hung down between her shoulder blades, and Gillian abruptly realized what the two of them reminded her of: her sister Kathleen and Kathy’s ex-husband when they were forced to be together at some family function. Between them was lingering affection, a heavy residue of physical attraction, and a lot of emotional scar tissue, and although they were polite for the sake of the children, there was also the mutual awareness that if they ever relaxed, blood would flow.

Glen McCarthy and Anne Waverly had been lovers, Gillian was sure of that.

She was also quite certain that whereas the professor might be finished with the FBI man, he was afraid that he was not through with her. Gillian Farmer was enough of a cop to disapprove of sex cluttering up a professional relationship, enough of a woman to find it both troubling and mildly amusing. She cleared her throat. “Can I help with anything?”

“No thank you, Inspector Farmer. I’ll just dump this together and we can eat when the rolls are done.” Anne swept a handful of finely chopped onions and a heap of other vegetables into the seething pot, poured in the bottle of tomatoes and a generous amount of red wine, took a hefty pinch of dried herbs from a pottery jar and sprinkled it over, dropped the top on the pan, and turned the heat down.