“Maybe they didn't. Maybe he jumped. Kevin?”
“What?”
“If someone did kill him, it wasn't me.”
The silence began again, and stretched on and on, until Phil started to wonder if anyone, anything, in this room would ever move anymore.
Then Kevin slid to the end of the booth. He pushed to his feet and leaned for his crutches. He set them where he needed them and gripped them, Phil thought, tighter than he had to: his knuckles were white. Without another word or a look at Phil he swung away, through the room. As he shouldered the door, a flare of bright light filled the opening, as though something had exploded the very moment Kevin left.
Well, sure, thought Phil.
It had.
MARIAN'S STORY
Chapter 12
Marian walked with Tom along the streets of Pleasant Hills. He wasn't telling her something, and she didn't know what it was. That was almost funny, not funny but almost, considering what he had told her, and how much she had not wanted to hear it.
When they'd first left the bar (it was all a little runny to Marian, like a watercolor, but she did not think Tom had paid for their meal and drinks, just signaled to the bartender and pointed to the table as he rose from his chair), she had been glad of the cool and the quiet and the dark. Tom had his hand on her arm, and he'd steered her off the avenue at the first corner they came to, so even the thin traffic and unambitious neon of a Pleasant Hills evening was behind them. Quiet streets, cars in the driveways, yellow glows from the windows. On porches, carved pumpkins sneered. The flickering candlelight inside them made them seem to move their mouths, whispering terrible things. Ghosts swung from tree limbs, but these were just cloth, not the real ghosts of Pleasant Hills.
This was the oldest section of town, not far from where they'd grown up. Marian knew whose houses these were, and if she didn't, she knew whose they had been: the Leslies, old man Callahan, the crazy Curren sisters. Marian knew which of these trees were good for climbing and what birds sang in them, though no birds sang now, this dark, this late. What she did not know was what the secret was that Tom was keeping.
Tom had always had secrets, well, of course he had, he was Tom Molloy, so many things his family knew and did that the rest of them did not know. And he had secrets now that Marian would not think of trying to unearth. How hard it had been to have his children grow up around the corner with Vicky instead of under his own roof. How Mike the Bear had felt when Tom sold or gave away or let fall into ruin or burned down the disparate parts of the empire Big Mike had built. Whether Tom thought he had ever brought a smile, a real smile, to his mother's sad eyes.
About some things, Marian would never ask.
Tom had secrets; she had a secret, too, one she'd been hiding forever. That hideous knife-scaled thing had crawled out between them in Flanagan's, fouled the air, driven them outdoors, and was now following them, hissing, through the streets. (Marian shivered, was barely able to keep from looking behind; Tom put his arm across her shoulders.) And so she wondered, What other secret could there be? What else was worth hiding, once this truth was out?
“Tell me,” she said.
“Tell you what?” Tom pulled her closer to him. She was grateful. She wanted to answer him, but she did not know how to demand his secret, how to shrilly insist, when it was his arm that was keeping her warm. So she asked something else.
“Why did—did Jimmy”—she stumbled, and it made her stammer, or maybe it was the other way—“why did he let Markie say it was him? Markie went to jail—” To her horror, she started to cry.
Tom gave her a handkerchief, Tom gave her time. “It wasn't supposed to happen the way it did.” Marian scrubbed at her eyes. Tom said, “He was supposed to serve maybe five months, get paroled, everything would be fine.”
“What do you mean, ‘supposed to'?”
“It's what we thought,” Tom said, looking as they passed the McCrae house with its big new addition.
“When did you think that? Who said to think that?”
She knew her voice was rising. Tom's was patient. “Markie had no priors, he had no sheet. He was going to keep his head down inside. It shouldn't have been a problem.”
“That lawyer bastard, it was all his idea, right?”
Tom turned his face to her. Even in the dark she could see the blue of his eyes. No, she couldn't. It was just that she knew about his eyes, with Tom she believed things without having to see them. “Constantine?” he said. “He didn't even get the case until way after we'd worked it out. He came in after Markie was arrested. He believed the story the way Markie told it.”
She wasn't sure what Tom was saying: on these quiet streets there was too much noise, though maybe it was in her head, what sounded like sobbing. Tom was likely to be right. Yes, of course. But it could not be that Phil was innocent in all this.
“‘Worked it out,'” she said. “What does that mean?”
“Markie and Jimmy and me. Our story. We worked it out together.”
