and you were sleeping with her.”
He smiled uncomfortably. That was part of it, too. To Holly there didn’t seem to be any special categories of things that weren’t for discussion. “It’s possible,” he said. “But this was something else. It took over a week. It was a girl who was hurt and scared. I took her far away and taught her how to stay hidden from some bad men.”
“Good for you, Dad. You’re the best!”
“Well, it may be that I’m going to get in trouble for helping her hide. I found out that an innocent man—an old boyfriend of hers—is being accused of killing her. So I had to go to the District Attorney’s office and admit that I took her away and she’s living somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“So the DA would tell the police to let him go.”
“Couldn’t you just tell the police yourself? They know you.”
“No. It had gone too far for that. There’s going to be a trial.”
“So you told, and saved him. Now what’s the problem?”
“I may have to go away myself, because of it. What I did to make this girl hard to find wasn’t all perfectly legal. I helped her get false identification papers and so on. I helped her to lie.”
“Are you going to jail?”
“I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
“Sending me to jail would take a long time. They would have to charge me and then have a trial, and I would get my turn to tell the judge why I did it, and show that I didn’t mean any harm, or really hurt anybody.”
“So you probably shouldn’t worry yet.”
“That’s exactly right. It may never happen. I’m only telling you about it right now because that’s always been our arrangement, our deal. You and I tell each other things as soon as we know them.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“Nothing yet. Maybe if I
“I would visit you. too. And write you long letters.”
“Thanks, honey. I knew I could count on you to think of something nice to do.”
They were walking around the block, and Till could see the back of Garden House between the two houses behind it. He watched Holly staring at the house, as though she were deciding what to plant next, or what color to paint it.
He wondered what her mother would think if she could see her and hear her. Holly was visibly a person with Down syndrome, but she was also beautiful and strong. He wished that Rose could have foreseen the possibility that someone could be all of those things at once. Rose had been living in Florida for twenty years already, remarried for eighteen of them to Dr. Timothy Zyrnick. It had always seemed strange to Till that she had married a doctor. He had never been able to tell whether Dr. Zyrnick knew about Holly. In the letters Till had sent her over the years—usually once a year—he had never asked, and in her replies, she had never mentioned anything that passed between her and her new husband. Till had enclosed pictures of Holly at first, but then one of his letters got an answer asking him not to. A few years later, Rose asked in a letter that he stop writing to her and allow her to go on with the new life she had built. She had added that if she and her husband moved, she would keep him informed in case there were some legal or medical reason for his knowing. Since then she had moved about three times to houses in fancier-sounding neighborhoods around Naples. She’d never had any more children.
He walked along beside Holly, made the last turn toward Garden House, and felt a deep sadness. He had a lot to do this evening, but he hated stopping for ten minutes, having a quick conversation, and then leaving her.
She looked at him slyly. “It’s spaghetti, you know. You can always add enough of it to the boiling water to invite another person.”
He put his arm around Holly’s shoulders and squeezed. “Okay. Now that you’ve coaxed me, I’d love to stay for dinner.”
8
LATE THAT NIGHT, Jack Till sat in his car on Vignes Street, watching the lighted space outside the gate of the county jail. Even though it was after midnight, the slit windows of the big concrete building were brightly lighted and at least forty people sat in their cars or stood beside them at the curb outside, waiting They looked like people at the harbor waiting for a ship to dock. There were young women with children who were too tiny to be out at this hour, old ladies who were obviously waiting for sons or daughters. On the other side of the street there were three low-rider cars with candy-flake paint jobs and lots of chrome, all sitting nose-to-tail. The young men who had brought them were out walking back and forth, talking and waving their heavily tattooed arms for emphasis. Till couldn’t tell from here what gang colors were on the tattoos, but he knew that if he moved closer, he would recognize the symbols. He had seen all of them before on corpses and on suspects. The friend they were waiting for must have been popular to rate a convoy to take him home.
The door of the building opened and a group of inmates was released into the area just inside the gate. The jail was crowded and understaffed, so the guards always seemed to process the prisoners in batches. Till saw a few arms wave, a few of the people in cars get out and walk toward the fence. A guard went to the gate and unlocked it, then let the prisoners out one at a time.
Till got out of his car, stood beside it and spotted the prisoner he had been waiting for: Eric Fuller was in his early thirties, as tall as Jack Till, and he had hair so short and blond that the eye had trouble telling where it began or ended. His face was reddish and slightly lined for his age, as though he had spent time squinting. As he came out the gate, Till intercepted him. “Hello, Mr. Fuller. I’m Jack Till.”
“Jay Chernoff told me about you. Where is he, anyway? I thought he’d be here.”
“I asked him to stay on the other side of the building, in case there are reporters or something worse waiting for you. We agreed that I would take you home, because I wanted to talk to you. All right with you?”
Fuller looked up the dark street. The other prisoners had all gotten into cars and driven off. “I don’t have much choice.”
He followed Till to his car and got into the passenger seat. Till got in and drove. “I know you have a right to be mad at me.”
Fuller turned to look at him. “I’m happy to know that Wendy’s alive, and I guess I should thank you for that, and for coming forward now. That doesn’t mean I like you. You took Wendy away, and let me think she was dead for six years. Wendy was—is—the most important person in my life. I’ve thought about her every day since she disappeared. Sometimes I’ve wished I had died with her. And about twenty-four hours ago, I got arrested and hauled down here and thrown in a cell that smells like piss and vomit, and charged with murdering her. I can’t help thinking I owe you some of the thanks for that, too.”
“I was trying to save her life. I apologize to you for the parts of this that got you in trouble. As soon as I found out about it, I went to the DA.”
“I know you didn’t intend to do me any harm. But what made her do that? I loved her. What the hell was she thinking?”
“I was under the impression that you two had broken up.”
“Broken up? That term doesn’t apply to us. We had been together so long that getting married seemed like the obvious thing to do. When we realized it wouldn’t work, we admitted we’d been more attracted to other people from the beginning, but didn’t see how we could be apart. We weren’t mad at each other. It wasn’t like her not to tell me what she was doing. Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She thought it was the only way to protect you. She believed that her time here was over. Yours wasn’t. She had helped start your restaurant and turn it into a paying business, but you were the real force behind it. She said, ‘Nobody comes to a restaurant because there’s a good MBA in the back office.’”
“That isn’t a reason to let me think she was dead.”
“She also thought you would try to protect her, maybe go after the people who were trying to hurt her.”
“It was a stupid thing to do. I could have helped her. Instead I get accused of killing her.”
