I gave him the sunny version of Ben’s recovery. By unspoken agreement, that was the one that Ben, Frank, Jack, and I gave out to other people. It was so obviously the one Ben wanted other people to believe.
I understood that attitude; Ben was not big on thinking of himself as a victim. “Please leave all pity shipments unopened and mark them, ‘Return to Sender,’ ” he once told me.
“So he’s already up and walking?” Phil Newly asked me now.
“From the day after the surgery, they had him standing. As soon as he had healed enough from the surgery to do so, he worked on learning to walk again. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been problems here and there, but for the most part, he’s been making steady progress. Lately, he’s been justifiably pleased with himself. And he has this remarkable new foot. It’s a Flex-Foot Re-Flex VSP.”
“A what?”
“A Flex-Foot. It’s his prosthesis. Designed by an amputee. Ben loves it. He’s managed to get around much better since he got it. It’s this high-tech foot that’s made from a carbon fiber composite — same stuff that’s used on jets, so it’s lightweight, but strong.” I picked up his mechanical pencil and made a rough sketch on a scrap of paper.
“It looks a little like — well, a piece from a charcoal-colored ski,” I said. “Flat and narrow like a ski, but much shorter — the length of a foot and part of a shin, in sort of a curved L-shape . . .” I looked up from my artwork and saw that I was losing him. “Sorry, Phil — I’ve become more interested in all of this lately.”
“I can understand why. So Ben is living alone now?”
“Yes, David left his house to Ben. I’m a little frightened for him, I have to admit. Not because of the injury — Ben will swear to you that he’s in better shape now than he was before the amputation — but because there was a break-in there a few months ago.”
The color drained from Phil Newly’s face.
41
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 12
Las Piernas
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he said, shuddering. “I seem to always let myself think the worst these days. Undoubtedly someone read in the paper that David had died and decided to take advantage of that. It’s a sad commentary on life in these times, but it happens.”
“Phil — don’t give me the ‘life in these times’ bit. I can’t take it from someone in your line of work.”
He smiled, then said, “I understand you’ve made use of a defense attorney or two in your day.”
I laughed. “Yes, it’s true what they say. You stop making lawyer jokes the moment you’re taken into custody.”
“Was anything stolen at David’s house?”
“No. Although now that you mention it, the break-ins occurred not too long after David’s name appeared in the first stories about — about Parrish’s escape.”
“Break-ins? Plural?”
“They hit Ben’s office, too.”
“Hmmm. How about the other homes? Anyone else have similar trouble?”
“No, not that I know of, but — I haven’t contacted their families, so I don’t know.”
“The families!” he said. “They must hate me.”
“I hope any hatred they feel is centered on Nick Parrish,” I said.
He fell into a brooding silence, then said, “He’s my obsession, you know.”
“Parrish?”
“Yes. That’s why I have all of these books. It’s not healthy, I know, but I keep trying to understand, to see if there was something I should have spotted early on, if there had been some warning that things would end as they did, something I failed to recognize.”
I tried to tell him it was useless to blame himself, but soon realized that I wasn’t going to be able to talk him out of this way of thinking.
“Here—” he said at one point, pulling the topo map out, heedlessly spilling the stacks of books. “Look — I can’t even figure out where — where it happened.”
Again I forced myself to look at his map. I hadn’t even studied the one I had used in the mountains. This one encompassed a larger area than mine, and so the scale was smaller. It gave a greater overview of the area, but in less detail.
Newly had marked the clearing where his foot had been broken. “That’s the last place I recorded on my GPS unit,” he said, pointing. He moved his finger a short distance to another mark. “Here’s where the landing strip was.” He moved it once more, to a symbol some distance from the other two. “And this is J.C.’s ranger station.”
It was odd to me, looking at the map now. Despite my initial misgivings, it was simply the earth’s fingerprint, whorls and contour lines and colors, shapes that — once you got the hang of reading topo maps — transformed themselves into a landscape of ridges and valleys, cliffs and slopes, lakes and rivers.
A view so far above the burial ground could not harm me or upset me much. I had not seen the area from this perspective. “It happened in this section — here,” I said, using the pencil to point out the ridge between the two meadows. “The coyote tree was on this ridge.” I moved the pencil a slight distance. “Julia Sayre was buried in a meadow on this side of it. You can’t really see the detail of the meadow on this map. The other side of the ridge is where he set his trap.”
Places. Just places, I told myself.
Phil Newly was staring at the map in silence.
