Breakheart Hill

left corner of her mouth jerk down slightly in a look of absolute repudiation and contempt. “Mr. Gates says that he recognized Kelli, and since he’d had that run-in with you and her at Cuffy’s, he was afraid of being blamed.”

I said nothing.

“And so he just left her there,” Miss Carver added. She waited for me to answer her in some way, and when I didn’t she said, “Fine, then.” She said it stiffly, then added in a voice that carried the arctic formality with which she was to treat me forever after this moment, “You may go.”

I walked out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building. In the parking lot, I could see Todd still slumped against his car, with Mary next to him, her face pressed worriedly against his arm. She was staring down at the ground, but Todd faced northward, his eyes lifted toward the mountain, trained with a terrible precision, as I realized, on the upper slope of Breakheart Hill. I had never seen a more tormented face. Nor have I ever since that time.

After a while, Mary urged him into the passenger seat of his car, then got behind the wheel herself and pulled away. She did not wave at me as she drifted past, the car moving at a slow, funereal pace.

Normally I would have gone home, but the thought of sitting in the living room, watching my father shake his head in bafflement at the cruelty of man, was more than I could bear. And so I remained pressed against my car, watching the air grow steadily darker.

Night had fallen before I finally returned home. The lights were on in the living room, and as I pulled into the driveway, I could see my father under the lamp, sleeping in his chair, the newspaper spread over his lap. He had never looked more innocent, nor had innocence ever looked more threatening.

I got out of the car and walked to the front door, but I didn’t open it. Instead, I turned away, headed out into the yard and stood alone in the darkness.

I remained there a long time before I saw a car cruise up the street, then turn into the driveway, the beams of its headlights briefly sweeping over me before they blinked off.

It was Noreen who got out of the car. She came toward me slowly, her red dress like a stain upon the darkness.

“I called you before,” she said when she reached me. “Your father said you hadn’t come home yet.”

“I stayed at school awhile.”

She drew closer to me, her eyes watching me with an odd concentration. “I needed to talk to you,” she said, her voice thin, intense, full of the same urgency I could see in her eyes. She hesitated, as if unsure as to how she should begin, then said, “She called me, Ben.”

“Who did?”

“Kelli.”

I felt as if my skin had suddenly been pricked by a million tiny needles.

“The day it happened,” Noreen added. “She called me that day.”

“What did she want?”

She seemed reluctant to answer. “You, Ben,” she said finally. “She was looking for you.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat.

“She didn’t say why she was looking for you,” Noreen added quickly.

A wave of relief swept over me. “Well, maybe she just wanted me to give her a ride up to Breakheart Hill,” I said weakly. “She was always calling me for a ride.”

Noreen stared at me evenly. “Then why didn’t she ask me for a ride?”

I had no answer for her, and admitted it.

Noreen paused a moment, and in that brief interval I knew that there was more.

“When she called me, she sounded like she’d been crying,” she said.

Instantly, I saw Kelli’s face, saw her eyes, the dread that must have been in them, a black net descending.

“Why would she have been upset like that, Ben?” Noreen asked.

For the first time in my life, I felt truth not as something valuable, to be sought after, a shining light, but as a knife at my throat. And so I lied.

“I don’t know, Noreen,” I said.

She gazed at me closely, like a doctor examining a body, looking for the source of its malignancy. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

She watched me silently, as if making a decision for all time, a choice she would have to live with forever. “Okay,” she said at last. Then she touched my hand with a single outstretched finger. “Sheriff Stone talked to me. You know, like he’s talked to everybody at school.”

I nodded.

“But I didn’t tell him about Kelli’s call,” she said. “Or that she was looking for you that day, or anything like that.”

I said nothing.

She looked at me significantly, as if swearing a grave oath. “And I never will,” she said.

For a moment we stood facing each other silently. Then her arms lifted toward me, gathered me into a firm embrace. When she spoke, her voice was low, its tone unmistakably collusive. “What do we do now?”

I felt her arms tighten around me, and I knew that I would never be loved more powerfully than this by anyone. And it struck me that over time I might offer loyalty in return, devotion through the years, perhaps even come to feel it as a kind of passion.

CHAPTER 20

MORE THAN EVER OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS, IT HAS RETURNED to me in the sound of an ax blade whirring in the air, and of Luke’s voice directly after that. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

Even as he said it, so matter-of-factly, I heard all the other questions he has asked through the years, all his unspoken doubts like a chorus in my mind. Luke believes that there is something missing in the case the prosecution brought against Lyle Gates, something missing in the motive Mr. Bailey offered the jury to explain what happened on Breakheart Hill.

And so he has not forgotten Lyle, nor his own testimony at the trial, nor mine, nor even the dramatic way Edith Sparks pointed Lyle out as the man she’d seen coming out of the woods that day, her finger trembling in the charged atmosphere of Judge Thompson’s courtroom, her voice barely carrying as far as the jury box, so that she’d had to repeat her answer, saying it harshly the second time, and in a voice that carried outrage as well as testimony: Him.

But more than anything, Luke has not forgotten the look on my face as he struggled to tell me what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. He has not forgotten the dead eyes that greeted him, the tightly closed mouth, the utter stillness that enveloped me, and that even as he tried to tell me, suggested I already knew. And I know that it is a face that has surfaced many times in his mind over the years, like a corpse suddenly given up by the river.

And so there was something darkly suggestive in the way he posed the question that afternoon, the words coming slowly, heavily, as if hung with weights. Did you hear what happened to Lyle Gates?

I shook my head almost casually, revealing no hint of the pang I suddenly felt at the mention of his name. “No, I haven’t heard anything about Lyle,” I answered.

It was late on a fall afternoon, and Luke had dropped by my office as he often did, though on this occasion he had no doubt been urged there by what he’d just learned. “Well, you knew he’d been brought to the prison farm, didn’t you?” he asked.

Two years before, the local paper had noted that after twenty years in the state penitentiary, Lyle had been moved to a prison farm near Choctaw to serve the rest of his sentence. His mother was ailing, the article said, and she had petitioned the Board of Prisons to have Lyle moved closer to her so that she could continue to visit him without having to endure the hardship of a long journey. The board had granted Mrs. Gates’s petition, and Lyle had subsequently been transferred to a prison farm in the northern part of the county. I had neither heard nor read