“On the other hand there’s nothing broken.”
“So why fi x it?” Susan said.
“Maybe,” I said.
Again the interactive quiet stretching nearly seven hundred miles across the dark fields of the republic. The fi elds were now probably darker and fewer than the ones Fitzgerald imagined, but I liked the phrase.
“And have you been thinking about why you’re so committed to this case?” Susan said.
“Most of the drive out here,” I said. “When I wasn’t thinking about marriage.”
“Any conclusions?”
“More a bunch of images,” I said. “Doherty talking about his wife. The look on his face when he listened to the tape. The way his wife seemed to feel he didn’t matter.”
“And are there any images of us that pop up?”
“We were separated,” I said. “I had to kill some people in a way I don’t feel so good about.”
“And if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t have had to kill the people you killed.”
“True.”
“Isn’t that a little hard to forgive?” Susan said.
“I’ve never thought so,” I said.
“Until this case?” Susan said.
“Doherty has to matter to someone,” I said.
“He matters to Epstein,” Susan said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I did a number of things that caused us both a lot of pain.”
“It did,” I said. “But we got past that.”
“I have never liked talking about it,” Susan said. “But I did what I had to do at the time.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Would it help if we talked about it now?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Again the rich silence across the phone connection.
“I love you,” she said. “You know that. I have always loved you. Even when I couldn’t stand to be with you, and was with someone else, I loved you.”
“It didn’t always feel quite that way,” I said.
“No, I’m sure it didn’t,” she said. “But it was true. You have to know it was true. That it is true.”
“I know,” I said.
“Don’t forget it,” she said.
After we hung up I stood in the window and looked at the dark lake stretching north to the horizon and beyond it to Canada. There was a moon, and I could see some sort of isolated bell buoy marking something a half mile from shore.
“I won’t forget it,” I said.
46.
Coyle state college was a scatter of yellow brick buildings across from a shopping center in Parma. The vice president for administration was a guy with a bad comb-over.
“Gerald Lamont,” he said when we shook hands. “Call me Jerry.”
Jerry was wearing a plaid sport coat, with a maroon shirt and tie. It went perfect with the comb-over.
“I’m interested in a member of your faculty from ten years ago, Perry Alderson.”
“Sure,” he said.
He picked up the phone and dialed an extension.
“Sally? Could you look up a former faculty member here, from ten years ago, Perry . . .”
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Alderson,” I said.
“Perry Alderson, yeah, soon as you can. Thanks, Sal.”
He hung up.
“What’d this guy Perry do?”
