“I’d love to,” he said.
“That would be box two-two-one-two, Newport,” I said, my heart pounding. “No sense in pulling the lion’s tail.”
He looked surprised again, feigning an innocence about human nature I know he never had.
“Send mine to Dave Smith, at Cheverton Sewer and Septic in Newport. I’ve got lions, too. They wear pinstripes.”
I laughed and so did he. There were a million things I could have said, about writing “secret” letters to a sewer place, but for once I held my tongue. My head was spinning like the lanterns on the wire. Damn, I thought — what if Ray found out? What if Mom found out? As if Dave Cantrell hasn’t put us all through enough.
I saw him a few more times that night, always with Christine, who is an attractive woman, if a little self-conscious. Our eyes kept bouncing off each other’s like billiard balls. The Power Crowders made Buddy get up and dance while someone played piano. There he was, Jed Clampett, eighty-plus, limber and graceful and casting his tall, lanky shadow up against the teakwood ceiling while the ship rocked and the lanterns swayed, and I thought, Buddy, you’re a beautiful man. Across the room, through the gowns and the tuxedos, beyond Buddy and his devoted dancing shadow, I caught David looking at me.
Dennison raised $85,000 for his campaign that night, but the Power Crowd buzz was that most of it would go to the No On Proposition A Committee, of which Brian was, of course, treasurer. GROW, DON’T SLOW! was their motto, because most of the Power Crowders were businessmen of one kind or another, and businessmen are always happy for new people to sell things to.
I made three hundred in tips.
More than that, I made the realization that everything in my life was about to change. In fact, it already had.
I haven’t kept a journal since I was ten, but I feel I’ve got to get this down now. Too much confusion. Too much deceit. Too much betrayal. Can we do bad things for good reasons? I wish I had someone to talk to. I can talk to my Dear One, warm and snug inside me.
Goins marked his place in the journal with a postcard from Poon’s Balboa. Time to write Mom and Dad again, he thought. In some kind of incomprehensible way, he missed them.
He stood up, a little dizzy, overwhelmed by thoughts. There was a time in his life when he felt great emotions. It was so difficult to tell sometimes if they were his own or someone else’s. Goins had read an interview with a popular songwriter once, who said that songs were already in the air and he just listened and wrote them down. Joseph knew exactly what that meant. But now, since the hospital and the picture of what was wrong with his brain, and the medications they gave him, he no longer felt so strongly. Instead, the emotions — the feelings — were always dim, as if hovering around him in a haze. If he concentrated on them, they would finally coalesce, and never — at least not yet — were they terrible, like they used to be.
What he now felt was confusion. He had left Ohio for Ann, and it was over. Nothing had ended as he planned it, though there were moments of brightness, times of serendipity. He looked at the images of Ann around his cramped dungeon of a kitchenette, drawn into their illusory life almost as strongly as he’d been drawn to her in taking them, and with the feeling that if he could only go back in time to one of those moments he captured her with his camera, he could do something to set Ann’s course — and his — toward a safer, more forgiving shore.
The timer on Joseph’s pill container beeped. He moved toward the kitchenette counter, exactly one step away from the little table, and looked down at the bottles of pills arranged there. These were the forces, he understood, that kept him as he was. Without them would be the feelings, the urges, the dark and irresistible imperatives. It had been so long since he had lived without psychoactive interference, he had to close his eyes and concentrate for a moment just to get a taste of the way things used to be. A bright blue bolt of light cracked through the darkness in him, and a warm surge followed it through his body. The big difference was clarity. Without the drugs, he’d had clarity. Feelings and clarity. Now, only dullness.
Joseph stood there, eyelids tight and trembling, trying to think his way out of the confusion of what had happened and into a place where objects were clearly defined, where effect followed cause and cause was understandable. I’ve made such a mess of it, he thought. And now what? If only he could think clearly about what must be done next, he could implement. Through the unfocused surges of color and feeling that began to heave behind his eyelids now, Joseph heard only one thought, again and again, faintly but almost clearly: You should turn yourself in. Tell them everything you did.
Beyond that was only chaos. He opened his eyes and looked again at the pill bottles arranged on the counter like the buildings of a little city. If I stay, he thought, I need the old clarity back, I need to have the old feelings. No.
But to go away now was to leave his life unfinished. There was an obligation here, a commitment to Ann and to himself. He knew that to stay was peril — the police would be all over the place, smelling him out. Yes, to stay, he would need the old portfolio of skills and instinct. No.
He’d been faithful to the medication for years, almost obsessively faithful to it since his release, and what had it gotten him? What had it gotten Ann? No.
Joseph turned on the faucet, twisted off the bottle caps — childproof, so amusing — and counted out his midnight dosage. They scraped his throat as they went down, bringing with them the promise of a haze that would substitute for sanity. Why have I never had them, he wondered — feelings, dependable emotions — good and true and mine alone?
Chapter 13
Sergeant Philip Kearns’s home was a small upstairs apartment on Newport Island, a tiny piece of land accessible only by a bridge so narrow, it would admit just one car at a time. Around the island stood a forest of masts, bobbing patternlessly in the stiff morning breeze. Each waterfront home had a dock and a yacht of varying size, the vessels tethered to the islet like a litter of pups to a mother.
Jim parked on the boulevard and walked across. A Newport cop car slid by, both officers eyeing Jim with long, hard stares as he crossed the bridge. He wondered whether Virginia’s theory could be true. That was the trouble with paranoia, though: It was contagious. The morning sun gave the harbor a low-gloss finish. Coming off the small bridge, Weir surprised a couple of ducks, which squawked, then waddled huffily into the water, where they paddled away, glancing back at him as perfect ripples advanced from their breasts.
Kearns had been easy enough on the phone. He had invited Weir over at seven, in a tone of voice that suggested neither suspicion nor submissiveness. He answered the door wearing a black silk robe and a pair of Japanese sandals. Kearns was taller than Weir had expected, slender for a cop. His sandy brown hair was receding from a suntanned forehead, and tussled from sleep. Lighter than the hair on Ann’s blouse, Jim thought — but how much? What struck Weirwas his skin: smooth, unwrinkled, unblemished. His handshake was firm. “Getting a late start,” he said.
“Thanks for meeting.”
“Have a seat, I’ll get some coffee.”
Kearns’s apartment was almost all glass, which gave him views past city hall toward Balboa, up Newport Boulevard, of the huddled duplexes on the upper peninsula and the ocean beyond them. The west wall was mirrored to expand the room, which couldn’t have been more than twelve by twelve. Weir looked down a very short hallway that ended at a closed door. The kitchen in which Kearns was now pouring coffee had the small versions of everything — refrigerator, oven and two-burner stove, a microwave and wineglass rack tucked under the cabinets to save space. It looked like ship’s galley. The living room furnishings were masculine: black leather and metal, minimal, expensive. The place smelled of cologne and talc. The ultimate bachelor-on-a-budget pad, thought Weir. Not bad. Through the window behind Kearns, Weir could see a sea gull perched on orange feet atop a yacht mast.