Immoral (5 page)

“
Wait!” Emily shouted, but no one heard her
.

The sensations of the night became a blur. The din of music and voices thumped in her head. Lights blinked and whirled around her. She smelled burnt grease, powerful enough to suffocate her
.

“
He’s having a heart attack!” she screamed, as loudly as she could
.

The people around her laughed. It was a joke. It was funny
.

Ping.
The cable released. The Ejection Seat shot upward like an arrow. The towers rattled and swayed. The microphone in the chair caught Rachel’s squeals of delight. Her excitement at being shot weightless into the air was almost sexual. The giggling laughter poured out of her and washed over the crowd
.

Tommy never said a word
.

Up and down the chair went, bouncing and wobbling like a jack-in-the-box for thirty seconds that lasted a lifetime. Then Emily heard murmurs among the people around her. She saw people start to point. Rachel’s squeals subsided
.

“
Daddy
?”

Emily could see her husband clearly now, his head lolling to one side, his eyes rolled up into his skull like two hard-boiled eggs, his tongue hanging limply out of his mouth. Rachel saw it, too, and screamed
.

“Daddy. Wake up, Daddy.”

Emily clambered over the fence that kept the spectators back. The ride workers managed to snag the chair and pull it back to the ground. As Emily ran toward them, they undid the straps from Rachel, who clung to her father and cried hysterically. They undid the straps from Tommy, too, but he simply slid from the chair and crumpled in a pile on the ground, with Rachel still hanging on him and calling his name
.

Emily knew at that moment she had passed a crossroads in her life. Part of her secret soul believed it would be a road to something better. In many ways, living with Tommy dead was easier than living with Tommy alive. She had always been the one holding a steady job and paying the bills. During the next few years, she began to pull them slowly out of debt.

But in the most important way, in her daughter’s mind, Tommy never died. He became frozen in Rachel’s memory.

It began the day after the fair, as they drove in cold silence back to Duluth. The tears on Rachel’s face had dried, and her grief had turned with amazing swiftness to malevolence. At one point on the highway, the little girl turned to Emily, her eyes on fire, and said with a terrifying passion, “You did this.”

Emily tried to explain. She tried to tell Rachel about Tommy’s weak heart, but Rachel didn’t want to hear anything.

“Daddy always said that if he died, it was you who killed him,” she said.

So began the war.

Emily, lying in Rachel’s bed, picked up the silly stuffed pig.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “What did I ever do to make you hate me so much? How can I make it up to you?”

Stride lived in an area known as Park Point, a crooked finger of land jutting out between the southern tip of the lake and the calm inner harbors of Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin. The peninsula was just wide enough to drop a strip of houses on either side of the road. There was only one way to get to the Point—across the lift bridge over the canal—which forced the people who lived there to structure their lives around the comings and goings of the ore ships.

He gave no thought to the bridge as he glided on autopilot, his eyes barely open, toward the Point at four in the morning. At first, when he heard the raucous warning bell, he thought his tired brain was playing tricks on him. He turned down the Sara Evans song on his stereo and listened. When he realized the bridge was really going up, he accelerated, but he knew he was too late. Disgusted, wondering how long he would be marooned, he pulled to a stop at the guardrail and shut off the engine.

He got out of the car, leaning on the door, letting the cold air wash over him. He reached back inside to the cup holder, found a new pack of cigarettes, and lit one. So much for willpower. He didn’t care. Smoking, exhausted, listening to the groan of steel as the bridge climbed above him—this was his life. And it had been that way for the past year, ever since the cancer took Cindy away. The city that had always been his home, and that he assumed he would never leave, had begun to feel different to him, darker and more menacing. The familiar things, like the hulking lift bridge and the smell of the lake, now seemed consumed with memories.

Back in his youth, Duluth was a one-industry town, capital of the northern region of the state known, for good reason, as the Iron Range. It was a city where trillions of pellets of taconite belched into the hulls of giant ships, which sank low in the water and then shouldered their way through the cavernous troughs of Lake Superior toward the northeast. It was a hardscrabble, hard-luck city, filled with brawny miners and seamen like his dad.

He didn’t recall that life was particularly good back then, but the city had a small-town feel, and people weathered the ups and downs of the ore industry together, living fat, living poor, working, striking. For nine months every year, until the lake froze, the rhythm of the ore industry governed the city. Trains came and went. Ships came and went. The bridge rose, and the bridge fell. The raw elements of steel that built skyscrapers, cars, and guns around the world began their journey under the clay soil in northern Minnesota and eventually traveled through the seaway in the holds of the great ships.

But the taconite industry waned, eaten up by overseas competition, and so did Duluth’s fortunes. Ore couldn’t pay the bills anymore. So the wise men who ran the city took a look at its location on the lake and said: Let the tourists come. The ore industry became a kind of tourist attraction itself, drawing gawkers to the bridge whenever a ship slid through the canal.

Not now, though. Not in the middle of the night. Stride stood alone, taking long drags on his cigarette, watching the rust-red hull creep under the bridge. He saw a man standing on the deck of the ship, also alone, also smoking. He was indistinguishable, little more than a silhouette. The man raised his hand to Stride in a casual greeting, and Stride returned it with a wave. That man could have been him, if his life had gone as he expected when he was younger.

He climbed back into his Bronco as the bridge settled back into place. As he drove across to the Point, hearing the bridge deck whine under his tires, he glanced at the ship, which was aglow and heading into the lake. A part of him went with it. That was true every time one of the ships left. It was partly why he lived where he did.

The residents of the Point were a hearty tribe who endured tourists, gales, storms, blizzards, and ice for the privilege of that handful of idyllic summer days on which no one on earth had a better place to live than they did. They shared a strip of beach that eroded an inch or two each year, with tufts of madras grass and mature trees separating the sand from the tiny backyards of the houses. Stride would often haul a lounge chair out past the madras on a Sunday in July, set it up on the beach, and sit for hours to watch the traffic of sailboats and cargo ships.

Most of the houses on the Point, except those few that had been torn down and rebuilt by wealthy transplants from the Cities, were old and ramshackle, constantly pummeled and worn down by the elements. Stride slapped on paint each spring, using whatever was on sale, but it never lasted beyond the winter season.

His house, a quarter mile from the bridge, was barely thirty feet wide, built in a square, with the door and two steps situated exactly in the middle. To the right of the door was the living room, with a window looking out the front. There was a detached one-car garage to the left of the house, at the end of a small stretch of sand that counted as a driveway.

Stride jiggled the key in the lock, then used his shoulder to push the door inward. He shut the door behind him and stood in the hallway, sinking back against the door, his eyes closed. He smelled the musty odor of aged wood and the lingering fishy aroma of opilio crab legs he had steamed two nights ago. But there was more. Even a year after she was gone, he could still smell Cindy in the house. Maybe it was just that he had caught that same hint of perfume and floral soap for fifteen years, and his imagination remembered it so clearly that he could still picture it as real. In the early days, he had wanted to banish the smell from the house, and he had thrown open all the windows to let the lake air wash through. Then, when the aroma began to fade, he got scared, and he shut up the house for days for fear he might lose it altogether.

He stumbled sleepily down the hall to his bedroom and emptied his pockets on his nightstand. He yanked off his jacket and let it fall on the floor, then rolled into his unmade bed. His feet throbbed, and he didn’t know if he had remembered to kick off his shoes. It didn’t matter.

He closed his eyes, and she was there again, as he knew she would be. The dreams had faded in recent weeks, but tonight he expected to be tormented.

He stood on a highway somewhere in the wilderness, with miles of birch trees lining the deserted road in both directions. Across the narrow strip of pavement, divided by a yellow line, stood Kerry McGrath. She beamed at him with a happy, carefree smile. Perspiration glinted on her face. She had been running, and her chest heaved as she sucked in deep breaths.

She waved at him, gesturing him to cross the road.

“Cindy,” he shouted.

The smile on Kerry’s face died. She turned and vanished, running between the trees. He tried to follow, hurrying down the slope behind the shoulder of the road and into the forest. His legs felt heavy. So did his left hand. When he looked down, he realized he was carrying a gun.

Somewhere, he heard a scream.

He stumbled along the trail, wiping sweat from his eyes. Or was it rain? Water seemed to filter down through the leaves, turning the trail into mud and matting his hair. Ahead of him, he saw a shadow pass across the trail, something large and menacing.

He tried to call Kerry’s name again.

“Cindy.”

Through the maze of trees, he realized someone was stopped, waiting for him.

It wasn’t Kerry.

Rachel stood there, naked. She confronted him on the trail, her arms in the air, balanced against two birch trees, her legs spread casually apart. The rain fell in spatters on her body, dripping off her breasts and running in silver streams down her stomach and into the crevice between her legs.

“You’ll never find me,” she called to him.

Rachel turned and ran, and her body was enveloped by the forest. He could see her gliding away. Her body was beautiful, and he watched as it got smaller and farther away. Then, as before, a menacing shadow crossed the trail and disappeared.

He raised his gun. He called after Rachel.

“Cindy.”

He made his way into a small clearing, where the dirt under his feet was mossy and wet. A stream gurgled toward the lake, but the water tumbling over the rocks was bright red. The crackling and rustling in the forest got louder, almost deafening, a thumping in his ears. The rain sheeted down, soaking him.

He saw Rachel on the opposite side of the clearing. “You’ll never find me,” she called again.

When he stared at the blurry image on the far side of the stream, he realized it was no longer Rachel who stood there.

It was Cindy. She stretched out her hands toward him.

He saw the shadow again, moving behind her. A monster.

“You never do,” she told him.

Stride lay sprawled in bed with his head engulfed in his pillow. He was half asleep now, slowly growing aware of his surroundings. He heard the rustle of paper somewhere close by and smelled burnt coffee.

He opened one eye. Maggie Bei sat a few feet away in his leather recliner, her short legs propped up, a half-eaten cruller in one hand and one of Stride’s chipped ceramic mugs in the other. She had opened the curtains halfway, enough to reveal the early morning view of the lake behind her.

“That coffeepot of yours stinks,” she said. “What is it, ten years old?”

“Fifteen,” Stride said. He blinked several times and didn’t move. “What time is it?”

“Six in the morning.”

“Still Monday?” Stride asked.

“Afraid so.”

Stride groaned. He had been asleep for ninety minutes. It was obvious that Maggie, who was still wearing the same jeans and burgundy leather jacket she had worn last night, hadn’t slept at all.

“Am I naked?” he asked.

Maggie grinned. “Yeah. Nice ass.”

Stride pushed his head off the pillow and glanced behind him. He, too, was wearing the same clothes from last night. “I hope you made enough coffee for me.”

Maggie pointed at his nightstand, where a chocolate old-fashioned doughnut lay neatly placed on a napkin. A steaming mug of coffee was beside it. Stride grabbed a bite of the doughnut and took a sip of coffee. He ran his hand back through mussed hair. He finished off the doughnut in two more bites, then began unbuttoning his shirt. He yanked the belt from his jeans.

“It gets ugly from here,” he said.

“Don’t I know it,” Maggie replied. She continued calmly eating her breakfast.

“Yeah, you wish.”

He joked, but Stride knew he was on sensitive ground. He and Maggie had worked together as a team for seven years. She was a Chinese immigrant whose vocal participation in political rallies during her student days at the University of Minnesota had left her without a home to which to return. When Stride hired her right out of school, she proved to be a quick study. In less than a year, she knew the law better than he did, and she had demonstrated her instincts by seeing details in crime scenes—and suspects—that most officers missed. Stride had kept her at his side ever since.

The longer they worked together, the more Maggie blossomed. She became funnier, bolder, willing to laugh at herself. Her face became expressive, not a somber mask. She learned to speak English with no hint of an accent and with a healthy sampling of sarcasm and profanity.