do any good, and might even scare you away, and then I’d really feel like crap.”
“We’re fine,” I said. “Better than fine. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Okay,” she said, and softly shut the door, floating back into her world of comfort and order, sparked by the mutually sustaining forces of lust and curiosity.
TWENTY-FIVE
AMANDA’S LIGHTS WERE ON when I got back from Rosaline’s. I turned off my headlights, parked on the road and walked down our common driveway. I felt like a jerk sneaking into my house, but I wanted a chance to look at those phone records before Amanda knew I was home. As promised, Will Ervin had left them wrapped in a plastic bag and stuck partway under the doormat on the side porch.
I made a cup of coffee to dilute the effects of Rosaline’s vodka and took the phone records and some notes out to the pine table on the screened-in porch. I brought along a yellow legal pad on which to draw boxes and arrows like engineers used to do before we drew them with keyboards and liquid-crystal monitors.
I liked this kind of work, making flow schemes and process diagrams. Not as a tool for analysis but as a way to graphically represent a conclusion I’d already drawn.
I’d expected to search through pages and methodically pull numbers out of long columns, then cross-check those numbers with another set. But that work had already been done. I now knew why Sullivan said to be as specific as possible with what I was looking for. What I held weren’t the records themselves, but the answer to a query. A report developed by a type of analytical software. Of course.
So it didn’t take very long to fill in my boxes and draw my arrows. It was mostly a pro forma exercise. But rather than a petrochemical product at the end of the process it was the consummation of entirely human motivations and behavior. A schematic of pathological cause and effect.
I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and ran some though my hair. I caught myself looking in the mirror. That was something I rarely did, because I never liked what I saw. It wasn’t all vanity, though I admit I’d turn my head a little to get a better angle on my busted nose. I saw things when I looked into my own eyes that seemed to betray thoughts or feelings I was unaware of. It was unsettling.
I pulled myself away and went to put on a clean shirt. Then I called Amanda to tell her I was on my way.
“Right now?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t laugh,” she said, and hung up the phone.
She answered the door with a towel wrapped around her head.
“I just got out of the shower.”
“No kidding.”
“I need a few minutes.”
“Take all you want. I know where the Scotch is.”
“Bring it out to the terrace. I’ll meet you there.”
The terrace was actually a patch of lawn on the side of the house facing the channel to the lagoon where she kept a set of white plastic recliners and a small glass table. It wasn’t long before she was out there with me, dressed in a silk kimono, her wet hair brushed smooth, a glass of wine in one hand and the bottle in the other.
“Did you sleep?” I asked her.
“Like a dead person. I knew I would. Lately I’d be just about asleep when I’d think of those two men from the DEC with their maps and charts and official-looking papers. A jolt would run through me and I’d be wide awake for hours. This time all I had to do was remember your voice saying the cellar was all clear. And I blissfully fell into the abyss.”
“I’ve fallen in a few of those. Weren’t so blissful.”
She frowned at me.
“One was in your shower, as I recall,” she said. “Any word on that?”
“Nothing official. Had a little chat with Markham Fairchild.”
“And?” she asked.
“He’s worried about my right prefrontal cortex.”
“Me, too, even if I don’t know what it is.”
“A part of the brain. Apparently controls social behavior.”
“Then I’m not so worried,” she said.
“You’re not?”
“You’ve been very social to me. And always well behaved.”
“That’s because I love you,” I said.
“You love a lot of people, Sam. You can’t help it. You try not to, but it happens anyway. And they love you back. Whether you like it or not.”
“Geez.”
“I know, you hate this kind of talk. But it means what happens to you is no longer your concern alone. It affects other people. That wasn’t true when I first met you, but it is now. You’re a full citizen in the land of the living. And some of us here care about the condition of your brain, by reputation a pretty good one.”
I didn’t know what to say to all that, but I had brains enough not to argue. I wouldn’t have put it the way she did, but she had a point. It was a realization I’d come to late in life. People will grow on you if you let them. They’ll work their way right through the prefrontal cortex and down into your vital organs, lodging themselves around your heart. They might even save your life, even if you don’t realize they’re doing it. What I’d learned was you didn’t have to fear any of it. Even if sometimes it meant you had to feel the pain of loss. The occasional charges were worth the investment. In fact, it was the only investment worth making.
“I don’t know how good it is, but my brain’s been getting a workout lately,” I said.
“I can imagine. How are things progressing?”
“Word is the indictment could show up any minute,” I said.
“Oh dear.”
“But I’ve been able to put a few thoughts together.”
“Promising thoughts?”
“Depends on how you look at it. I’m still curious about some stuff. I need to talk it out.”
“I’m glad to help if I can,” she said. “Actually, you’re the only one who can.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Like for starters, when did he approach you?”
“And that would be?”
“Milhouser.”
She took a long pull of her wine and let her head fall back, showing off her long lean neck, to which the hard year of stress and striving had added new lines and bands of sinew.
“He approached me when I said he did,” she said.
“At the restaurant.”
“No, Mr. Inquisitor. I’d spoken to Robbie Milhouser at the project on Jacob’s Neck. If you don’t believe me, get Joe Sullivan to give me a lie detector test.”
I stood up from my plastic chair and walked halfway across the lawn toward the lagoon. The houses lined up along the northwest shore were all lit up and you could hear voices bouncing across the water, though you couldn’t hear what they were saying. Words without meaning. Sound without comprehension.
I went back to Amanda, who was pouring another glass.
I sat on the edge of the chair and leaned toward her, my elbows on my knees.
“It was a Milhouser. But it wasn’t Robbie.”
The look on her face betrayed a chorus of conflicting impulses.
“Oh God, Sam, do we have to?”
I tried to make it as easy as I could.
“I think we do.”
“And if I say I’d rather not you’ll just persist. That’s your way.”
