Dark Rivers of the Heart

“But the initial assault failed.”

“Koresh was more unstable than they realized. So innocent ATF agents were killed. And innocent children. It became a media circus. With everyone watching, Summerton’s goons couldn’t plant the drugs and guns. The operation was abandoned. But by then there was a paper trail inside ATF: secret memos, reports, files. All that had to be eliminated quickly. A couple of people were also eliminated, people who knew too much and might squeal.”

“And you’re saying this nameless agency cleaned up that mess.”

“I’m not saying they did. They really did.”

“How do you fit into all this? How do you know Summerton?”

She chewed on her lower lip and seemed to be thinking hard about how much she should reveal.

He said, “Who are you, Valerie Keene? Who are you, Hannah Rainey? Who are you, Bess Baer?”

“Who are you, Spencer Grant?” she asked angrily, but her anger was false.

“Unless I’m mistaken, I told you a name, a real and true name, when I was out of my head, last night or the night before.”

She hesitated, nodded, but kept her eyes on the road.

He found his voice diminishing to a softness barely louder than a murmur, and though he was unable to force himself to speak louder, he knew that she heard every word he said. “Michael Ackblom. It’s a name I’ve hated for more than half my life. It hasn’t even been my legal name for fourteen years, not since my grandparents helped me apply to a court to have it changed. And since the day the judge granted that change, it’s a name I’ve never spoken, not once in all that time. Until I told you.”

He fell into a silence.

She didn’t speak, as though in spite of the silence, she knew that he wasn’t finished.

The things that Spencer needed to say to her were more easily said in a liberating delirium like the one in which he’d made his previous revelations. Now he was inhibited by a reserve that resulted less from shyness than from an acute awareness that he was a damaged man and that she deserved someone finer than he could ever be.

“And even if I hadn’t been delirious,” he continued, “I would’ve told you anyway, sooner or later. Because I don’t want to keep any secrets from you.”

How difficult it sometimes could be to say the things that most deeply and urgently needed to be said. If given a choice, he wouldn’t have selected either that time or that place to say any of it: on a lonely Utah highway, watched and pursued, hurtling toward likely death or toward an unexpected gift of freedom — and in either case toward the unknown. Life chose its consequential moments, however, without the consultation of those who lived them. And the pain of speaking from the heart was always, in the end, more endurable than the suffering that was the price of silence.

He took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say to you…it’s so presumptuous. Worse than that. Foolish, ridiculous. For God’s sake, I can’t even describe what I feel for you because I don’t have the words. There might not even be words for it. All I know is that what I feel is wonderful, strange, different from anything I ever expected to feel, different from anything people are supposed to feel.”

She kept her attention on the highway, which allowed Spencer to look at her as he spoke. The sheen of her dark hair, the delicacy of her profile, and the strength of her beautiful sun-browned hands on the steering wheel encouraged him to continue. If she had met his eyes at that moment, however, he might have been too intimidated to express the rest of what he longed to say.

“Crazier still, I can’t tell you why I feel this way about you. It’s just there. Inside me. It’s a feeling that just sprang up. Not there one moment…but there the next, as if it had always been there. As if you’d always been there, or as if I’d spent my life waiting for you to be there.”

The more words that tumbled from him and the faster they came, the more he feared that he would never be able to find the right words. At least she seemed to know that she should not respond or, worse, encourage him. He was balanced so precariously on the high wire of revelation that the slightest blow, although unintended, would knock him off.

“I don’t know. I’m so awkward at this. The problem is I’m just fourteen years old when it comes to this, when it comes to emotion, frozen back there in adolescence, as inarticulate as a boy about this sort of thing. And if I can’t explain what I feel or why I feel it — then how can I expect you ever to feel anything in return? Jesus. I was right: ‘Presumptuous’ is the wrong word. ‘Foolish’ is better.”

He retreated to the safety of silence again. But he didn’t dare linger in silence, because he would soon lose the will to break it.

“Foolish or not, I’ve got hope now, and I’m going to hold onto it until you tell me to let go. I’ll tell you all about Michael Ackblom, the boy who used to be. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, everything you can bear to hear. But I want the same thing from you. I want to know all there is to know. No secrets. This is an end to secrets. Here, now, from this moment on, no secrets. Whatever we can have together — if we can have anything at all — has to be honest, true, clean, shining, like nothing I’ve known before.”

The speed of the Rover had fallen while he talked.

His latest silence was not just another pause between painful attempts to express himself, and she seemed to be aware of its new quality. She looked at him. Her lovely, dark eyes shone with the warmth and kindness to which he had responded in The Red Door less than a week ago, when he’d first met her.

When the warmth threatened to well into tears, she turned her attention to the road once more.

Since encountering her again in the arroyo on Friday night, he had not until now seen quite that same exceptionally kind and open spirit; of necessity, it had been masked by doubt, by caution. She hadn’t trusted him anymore, after he’d followed her home from work. Her life had taught her to be cynical and suspicious of others, as surely as his life had taught him to be afraid of what he might one day find crouched and waiting within himself.

She became aware that she’d let their speed fall. She tramped on the accelerator, and the Rover surged forward.

Spencer waited.

Trees crowded close to the highway again. Filleting blades of light flashed across the glass, spattering quick sprays of shadows behind them.

“My name,” she said, “is Eleanor. People used to call me Ellie. Ellie Summerton.”

“Not…his daughter?”

“No. Thank God, no. His daughter-in-law. My maiden name was Golding. Eleanor Golding. I was married to Tom’s son, only child. Danny Summerton. Danny’s dead now. Been dead for fourteen months.” Her voice was pulled between anger and sadness, and often the balance in the contest shifted in the middle of a word, stretching it and distorting it. “Some days it seems he’s only been gone a week or so, and some days it feels like he’s been gone forever. Danny knew too much. And he was going to talk. He was killed to shut him up.”

“Summerton…killed his own son?”

Her voice became so cold that anger seemed to have won forever against the insistent pull of sadness. “He’s even worse than that. He ordered someone else to do it. My mom and dad were killed too…just because they happened to be in the way when the agency men came for Danny.”

Her voice was colder than ever, and she was whiter than pale. During his days as a policeman, Spencer had seen a few faces as white as Ellie’s was at that moment — but they had all been faces in one morgue or another.

“I was there. I escaped,” she said. “I was lucky. That’s what I’ve been telling myself ever since. Lucky.”

* * *

“…but Michael had no peace, even once he’d gone to Denver to live with his grandparents, the Porths,” Gary Duvall said. “Every kid in school knew the name Ackblom. An unusual name. And the father was a famous artist even before he became a famous murderer, killed his wife and forty-one others. Besides, the kid’s picture had been in all the papers. Boy hero. He was an object of unending curiosity. Everyone stared. And every time it seemed the media would leave him alone, there would be another flare-up of interest, and they’d be hounding him again, even though he was just a kid, for God’s sake.”

“Journalists,” Roy said scornfully. “You know what they’re like. Cold bastards. Only the story matters. They