They walked seven routes, some slight deviations from the last. They got nowhere at all.
“He didn’t have it. If he had we would’ve found it, or more likely Boyd would have.”
“It’s a hole in their case. A big one,” Martha said. “The D.A. will be pissed.”
They found their way back to the Radley house and stood on the sidewalk.
She reached out and grasped his hand. He was close to breaking. Every way he turned, he couldn’t figure it. He’d lost Darke, tried his cell over and over and left so many messages he filled up the mailbox.
He felt it. Darke killed Star and pinned the blame on Vincent King in order to get his hands on the house that would save his empire and make his fortune. It was flawed, but that’s all he had to work on. As for the girl, he took comfort in the fact that Hal was a ghost, Radley land was buried, the kids were safe up there.
At the end of Newton she led him down the neighbor’s driveway and then hopped a low fence, hidden by thick barberry.
“You still know all the shortcuts,” Walk said.
“Star showed me that one.”
Twenty minutes and they were by the old wishing tree, stars over the ocean, the tower at Little Brook like an abandoned lighthouse.
“I can’t believe it’s still here. You remember we used to make out under this tree.”
He laughed. “I remember everything.”
“You never could unhook my bra.”
“One time I did.”
“No. I unhooked it before, let you have your moment.”
She sat down, then reached up and pulled him down beside her. Together they leaned back against the wide oak and looked up at the stars.
“I never said I was sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“Leaving you.”
“It was a long time ago. We were kids.”
“We weren’t, Walk. Not according to the judge. Do you think about it?”
“What?”
“Me. Pregnant. A baby.”
“Every day.”
“He didn’t get over it, my father. He wasn’t all bad. It’s just … he thought he was doing right by me.”
“And wrong by God.”
She said nothing for a while. The lights of a boat drifted, moving with the tide.
“You didn’t marry,” she said.
“Of course not.”
She laughed gently. “We were fifteen.”
“But I knew it.”
“That’s what I loved about you. That pure belief, in good and bad and love. You never said anything, about my father, about what he did. You never told anyone. Even though I left you behind, and Star went to another school and it was just you, and this thing. This giant fucking sickening thing that Vincent did.”
Walk swallowed. “I just wanted you all to be happy.”
That laugh again, nothing about it was pitying.
“I did see you,” he said. “Maybe a year after. At the mall in Clearwater Cove. I was with my mother, and you were standing in line outside the movie theater.”
She was quiet before it came to her. “David Rowen. Just a boy. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, I know that. I didn’t mean because of that. I just, you looked happy, Martha. And I thought about that boy, and he didn’t know, right. He didn’t know what we all went through, and I thought that must’ve been alright. You could just … it wasn’t there between you. You didn’t have to share that thing. You could just … be.”
She cried.
He held her hand.
26
AS WINTER ARRIVED RADLEY LAND froze and the sky whitened with light snows.
Robin lay flat on his back and watched it so long Duchess had to drag him in when his fingers turned white. The field work eased but the animals still needed tending. The gray and the black wore coats as they grazed. Duchess began to take the gray out each morning alone, saddling her at first light and following tracks she began to learn well. She took enjoyment from the Montana quiet, so thick it was as if God had laid down a blanket over the woodland and smothered all but the loudest chickadees.
They watched out for Darke, Hal sitting till late each night, a deerstalker and blanket and the shotgun by his feet. Some nights Duchess woke and went to the window, saw him down there then promptly fell back into deep sleep. Other nights she went down and he fixed cocoa. They would sit, mostly in silence, but sometimes she allowed him to tell her stories of Billy Blue, so dazzling and detailed she wondered if the old man made them up himself. One night she fell asleep on his shoulder, then woke in her bed, the cover pulled up tight.
She spent weekends with Thomas Noble and Robin, tramping white woods, giving them a head start then tracking their boot prints. The cold was crisp and fresh and brought clarity to her wandering mind. She thought less about Cape Haven and its unchanging seasons, and more about Montana and, occasionally, the future. She chose memories of her mother with great care, seeking only the diamonds amongst a mountain of coal.
Her grades improved, she sat at the back and got on with her schoolwork, drafting Indians and settlers and making them live through her writing. She sent Walk a photo of Radley land, taken from the window in her bedroom the day they woke to thick snow. She went with Hal into town each Saturday morning, they did the grocery shopping then headed to Cherry’s to drink cocoa and eat donuts. Most days Dolly was there and they sat and talked with her. Bill’s health had worsened and beneath Dolly’s faultless face Duchess saw cracks beginning to snake in a show of prescient mourning that left her fretful after.
They drove up to Hamby Lake, the water so deep it might’ve been an ocean. Hal rented a boat, cutting crystal water as they drifted and fished, the sun stealing the cold away for an afternoon as close to perfect as Duchess could allow herself
