The Poet (7 page)

As I drove through the lot I thought about why he had picked this place to come. As far as I knew it had nothing to do with the Lofton case. But I thought I knew why. He parked where he had parked and just sat there thinking.

There was a light on in the ceiling of the overhang above the front of the ranger shack. I decided to get out and see if Pena, the witness, was there. Then another thought struck me. I slid over to the passenger side of the Tempo. I took a couple of deep breaths, then opened the door and started running for the woods where they grew closest to the car. As I ran I counted by thousands out loud. I was at eleven thousand by the time I had gotten over the snowbank and reached the cover.

Standing there in the woods, a foot deep in snow without boots on, I bent over and put my hands on my knees as I caught my breath. There was no way a shooter could have gotten into the woods to hide if Pena had been out of the shack as quickly as he had reported. I finally stopped gulping the air and headed toward the ranger’s shack, debating how to approach him. As a reporter or a brother?

It was Pena behind the window. I could see the nameplate on his uniform. He was locking a desk when I looked through the window. He was calling it a day.

“Can I help you, sir? I’m closing up.”

“Yes, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

He came out, eyeing me suspiciously because I obviously wasn’t dressed for a hike in the snow. I had on jeans and Reeboks, a corduroy shirt beneath a thick woolen sweater. I had left my long coat in the car and I was very cold.

“My name is Jack McEvoy.”

I waited a moment to see if it registered. It didn’t. He had probably only seen the name written in reports he had to sign, or in the newspaper. Its pronunciation-Mac-a-voy-didn’t jibe with its spelling.

“My brother … he was the one you found a couple weeks ago.”

I pointed toward the lot.

“Oh,” he said, understanding. “In the car. The officer.”

“Uh, I’ve been with the police all day, looking at the reports and stuff. I just wanted to come out and take a look. It’s hard, you know … to accept it.”

He nodded and tried to hide a quick glance at his watch.

“I just have a few quick questions. You were inside there when you heard it? The shot?”

I spoke quickly, not giving him the chance to stop me.

“Yes,” he said. He looked like he was trying to decide something and then he did. He continued. “I was locking up just like tonight, ‘bout to go home. I heard it. It was one of those things, I kinda knew what it was. I don’t know why. Really what I thought was that it might be poachers after the deer. I came out pretty quick and the first place I looked was the lot. I saw his car. Could see him in there. All the windows were fogged up pretty good but I could see him. He was behind the wheel. Something about the way he was leaning back, I knew what happened … Sorry it was your brother.”

I nodded and studied the ranger’s shack. Just a small office and storage room. I realized that five seconds was probably a long estimate from the time Pena heard the shot until he saw the lot.

“There was no pain,” Pena said.

“What?”

“If it’s something you want to know. There was no physical pain, I don’t think. I ran to the car. He was dead. It was instant.”

“The police reports said you couldn’t get to him. The doors were locked.”

“Yeah, I tried the door. But I could tell he was gone. I came back up here to make the calls.”

“How long do you think he was parked there before he did it?”

“I don’t know. Like I told the police, I don’t have a view of the lot. I’d been in the shed-I got a heater in there-oh, I’d say at least a half hour before I heard the shot. He could have been parked there the whole time. Thinking about it, I guess.”

I nodded.

“You didn’t see him out on the lake, did you? You know, before the shot.”

“On the lake? No. Nobody was on the lake.”

I stood there trying to think of something else.

“Did they come up with any reason why?” Pena asked. “Like I said, I know he was an officer.”

I shook my head no. I didn’t want to get into it with this stranger. I thanked him and started back to the lot while he locked the shack door. The Tempo was the only car in the plowed lot. I thought of something and turned back.

“How often do they plow?”

Pena stepped away from the door.

“After every snow.”

I nodded and thought of something else.

“Where do you park?”

“We’ve got an equipment yard a half mile down the road. I park there and walk up the trail in the morning, down at quitting time.”

“You want a ride?”

“Nah. Thanks, though. The trail will get me there quicker.”

The whole way back to Boulder I thought of the last time I had been to Bear Lake. It was also winter then. But the lake wasn’t frozen, not all the way. And when I left that time, I felt just as cold and alone. And guilty.

Riley looked as if she had aged ten years since I had seen her at the funeral. Even so, I was immediately struck when she opened the door by what I hadn’t realized before. Theresa Lofton looked like a nineteen-year-old Riley McEvoy. I wondered if Scalari or anybody else had asked the shrinks about that.

She asked me in. She knew she looked bad. After she opened the door she casually raised her hand to the side of her face to hide it. She tried a feeble smile. We went into the kitchen and she asked if I wanted her to make coffee but I said I wasn’t staying long. I sat down at the kitchen table. It seemed that whenever I visited we would gather around the kitchen table. Even with Sean gone that hadn’t changed.

“I wanted to tell you that I’m going to write about Sean.”

She was silent for a long time and she didn’t look at me. She got up and started emptying the dishwasher. I waited.

“Do you have to?” she finally asked.

“Yes … I think so.”

She said nothing.

“I’m going to call the psychologist, Dorschner. I don’t know if he’ll talk to me, but now that Sean’s gone I don’t see why not. But, uh, he might call you for permission …”

“Don’t worry, Jack, I won’t try to stop you.”

I nodded my thanks but I noted the edge to her words.

“I was with the cops today and I went up to the lake.”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Jack. If you have to write about it that’s your choice. Do what you have to do. But my choice is that I don’t want to hear about it. And if you do write about Sean, I won’t read that, either. I have to do what I have to do.”

I nodded and said, “I understand. There is one thing I need to ask, though. Then I’ll leave you out of it.”

“What do you mean, leave me out of it?” she asked angrily. “I wish I could be left out of it. But I’m in it. For the rest of my life I’m in it. You want to write about it? You think that’s a way to get rid of it? What do I do, Jack?”

I looked down at the floor. I wanted to go but didn’t know how to exit. Her pain and anger radiated toward me like heat from a closed oven.

“You want to know about that girl,” she said in a low, calmer voice. “That’s what all the detectives asked about.”

“Yes. Why did this one … ?”

I didn’t know how to phrase the question.

“Why did it make him forget about everything good in his life? The answer is I don’t know. I don’t goddamn know.”

I could see anger and tears welling in her eyes again. It was as if her husband had deserted her for another woman.

And here I was, as close a flesh and blood approximation of Sean as she would ever see now. No wonder she was venting her anger and pain at me.

“Did he talk about the case at home?” I asked.

“Not especially. He told me about cases from time to time. This one didn’t seem that different except for what happened to her. He told me what the killer did to her. He told me how he had to look at her. After, I mean. I know it bothered him but a lot of things bothered him. A lot of cases. He didn’t want anybody to get away. He always said that.”

“But this time he went to see that doctor.”

“He’d had dreams and I told him he should go. I made him go.”

“What were the dreams?”

“That he was there. You know, when it happened to her. He dreamed he saw it but couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

Her comment made me think of another death a long time ago. Sarah. Falling through the ice. I remembered the helpless feeling of watching and being unable to do anything. I looked at Riley.

“You know why Sean went up there?”

“No.”

“Was it because of Sarah?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“That was before we knew you. But that was where she died. An accident …”

“I know, Jack. But I don’t know what it had to do with anything. Not now.”

I didn’t, either. It was one of many confusing thoughts but I couldn’t let it go.

Before heading back to Denver I drove over to the cemetery. I don’t know what I was doing. It was dark and there had been two snows since the funeral. It took me fifteen minutes just to find the spot where Sean was in the ground. There was no stone yet. I found it by finding the one next to it. My sister’s.

On Sean’s there were a couple of pots of frozen flowers and a plastic sign sticking out of the snow with his name on it. There were no flowers on Sarah’s. I looked at Sean’s spot for a while. It was a clear night and the moonlight was enough for me to see. My breath came out in clouds.

“How come, Sean?” I asked out loud. “How come?” I realized what I was doing and looked around. I was the only one in the cemetery. The only one alive. I thought about what Riley had said about Sean not wanting anybody to get away. And I thought about how I didn’t even care about such things, as long as it made a good thirty-inch story. How had we separated so completely? My brother and I. My twin. I didn’t know. It just made me feel sad.

Made me feel like maybe the wrong one was in the ground.

I remembered what Wexler had said that first night when they came for me and told me about my brother. He talked about all the shit coming down the pipe finally being too much for Sean. I still didn’t believe it. But I had to believe something. I thought of Riley and the pictures of Theresa Lofton. And I thought of my sister slipping through the ice. I believed then that the girl’s murder had infected my brother with the most desperate kind of hopelessness. I believed he became haunted by that hopelessness and the crystal-blue eyes of the girl who had been cut in half. And since he didn’t have his brother to turn to, he turned to his sister. He went to the lake that took her. And then he joined her.

I walked out of the cemetery without looking back.

7

Gladden posted himself at a spot along the railing on the other side from where the woman took the tickets from the children. She couldn’t see him. But once the great carousel began turning, he was able to study each child. Gladden pushed his fingers through his dyed blond hair and looked around. He was pretty sure everybody else regarded him as just another parent.

The ride was starting again. The calliope was grinding out the strains of a song Gladden could not identify and the horses began their bobbing, counterclockwise turn. Gladden had never actually ridden on the carousel, though he had seen that many of the parents got on with their children. He thought that it might be too risky for him to do it.

He noticed a girl of about five clinging desperately to one of the black stallions. She was leaning forward with her tiny arms wrapped around the candy-striped pole that came up through the painted horse’s neck. One side of her little pink shorts had ridden up the inside of her thigh. Her skin was coffee brown. Gladden reached into his duffel and brought out the camera. He amped up the shutter speed to cut down on movement blurring and pointed the camera at the carousel. He focused and waited for the girl to come around again.

It took him two revolutions of the carousel but he believed he got the shot and brought the camera back down. He looked around just to be sure he was cool and he noticed a man leaning on the railing about twenty feet to his right. The man hadn’t been there before. And most alarming, he was wearing a sport coat and tie. The man was either a pervert or a policeman. Gladden decided he’d better leave.

Out on the pier the sun was almost blinding. Gladden shoved the camera into the duffel and pulled his mirrored shades out. He decided to walk out further on the pier to where it was crowded. He could lose this guy if he had to. If he was actually being followed. He walked about halfway out, nice and steady, acting cool. Then he stopped along the railing and turned and leaned back against it as if he wanted to catch a few rays. He turned his face up toward the sun but his eyes, behind the mirrors, took in the area of the pier he had just come from.

For a few moments there was nothing. He didn’t see the man in the sport coat and tie. Then he saw him, jacket over the arm, sunglasses on, walking along the front of the arcade concession, slowly moving toward Gladden.

“Fuck!” Gladden said out loud.