Red Light (19 page)

"But
did you
love
her, Mike?"

"I thought I was
falling in love. And that's when I knew I had to end it."

She let the words
hang. Even in the wind they stayed right there in front of her, solid as
boulders, impervious to the elements.

"How
were you going to end it?"

"When I walked
out after dinner that night I knew it was over. I'd come right up to the edge
and looked in. I wasn't going to go there. Never. I'd learned what I needed to
know."

"And
what was that, Mike?"

"It's
not something I'm proud of."

"What
was it you needed to know?"

"That someone
would find me, um, lovable, I guess. That was all. It was a question I had
between me and me, Merci. Not me and you. Not anybody else."

So
you go to a prostitute to get your answer, she thought.

She
handed the box back to him. She picked up Tim and stood.

Mike stayed down
where he was. "I knew you wouldn't take it, and that's okay. I've had it
for six months, but the time never seemed right. It sure isn't right now. But I
wanted you to know where I stand. More important than that, though, more
important than anything right now, is I want you to know how sorry I am for
yesterday. Just know that. I'll keep the ring while you think. It'll be
there."

He stood and kissed
her on the cheek. Her face was so cold she could barely feel it.

Tim grabbed Mike's
face and Mike smiled. In the harsh security light he looked like someone she
barely knew, an exhausted man-boy with a smile cold as the stars.

Mike put an arm
around Merci and Tim, hugging them gently. Then she felt the fingers of his
other hand against the inside of her thigh.

"Let's go get
warm together. I can hold you and you can hold me. It's been an awful long
time. Maybe we can remember who we are."

"I
know who I am."

He
released her.

"I'm not going
to lose you, Merci. They can strip me down to nothing and you can never look at
me again, but I won't lose you. You're here forever. I'm not letting you
out."

He made a gun of his
hand, and aimed it at his heart.

M
erci rented a skiff in the Dana Point harbor early
the next morning, Saturday, and guided the belching little outboard through the
breakwater and into the bottomless sway of the Pacific. Her stomach went soft
inside when she hit the open sea.

She
bore south. The morning was cold and clear and she could see the great
sandstone cliffs where the cattle hides had been thrown down to the trading
vessels just a hundred short years ago. A cold sweat slicked her brow.

The
bow of the little skiff took the swell hard and she felt the bench slamming up
under her as she upped the throttle and sped south. She measured her velocity
against the oncoming swell and it seemed considerable; she measured it against
the breakwater rocks and it seemed almost no velocity at all.

While
the engine screamed, an assembly of voices quarreled inside her head.

Mike is a good man, but you misunderstand him.

Mike is weak and capable of error.

You should help him.

You should suspect him.

You should abandon him.

You should love him. .
Merci
looked out at the towering white clouds to the west, saw the gulls circling
over a kelp bed. The bench knocked against her butt and she tried to get more
speed, but the little two-cycle was tapped out she could smell the oil burning
with the gas.

She almost gagged on
the fumes; almost gagged on the nausea rising and falling in her gut.

She hugged the shore
as best she could, staying a swimmable distance from the beach. She did not
like the ocean, never had. It was untrustworthy and prone to violence. Nature's
felon, she thought.

She had almost lost
Tim, Jr., to it. Not to mention herself. For reasons that had nothing to do
with her own will, it had rejected them given them back their lives.

But Hess had loved
this ocean and Merci told herself that Hess had some influence out here, that
some residual goodwill had surely rub off on her from him. As a lover of Hess.

She
thought of him and wondered why memory had to be a tribulation.

She squinted to the
south and saw the San Clemente Pier and knew she was just a mile or two from 23
Wave Street, from that tiny patch ocean that held the key to Aubrey Whittaker's
murder.

Half an hour later
she was directly offshore of the Wave Street apartments. She tried to eyeball
where that bullet had gone, assuming it flown in a straight line from the gun,
through Aubrey Whittaker’s shocked heart, through the thin pane of the sliding
glass door and into the infinite sea.

She looked down at
the water around the bobbing boat: indigo blur with silver facets that flashed
like mirrors, countless variations, never the same arrangement twice.

She realized that
what she was hoping to find was roughly one-half inch square, maybe mushroomed
out a little, but about that size. It would have sunk to the bottom, wherever
that was.

She looked at her
beach bag, which had slid off the aft bench and now lay soaked by spray and
spill against the hull. Through the mesh she could see the two red adjustable
swim fins, the pink mask and clear snorkel. She touched the bag with the toe of
her shoe. She hunched down deeper into her sweater against the cold day and
told herself that she could suit up, don the mask and fins and make the dive.
Make a hundred of them today. Make a hundred tomorrow and a hundred every day
after that until the close of the age and she would never find the bullet. She
would never even reach the bottom.

This truth went
against every grain in her, against her belief that hard work paid off, her
sense of hope itself.

Mike loved the girl.

Mike thought he loved her.

You can trust him with your life.

He can't be trusted with anything.

She sat for a long
while, looking down into the shifting water, telling herself that miracles only
come to the well positioned. And that was what she was.

She looked back
toward 23 Wave Street. She looked west to Catalina, visible as a low hump above
the distant horizon line. A late morning wind came up and she could feel it
rattling through her joints.

Pulling the little
outboard to life she carved a turn back the way she had come.

• •
•

Two hours later she stood
in Aubrey Whittaker's bedroom, contemplating herself in the mirrored closet
door. The red leather dress fit tightly. Merci knew she was a slightly heavier
woman than Aubrey. Slightly shorter.

Slightly
not as beautiful, she thought.

She turned. The
golden buckles caught the light. The leather smelled good, cool against her
skin, a little stiff maybe, but leather formed to you, right?

She held up her hair
with one hand. Then the other. She put both hands on her hips and released the
left one out to one side. Turned again. But no matter what she did Merci saw
nothing attractive before her, nothing alluring or seductive or sexual. She
looked like a big woman in a little dress with tears on her face.

What
had gone wrong?

She knew that
whatever it was, it was at the center of what Mike had done, or not done.

Yes, because you are the key to him.

No, Mike is what Mike does.

You needed to love him, take those things out of him. They spoiled and
festered and erupted.

I am not the
mother of menace. I have a heart. A big one. Big and cold. Big and cold.

S
unrise,
Monday morning, the last stars fading into a pale sky while Merci parked her
car up the road from Mike's house, behind a tree where he wouldn't notice it.
Oak branches vanished when she turned off the headlights. She killed the
engine, felt her nerves bristle, then settle.

She
dangled an arm into the space behind the backseat, moving it around in the
cool, comforting emptiness. She watched the smoke rise from chimneys up and
down Modjeska Canyon, and she tried to banish the voice that told her she was
wrong to be doing this.

She'd
spent the last forty-eight hours listening to that voice. She'd argued with it,
agreed with it, disputed with it, screamed back at it. Now, decided, all she
could do was tell it to shut up and leave her alone.

At
7:02 she saw his van roll out of the driveway and down the road. Mike started
work at quarter of eight, and Mike would rather be dead than late.

You're betraying
him so you can know him?

You're
investigating him to prove him innocent?

Ten
minutes later she drove over, parked in front of the house and let herself in
as the dogs commenced barking.

The
house smelled of wood smoke and coffee like it always did. The fire was tamped
down, just a glow behind the glass of the stove front. The animals in the
pictures looked at her. The telephone desk was well organized, as all of Mike's
things were organized. One message light on the machine, so she played it.

Mike, this's your old man, you there or—

The kitchen was neat,
dishes washed, the empty Scotch bottle in recycle bin.

She put her head into
Danny's room, then into the spare bedroom, then went down the narrow hallway
and into Mike's bedroom.

Familiar smells:
aftershave, deodorant, the humid bouquet of after-shower man. The room was
large and dark, with the only window opening to a steep hillside that blocked
the sun at almost every hour of day. She turned on two lamps.

His bed was unmade. There
was a desk along one wall—just an over turned door set upon file cabinets—with
a computer and a printer. The cables went through the doorknob hole and down to
the wall. Bloodhound pictures, bloodhound calendars, bloodhound books. A Navajo
blanket hung from an adjacent wall, above Mike's framed collection of arrow
heads. The other wall had a bookcase and shelves for photographs, valued
fossils and seashells, little sayings from the Bible that Mike's mother written
by hand on colored paper and set in small, standing frames.

A good wife who can find?

She is far more precious than jewels.

The heart of her husband trusts in her,

And he will have no lack of gain.

Dear Lord,
Merci thought,
maybe You should just strike me
dead right now and get it over with. The voice inside me would agree with You.
Damn me. Damn me.

But
He didn't, and Merci turned to doing what she did best.

It took her less than
a minute to find the black sweater in the dresser. The date-night sweater. It
was tight on him, with a crew neck, and he wore it when he wanted to look good.
It showed off his blond hair and fair skin and hard muscles.

. . . black wool
and Orlon mix, definitely not from her dress, probably a sweater or outer
garment of some kind . . .

She read the label:
65 percent lambswool, 35 percent Orlon. Clean, folded, no blood. She told
herself it meant nothing, fundamentally nothing at all— except that he had
wanted to look his best for Aubrey. A little fury rippled inside.

It meant little more
than the beige carpet in the bedrooms of this house. The beige carpet she was
standing on.

Betray him because you care for him? Or because he's humiliated you?

The closet was old
and the runners were bad and she had to lean into it to get it to slide open.
At the far end, jammed up against the side, were the things she left there:
robe, a clean pair of jeans, a blouse, a light jacket.

She knelt down and
looked at the shoes. Mike was a shoe guy— probably twenty pair in all. Size
twelve. She began pulling them out one at a time and looking at the tread
patterns. Nothing like Evan O'Brien's print. In the far corner, behind a long
duster she found a dusty old duffel containing a worn pair of moccasins, two
tennis shoes caked in mud, and a pair of chukka-style boots.

The tread pattern on
the chukkas was like the one on the lab print. There was a dark, viscous
buildup along one of the comma-shaped lugs that pointed toward the back. There
was more trapped in the central circle of the right boot heel.

She cursed him. And
she cursed herself. And she cursed God, too, as the creator of all things.

She put the shoes
back into the duffel and put the duffel back behind the duster. She stood and
leaned into the door to get it closed again.

She told herself
there was an explanation. There was an explanation. There had to be some
explanation.