Haunted Hearts (25 page)

Thomas Schaeffer described his job as a development executive with a Tucson communications firm and speculated on the impact of digital transmission, a topic McGuire found desperately boring. Belinda sat on her mother's knee. Jamie remained aloof on the pool diving board, swinging his legs and looking stricken, glancing sidelong at his parents and this stranger, avoiding their eyes.

“How long are you staying?” Schaeffer asked McGuire.

“Until tomorrow,” McGuire said.

Schaeffer nodded, as though in approval. “I'm not sure what my legal rights are,” Schaeffer said.

“About what?”

“About, I don't know . . . restricting access to the kids, visiting rights . . .”

“Thomas,” Susan said, and both men turned to look at her. “I'm their mother. I want them to grow up happy and I want them to understand me. I want them to know what I did and why I did it. But I would never try to come between you and them.”

Schaeffer looked away, west to the low scrubby hills.

“That's a Lexus you're driving?” McGuire said, standing up.

“Yeah.” Schaeffer was pulling at his beard again.

“You mind showing it to me?” McGuire said. “I'm thinking of buying one. Some street punk beat up my old Chrysler.”

The two men walked around the side of the house, and McGuire paused at the Lexus, one hand on its hood.

“You don't want to talk about my car,” Schaeffer said.

“No, but I'd like you to cut Susan a little slack,” McGuire said. “It's not your kids you're worried about, is it? It's your marriage.”

“Sylvia's falling apart in there.” Schaeffer tilted his head towards the house. “She's been afraid of this happening since before we were married. Susan showing up, I mean.”

“What did you do, brag to her about your glamorous and notorious ex-wife?”

“I guess.” Schaeffer smiled, embarrassed. “I guess I did.”

“She thinks she can't compete with Susan. She thinks you'll fall all over her.”

“Sylvia's a good woman,” Schaeffer said. He shrugged, unsure of how to continue. “She's a good woman,” he repeated, agreeing with himself, and McGuire felt a wave of sympathy for these people, a man unable to sever emotional ties with the mother of his children, a woman whose husband could say nothing more flattering about her than that she was “good.”

“You happy here?” McGuire asked.

“Hell, yes.” Schaeffer swept his arm to encompass the desert landscape. “Who wouldn't be?”

“Susan meant it when she said she wants happiness for her children.” McGuire walked along the side of the car, tracing its lines with his fingertips. “And you know it.” He stopped and looked back at Schaeffer. “Something wrong with Jamie?”

“He's kind of my favourite. And he's the oldest. Maybe he remembers things I told him about his mother.”

“Yeah, well.” McGuire shielded his eyes and stared through the window glass at the interior of the Lexus. Leather upholstery, CD player. Hell, he'd never be able to afford one of these. “You still feel that way? About Susan?”

Schaeffer shook his head. “You're a bright guy. You can figure out how I feel about her.”

“Yeah.” So can your wife, McGuire thought, walking to the rear of the car. “Well, you know, maybe you could tell your son that. Because he looks like he's having a hell of a time dealing with this woman who's his mother, the one he hasn't seen for a few years. She doesn't have a wart on her nose or ride a broom, maybe like he expected.”

“You have kids?”

“No. Just a long memory.” He continued walking around the car, the other man a few steps behind.

“When I go back into the house, it's Sylvia's emotions I'll have to deal with. What can I say that'll calm her down? Tell her Susan won't come around anymore? That she should get over her idea that Susan's some kind of competition?”

“Nice car.” McGuire was walking back towards the pool area again. “Nice house, nice location. Good family. Sounds like you've got a great career. You're not really dumb enough to throw it all away by making a play for your ex-wife, are you?” He smiled at Schaeffer. “Maybe that's what you tell her. That's what I'd say.”

McGuire and Susan declined a half-hearted invitation to a barbecue dinner, but they accepted Schaeffer's offer to return the next day, and his invitation to take them for a drive through the desert and show McGuire how his Lexus performed. Belinda cried when they left, but Jamie hung back, and when his mother pleaded with him to come and kiss her goodbye, he turned on his heel and returned to the pool.

They found a motel outside Tucson and registered for the evening. In bed, Susan sobbed against his shoulder, then brightened again and spoke of her children, how healthy they looked, how well they seemed to be doing in school. Around dusk, McGuire walked across the highway to a restaurant, returning with fried chicken, and they sat in bed, watching local news stories, wiping the grease from their fingers on towels from the bathroom.

Belinda ran laughing across the lawn to greet her mother when Susan and McGuire arrived the next morning. Jamie walked to her, smiling and embarrassed.

In the car, with Schaeffer driving, McGuire sat up front and listened to the other man rhyme off the vehicle's various features and specifications, while Susan and the children chatted behind them. Sylvia had begged off, saying she had so much to do that day.

They stopped for ice cream, Susan and the children lining up at the takeout counter while the men remained in the car.

“You had a talk with your son,” McGuire said.

“Yeah, I did.” Schaeffer was watching his former wife as she bent to speak to Belinda. “Sylvia too.” He turned to McGuire. “Sometimes,” he said, “it's harder to give up your enemies than it is to give up your friends.”

McGuire thought it was probably the most profound observation Schaeffer had made in many years.

“Can we go see the babies?” Belinda asked. Her lips were smeared in strawberry ice cream. When Susan asked what babies, the young girl said, “The Indian babies, painted on the wall.”

“It's called the Chapel of the Sky,” Schaeffer said. “Because the artist decided not to rebuild the roof that had fallen in.”

They drove north to an adobe building among groves of saguaro cactus. Behind the chapel rose terracotta hills scattered with mesquite and other ragged foliage. Belinda ran ahead, leading her mother into the chapel, which was no larger than a suburban bedroom. Schaeffer stood at the entrance, watching Susan and the children. To the south and below, the city of Tucson stretched like the embodiment of all that could go wrong among a landscape that was harsh and beautiful and true: tall rotating signs announced the location of gas stations and fast-food outlets, and the sounds of diesel trucks down-shifting through the city disturbed the sense of peace that otherwise blanketed the chapel. McGuire sat on an outcropping of rock, closed his eyes, and absorbed the sun's warmth.

“You really a detective?”

McGuire opened his eyes to see Jamie seated next to him. The boy was round-faced and blue-eyed, and a cowlick of his sand-coloured hair stood at attention, crowning his head.

“Used to be,” McGuire said.

The boy pondered the news. “Sylvia's afraid of you.”

“Why?”

Jamie shrugged. “Do you like it here? In Arizona?”

“Yes. I like it a lot.”

“So do I.” The boy scooped a handful of dust from the ground and sifted it through his fingers. “Do you think my mom's pretty?”

“Your mother is very pretty,” McGuire said. “She's more than that.”

Jamie rubbed the dirt from his hands. “Sylvia says, if my mom stays, she'll leave.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard my dad and her talking last night. They thought we were asleep.”

“What do you think of Sylvia?”

“She's okay.”

“We're not staying.”

Jamie shrugged. “If my mom needs me, like you said she does, and she goes back to Boston . . .” He left the words hanging in the air.

“You can't figure out how somebody can need you and still be two thousand miles away,” McGuire said, and the boy nodded. “She doesn't need you in the next room or in the next house as much as she needs you here.” McGuire thumped his chest. “She needs to know you're there, because that's where people you love are. Can you understand that?”

Jamie nodded. “I think so.”

They sat in silence for a minute until McGuire said, “So, you ever thought of becoming a cop?”

Schaeffer gave them a tour of Tucson over the rest of the morning, stopping for lunch at a fast-food drive-in, and touring Old Tucson, where actors portraying cowboys engaged in street shootouts.

“You ever shoot anybody?” Jamie asked McGuire a few moments after seeing a re-enacted gun battle. The two were standing next to a corral fence watching horses.

“Yes,” McGuire said.

“Was it like that?”

“It's never like that. It's maybe the worst thing in the world.” McGuire's tone of voice and his expression, suddenly distant, silenced the boy. All the way back to Green Valley, McGuire felt Jamie's eyes on him.

At Schaeffer's home, Sylvia greeted them wearing a red satin halter top, balloon pants, and more makeup than the day before. She made another half-hearted invitation to McGuire and Susan to stay for drinks. They declined, and in the driveway Belinda and Susan hugged goodbyes. The girl pecked McGuire on the cheek, then ran sobbing into the house, pursued by Sylvia. McGuire shook hands with Jamie and asked if the boy knew much about the Apaches that had once lived in this area of Arizona. When Jamie said yes, McGuire promised to come back and learn as much as the boy wanted to tell him. He shook hands with Schaeffer and gave him Ollie's telephone number in Revere Beach. Then he put his arm around Susan's shoulder, and guided her back to the rental car, her face wet with tears.

They were booked on an early evening flight through Chicago. “We could have stayed a little longer,” he said, but she shook her head and gripped his hand, staring out the window at the passing desert scene.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” she said. “Aren't they lucky to live here?”

McGuire turned off the highway to a side road before the airport, and followed a narrow dirt track leading up into the low hills south of the city. At a sharp turn on the crest of a ridge, the road provided a panoramic view of the desert area to the east of Tucson, and he pulled to the side and switched off the engine.

“I find it harder than ever,” she said, “to believe that I did what I did.”

“You want to get out and walk around?” McGuire asked, and she shook her head. Then she leaned against him, there in the car, her cheek pressed against his chest. “When I was able to read the Boston papers,” she said, “when I'd get them at Cedar Hill, they were usually a week or so old, and I would read the obituary columns, looking for his name.”

“Whose?”

“Ross's. I'd look for Myers in the death notices. I couldn't believe he would still be alive. I thought he would be killed in jail or on the street when he got out, but he wasn't. Or maybe he was. Maybe he's not down in Annapolis after all. Maybe he's dead. Did you ever think of that?”

“Who would kill him?”

“Lots of people wanted to. The men who invested in the business school. Two of them lost everything. Everything. Ross spent it on . . . I don't know . . . gambling, for sure. He spent it on the horses he owned and the clubs he belonged to, the cars. The women. I'm sure he spent much of it on women. The wife of one man who put money into his business, a lawyer, she divorced him over it. The lawyer had given Ross everything he owned, even mortgaged his house, when Ross said he could double his money for him. He was such a controller. You have no idea. He controlled me, he controlled his partners . . . Nobody could believe that anyone was able to lie so often, so convincingly. Honestly, he was a sociopath. And the bookies . . .”

“You don't tell lies to big-city bookies,” McGuire said. “Not for long.”

“Ross could tell lies to anybody and get away with it.”

Below them the desert was a carpet and a panorama, an unreal vista of shapes and colours and shadows. She snuggled closer to him and stretched her arm across him, resting her hand on McGuire's hip.

“He would tell the most outrageous lies,” she said, “and people would believe him. Eventually he thought I'd believe anything he told me, just because I wanted to believe it. That's what a controller does, isn't it? He figures out what you want to believe, and he tells you the lies you want to hear. He told me once . . .” She laughed without any humour and began again. “He told me that I only imagined what I actually saw, that I didn't really see what I
knew
I had seen.”

“What was that?” McGuire was watching an aircraft on its final approach to the airport, gliding down, down, its landing gear lowered.

“I was coming home one evening, and I saw his car parked in the driveway of the condominium. I saw something moving inside, and I didn't know what it was, or who it was. I thought it might be Ross, in trouble or something, so I went to the window and looked in.” She sat up and looked through the windshield at the descending aircraft. “He was in the car, on the front seat. Doing it, right there in our driveway, with some woman friend of his. I mean, there he was with his pants down and her legs . . .”

McGuire, remembering a similar scene, made a fist and pounded the steering wheel. “For Christ's sake,” he said, and started the engine. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Susan was frightened at his sudden outburst. “Why do you get angry when I talk about Ross?”

“I'm not angry with you,” McGuire said. He swung the car around on the narrow road. “I'm pissed at myself for not making a connection.” He removed a hand from the steering wheel to squeeze hers in reassurance.