she'd gotten her information-except for one thread still hanging that I couldn't quite clip.
In the motel room, there'd been a few seconds when Laurie had seemed genuinely confused, and she'd said the words, 'No to a horse, yes to a stallion.' At the time, I could only think she was suggesting that Celia really had been thrown and killed like the Pettyjohns had claimed.
But now I knew for a fact that Pete had done it, and I'd started to wonder if Laurie could have meant stallion in the sense of stud, and she'd been referring to Reuben-the dominant male-as the baby's real father.
In all probability, she hadn't meant anything at all-those were just words that had slipped out during her prattle to con me. If she had known, she must have learned it from Beatrice-although I wasn't sure whether Beatrice had been aware of Reuben's affair with Celia, or even that Celia was pregnant. That was the main thing I'd hoped to pry out of her, but I never would.
It was a quarter after three in the afternoon. I decided that as long as I was in town, I might as well pay one more call. I started the truck and headed for a flower shop.
61
I walked into Sarah Lynn's office at twenty minutes to four, carrying a dozen long-stemmed roses wrapped in green paper, along with an envelope containing the rest of the cash I still owed her. The place was quite a contrast to Gary Varna's spartan digs-a corner room with big windows that let in a flood of light, walls of a delicate eggshell white that accentuated it, and a thick ecru carpet. The paintings and furnishings were very tasteful and very expensive.
She was sitting at her desk, wearing a deep blue dress that lit up her mane of tawny hair. She glanced at me, then turned right back to her computer screen, her fingers barely pausing at the keyboard.
'OK,' I said. 'I just want to leave these, tell you I'm sorry, and I want to take you to dinner if you'll ever talk to me again.'
She kept typing for a few more seconds, but then sighed and held out her hand to take the flowers.
'They're beautiful, Huey,' she said, and raised them to her face and inhaled. 'So what is this? Payoff? Buyout? Drag bet?'
'I don't know what. But none of those.'
Her voice turned angry, and her eyes, hurt. 'Where've you been? Why didn't you call me, dammit?' My raw sense of unworthiness dug at me like a hair shirt around my heart.
'Things went from bad to worse,' I said.
Her eyes turned concerned. That was even harder to take.
'Are you still in trouble?' she said.
'A better class of trouble. I'm straightened out with Gary, at least for now.'
Sarah Lynn inhaled the flowers' scent again, watching me over their blossoms like a geisha with a fan.
'I'd love to have dinner with you,' she said. 'But I'm not going to be your fallback squeeze.'
'That's not what I'm trying to do, Slo. It's-' I groped for words.
Then, abruptly, I was slammed by the exhaustion that had been hovering over me. I started to sag, and I had to physically brace myself back up. I felt like I could have collapsed into a puddle on the floor.
'It's not like that,' I finished lamely. 'I'm wiped out. I've got to go. I'll call you. I will.'
'You better,' she said, but she smiled. She lowered the flowers, inviting a quick kiss. I gave it to her, torn between shame and happiness. Then I stumbled out.
Helena's little rush hour was gathering steam, and I forced myself to concentrate on the traffic. But as it thinned, my feelings began to surface as fatigue-dulled thoughts, centering on whether Sarah Lynn and I might have another chance.
She was everything that Laurie wasn't. I still loved her in some way-not with the consuming passion of our youth, but with a deep, comfortable affection-and I was sure she felt the same. I wouldn't be much of a catch for her, but I was warm and breathing, and I wouldn't beat her up or steal her money and head to the casinos. She could probably even dress me up and take me out once in a while. From my side, I'd never come close to another woman who was simply so good, or to the satisfying life she had to offer. We had our differences, but they were far from insurmountable. And that young man who'd walked away from her was long gone.
Yet just in these past few days, something fundamental had changed for me and my life. I couldn't get hold of it, but I was already pretty sure that no amount of effort or good sense was going to turn me back toward being the kind of man that she needed and deserved.
When I got home, I fired up the woodstove and dug my last can of corned beef hash out of the cupboard. While it fried, I drank a beer and a couple of splashes of Old Taylor bourbon. I sat on the steps to eat, and drank another couple of shots as the day faded toward dusk.
Then, at last, I slept a real sleep.
62
The next day was another of those autumn beauties, with the air clear and crisp and the sky almost shockingly blue. There wouldn't be many more of them this year. In the afternoon, after making sure nobody was keeping tabs on me, I fired up the Victor and rode into the Belts behind my place.
I had slept in a near coma from yesterday evening until this morning, getting up once to stumble outside and take a leak, then collapsing again. For the first few hours after waking, I'd wandered around in a stupor. But finally my mind had cleared and I'd started thinking about practicalities, like the scrutiny I'd soon be facing. Top priority was to make sure that Kirk's interment was as hidden as I thought. Hunting season would be starting soon, and somebody just might go wandering by there.
The place where Madbird and I had stashed him was about three miles away as the crow flew, and a shorter trip overland than going down to the highway and looping up again. I took the familiar back trails through the woods and rock formations of my childhood sanctuary. That part of what I'd told Gary Varna was true. I left the bike at the logging road and hiked the last stretch through the brush.
The news was fine about the job we'd done. The site appeared perfectly natural-a passerby would never give it a second glance.
But I could almost imagine that I saw a hint of Kirk's outline behind the facade of earth and stone, and that there was a sort of grim satisfaction in his posture. It looked good on him. He had never amounted to much in his father's eyes, but he'd finally brought Reuben a kind of peace in a Byzantine way. Maybe that was another canceled debt, like the one between Reuben and me. I recalled thinking of Reuben in Shakespearean terms, as a kind of colossus. Now, with Kirk, another line from Shakespeare appeared in my mind.
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
I knelt down for a minute-not to pray, exactly, but to tell Kirk that although he'd given me no choice, I was bitterly sorry. Then I got back on the bike and started home.
My imaginings about Kirk were really for my own benefit, not his. I didn't know what to believe about an afterlife-whether the dead knew or cared what happened here on earth, or if anything that the living did could help them rest, or even if they continued to exist in any way we could conceive of.
But I did believe in an immense, mysterious machine of fate that ultimately exacted true final justice, that couldn't be swayed by influence peddling and didn't accept get-out-of-jail-free cards, and that kept track of who owed what right down to the molecule.
I had to think that everybody involved in these events had undergone a serious shake-up of their bank balances, for better or worse.
63
