The Lace Reader (32 page)

I watched powerless as Jack heaved and collapsed, exhausted, sobbing into the sand. È

Ê

Ë

É PART FOUR

Out of the chaos and the swirling of pattern,
the images will begin to emerge. The first will
Ë
appear at the still point. These are the Guides.
The Lace Reader must use the Guides to move
past the still point and beyond the veil. Beware
of images that emerge at this place. They are
not real. The Guides are tricksters. They will
show you their magic and invite you to linger.
If they are able and the Seeker is vulnerable,
È

the Guides will fool you into believing that
they themselves are the answer. Their egos

are great. The Reader must resist the urge to
allow the Seeker to rest here, no matter how
captivating the images seem, or how true. It is
the Lace Reader’s job to move the Seeker past
the still point to the real truth, which lies not
within the veil but just beyond.

—T H E L AC E R E A D E R ’ S G U I D E

Chapter 21

Rafferty and Towner sat together on the porch like an old couple on a cruise ship, blankets over their legs, deck chairs pulled up tight against the rail of the old Victorian fixer-upper Rafferty had bought his first winter here and regretted ever since.

“Taking the cruise to nowhere”—that’s what Towner called sitting here like this. It had become her main occupation since she got out of the hospital. It was prescribed. Rest, the doctors said. When she felt strong enough, she could swim a little, as long as it was in salt water. That last part had been Rafferty’s idea, not Towner’s. He knew she was a swimmer—all the Whitney women were—so he’d asked the doctor about a little swimming. Good idea, the doctor said. So far Towner had not gone anywhere near the water. She’d been in the hospital for three weeks, the first on a vancomycin drip. It was a bad infection. Postsurgical, they said. With complications. They hadn’t defined the complications, but they were there. Complications were a given in Towner’s life, and they were what had worried Eva most about her grandniece. There was something inevitable about these recent complications—not about what was happening but about Towner’s reaction to it all. Eva’s words kept 286 Brunonia

Barry

coming back to him:
There are many ways to kill yourself.
In the weeks that followed the infection, Rafferty read everything he could find on twins and bereavement. Twins were something special. Lose a twin at any age and you lose part of yourself. Half of you dies. Even people who didn’t know they were twins, who had lost a twin in the womb or been separated at birth, walked around all their lives with feelings of separation and grief, as if half of themselves had been lost and could never be found again.

Ever since he read Towner’s journal, the image she had created of Lyndley’s suicide kept playing through his mind. It was classic survivor’s guilt, if you thought about it. Suicide was almost impossible to get over. Rafferty’s roommate at Fordham had committed suicide, a fact made much worse because it wasn’t talked about, because the Catholic Church considered suicide not only a crime but a sin. In some ways it had felt like sin. At least to someone left behind. It engendered the same sick feeling you get when you’ve done something from which you can never truly recover. Like sin, or a low-grade virus.

Rafferty had been the one to discover his roommate. The image had never left him. Unlike Towner, Rafferty had never tried to kill himself, not directly. But the possibility was always there. Like the virus. Once you were exposed, it stayed with you forever, just waiting for you to weaken. You never knew what day your resistance would be down and the sickness would get its shot at you. Rafferty visited Towner at Salem Hospital. He stopped there most days on his way home from work. They didn’t talk much but sat on the roof porch looking out toward the harbor. When it was time for her release, it seemed natural to take her to his porch, where the view was better and he could keep an eye on things.

She couldn’t go back to California, not yet. She didn’t want to go The Lace Reader 287

back to Eva’s, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to. So he offered her his daughter’s room. Only for a few weeks, he said, when he heard her hesitation. Until she was stronger.

She liked his daughter’s room, seemed to feel comfortable surrounded by the souvenirs of a life that had nothing to do with her own: a poster of Tupac Shakur over the dresser, Beanie Babies suspended from the ceiling in a makeshift hammock.

“How old is your daughter?” It was one of the only questions Towner ever asked him.

“Leah is almost fifteen,” he said.

She would have turned fifteen while she was vacationing up here this summer, if he hadn’t changed the dates of her visit.

“What would you think about coming a couple of weeks later?”

he had asked Leah when he’d called her last week. “We could take the boat up to Maine.”

“The big boat or the little one?” she’d wanted to know.

“The big one.”

“Okay,” she’d said. “Whatever.”

His ex-wife had been all over him for changing the date. And for not taking it up with her.

“You can’t just keep changing everything,” she’d said.

“I don’t keep changing everything, I just changed this one thing. Leah didn’t seem to mind.”

“The things you don’t know about children could fill a book.”

Rafferty thought she was probably right. “I’m on a case.” It wasn’t an explanation, not really, but it was all he had, so he went with it.

“So what else is new?”

“A murder case.”

There’d been a long pause when he said the word. “I thought you moved up there to get away from murder cases,” she’d said finally.

“I moved up here to get away from a lot of things.”

288 Brunonia

Barry

It had been a direct hit, and he knew it. He hadn’t meant it, not really. It was habit.

“You can’t just go changing things,” she’d repeated. “What if I made plans?”

“So this is really about you.”

Click. He’d gotten used to the hang-up. It was the way most of their conversations ended. And it was usually because of something he’d said.

He’d felt bad about the whole thing for maybe an hour. Rafferty knew that Leah probably did care that he changed things around. But he also knew that to his daughter this wasn’t a vacation, it was a “dutation.” Leah had given it that name herself. Part duty, part vacation. She was clever with words, his daughter. He’d been a little insulted when she came up with the word, even if it was an accurate description of their time together. They were awkward with each other. It was as tough for her to come here as it was for him to have her. Not that he didn’t love her. He loved her a lot. But the guilt of leaving her behind had been too much for him. When he’d left New York, she’d wanted to come with him. She didn’t like the man her mother had left him for, she’d said. “I just want to be with you.”

“Your mother would never allow it,” had been his response. It was true, of course, but it wasn’t an answer.

She hadn’t asked him again. It wasn’t her nature. He’d counted on that. Just as it wasn’t her nature to question the change in vacation dates. She didn’t ask questions. Which was a good thing, at least in this case. The last thing Rafferty wanted Leah to know was the real reason he had changed things around. He didn’t want her to know he’d fallen for Towner Whitney.

Most nights Rafferty made dinner for the two of them. Pasta mainly, because it was something she would actually eat. She liked ice cream, The Lace Reader 289

too. Sometimes the ice cream truck made its way into the Willows, and he would walk down to the little beach to get some for her. Other nights, if he was working late, he would stop by the Dairy Witch on his way home. She liked anything with jimmies—the chocolate ones, not the rainbow sprinkles.

“What are you looking at?” he asked her. Her gaze was distant most of the time. He had asked the question before, usually without getting any answer.

“The lights,” she said. She was looking toward May’s window.

“She usually has only the one light burning,” Towner said, pointing to the two lights that shone in May’s window again tonight.
One if by land and two if by sea,
Rafferty thought. He stopped short of saying it out loud.

It surprised him that she had noticed the lights, the detail. He took it as a good sign.

That she didn’t seem to notice Jack’s boat leaving the harbor seemed a good sign, too, if for a different reason. Towner’s night with Jack LaLibertie was the elephant in the middle of the room that neither of them talked about. Not that they talked about anything, really. But they definitely didn’t talk about Jack LaLibertie. He had to admit he was relieved when her eyes stayed on May’s lights and did not track Jack’s boat heading for the Miseries, where most of his traps were located, then turning off its running lights and taking a hard turn to starboard and the back side of Yellow Dog Island.

They didn’t talk much. That was the truth of it. If they had, he might have asked her about Jack. He definitely would have asked about the journal. Or was it a book of short stories? Rafferty didn’t know exactly how to categorize it. The stories he had heard from Eva seemed to overlap and twist in Towner’s version. He knew she was filling in the gaps of her own history, that it was somehow therapeutic; that’s what she’d told him when he’d asked if he could read it. 290 Brunonia

Barry

Yes, he could read it, she’d said, if he thought it would help with his case against Cal. But she didn’t want anything to do with it. He’d read it over and over. Each time it raised more questions than it answered. It had instructor’s notes scrawled across the bottoms of the pages. The class she wrote it for was taught by a BU professor, though Towner had never enrolled as a student there. Rather, it was part of her reentry program her last year at McLean. Rafferty had been able to fact-check that much. But the course instructor was long gone. The course title, Introduction to Fiction Writing, didn’t do much to explain it either. The instructor may have believed that Towner was writing fiction; there certainly was a good amount of fiction involved. But there were facts, too, facts a more normal person might not want to share with the world. He would have asked her about Lyndley, about the love triangle, and about Towner’s conclusion that it was Lyndley whom Jack really loved, and not her. It was too personal and too painful for him to ask about, yet he couldn’t help reading it over and over again, trying to get a handle on it, trying to figure out the questions he would ask, should ask, if the time were ever right.

This was the part of the journal that was the hardest for him to take. And how he knew he was in trouble. The part he kept reading over and over wasn’t the part about Cal, it was the part about Towner and Jack.

Rafferty had known everything there was to know about Jack and Towner long before he’d met her. Not because Eva had told him but because Jack had told the story in AA meetings. Not just once but many times.

He knew how they’d met and how Jack had put up with things he never should have put up with because he was in love. How he’d gone to the hospital every day in hopes that she would speak to him. How, after she got out, Towner had pretended not to know him.
Not
to even know me!
Jack had almost cried when he said it. Rafferty had The Lace Reader 291

felt sorry for Jack, sure, but he’d also judged him for it, deciding that Towner had probably never loved him, not really. But Rafferty had changed his mind about that, both because of recent events and because of the journal. After reading her journal, Rafferty realized that at least at one time Towner had been in love with Jack LaLibertie. Probably she loved him still. It was because of Jack LaLibertie that Rafferty had stopped going to the Salem AA meetings. Not because Jack was there—no, he wasn’t likely to show up at AA anytime soon. Jack had fallen off the wagon long before Towner had come back to town. The reason Rafferty had stopped going to the meetings was that everybody knew about Towner, which made Rafferty feel guilty as hell. He had good reason. At one time, before Jack had started drinking again, Rafferty had been his sponsor.

“Check your integrity, Rafferty,” Roberta had said to him the last time he’d gone to a meeting in Salem. The room fell silent. It was what everybody wanted to say to him and didn’t dare. Things got even worse for him at work.

Every part of Rafferty’s cop’s brain knew that what was happening to him was a bad thing. And other people had been starting to notice.

The chief had warned him. “Don’t corrupt the case just because you’ve got an itch.”

“Fuck you,” Rafferty had replied.

Towner had been in the hospital for three days before Rafferty arrested Cal for her assault. He could have done it sooner—the chief had been 292 Brunonia

Barry

pressuring him to, in fact— but he knew that Cal would probably be out within twenty-four hours. If he waited until 4:00 p.m. on Friday, the arraignment wouldn’t take place until Monday morning. At the very least, Cal would spend the weekend in jail. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And it gave Rafferty a chance to interrogate some of the Calvinist followers without Cal’s ever-present supervision. The interrogations proved fruitless. If anything, the Calvinists were more dogmatic than their leader. Or just plain brainwashed. Rafferty had one other idea, but it was a long shot. At the arraignment he asked the judge to allow no bail, explaining that Cal was a danger to the community, citing his beatings of Emma Boynton as evidence, beatings that had left her blinded and brain-damaged. He brought in the medical and court records to support his claims. Cal’s attorney had of course anticipated this, and he countered by producing Cal’s spotless record for the last thirteen years and his community-service commendation from the mayor of San Diego. On the day of Cal’s hearing, the courtroom was packed. First the chief presented some complaints against Cal from the local merchants whose businesses the Calvinists had interrupted and from some mothers who stated that Cal’s exorcism practices included corporal punishment that bordered on abuse.