truck, he’ll know where to find me. My address is in the wallet.” It just kind of tumbled out of him.
“Who, Ben? What truck?” He heard concern in her voice.
He looked up at her, his vision blurred by his tears. She looked back with sympathy and love, and he knew he was about to tell her everything. He was about to offer her the money-the whole $500-and ask if he could stay with her. He knew her answer long before he uttered his first stuttered sentence of explanation, but that didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him. The truth fell hard, like the rain. It poured out of him.
Emily Richland, reaching out to comfort him, never stopped holding him. She drank up the truth like the garden with the rain. She listened to every word, nodding as he spoke; her own eyes filled with tears; and the two spent over an hour there on the back porch, right through the squall and into a patch of blue sky, welcoming the sun’s penetrating warmth that followed behind, flowed through it, like the intense love that Ben felt for this woman.
20
When his pager sounded, Lou Boldt cringed. The effort to pull its tiny LCD screen into view was as automatic as turning the ignition key of his car or pulling on a pair of socks. At that very moment he had been wondering what to do about his suspicions about Liz, because if he was right about her it started a series of unthinkable, problematic choices that questioned the survival of their family.
Liz was taking a bath. Taken in and of itself, this was no big deal, except that in this family it was Boldt who usually took the baths and Liz, ever in a hurry, who always took a shower. But three times this week she had come home from work and immediately drawn herself a bath. And it was only a few minutes earlier that Boldt realized she had taken baths on the same days the week before: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. All three days she had come home an hour and a half late. His imagination raced. As a detective he was trained to see patterns. He regretted this ability, this talent; most of all he resented that his work should intrude into his private life to this degree. He was engaged in maintaining a thoughtful surveillance on his own wife, based on distrust and fear and driven by palpable memories of the past. He hated himself. Coincidence was not in Lou Boldt’s vocabulary. He heard Sarah crying and felt on the verge himself.
He scooped up his infant daughter from the crib, nuzzled her, and inhaled the sweet-milk fragrance of her skin that he treasured. She reached out, her tiny fingers locking onto his hair.
“Knock, knock,” he said, toeing open the bathroom door, trying to release the vise of her grip on his hair.
Liz’s face was bright red, her chest flushed, her body stretched in the tub and magnified by the water. She looked so incredibly appealing, the florid skin tones of a Rubens. He felt a pang of protective jealousy. There was no such thing as ownership; he knew this consciously, and yet …
“I think it’s dinnertime,” he said, his voice cracking, emotions and memories welling up from within him. She had betrayed his faith once before; was it so impossible again? Many of the same elements were in place: both of them working too hard, ignoring the other’s needs. The two kids placed impossible burdens on their attentions. There was little time left for their marriage. It was all about the family now. It was different.
He didn’t want to cry in front of her, to set her off, to start something he felt so unclear about, so incapable of articulating. He wanted to treasure her, to trust her, to believe. He feared the truth; he didn’t want to know-and the realization swept through him that this was the first time he had purposely and intentionally not wanted the truth. As an investigator, curiosity drove him, fed him. It was the fuel of his professional existence, and yet now he stifled it, like throwing a wet blanket over a fire. To him this was a profound and significant difference, and one he interpreted as a weakness. A crack in the armor.
The mother beckoned with outstretched arms, and the child, seeing this, stopped crying and wiggled to be free. Boldt envied Liz this biological connection and for a moment felt himself a visitor in his own home. Liz sat up high in the tub and, cradling the child, offered her ripened breast. The hungry lips drew her mother into her and Liz smiled slightly, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back against the tub. Boldt studied his wife’s nakedness from head to toe, her youthful breasts, trim waist, the grassy swatch of black hair between her long legs. He didn’t want anyone else having this. He felt possessive. He wondered why he had allowed his own body to train-wreck the way it had. He blamed himself.
“Didn’t I hear your pager?” she questioned, her eyes still closed.
Did she want him out of the house? He felt a flood of anger surge through him. He stood taller and drew his stomach a little tighter. He suddenly wished he looked different, less disheveled, more hair, better tone to his muscles. Had her eye wandered? Was he aging too quickly for her?
“Yeah,” he answered. Was she going to blame the pager for awakening Sarah? It wouldn’t be the first time. She had fallen into the habit recently of blaming him for all sorts of things, many out of his control. He had let most of these complaints pass unchallenged, but they had eaten into him like dry rot, damage unseen to the naked eye.
“You going to call it in?” she asked. The lines of her naked form were a work of art. He wished the tub were big enough for both of them. He wanted to feel her skin against his, warm and wet.
“Yeah.” When had he not called it in? he wondered. He was a slave to his work. He lived for it.
She opened her eyes slightly, like a person drugged-dreamy and quiet. The baby suckled her. Again he was struck by how he envied that connection. He wondered what it must feel like to her, the aching swelling of the breast relieved, her fluids giving life to another. “You okay?” she asked, her brow knitted sharply, her eyes suddenly pained.
“Sure,” he replied.
“I don’t think so.”
“Fine,” he lied to her, wondering when and how that had become such an easy thing to do.
“You know what it is?” she asked. He looked back at her curiously, wondering if this was to be her moment of confession. Strangely, he didn’t want that just now. “The pager,” she explained. “Do you know what it’s about?”
“No, it’s not that,” he informed her.
“Then what?”
“Regrets. Concerns.” He heard his voice betray him. Betrayal fed on itself, he thought, like those insects that eat their mates.
Her eyes came open wider. Her hips rolled in the water as she leaned toward him. She floated there, motionless. She cradled the baby tighter to her. “Honey?”
He had an urge to make love to her. Possess her. He knew it was for all the wrong reasons. “Maybe we should talk at some point,” he said, though he sounded defeated and he knew she picked up on it.
“I’m all yours,” she said.
I wonder, Lou Boldt thought. He nodded, though insincerely. She took the baths to clean herself up, to keep him from knowing. A cleansing. Purify her from whoever else had been with her. He ached, wondering what drove such thoughts.
“Go to work, Sergeant,” she ordered. “I’m not going to get mad about it.”
“I’ll call in,” he said. “Check it out.”
“I’ll wait up,” she told him, acknowledging with more certainty than he wished that the page was going to take him from their home. She was right, of course, it nearly always did. The pager was the giant stage hook, designed, it seemed, to steal him from his home life. To disrupt. He had come to hate it. “Or I’ll try to, depending how late you are.” She chuckled. The baby lost her mother’s nipple, and Liz helped her to find it again.
“You two are beautiful,” he said, still living with the urge to have her sexually. He felt his throat choke and turned toward the phone to prevent her from seeing the betrayal of tears that filled his eyes.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Boldt thought, the wind blowing through his close-cropped hair-what was left of it; her silhouette caught by a streetlamp that lit the running path that surrounded Green Lake. Daphne Matthews was a little too fit, a little too pretty; she never quite looked the part.
The lake was several acres of black water surrounded by the running path, a perimeter road lined on the east
