Night Work (28 page)

“Maurice …”

“I’ll tell her you said thank you for the food.” He grabbed the door and was about to close it.

“Maurice, did you kill Laurel?”

He stopped himself. He looked in at me, looked me straight in the eye. It was the same look he gave me when we were sparring that one time, when I surprised him and he came right back at me with that overhand right. It was the one and only time he had let down his guard, I realized now, the one and only time he had shown me his true self.

“Did you kill her?” I said. “Tell me.”

He slammed the little door shut and locked it. Then he was gone.

I
bounced around the inside of the shed for the next hour or two. If there had been a stick of furniture in the place, I would have turned it into sawdust. When I finally ran out of gas, I sat back down in my usual spot with my back against the door. I finished the rest of the water. The light grew dimmer, but the heat of the day remained.

I tried hard not to think. It was an impossible task.

Another hour passed. Or so it felt like. Then another.

Then I felt a jolt run right up my spine.

“I’m opening the door,” I heard Maurice say from the other side. “I have a gun, and I’ll shoot you if you don’t move to the back
right now.”

I got up, feeling the blood rush from my head.

“I’m not kidding, Joe. You’ve got three seconds.”

“I’m going,” I said, although I doubted he could hear me. I stood against the back wall and listened to the clacking of the padlock against the metal door. Then it opened. A wave of fresh air washed over me. It felt thirty degrees cooler. The sun had gone down, but I could see the grass just outside the door. After the hours I had spent in this place, just looking outside … I would have made my break right there if I hadn’t seen the hunting rifle in Maurice’s hands.

It was Mrs. Gayle who opened the door. She was wearing a red housedress with white polka dots. Her hair was down. She stood with bare feet in the grass, looking in at me. She was squinting like she couldn’t quite see me in the dark recess of the shed.

I stayed against the back wall, my head slightly bowed under the short ceiling. I waited for something to happen.

“One move,” Maurice said. His voice had a new edge to it. “One move and I shoot you dead. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Say it out loud,” he said.

“I understand.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Because one or both of you are batshit crazy. “I can only imagine,” I said. “I suppose it has something to do with Brian.”

“Don’t say his name.” She turned to Maurice. “Make him stop that.”

“He won’t say it again,” Maurice said.

“Tell him you’ll shoot him if he does.”

“I’m sure he gets that.”

“I want it to be clear,” she said. “Not another warning.”

“He won’t say it. Am I right, Joe?”

“You asked me why I thought I was here,” I said. “You didn’t tell me what words I couldn’t say.”

“Well, now you know.”

“You told me you’d stay in control of this,” she said to him. “I’m getting very uncomfortable.”

“Everything’s fine, Agnes. Please relax.”

“How can I relax? He’s standing right here in front of me. I told you this was a bad idea.”

“It was
your
idea, Agnes. Go ahead.”

“How did this even happen?” she said. “How did he end up back here?”

“It was just bad luck, okay?”

“He’s not supposed to be here, Maurice. He’s not supposed to be
anywhere.”

“I told you,” he said. “He’s one of them, don’t you
understand? He’s part of the whole system. They’re not going to turn on him so easy.”

“You said you were going to lay it right in their laps. That they’d have enough to arrest the president. Those were your exact words.”

I was getting sick to my stomach trying to follow what they were saying. I could barely process it.

“You asked me to give you this chance to speak to him,” Maurice said. “I’ve done that. So please say what you need to say so we can be done with it.”

She turned away from him and rubbed her forehead for a while. Then she reached into a front pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. She unfolded it once, then twice. She held it up and looked at it, then moved it a few more inches away from her face.

“I forgot my glasses,” she said. “Will you go get them?”

“I can’t leave you here with him alone,” he said. “Just tell him.”

“I spent all this time getting it right. I want to make sure he understands why this is happening.”

“I think he knows the general idea,” he said. “He knows what he did to you.”

She kept rubbing her forehead. She wouldn’t look at me. Finally, she went to Maurice and put her hand on his shoulder. As he put his arm around her, he had to hold the rifle with one hand for a moment. I was thinking that might be my one chance to surprise him, if I could somehow get to the gun …

But no. No way. It was too much ground to cover.
He moved to the other side of her so he could hold her with his left arm and keep the rifle on his right hip.

“Mrs. Gayle,” I said. “What happened to your son …” I was careful not to say his name.

“Do you know what the worst part was?” she said. Her voice was steady and clear now as she stepped away from Maurice. “Never mind having him taken away from me. Maybe you know how that feels now. I don’t know, you tell me. But the worst part of having him go away to that place was that it meant I was breaking my promise to him. Because I promised him, Mr. Trumbull … I promised him that he would never again have to live in a cage. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

“When that promise was broken, he lost all hope. It didn’t matter at that point whether he’d be in that prison for another month or another year or for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to be alive anymore. That’s what it came down to.”

She took a step toward me.

“I don’t imagine you’ve been kept in a cage like an animal before,” she said. “Perhaps you have some small idea now of exactly how that feels.”

“Yes,” I said. Let her have her say, I thought. Don’t try to argue with her.

“Brian’s father …” She looked up to the sky, obviously trying to find the right words. “Brian’s father didn’t deal with things in the best way. I think that’s safe to say. I tried to make things better between them,
but there was only so much I could do. Maurice can tell you that.”

He nodded his head slowly.

“When you were assigned to him by the court, I had such high hopes that you’d be able to help him. I trusted you like you were a member of this family. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking, no, not at all. I’m not supposed to be a member of your family. I’m not supposed to take the place of the kid’s father.

“He spoke very highly of you, did you know that? He once told me that he was thinking of being a probation officer and working with kids, just like you.”

If it wasn’t surreal enough, that one really threw me. The kid never said a word to me. I had no idea if he was even listening. Either I was getting through to him without knowing it, or else he was feeding some line of bullshit to his mother. Or hell, maybe it never happened at all. Not in the real world.

“He really looked up to you, Mr. Trumbull. But when he had the worst day of his life, where were you?”

“I came,” I said. “By the time I got here …” The moment came back to me, coming up the driveway and seeing the fire trucks and police cars. The officer Brian had tried to shoot was sitting in the back of an ambulance. Brian himself was already gone, on his way to the Woodstock station.

Come to think of it, I thought, the rifle Brian had
that day … that could be the very same rifle Maurice is holding right now.

“It was your job to support and protect him,” she said. “But instead of doing that you turned against him.”

“No.”

“You told the judge to send him away to prison.”

“That’s not true. That’s not how it happened.”

“Be quiet,” Maurice said. He pointed the rifle at me.

“Don’t try to lie to me now,” Mrs. Gayle said. “I know how it works. You’re the one who tells the judge what sentence to pass down.”

“I make a recommendation,” I said, “but the judge has the final say. I wanted him to go to the hospital, Mrs. Gayle. I wanted him to get help. I didn’t want to see Brian go away to a regular prison.”

“Do not say his name,” she yelled, “God damn you!”

I turned sideways and crouched into a ball, waiting for the shot. It didn’t come.

“When Brian took his own life in that place,” she said, “I lost my son, the only son I will ever have. You, on the other hand, you were free to walk around like an innocent man, to go on with your life, to do whatever you wanted to do. I was filled with so much hatred for you, Mr. Trumbull … I thought I would have to kill myself, too. I really did. Thank God for Maurice. Because he came up with the most beautiful idea to make me feel better … He said if there was a way to make you suffer as much as I was suffering …”

“No,” I said, pushing myself back to my feet. “For the love of God—”

“He would come home every day, and he would tell me about how much pain you were in, after the thing that happened to you …”

“It didn’t happen to me,” I said. I wanted to throw myself at both of them now. Let him shoot me. I didn’t care anymore. “It happened to a woman who had nothing to do with this.”

“It was a miracle, Mr. Trumbull. It really was. Because every ounce of pain you felt was like one ounce that was taken away from me. So I was really feeling a lot better about everything. Until the day Maurice came home and told me that you were going to start dating again. Brian never had a girlfriend in his whole life, by the way. Did I mention that?”

This is impossible, I thought. How can she be so deranged and still function in the world? Get up, get dressed, answer the door, and talk to you like she’s just another lonely widow? How can you not see the insanity, from the very first moment you meet her?

“So I was thinking to myself, what will we do about this? And that’s when it occurred to me, Mr. Trumbull … You know, I went to see Brian three times in that place, before he couldn’t take it anymore. I know how bad it is to be in prison. He told me all the stories. All the things that can happen to you in there. The last time I saw him, he told me it was worse than being dead. Much worse. I thought he was just saying that,
But … Well, I guess he wasn’t. I keep thinking about that, how he must have been serious. So when Maurice told me you were getting ready to start seeing women again …”

He’s just as crazy as she is, I thought. Which is even more incredible. He leaves the house every day, comes down to the gym and trains. For two years he does this. How is it possible? Can they really be feeding off each other this much? Enabling each other?

“This way would be even better,” she said. “You go to prison yourself, the very place you sent Brian. You’d experience all the bad things he experienced in there. Worse than being dead, like he said. With you there, every day for the rest of your life, then I would finally have some peace, because everything would be in perfect balance.”

“You have to listen to me,” I said. But I didn’t know what else I could actually say to them. All the words had left me. Every thought, every argument, every ounce of reason and common sense.

“But now you’re here,” she said. “The whole thing is ruined.”

“Just let me finish this,” Maurice said.

“It’s ruined, Maurice. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“He got to hear it from you, face to face. This is just as good.”

“It’s not just as good. It’s not
nearly
as good.”

“You should go inside now.”

“I’m not going inside.”

“Agnes, please. Go inside the house.” He raised the rifle to his shoulder and pointed the muzzle at me.

This is it, I thought. A cold wave of nausea washed over me. I looked around the shed, at the doorway. Maybe the gun’s not loaded. Or maybe he won’t be able to really shoot me. As if a man who strangles four women won’t be able to shoot me. Or if he does, maybe I can dive and he’ll miss and then I’ll get a chance to get away …

“Just hold on a minute,” she said. “Don’t do it.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Don’t shoot him.”

“What are you talking about? We agreed, this is the way we finish it. We have no choice.”

“I want to think about this.”

“We can’t change things now,” he said. He kept looking down the barrel at me. One squeeze of his finger and I’d be long gone.

“I might have a better idea,” she said. “I’d like to discuss it with you.”

He didn’t move. Seconds passed.

“You’re serious,” he finally said.

“Yes. I think I have something better.”

“Something better than shooting him.”

“Yes.”

The rifle barrel came down. The sky behind him was getting darker.

“She’s got something better for you,” he said to me as he came to the door. “This should be interesting.”

Then he closed the door with a bang.

When the light came again, I was out of ideas. In what I had guessed was the dead middle of the night, when the heat had gone down as much as it was going to and when I figured Maurice and Mrs. Gayle were asleep, I had pounded on the door for as long as I could, hoping that I could knock it loose. I had thrown my body into it, trying to avoid hitting it with my sore right shoulder. It had felt as solid on the last hit as it did on the first.

When I was done with that, I sat back down and cursed myself for not saving one last swallow of water.

“Come on, Howie,” I said to the darkness. “You don’t have much time left. You’ve got to find me right now.”

I tried to imagine him getting in his car and driving all the way up to Woodstock, coming up the mountain, then turning into the Gayles’ driveway. I imagined every detail, hoping that I could somehow make it reality. That fantasy, pitiful and delusional as it may have been, was all I had left.