sent her sprawling from her chair onto the hardwood floor.
Caren Angland was forty-one years old and she hadn’t been struck in the face since grade school. Lights went tilt in her head. Not just pain. Something fundamental broke.
“Low impulse control,” she said, a stand-up girl through the sting of tears and a bloody nose. During their early years, when he was a ball of fire working the streets, he’d regaled her with stories about how blunt and obtuse the “assholes”
were. How they’d go from zero to sixty on the stupid accel-erator at the drop of an insult because they had low impulse control.
He shook the picture at her and rolled his eyes. “Tom James? He’s an idiot. They used to call him One Call James at the courthouse. He’ll print anything.”
Caren’s smile. White teeth outlined in blood: “He asked me if the FBI was investigating you?” Her eyes focused through a knotted veil of pain and gave him such a look he should die right there.
“That little bastard,” muttered Keith, his voice vacant, trapped, fatal.
You dumb shit, she thought. Looking Medusa in the eye and you don’t know it. You’re stone. You’re dead.
How fickle the passion was that once wore the decorous chains of loyalty and commitment, and yes, love and sacrifice and everything they put in vows to make them stick. How agile it turned a somersault and bounced up spitting poison.
He ignored her and stalked from the room, slapping the picture against his thigh.
How one-pointed and inelegant was hate-now that she held it, unsheathed, in her hand. “You’re going down, fucker!” she screamed after him, through the open front door, into the night.
Mad. When the growl of his car had faded down the road, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, applied pressure and then packed tissue in her right nostril. Swelling and discoloration had already blurred the contour of her right cheek. She’d have a raccoon eye before lunchtime.
The battered face, by itself, was enough to cost him his job.
Stay mad. While she waited for the slight bleeding to staunch, she opened her prescription pills and methodically dropped the blue caplets one by one into the aquatinted toilet water.
The psychiatrist who prescribed the antidepressants was a nice St. Paul liberal with Inuit stone sculptures on her desk.
She believed in small dark corners in your past, and she’d kept probing for one in Caren’s. Caren had played along, looking for that faraway dark little corner when really she was stuck all alone in the echoing rooms of this big, pitch black house with Keith, who was playing Faust.
Dr. Ruth Nelson would have probably liked the Faust reference. She might have thought it an apt metaphor for the concessions her clients made to keep up in the 1990s. It would have been easier and cheaper if Caren had just told her, “Look, I was bad.”
Dr. Ruth believed in “disorders”; certainly she didn’t believe in evil. Or that the devil could sit in Caren’s basement in the form of Paulie Kagin and Tony Sporta from Chicago.
Caren tugged at her wedding ring. Wanting it off. Swollen knuckles, water retention; it stayed. She flushed the toilet, turned and trekked through the blue rooms, up the stairs, stepped over the broken door into her bedroom and stripped off the now blood-dotted T-shirt she’d worn to bed last night.
She pulled on jeans, a lined denim jacket. She resolved to keep it simple.
She had to warn Tom James, the reporter. She had to go to Phil Broker and tell the truth. Get his advice about what to do next.
Take her lumps.
But Phil would be standoffish. Keith and Phil disliked each other, but they had history, all the way back to that bad night on St. Alban.
She needed an intermediary. And this brought her back to Tom James. They could help each other. She could get him out of harm’s way and whisk him with her up north.
He could make the approach to Phil and explain it all. She could give James the information. The story.
Find a way to make it
Better now, she went downstairs to the tool drawer in the breezeway, to the garage, and took out a cordless screwdriver. On the move, enjoying the sensation of motion, she made sure a Phillips driver was in the head. On the way down the stairs to the basement she tested the battery.
Uh-uh.
So she stepped right up to the wall in Keith’s paneled den, under the indifferent glass eyes of the stuffed white-tail and the stuffed antelope. He’d left room up there between the deer for her, the stuffed trophy wife. She removed the screws that fastened the vertical slats of stained boxcar siding.
Time to get the “bricks.”
When she had yanked out six of the boards she could see the suitcase sitting in its nest of studs and sawdust. Compact square vinyl, the bag weighed almost fifty pounds.
Tony talked like that, swallowing his consonants. Keith’s new partner.
Give the bag to Phil, Keith’s
She trundled it out into the den and carefully replaced the siding. A minute with the vacuum erased any evidence of sawdust on the shag carpet.
Caren, five nine and strong, dragged and bumped the case up the stairs and down the breezeway. She opened the garage door, and the bluish predawn air flooded in, pristine as a new beginning. With bent knees, she stooped and heaved the suitcase into the back of the Blazer.
She returned to the basement and entered the laundry room. There, between the washer and dryer and the water heater, the partition didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. An unfinished spot that Keith had masked with imitation planters.
She reached behind the dryer, pulled out a leather shoulder bag that contained a Panasonic video camera, and popped out the tape. She had warned Keith. If he wouldn’t do something. She would. He thought her threats were just more of her “blue room syndrome.” So…
Caren’s home movie featuring Keith Angland playing Faust, meeting with “Them.”
She’d just positioned the camera on top of the partition between the planters where it commanded a view of the whole den. She’d turned off the camera light, put in a thirty-minute tape, and when the time was right, just let it run. The thing was virtually soundless.
On her way to the garage she picked up an overnight bag she kept packed in the hall closet. Toiletries and a change of underwear. Just in case.
She tossed the bag in the car, turned and squared her shoulders. She craved a cigarette. Not a physical need, but a dramatic urge. There were no cigarettes in the house.
She went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and picked at a bag of chocolate truffles. She took one bite from the candy and set the remaining half down on the counter.
Deep breath. As a girl, in Lutheran Sunday school, she’d been taught that God never tests you beyond your strength.
She shut her eyes, tried to remember. Corinthians something.
Too far away now.
Most people are tested in little ways. So they talk to friends.
If the test is moderate to serious, they may need a lawyer.
Real trouble, they call a cop.
C’mon God, who do you call if the trouble is your cop husband?
Not fair. Being tested this hard. Her jaw trembled with emotion, thinking; Dad must have felt like this when
