The congregation was standing, singing anthems from the old Peace Movement days. Many had joined hands and were leaning against each other, swaying as they sang. It was a scene straight out of 1969, except the faces were older, the clothes were better. They were contentedly bereaved, so many together once again after so many years. I didn’t like what I was feeling toward them.
I turned to Mike Flint and whispered, “Can we leave?”
He rose with me and we started down the aisle. Hands groped for me, tried to hold on to me or embrace me. It was frightening. They were for the most part strangers, yet they seemed to want from me some sort of absolution, or maybe intercession with the not-yet-departed, as if I were a conduit to Emily’s grace. I hated the idea of the martyrdom of Emily, Saint Emily. Even worse, Emily wasn’t going to her folk beatification alone: we were sending Marc in with her.
A man in a wheelchair with a Veterans for Peace button on his lapel pressed a crumpled American flag into my hand. “God bless you,” he said.
Pregnant women in dark shawls, like the one I had encountered on Emily’s front steps, reached out at me from the pews. They touched my clothes and placed in my hands religious medals or small silver milagros, miracle charms crudely shaped like eyes or women.
The crowd pressed so close they seemed to suck away all the air.
“Mike,” I pleaded, gripping his arm with both my hands. “Get me out.”
From out of the corner of my eye I caught a dark movement that rose from the crowd and came flying toward my head. I was hemmed in so closely I couldn’t have ducked even if there had been time.
The first blow fell on the back of my neck, fists clenched into a hammer. I got my arms up and took the next hit on my wrist. “She was a murderer!” I felt cold spit hit my face.
I fell back against the fluid mass of people as Mike released me to lunge into the attacker. When the flurry of arms and legs cleared, when the screaming stopped, the man was face down on the red tile with his hands cuffed behind him, pinned to the floor by Mike’s knee.
I didn’t recognize the man. He was older than middle-aged, better cared for than the local street loonies. He wore pressed Dockers, soft leather shoes, a clean windbreaker. Washed and ironed garb. Without the handcuffs, he would look like anyone’s nextdoor neighbor. He raised his head and strained to look up at me, his broken glasses hanging from one ear.
“She was no hero,” he sobbed. “Doesn’t anyone remember? She was a killer.”
“That’s enough,” Mike said, hauling the man to his feet. “Who are you?” I demanded.
“Potts.” The man dropped his head and began to sob with tragic anguish. “Emily Duchamps murdered my son.”
Chapter Nine
At 5:00 A.M. the desert sky was deep black, the stars hidden by a canopy of haze. I sped through the void between the black sky above and the black road below, trying to keep the speedometer of Uncle Max’s Beemer from slipping past 100 mph. I didn’t try very hard.
The trucks in the lanes to my right were a blur as I passed, or more likely I was their blur, sailing down the left lane as if it were a chute out of the abyss.
I had the beginnings of a hangover, house wine on an empty stomach, and my neck ached dully where I had been struck in church. I wanted a hot shower, fresh clothes, a toothbrush, a handful of aspirin. And the truth. I was depending on Jaime Orozco to have it all.
Jaime, as I remembered him, probably wouldn’t be up and coherent for hours yet. I kept thinking about margins of time, about the hour I spent sitting on Emily’s stoop, possibly the same hour during which she was shot. Had I taken an earlier flight, I might have found Emily on time, I might have made a difference in someone’s decision to put a gun to her head. Everything was timing. I forgot about the highway patrol and let the car go.
The speed, the cold air streaming in the window, made my head feel a little better as, over and over on Max’s tapedeck, I replayed the message tape Flint had taken from Emily’s answering machine. I was thinking about Aleda, the fresh pain in her voice when she said Marc’s name. Max had said that he half-expected Marc to show up with Emily.
It was a ridiculous idea, born I’m sure from the mating of anxiety and a bottle of scotch. But it was a notion I grasped for, longed for, as I thought of Emily immobile in her hospital bed, slipping away from me just as Marc had.
What had pushed me toward the edge was the strange service at La Placita and the even stranger conversation in the Bonaventure bar afterward. Max, I think, had been well-lubricated, though eloquent, when he delivered his eulogy. Later, he had been plain old drunk.
In the bar, I took him to task for speaking of Emily as if she were dead. He had said, “Don’t let it bother you. We buried Marc before he was ready, too.”
I asked him to explain himself, but he only grew more incoherent. As Lucas was finally helping him upstairs, Max had turned to me and said, “Marc lives.”
In a metaphysical sense, sure. Just the same, it was an idea I could not let go. Every time I learned something about Emily on the day she was shot, I tripped over Marc.
Driving Max’s car, as far as Riverside, I had tried to convince myself that the voice of the mystery caller on the tape was Marc’s. I aged it twenty-two years, made allowances for substandard fiber optic transmission, adjusted the pitch to account for stress. I gave him a cold.
Then somewhere after the 60 interchange, I decided it couldn’t be Marc at all. By the time I passed Banning, I had waffled back and forth so often, I couldn’t even recognize my own voice. The only thing I was sure of was that I felt no shame over the method I had used to liberate the tape from Flint’s pocket. He’s a cop; he should be more careful. He shouldn’t get drunk with distraught women.
As I neared the Indio off-ramp, I saw the first red sliver of sunrise over the Cottonwood Mountains. The moment of desert dawn came in a hurry. When the sun broke the ridge, soft rose light washed across the black desert floor like spillwaters pouring down from the mountains.
During the long drive through the night, I had felt a strong sense of isolation, as if I were passing alone through a vast and desolate wilderness. But in the first light, the illusion vanished. Desert-pink condos, new strip malls with turquoise trim, and the rolling green lawns of freshly planted golf courses emerged in relief as the night receded.
The arrival of another day reminded me I had missed a night’s sleep. I felt tired, but there was too much I had to do to waste time in bed. At least, I thought, remembering the goofy look on Flint’s face when I left him, wasting time sleeping.
I exited the freeway at Washington Street and was stuck immediately in a bottleneck of construction traffic. On both sides of the wide street the skeletons of new, half-framed condos cast long shadows across what was left of the open, white desert sand.
Trapped behind an earthmover, I found the last few miles to Jaime Orozco’s house excruciatingly slow going. Like everything I had been looking for, he was so close yet so unobtainable.
I hadn’t seen Jaime since his divorce from Emily, probably eight or nine years ago. I couldn’t remember exactly. They had planned to be a one-family medical mission to the Third World, a team, he the orthodontist/dentist, she the specialist in communicable diseases. But somewhere between the amoebic dysentery they brought home from Honduras and the malaria they contracted in Bangladesh, the plan had soured. And so had the marriage. It was too bad, too, because I always liked Jaime. I can only describe him as loose. He was good for Emily.
My hope was that during long, intimate nights in Honduras, or during delirious ramblings in Bangladesh, or maybe some-where in between, Emily had said something to Jaime that would help me now.
As the sky grew brighter, it became easier to recognize the few remaining landmarks. After getting lost only twice, I man-aged to find Jaime’s place along what was now the road to Lake Cahuilla.