What had convinced me was the current I had felt flowing from her to me, a strange nonverbal communication that bypassed the logic centers of my left brain and flowed straight into the emotional centers in my right. I was convinced she was telling the truth because she was telling me so in a way I was ill-equipped to refute. Emotionally I believed every word she said and after my emotions were engaged my logic swiftly followed. Of course the Church of the New Life wouldn’t hurt Jacqueline Shaw. They loved her, they cared for her, she was family, so said my emotions. And she was a sugar tit that they could suck on for the rest of her life, draining, over time, enough of her share of the Reddman fortune to make the five mil look like a pittance, so said my logic, hustling to catch up.
And then, as if she were reading my spirit like a billboard, she convinced me to do all I could to find Jacqueline’s killer, not by pure emotion, not by reason, not by virtue of her rare beauty, but through the one medium most designed to catch my attention. She offered me cash.
“If you can convince the insurance company to stop holding up the payment, Mr. Carl,” she said, “by proving to them that we were in no way responsible for Jacqueline’s death, we will be sure you are rewarded. Generally the rewards we give to our church members are karmic in nature, designed to benefit the soul in future lives. But seeing as you’re not a member of the church, how about a portion of the recovery? Say five percent?”
To give you an idea of my state of mind, I promised to do my best immediately, I didn’t so much as haggle. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have seen the offer for what it obviously was, a bribe to turn the direction of my investigation away from her church. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. In fact I didn’t even do the calculation until I was in the car, on Kelly Drive, on my way back into Center City. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She was offering me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to prove that someone else, and not she, was the killer. It was an obvious bribe, yes, but I was certain that it was no such thing. How was I so certain? How indeed? Because I had felt something flowing from Oleanna, something pure and innocent and irrefutable, something I almost couldn’t recognize because of my pathetic lack of experience. What I had felt flowing from her to me was something close to love.
“So what was going on at Veritas?” I asked Caroline as we sat at my red Formica dining table and ate a pizza I had called out for.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Did you look for the hiding place your grandmother mentioned in her diary?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Well? Did you find it?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of? What does that mean?”
“Okay, I found it. By the cast-iron fireplace, like my grandmother wrote in her diary. I tapped around with my knuckle until I found a hollow part. There was a piece of wood trim that slipped up.” She shrugged. “So I pushed the panel and it opened.”
“Hell, Caroline, that’s fantastic. What did you find? Another corpse?”
“No, thank God. Nothing important, really, just books, ledgers, different kinds of financial journals. Worthless stuff.”
“I’d bet not. Did you get them for us?”
She nodded slowly.
“Where are they?”
She didn’t answer.
“Where are they, Caroline?”
She waited a moment and then gestured to my hall closet.
Inside I found a cardboard box, sitting on the floor among my loose jackets and assorted balls and racquets. I pulled out the box, kneeled down, and looked through it quickly. Old ledgers with their pages crumbling and the moth-eaten cloth on their frayed bindings seeming to be a step away from complete disintegration. The numbers inside were written in a fading ink, numbers over numbers over numbers, in progressions that meant absolutely nothing to me.
“This is amazing,” I said. “I’d never be able to make head nor tail of it but I’ll have Morris take a look.”
I put the books back and stood up and thought for a moment and then turned to look at her. She was staring at a piece of pizza where the cheese had pulled off and was now in a clump on her paper plate.
“Why didn’t you tell me about what you found right off?” I said.
She shrugged without looking up, staring at the denuded slice of pizza as if it was the most fascinating sight she had ever seen.
“I thought if I lied and told you the hiding place was empty,” said Caroline, finally, after not responding to my question for hours, “what was inside would go away.”
“What do you think is in those books?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“I don’t think the truth ever goes away, Caroline. I think it just sometimes lies in wait for us.”
We were now side by side in my bed. It was late. We had made it halfway through Leno before I had retired to the bedroom. I had wanted some time alone that night but I didn’t know how to tell her that, so I stayed up past my bedtime, hoping she’d get the hint to go to sleep by herself, had stayed up watching the local news and Jay’s monologue and an insipid conversation with some long-legged starlet, Jay fawning over her so assiduously that she had to wipe the slobber from her leather dress, and I would have happily slept right there on the couch except that Caroline was sitting right there with me. So I stretched and yawned and said I needed to get some sleep and that was her cue to follow me into the bedroom. I had never lived with a woman before and I wondered if this was what it was like to be married. I could tell right off I didn’t like it.
“I have an idea,” said Caroline. “Let’s go to Mexico.”
“It’s not easy learning the truth, is it?”
“ Cancun, just me and you.”
“You don’t really want to stop our search.”
“Oh yes I do.”
“Really?”
She waited a moment before she said, “I thought I could control what we did and what we found, but now I’m not so sure.”
I realized just then how close she was to actually quitting and I felt a twang of fear. I wasn’t ready yet to stop, neither for my sake, nor for hers. I mean, however could I save her if she wasn’t willing to be saved? What I needed to do was to keep everything together for just a little longer.
“What did you think we were going to find,” I asked, “when we started looking into your family’s history?”