“What did you overhear us say?”
Karen said, “You said that you hoped nobody looked into what really happened to Michael that night.”
A smile touched Forester’s lips. “So on that basis you concluded that we murdered him?”
“There wasn’t much else to conclude.”
Price said, weaving still, leaning on the fender for support, “I don’t goddamn believe this.”
Forester nodded to me. “Dwyer, I’d like to have a talk with Price and Haskins here, if you don’t mind. Just a few minutes.” He pointed to the darkness beyond the car. “We’ll walk over there. You know we won’t try to get away because you’ll have our car. All right?”
I looked at Karen.
She shrugged.
They left, back into the gloom, voices receding and fading into the sounds of crickets and a barn owl and a distant roaring train.
“You think they’re up to something?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We stood with our shoes getting soaked and looked at the green green grass in the headlights.
“What do you think they’re doing?” Karen asked.
“Deciding what they want to tell us.”
“You’re used to this kind of thing, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“It’s sort of sad, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Except for you getting the chance to punch out Larry Price after all these years.”
“Christ, you really think I’m that petty?”
“I know you are. I know you are.”
Then we both turned to look back to where they were. There’d been a cry and Forester shouted, “You hit him again, Larry, and I’ll break your goddamn jaw.” They were arguing about something and it had turned vicious.
I leaned back against the car. She leaned back against me. “You think we’ll ever go to bed?”
“I’d sure like to, Karen, but I can’t.”
“Donna?”
“Yeah. I’m really trying to learn how to be faithful.”
“That been a problem?”
“It cost me a marriage.”
“Maybe I’ll learn how someday, too.”
Then they were back. Somebody, presumably Forester, had torn Price’s nice lacy shirt into shreds. Haskins looked miserable.
Forester said, “I’m going to tell you what happened that night.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got some beer in the backseat. Would either of you like one?”
Karen said, “Yes, we would.”
So he went and got a six-pack of Michelob and we all had a beer and just before he started talking he and Karen shared another one of those peculiar glances and then he said, “The four of us — myself, Price, Haskins, and Michael Brandon — had done something we were very ashamed of.”
“Afraid of,” Haskins said.
“Afraid that if it came out, our lives would be ruined. Forever,” Forester said.
Price said, “Just say it, Forester.” He glared at me.
“We raped a girl, the four of us.”
“Brandon spent two months afterward seeing the girl, bringing her flowers, apologizing to her over and over again, telling her how sorry we were, that we’d been drunk and it wasn’t like us to do that and—” Forester sighed, put his eyes to the ground. “In fact we had been drunk; in fact it wasn’t like us to do such a thing—”
Haskins said, “It really wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”
For a time there was just the barn owl and the crickets again, no talk, and then gently I said, “What happened to Brandon that night?”
“We were out as we usually were, drinking beer, talking about it, afraid the girl would finally turn us in to the police, still trying to figure out why we’d ever done such a thing—”
The hatred was gone from Price’s eyes. For the first time the matinee idol looked as melancholy as his friends. “No matter what you think of me, Dwyer, I don’t rape women. But that night—” He shrugged, looked away.
“Brandon,” I said. “You were going to tell me about Brandon.”
“We came up here, had a case of beer or something, and talked about it some more, and that night,” Forester said, “that night Brandon just snapped. He couldn’t handle how ashamed he was or how afraid he was of being turned in. Right in the middle of talking—”
Haskins took over. “Right in the middle, he just got up and ran out to the Point.” He indicated the cliff behind us. “And before we could stop him, he jumped.”
“Jesus,” Price said, “I can’t forget his screaming on the way down. I can’t ever forget it.”
I looked at Karen. “So what she heard you three talking about outside the party that night wasn’t that you’d killed Brandon but that you were afraid a serious investigation into his suicide might turn up the rape?”
Forester said, “Exactly.” He stared at Karen. “We didn’t kill Michael, Karen. We loved him. He was our friend.”
But by then, completely without warning, she had started to cry and then she began literally sobbing, her entire body shaking with some grief I could neither understand nor assuage.
I nodded to Forester to get back in his car and leave. They stood and watched us a moment and then they got into the Mercedes and went away, taking the burden of years and guilt with them.
This time I drove. I went far out the river road, miles out, where you pick up the piney hills and the deer standing by the side of the road.
From the glove compartment she took a pint of J&B, and I knew better than to try and stop her.
I said, “You were the girl they raped, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
She smiled at me. “The police weren’t exactly going to believe a girl from the Highlands about the sons of rich men.”
I sighed. She was right.
“Then Michael started coming around to see me. I can’t say I ever forgave him, but I started to feel sorry for him. His fear—” She shook her head, looked out the window. She said, almost to herself, “But I had to write those letters, get them there tonight, know for sure if they killed him.” She paused. “You believe them?”
“That they didn’t kill him?”
“Right.”
“Yes, I believe them.”
“So do I.”
Then she went back to staring out the window, her small face childlike there in silhouette against the moonsilver river. “Can I ask you a question, Dwyer?”
“Sure.”
“You think we’re ever going to get out of the Highlands?”
“No,” I said, and drove on faster in her fine new expensive car. “No, I don’t.”
The Ugly File
The cold rain didn’t improve the looks of the housing development, one of those sprawling valleys of pastel-colored tract houses that had sprung from the loins of greedy contractors right at the end of WWII, fresh as flowers during that exultant time but now dead and faded.
I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the right address. Houses and streets formed a blinding maze of sameness.
I got lucky by taking what I feared was a wrong turn. A few minutes later I pulled my new station wagon up to the curb, got out, tugged my hat and raincoat on snugly, and then started unloading.
Usually, Merle, my assistant, is on most shoots. He unloads and sets up all the lighting, unloads and sets up all the photographic umbrellas, and unloads and sets up all the electric sensors that trip the strobe lights. But Merle went on this kind of shoot once before and he said never again, “not even if you fire my ass.” He was too good an assistant to give up so now I did these particular jobs alone.
My name is Roy Hubbard. I picked up my profession of photography in Nam, where I was on the staff of a captain whose greatest thrill was taking photos of bloody and dismembered bodies. He didn’t care if the bodies belonged to us or them just as long as they had been somehow disfigured or dismembered.