Dark Rivers of the Heart

kind, good man she saw in Spencer was an illusion or, at best, only part of the truth. She realized, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to doubt Spencer Grant. Instead, she was eager to believe in him, as she had not believed in anything or anyone for a long time.

If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.

Those words had been so sincere, such an uncalculated revelation of his feelings and his vulnerability, that she had been left briefly speechless. Yet she hadn’t possessed the courage to give him any reason to believe that she might be capable of reciprocating his feelings for her.

Danny had been dead only fourteen months, and that was, by her standards, far too short a time to grieve. To touch another man this soon, to care, to love — that seemed to be a betrayal of the man whom she had first loved and whom she would still love, to the exclusion of all others, were he alive.

On the other hand, fourteen months of loneliness was, by any measure, an eternity.

To be honest with herself, she had to admit that her reticence sprang from more than a concern about the propriety or impropriety of a fourteen-month period of mourning. As fine and loving as Danny had been, he never would have found it possible to bare his heart as directly or as completely as Spencer had done repeatedly since she’d driven him out of that dry wash in the desert. Danny had not been unromantic, but he had expressed his feelings less directly, with thoughtful gifts and kindnesses, rather than with words, as if to say “I love you” would have been to cast a curse upon their relationship. She was unaccustomed to the rough poetry of a man like Spencer, when he spoke from his heart, and she was not sure what she thought of it.

That was a lie. She liked it. More than liked it. In her hardened heart, she was surprised to find a tender place that wasn’t merely responsive to Spencer’s forthright expressions of love but that longed for more. That longing was like the profound thirst of a desert traveler, and she now realized it was a thirst that had been in need of slaking all her life.

She was reluctant to respond to Spencer not primarily because she might have grieved too short a time for Danny but because she sensed that the first love of her life might eventually prove not to be the greatest. Finding the capacity to love again seemed like a betrayal of Danny. But it was far worse — cruel rejection — to love another more than she had loved her murdered husband.

Perhaps that would never happen. If she opened herself to this still mysterious man, perhaps she would ultimately discover that the room he occupied in her heart would never be as large or warm as the one in which Danny had lived and would always live.

In carrying her loyalty to Danny’s memory so far, she supposed that she was allowing honest sentiment to degenerate into a sugary pudding of sentimentality. Surely no one was born to love but once and never again, even if fate carried that first love to an early grave. If creation operated on rules that stern, God had built a cold, bleak universe. Surely love — and all emotions — were in one regard like muscles: growing stronger with exercise, withering when not used. Loving Danny might have given her the emotional strength, in the wake of his passing, to love Spencer more.

And to be fair to Danny, he had been raised by a soulless father — and a brittle, socialite mother — in whose icy embrace he’d learned to be self-contained and guarded. He had given her all that he could give, and she had been fortunate and happy in his arms. So happy, in fact, that suddenly she could no longer imagine going through the rest of her life without seeking, from someone else, the gift that Danny had been the first to give her.

How many women had ever affected a man so strongly that he had, after one evening of conversation, given up a comfortable existence and put his life in extreme jeopardy to be with her? She was more than merely mystified and flattered by Spencer’s commitment. She felt special, foolish, girlish, reckless. She was reluctantly enchanted.

Frowning, she studied Steven Ackblom’s photograph again.

She knew that Spencer’s commitment to her — and all that he had done to find her — might be seen as less the result of love than of obsession. In the son of a savage serial killer, any sign of obsession might reasonably be viewed as a cause for alarm, as a reflection of the father’s madness.

Ellie returned all four photographs to the envelope. She closed it with its small metal clasp.

She believed Spencer was, in all ways that mattered, not his father’s son. He was no more dangerous to her than was Mr. Rocky Dog. For three nights in the desert, as she had listened to him murmuring in delirium, between his periodic ascensions to a shaky state of consciousness, she had heard nothing to make her suspect that he was the bad seed of a bad seed.

In reality, even if Spencer was a danger to her, he was no match for the agency when it came to being a threat. The agency was still out there, hunting for them.

What Ellie really needed to worry about was whether she could avoid the agency’s goons long enough to discover and enjoy whatever emotional connections might evolve between her and this complex and enigmatic man. By Spencer’s own admission, he had secrets that were still unrevealed. More for his sake than hers, those secrets would have to be aired before any future they might have together could be discussed or even discerned; because until he settled his debts with the past, he would never know the peace of mind or the self-respect needed for love to flourish.

She looked out at the sky again.

They flew across Utah in their sleek black machine, strangers in their own land, putting the sun behind them, heading eastward toward the horizon from which, several hours hence, the night would come.

* * *

Harris Descoteaux showered in the gray and maroon guest bathroom of his brother’s Westwood home, but the scent of the jailhouse, which he believed he could detect on himself, was ineradicable. Jessica had packed three changes of clothes for him on Saturday, prior to being evicted from their house in Burbank. From that meager wardrobe, he selected Nikes, gray cords, and a long-sleeve, dark-green knit shirt.

When he told his wife that he was going for a walk, she wanted him to wait until the pies could be taken from the oven, so she could go with him. Darius, busy on the telephone in his study, suggested that he delay leaving for half an hour, so they could walk together. Harris sensed that they were concerned about his despondency. They felt he should not be alone.

He reassured them that he had no intention of throwing himself in front of a truck, that he needed to exercise after a weekend in a cell, and that he wanted to be alone to think. He borrowed one of Darius’s leather jackets from the foyer closet and went into the cool February morning.

The residential streets of Westwood were hilly. Within a few blocks, he realized that a weekend spent sitting in a cell actually had left his muscles cramped and in need of stretching.

He hadn’t been telling the truth when he had said that he wanted to be alone to think. Actually, he wanted to stop thinking. Ever since the assault on his house on Friday night, his mind had been spinning ceaselessly. And thinking had gotten him nowhere but into bleaker places within himself.

Even what little sleep he had gotten had been no surcease from worry, for he had dreamed about faceless men in black uniforms and shiny black jackboots. In the nightmares, they buckled Ondine, Willa, and Jessica into collars and leashes, as if dealing with dogs instead of with people, and led them away, leaving Harris alone.

As there was no escape from worry in his sleep, there was none in the company of Jessica or Darius. His brother was ceaselessly working on the case or brooding aloud about offensive and defensive legal strategies. And Jessica was — as Ondine and Willa would be, when they returned from the mall — a constant reminder that he had failed his family. None of them would say anything of that kind, of course, and he knew that the thought would never actually cross their minds. He had done nothing to earn the catastrophe that had befallen them. Yet, though he was blameless, he blamed himself. Somewhere, sometime, someplace, he’d made an enemy whose retribution was psychotically in excess of whatever offense Harris unwittingly had committed. If only he had done one thing differently, avoided one offending statement or act, perhaps none of this would have happened. Every time he thought of Jessica or his daughters, his inadvertent and unavoidable culpability seemed to be a greater sin.

The men in jackboots, though only creatures from his dream, had in a very real sense begun to deny him the comfort of his family without the need to buckle them in leashes and lead them away. His anger and frustration at his powerlessness and his self-inflicted guilt, as surely as bricks and mortar, had become the components of a wall between him and those he loved; and this barrier was likely to become wider and higher with time.

Alone, therefore, he walked the winding streets and the hills of Westwood. Many palms, ficuses, and pines