“Ghosts,” Carver said. “We all have ghosts. Sometimes in a crowd I think I hear my son calling me. For an instant the fact of his death isn’t real, and I turn around and expect to see him. Then I remember, and it falls on me like a wall.”
“I’m sorry,” Brant said. “How long has he been dead?”
“Almost five years.”
Brant shook his head slowly from side to side. “And it hasn’t stopped for you yet.”
“Maybe it never will,” Carver said. “I’ve learned to accommodate it.”
Brant released his grip on his kneecaps and stood up. “I suppose that’s the best we can hope for.”
“Think about Gloria Bream. About my advice.”
“Sure.” Brant moved toward the door. “Incidentally,” he said, “I checked and I’m sure Marla Cloy never wrote anything about Brant Development.”
“I’ve checked way beyond that,” Carver said, “and I haven’t found any connection at all between you and Marla.”
“Because there isn’t any.”
“I’ll keep searching.”
“Sure,” Brant said again. “I can tell that about you, but I’m getting more and more afraid it isn’t going to help.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds, almost as if offering up a silent prayer, appealing to a power infinitely higher than Carver. Then he went out, leaving behind him a haze of smoke in the sunlight near the ceiling, and the acrid smell of the snuffed-out cigarette.
Carver stared for a long time at the closed door. Right now Brant seemed innocent. And even if he was the real stalker, he’d stay away from Marla for a while after the McDonald’s incident,
Carver decided to take up the watch on Marla again, beginning that evening. In the meantime, he wanted to see Beth. Wanted very much to see her. He understood why at times they lay desperately locked together so far into the night.
It wasn’t always love and lust.
Each of them had ghosts to hold at bay.
25
“I’ve been to the library,” Beth said when Carver had parked the car and limped toward the cottage. She was sitting in the shade on the porch, her Toshiba computer glowing in her lap. Carver didn’t blame it.
“So have I,” he said, taking the porch steps and lowering himself into the webbed lounger next to her aluminum-framed chair. “In the middle of the afternoon.”
“I went there not long after you left here this morning,” she said. “Had to go out for crackers anyway.”
He didn’t know if she was kidding, so he kept quiet.
“We should have coordinated our efforts,” she said. “I expect you were there for the same reason I was.”
“Reference room?”
“Right. To check the
He nodded.
“Duplication of effort,” she said.
“We screwed up, all right,” Carver said, squinting out at the sun glancing off the calm sea. “One of us should have been on Marla or Brant. She claimed Brant threatened her again. This time at a McDonald’s near her house, at the same time I was looking at microfilm.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Of course not. It probably didn’t happen.”
“You’re coming around to my way of thinking, Fred. Marla Cloy might not be a typical harassed female, though I confess I can’t quite figure out her game.”
Carver didn’t remind her that that originally had been his approach to the case, the reason Joel Brant had hired him. Then he’d drifted away from that theory; maybe Brant was using him and in a clever double game really
It was complicated and confusing, just as Beth predicted it would be. He didn’t remind her of that, either. It was best not to push a pregnant woman who’d driven miles for crackers.
“The accident must have been terrible for Brant,” she said. “The decapitation, the fact that he was driving and had alcohol in his bloodstream. It might have been enough to unhinge him mentally. Make him unpredictable.”
Carver stared at her. “Good Lord, are we switching positions on this again?”
“I never had a firm position,” she said.
“Oh? I thought yours was the feminist position.”
“You don’t understand. You’re as much a feminist as I am, Fred.”
That surprised him.
“You’re a humanist,” she explained. “That’s somebody who believes in a life directed toward the well-being of other people. You might not know it, but that’s why you run around like a combination bloodhound and pit bull, searching out truths that will provide the gift of justice.”
“I thought it was my fee,” he said.
“One reason, anyway. A humanist is automatically a feminist. A feminist isn’t automatically a humanist, but should be.” She switched off her computer and closed its lid, then carefully set it down on the plank floor beside her chair. “There’s something else I don’t have a firm position on.”
He knew what she was going to say, and dreaded hearing it. Time was nudging them into a corner, forcing a decision before it was too late. You delayed in some things and you belonged to fate.
“I went into Del Moray for another reason,” she said. “I made an appointment for next week at an abortion clinic.”
A coldness moved through him. “I thought you said you were undecided.”
“I am. But you can’t just walk in and have the procedure the same day. The only other clinic in Del Moray closed last year after threats and demonstrations by pro-lifers. Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail through a window. It didn’t ignite, but it injured one of the patients. The doctors there called it quits, so there’s a long waiting list of patients.”
“Jesus!” Carver said.
“They say He has something to do with it. How do you feel about this, lover?”
He was numb. “I’m not sure. I can’t deny you’re the one carrying the baby, so it’s your decision.”
“I know that. But I don’t want to make it without you.”
He looked over at her and smiled. “Should I force you to carry a child to term? Is that really an option for me?”
“No,” she admitted. “I just want you to know I don’t take it lightly. The people demonstrating in front of the clinics … I see their point, Fred. At least the ones who are nonviolent. Don’t agree with it, but I sure see it.”
“You’re saying this is a close call.”
“Yes. And I’m sure it is for most women. Remember my telling you about the breech birth the last time I was pregnant? About Roberto’s son strangling on the umbilical cord?”
“I remember.”
“I was secretly glad, Fred. I didn’t want to bring a child into that world of drugs and cheap money and violence. The illicit drug business itself seduces and destroys people like a narcotic. Money’s addictive. Money’s a drug. In the recovery room afterward, I told the doctor I was glad the child died.”
“Did you tell Roberto?”
“No. He wanted a son. Afterward, when he learned what I’d said, he wanted to kill me. Others intervened, and I went away for a long time. Eventually he swore he forgave me, but I don’t think he ever really did.”
