Sarah Carlson shook her head, tears still running down her face. He could tell that what she was going to say was costly. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Nobody could have said anything that would have convinced her.” Mallon knew, rationally, that she could not possibly mean it. She must believe that if only she had been the one, it would have made all the difference.
He said, “I think you’re very generous to say that. I wish things had been different.”
“I meant it. See, Cathy had a problem with depression. Not a clinical imbalance or disease, where a doctor can prescribe something. It was sadness.”
Lydia visibly straightened, her head held still, as though if she moved she might miss a word, or startle Sarah into silence.
Sarah sighed. “It was one of those things that you read about in the papers, or see on television. It must happen to lots of other people, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. Cathy had a boyfriend. She was absolutely devoted to him, adored him. For about a year she was impossible to listen to. She wouldn’t talk about herself, or what she thought or did, because he was what she thought about, and trying to please him was what she did. If there was something to have an opinion about, it was ‘Mark thinks’ this or that, or even, ‘Mark knows about these things, and he says’ this or that.”
Mallon had lied. Neglecting to tell her about the sex made his whole story false. Mallon felt ashamed while he listened to her now, because listening this way was another act of deception, pretending to be receptive to every word, but really waiting to hear the secret reason that Sarah would divulge in a moment of weakness or misplaced trust. Or maybe she would report with such perfect accuracy that she would describe the reason without knowing it for what it was.
He decided that to dispel the feeling, he had to make her remember she was talking to strangers. “Who is he? Does he live in Pittsburgh?”
Sarah shook her head. “She met him in Los Angeles. I remember there was a class she took in the evening. She wanted to get a master’s degree in psychology, and this was an undergraduate class she wanted to make up. She met him at some coffee place on campus. He wasn’t in her class; he was just having coffee. About a month later she wrote and told me she had moved in with him. I didn’t think much of that, but she sent a picture of him in the letter, and I could hardly blame her. He was gorgeous. He looked like a modeclass="underline" tall and thin with black hair and blue eyes. He really did seem to be perfect, and she wasn’t my baby sister anymore, she was a grown woman. She was happy, so I was happy.”
“What happened?” asked Mallon.
“Everything was great for about a year. Then it wasn’t, or maybe she was just beginning to worry that it wouldn’t always be. She was kind of tense and irritable when I talked to her on the phone. About that time they moved to a different apartment. One day she left a message on my machine with a new phone number. A month later she called with another one. Then, six weeks after that, Mark was dead.”
Now Lydia stopped hiding her interest. “Dead? How?”
“Murdered. Shot dead in his car in a dark alley behind their apartment, where their garage was. She came to see me the next week, and she had a newspaper article about it. There was a lot of vague stuff about how he spent a lot of time in after-hours clubs and was ‘associated’ with people in the designer-drug scene, and all that. If the reporter knew what he was talking about, the article didn’t manage to convey it to me. People in their twenties go to clubs, and when they do, there are people who might be using just about anything. Of course, I asked Cathy.”
“Did your sister explain it?”
“She admitted that she had been getting nervous about some of the people Mark seemed to know. And now and then he would be out all night, and when he came in it was pretty clear he had been partying.”
“Other women?”
Sarah shrugged. “She didn’t know, and she said she didn’t want to know, but after all, he wasn’t out all night alone. He must have been with somebody and it wasn’t her, right?”
Lydia said, “Did he take a lot of drugs, or just know people who did?”
“She said she never saw him take anything. But she admitted that if he had wanted to, he could easily have fooled her. She didn’t care. She was absolutely in love with him. When she came and told me all this, she hadn’t slept in two days, and she talked just about all night, until she fell asleep. She woke up about fifteen hours later, and she had changed.”
“How?” asked Mallon.
“She never talked about him much after that, but she was always thinking about him. I waited for a month, but she was still that way-mourning him as though he had just died. One morning when I woke up she was packing. She thanked me and said she was going to New York.”
“Why did she pick New York?”
“I don’t know. She lasted there a few months, working in a restaurant. Then she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was a change from New York. Then she moved back to L.A. After Mark died, she was never the same. She was nervous, restless. She went places, but it wasn’t because she was hoping that anything was going to happen when she got there. It was more like a person pacing the floor, just moving because staying in one place was intolerable. She came here two months ago. She stayed here with me. She rented a car, the way she always had, but all the time while she was here she probably never went farther than the yard. I would come home from work and find her lying flat on her back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She had no desire to see anybody from the old days, or to pick up the phone to talk to anybody in any of the places she’d lived. Not even L.A. She had always been the one who was athletic, but this time she seemed physically weak. She was unwilling to move, but she wasn’t ever at rest. Finally one day, she packed up again to go home. That’s what she said. That it was time to go home.”
Sarah barely got the words out before she dissolved into tears again. Mallon and Lydia let their eyes meet while hers were closed. There seemed to Mallon to be nothing for them to do but wait. Lydia gave her only ten seconds before she said, “What was Mark’s last name?”
“Romano.”
Lydia said, “Do you know whether they caught the person who killed him?”
“No,” said Sarah. “I don’t think so.”
“Did that seem to bother Cathy?”
She stared at the window for a moment, and her answer seemed to come as a mild surprise to her. “I don’t think so. She talked about him, about good things they had done together. She didn’t talk about the killer at all. I suppose that if the only man you ever loved that much is killed, then what matters is that he’s gone. She never talked about the rest of it, the way some people seem to. Like they could never rest until the person gets punished. I think Cathy knew she could never rest no matter what.”
Mallon said, “Maybe if I had somehow known all of this at the time, I could have said or done the right things.”
“No. I knew everything, and I talked to her over and over for a year or more. It made no difference. The only thing that would have was bringing Mark back.”
Lydia said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give the Santa Barbara police your phone number and address. They’ll need to talk to you, and there will have to be arrangements made.”
Sarah looked at the floor. “I know. I’ll call them right away. I’ll have her brought back here so she can be buried near my parents.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself. Mallon knew she was going to be talking to herself often in the next few days, reminding herself of things that needed to be done, people who needed to be called. Death wasn’t just an event that happened by itself. It was a lot of work.