23
Long, low rolls of surf broke ceaselessly on the shore, collapsing into shallow sheets of water sweeping up the level beach, then draining away again, leaving the sand smooth and glistening. The sun stood high in a flawless blue sky, but a strong breeze kept the air cool.
The beach stretched away for miles in either direction, apparently as endless as the Pacific itself. The few people in sight-adults sunning themselves, children playing in the sand, an older couple walking their dog-made the landscape appear still emptier and more vast.
A woman basking in the sun looked up and called to a boy paddling at the edge of the waves.
“Thomas! Don’t go in any further!”
“It’s OK, Mom.”
“Just keep nearer in, OK?”
Testosterone, thought Kristine Kjarstad. He knows there are dangerous currents and that the water is icy, but he sees those facts as a challenge, not a threat, something to test himself against. And it will get worse as he gets older, until in the end I’ll lose all control. A father could still impose his authority, even once the child grew bigger and stronger than him, simply by drawing on years and years of conditioning. But all a mother had to offer was love and indulgence, and one day that might not be enough.
Such moods came on her very rarely, and were more frightening as a result. Most of the time, Kristine felt vaguely ashamed of being such an irredeemable optimist, convinced against all the evidence that things were basically OK and that the exceptions she encountered in her everyday work somehow conspired, in some way she had chosen not to examine at all closely, to prove that rule. But her abortive trip to Chicago and Atlanta seemed to have broken her spirit. Everything seemed bleak and hopeless, even her ability to do her job. I’ve been faking it all these years, she thought, and they just found out.
“They” meant her chief, Dick Rice, who’d summoned her on her return. The worst thing was that he’d been pleasant, too pleasant, the way you are with people you think don’t quite get it and never will.
“You had the makings of a nice little case there,” he’d commented. “Too bad the perps can’t talk, but at least they got what was coming to them. We ought to be grateful to those gangsters, they saved us all a ton of time and money. Now, Kristine, what I want you to do is forget the whole thing and get on with your job. I realize that everyday crime here in King County may not have the same glamor as a nationwide murder hunt, but the work is there and somebody’s got to do it.”
Kristine had tried to take the Chief’s advice, but it hadn’t helped. She just didn’t seem able to accept the fact that she had come so close to cracking such a huge and obscure conspiracy, and had failed. As Dick Rice had said, the perpetrators were dead, along with an unknown number of their victims. No one would ever know exactly how many people they had killed, let alone why. In one sense it was over, but in another and more important one it would never be over, not for her. She felt that she had been presented with the great chance of her life, and that she’d blown it. Nothing would ever change that.
This realization had triggered a severe attack of depression, in the course of which she not only lost all interest in her work but also came down with a bad cold. It was only when the physical symptoms appeared that Kristine did what she should have done right away, and applied for two weeks of the leave she had coming. Since the weather was good, she had decided to get away not just from work but from the city itself, away to this remote beach on the Olympic Peninsula, the very edge of the continent.
They were only staying a few days, but already the change had done her some good. Thomas, too. He was in mourning for Brent Wallis, who had finally left for Europe with his parents. For a while Thomas had been inconsolable, but in this different environment he finally seemed to have accepted the loss of his friend.
Looking up to check on him, Kristine was relieved to see that he had teamed up with an older boy. The two were busy whipping a beached log with lengths of the tough, snakelike seaweed with which the tideline was littered. The boy’s parents, a hearty couple with a red Jeep four-by-four, had gone off jogging along the beach. If only a family like that would take the Wallis house for the summer, Kristine thought wistfully. But the chances were almost nil, although she’d mentioned it to Paul Merlowitz at the lunch they’d had when she got back from the east. That had been one of the few good things that had happened to her since then.
She’d forgotten just how funny Paul could be, and how closely connected laughing and loving were in her mind. No sooner had she sat down than he’d launched into a story about some guy he knew, a state prosecutor who’d been questioning a child witness in court during a sexual abuse case. The point had been to establish whether the kid knew the meaning of the terms involved, and the prosecutor had led her gently through a verbal multiple-choice exam.
“Is this a penis?” he’d asked, pointing to his ear.
“No,” the girl had replied.
Pointing to his nose, “Is this?”
“No.”
Paul Merlowitz had broken off to order a glass of Oregon pinot noir.
“Then he points to his head, says, “Is this a penis?” And the kid nods and goes, “Yes.” Result, he not only lost the case, he’s now known around the DA’s office as Dickhead.”
While she was still laughing, Merlowitz suddenly demanded, “OK, what did the guy do wrong?”
Feeling put on the spot, Kristine shrugged. Merlowitz smiled and answered his own question.
“He broke the oldest rule there is in this business. Never ask a witness a question if you’re not sure what answer he’s going to give.”
“Maybe we should worry a little less about the rules and a little more about justice,” Kristine replied, nettled by his condescending tone. “If the jury system means anything at all, it means ordinary people working out the truth for themselves.”
Paul Merlowitz closed his eyes.
“Kristine, Talmudic scholars teach that every verse in the Torah has forty-nine different interpretations, each equally valid. Truth isn’t some commodity you buy at Fred Meyer. We’re talking about an exercise in damage limitation. The best we can hope to do is to recognize and control our ignorance.”
And to make a damn good living off of it, thought Kristine as the first course arrived. But she didn’t say anything, and the lunch had passed agreeably. When she mentioned the Wallis house, Paul-punctilious as ever-had promised to see what he could do. As she watched him noting down the details with his Mont Blanc pen, Kristine had felt a stab of pain at the contrast between his organized, methodical efficiency and her own sketchily improvised existence. Paul Merlowitz would never have wasted his time agonizing over something he couldn’t control the way she had with the Dale Watson fiasco. If he had a failure, as even he must occasionally, he would forget it and move on.
Trying to shake these gloomy thoughts, she rooted around in her beach bag for something to read. She had brought a novel along, but wasn’t making much progress with it. Eventually she found a copy of the local paper they had given her at the motel, or “Inn” as the place called itself. Besides the expense, another good reason for not staying longer was the management’s attempts to give the place what they imagined to be an upscale feel. Every item on the menu came “complemented” with something or “served on a bed” of something else. If she hadn’t had to look after Thomas, Kristine would have taken her chances at a bar in the hard-bitten logging community a few miles down the road.
The best thing about the newspaper was that it had no time for such ingratiating gentility and mock cosmopolitanism. The tone was that of the reader board she’d seen at a cafe in Hoquiam on the drive over: WE DON’T SERVE ESPRESSO. The lead stories concerned a crisis in the logging industry, the ongoing political fight about the threat to the habitat of the spotted owl, and a controversial proposal to upgrade the coast road by building a short cut through an Indian reservation. Buried on an inside page were short items off the wire about the situation in Bosnia and the Republicans’ proposals for balancing the budget.
On page 6, in a border around a huge ad for a local furniture store, she found a follow-up piece about the shoot-out among that religious cult on the San Juans. Kristine had been following this vaguely-it had been big news for a few days-but she found it hard to get interested. It sounded like one of those Waco-style things, or that guy in Guyana who got all his followers to kill themselves. You knew these people were out there, but it didn’t seem to
