“Your sister’s a trip,” John murmurs as we walk back into the yard.
“Hmmm? Oh. I’m sorry about that.” Taking a second or two to find my place in the conversation once more, because I am still a bit dazed to be on such good terms with my wife, even if it is just for show. “Mariah has-well, she hasn’t been herself since our father died. I want to thank you, you and Janice, for being so nice to her.”
“Janice is nice to everybody.” As though he himself is not.
“That’s true.”
“I don’t know how she does it.” He shakes his head, but there is pride in his voice: he loves his wife so, and she obviously loves him right back. I try to remember exactly how that sensation feels, only to decide I have never felt it. “Mariah could be right, though,” John adds thoughtfully.
“Oh, come on. You don’t think the autopsy results were faked.”
“No, not about the autopsy. And not about your father being murdered.” John shrugs. “But what I’m saying is, she could be right about the private detective. That somebody else paid him.”
“You’re not serious.”
“You think he worked for free? Mariah said he was expensive.”
“Hmmmph.” My usual intelligent response.
John waits while I examine the steaks and lay them, one by one, on the long grill. He is wearing loose, clean blue jeans and a New York Athletic Club windbreaker over a white dress-shirt. His shoulders are remarkably broad for so short a man, but the start of a paunch is evidence that he no longer works out regularly.
“Add her story to yours, Msha.” John balances on the balls of his feet, his hands behind his back, letting me do the work. “The combination is interesting.”
“Hmmmph,” I repeat, not wanting John to take Mariah seriously.
“Maybe the report is what the fake FBI guys were looking for.” When I do not rise to this, John murmurs: “You haven’t told her everything, have you?”
“No.”
“She doesn’t know about the note from your dad, right? Or the pawn?”
“No.”
“She’s your sister, Misha. You really should share that stuff.”
I give him a look. “The way she’s been acting?”
John is hardly interested. He is no longer looking at either me or the steaks, but instead is gazing off toward the trees beyond the fence marking the border of our property and the beginning of the two acres owned by the president of the First Bank of Elm Harbor. Can I be boring my friend? “John?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m listening. Go on.”
“You have to understand about Mariah. It isn’t just this one thing. She, um, she has always been… excitable. She has always had a tendency to jump to conclusions. I mean, okay, she’s smarter than I am, but she’s not always, um, reasonable. She… I guess she’s a little bit passionate, you know?”
“Yes.” Absently. He continues to study the fence.
“I have this friend. Eddie Dozier. You remember Dana? Dana Worth? I’ve told you about her, right? Well, Eddie is her ex-husband. He’s black, but he’s pretty far to the right. Into all this anti-government stuff. Anyway, Dana told me the other day that Eddie and Mariah have been talking, that he’s the one who convinced her that the autopsy results were faked. You know, those specks in the photo? I’ve tried to convince her not to talk to him any more, but she just-”
“Misha.” Softly.
“-won’t listen to anything I tell her. I don’t know. I have to find some way to get her to back off, to stop all of this before it gets out of-”
“Misha!”
“What?” Annoyed that John, who never interrupts, has broken in.
“Misha, there’s somebody in the woods. On the hill. Don’t turn around.”
From what seems a very great distance, I hear my voice, answering calmly with the Gospel according to Kimmer: “It’s just my neighbor. I told you, the president of the bank lives over there-”
John’s laugh is cold. “Not unless the president of the bank is tall and black. And, besides, he has a pair of binoculars. He’s watching us.” Pause. “It could be that Foreman guy.”
I turn around at last. I cannot help myself.
“I don’t see anybody,” I whisper.
“He’s gone. We must have spooked him.”
John Brown is as level-headed a man as I know. He is not given to hallucinations. If he says somebody was there, somebody was there.
We warn our mystified wives that we have to go check something out. Then we leave the steaks and go into the woods. I suppose I should be worried-the watcher, if there was one, had to be Foreman-but if the late Mr. Scott turned out to be harmless, how dangerous can his sidekick be? Besides, being part of a team increases courage remarkably.
“Over here,” John murmurs, pointing to the spot where he thinks the man he saw was standing, between two barren trees. But we find only a few tracks in the melting snow, neither one of us outdoorsman enough to know how long they have been there, or even where they lead, for they vanish quickly in the brambles. My old friend and I look at each other. He shakes his head and shrugs, the message clear. We are trespassing and cannot linger long.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think we missed him.”
“I think so, too.”
“But if he scares so easily, Misha, I don’t think he’s dangerous.”
“Neither do I. I’d still like to know who he is.” I do not want to remain up here. A neighbor could see two black men creeping through the woods and get the wrong idea, and I have already had my obligatory once-a-decade encounter with the law.
“You don’t think it was that Foreman guy?”
I turn toward him. “You saw him. I didn’t.”
John frowns. He is disappointed in me. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything, Misha.”
“I don’t know what you think I’m leaving out.”
His voice remains milder than mine. “You can’t play games with your friends.”
“I’m not,” I snap. John shrugs. As we prepare to return to my property, we hear a car growl into life on the adjoining street, which runs parallel to Hobby Road. Racing over the slushy ground, we reach the sidewalk in time to see a powder-blue Porsche disappear into the distance. But this is the ritzy part of town, and it could belong to anybody.
Although the driver looks black, and we are the only black family on Hobby Hill.
“I think you should call somebody,” says John.
“I’m going to sound silly,” I sigh, thinking of Meadows’s warning about the risk to my wife’s potential nomination. But I know that on Monday I will make the call anyway, just to be on the safe side, and that Cassie Meadows, down in Washington, will roll her eyes and make another note in the conspiracy file.
I also know something else, which I do not share with my friend as we trudge back down the snowy, leaf- strewn hill. Hidden within Mariah’s ramblings was a tiny nugget of hard information, a new and troubling fact over which she skipped too lightly because she was searching for an epic conspiracy to end our father’s life. I know who has read the missing report.
CHAPTER 32
