Blood Orange (34 page)

He watched Dana come out of the house and crouch to pet
Moby. As she did, she looked up at the apartment window, and
David sent her a telepathic message to look away, to go inside and
lock the door. The evil he felt around him was strong enough to
hurt them all.

Marsha asked him if he was finished with questions.

“Did he tell you what he did?”

“When Sandra went into the house he went in through the alley
gate and grabbed Lolly and made her breathe chloroform. He said
it worked fast on such a little kid, and she didn’t make a fuss at all.
Shawna did. She bit his hand. He told me if she hadn’t done that, he
would have only hung her over the side of the well to give her a
good scare. He only meant to teach her a lesson. Same with Lolly.”

David nodded, not trusting himself to make a comment.

“Then he took her in the garden shed and double-bagged her in
two of those big green garden bags, only not tight, because he didn’t
want her to die. That’s what he said. He was going to take her somewhere and leave her. He said the Calhouns didn’t know how to discipline her, and what she needed was the scare of her life.”

This made no sense at all. The girl had been three years old.
“What about afterward? She’d be able to identify him.”

Marsha looked at him, blinking.

“Anyway,” she said, “it was when he got to the mountain and he
undid the bag and she started screaming…. The thing people
don’t understand about Frank is how sensitive he is. He can’t take a
lot of noise. That’s another reason why we’re going to move to
Idaho.”

When Frank’s hotshot lawyer gets him off.

“What did he do?”

“Got upset, I guess. Bashed her head.”

He stood up. “Mind if I open the door?”

“It’s cold,” Marsha said.

He opened it anyway.

“Why did you get pregnant again? If he can’t stand the whining,
how will this baby be any different?”

“Oh, she will be. Frank’s taught me about discipline.” She lowered her eyes. “In a way, you see, it was my fault Shawna was such a
bad little girl. If I’d been a better mother-“

David walked onto the landing at the top of the stairs and took a
deep breath.

She said, “You’re not going to tell him what I said, are you?”

“No.”

“And promise you won’t tell Mr. Peluso.”

Through the window David saw Dana’s back. He didn’t need to
see her face. Every line and the curve of each feature were familiar
to him, imprinted on his heart and mind forever. All that he loved
and believed in was in the house across the yard.

“I’m Frank’s lawyer, Marsha. Your secrets are safe with me.”

avid came into the house, and Dana saw at once that he was
/deeply troubled.

“Tell me,” she said, resting her palms against his chest.

Without looking at her he moved away.

“You’ll feel better … “

“And you’ll feel worse, so just don’t ask me again.” He went upstairs, and she heard the shower running. When he came back
downstairs his hair lay damp across his forehead. He had changed
his shirt and put on a new tie.

“It’s after four. Do you have to go back?”

“I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“David-“

“I need to work, Dana.” At the back door he stopped, came
back, and held her. “I’m sorry I snapped. It’s the case….” His
body vibrated with tension.

“Come home early, then. Let’s go to the movies. Why not, huh?
It’s Saturday.” She recalled their sweet early morning together, the
hope she had felt that despite everything their love for each other could be salvaged. “Guadalupe can stay with Bay. Let’s eat at the
Cat and see something mindless.”

“We can’t keep paying a babysitter-“

“This is for us, David.” She pressed her index finger to his lips.
“Now isn’t the time to economize.”

He pulled back, abruptly angry. “If I lose this trial no one’s going
to hire me.”

“You’re exaggerating. Of course-“

“Not the clients we need. You know, Dana, it takes money to live
the way we do.”

She did not remind him that it was she who paid the bills and
stroked their creditors with minimum payments.

“babysitters all the time, housekeeper, private school. And you
don’t work-“

She would not be drawn into an argument and away from what
mattered. “Tell me what Marsha said to you. You don’t have to
carry this by yourself.”

He bent his head and rested his forehead against hers.

“Mind meld,” she whispered. It was an old joke between them.

“You’re right. A movie’d be good. Great. And dinner at the
Cat.”

They ate in silence, listening to oldies chosen by the disk jockey
seated in a glass booth over the bar.

“Hear that?” she asked. “`A Whiter Shade of Pale.”’ It had been
her mother’s favorite song. “And The Doors. Oh, God, she played
`Riders of the Storm’ until I was dreaming the lyrics.”

David nodded vaguely. Obviously his thoughts were somewhere
else. With Marsha Filmore, Dana thought, and wondered what had
transpired between them that morning. At another time in their
lives she would have nagged a little, and eventually he would have told her. But she had her own secrets. What Dana wanted was
happy talk-conversation, not interrogation.

“What kind of music did your folks listen to?”

“My mom and the judge-I don’t think they listened to anything
much, but my uncle liked Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard, all that
country stuff.” David looked up when a man paused beside their
table.

Dana recognized a local television reporter and saw the camera.

“Mel Gorson, Channel Seven News.”

David groaned.

“I went by your house, and your maid told me you were here.”

“Our house is off limits, Mr. Gorson.” Dana spoke as sweetly as
possible, but it was hard to be pleasant when she remembered the
days following Bailey’s kidnapping and Gorson and the other reporters’ persistent questions. None of them had cared that Dana
was dying inside. “My husband will be happy to talk to you at the
office on Monday.”

Gorson ignored her. “I knocked on the door of the apartment,
but no one answered. Marsha Filmore’s staying with you, isn’t she?
What do you think she does in her spare time? Can you tell me why
you decided to have her live with you?”

“She doesn’t live with us,” Dana said.

“My wife’s right.” The tone of David’s voice brought her to the
edge of her chair. “I’ll talk to you on Monday.”

“Just three questions. Thirty seconds each.” Gorson had a wide,
white, television smile. “Your food’ll still be warm.”

“I. Said. No.”

Dana put her hand on her husband’s forearm and felt his pulse
jump.

Gorson said, “I’m sure you agree it looks kind of strange, her living at your place.”

David stood up, knocking back his chair. He towered over the
reporter. From the corner of the room Dana saw the manager come
across the dining room fast. Diners around them had paused in
their meals and conversations to watch the scene. A red light flashed
on the video camera.

“David, stop.” She walked around to his side of the table and
stood beside him. “Why not answer a couple of questions?” She
squeezed his hand.

Was it true that Marsha Filmore was living with them? Why was
she living there? And, finally, “Mrs. Cabot, don’t you worry about
your little girl, living with the wife of a killer?”

It seemed to Dana that all her life she had been smiling when she
felt like screaming, smiling to make people like her, to look normal.
Her face ached with the memory of false smiles, but she forced another for Mel Gorson. “First of all, it is not a crime to have terrible
taste in husbands. If it were, your wife would probably be in jail.”
She laughed and patted Gorson’s wrist lightly, as if to say she did
not mean it. “Second, this city has dealt very harshly with Marsha
Filmore. The press has made her a pariah. I’d just remind your
viewers that this woman has not been accused of anything. And as
for Frank Filmore, in the United States we have something called
the presumption of innocence. He will be guilty only when and if a
jury decides he is.”

Later, as they waited in the dark theater for the feature to begin,
David took up her hand and kissed the palm. “You were great,
Number One. Saved my bacon.”

“It felt like the old days.” Standing beside him after good games
and bad.

“Yeah.” He smiled at her. “Those were happy days.”

“They’ll come again.”

David laughed curtly. “You mean Frank Filmore isn’t going to
be around for the rest of our lives?”

The theater lights went down. Dana pressed her lips to his ear.
“Promise we’ll be happy again.”

St. Tom’s had a bronze plaque on its oak door declaring the
church a San Diego historical site. It had been one of the earliest of
the mission churches, built in the late nineteenth century from redwood cut in northern California and carried by coastal barge to San
Diego. The fifteen stained-glass windows depicting the lives of the
saints had come around the Cape in boxes packed with sawdust,
each box filled with hundreds of pieces of colored glass precisely
designed and cut and labeled for assembly in San Diego. The floors
were of intricate oak parquetry, and the ironwork had come from
Mexico in a wagon someone had tried to hold up but been outrun
by. Everything in St. Tom’s had a sense of history about it, a story to
go with it.

The next morning, when Dana and David stood for the processional, St. Tom’s was three quarters full. She knew the names and
histories of most of the people standing around her; others were
nameless, yet later they would “exchange the peace,” hand to hand,
a company of believers.

Dana felt connected to God when she was in St. Tom’s waiting
for the service to start, and even more so when she and the people
around her recited the Episcopal liturgy in unison. At such times it
came to her that whatever God was or was not, the presence of the
congregation proved God was powerful enough to bring together
people of all varieties in a common declaration of love and belief.
That alone was astonishing.

In the moment before opening prayers, she knelt and vowed not to lie or bend the truth anymore, to be loving to David, more patient with Bailey. She would have to figure out what to do about her
thesis, but she did not expect God to help her with that. She begged
forgiveness for her sins and strength to follow through on her
promises. If God would just preserve her family …

Jason Gordon was St. Tom’s crucifer that morning. He carried a
cross of cypress cut more than three hundred years before in the
Holy Land. The figure on it wore robes and a crown and was called
Christ Victorious. Dana dipped her head as it passed. Next the
choir and then Father Bartholomew, his grizzled old head high, a
smile tickling the corners of his mouth. Last, Dana knew without
looking, was Lexy. She did not turn her head; she never did. In
church Lexy was the High Priest, not her best friend-and now, not
her ex-best friend.

Before church Dana had expected that everyone would be talking about Micah’s death and planning ways to make this time easier
on Lexy. When no one said anything, she surmised that Lexy had
decided to keep the news to herself for the time being. The massed
condolences of St. Tom’s would be hard to bear. She thought about
Micah lying in his own blood; she remembered how it felt to love
him.

“Why’re you crying?” David handed her his clean handkerchief.
“You never cry.”

She made herself think of Micah stealing Bailey from her home,
terrifying her. She stopped crying.

During the “prayers for the people,” the Sunday school director,
Laura, eased into the pew beside Dana and whispered, “Bailey
needs you.”

Dana heard Bailey’s screams before she opened the kindergarten
door and saw her standing in the middle of the room with her arms
pressed rigidly against her side, hands in fists. The other children huddled against the walls gawking, one or two looking ready to
scream themselves.