The only sound in the room was Charlie’s breathing. It was ordinary breathing, in and out, in and out, but to Ben it was the sound of doom. “Maybe I ought to go ahead and let you ruin yourself,” he said finally. “I can’t do that, though. Not yet, anyway. So I’m asking you to stay in your room for tonight and we’ll discuss this in the morning.”
“Ben may be right, Charlie,” Louise said. It was the first time she’d spoken since Charlie came into the room. She used her library voice, very quiet but authoritative. “You need time to get your story straight.”
Charlie shook his head stubbornly. “It’s not a story.”
“All right then, you need time to remember the facts. You can’t claim to have been at the scene without giving some plausible reason why you were there and what you were doing.”
“I wanted some fresh air.”
“Other streets, other neighborhoods, have fresh air. The police will ask you why you picked that one.”
“I didn’t. I was driving around everywhere, just driving around, breathing the free — the fresh air.”
“The way you did the other night?”
“Other night?”
“When I found you on Jacaranda Road.”
“Why do you bring that up?” he said violently. “You know nothing happened that night. You told me, you were the one who convinced me. You said, nothing’s happened, Charlie. Nothing whatever has happened, it’s all in your mind. Why aren’t you saying that now, Louise?”
“I will, if you want me to.”
“Not because you believe it?”
“I — believe it.” She clung to his arm, half-protectively, half- helplessly.
He looked down at her as if she were a stranger making an intimate demand. “Don’t touch me, woman.”
“Please, Charlie, you mustn’t talk to me like that. I love you.”
“No. You spoil things for me. You spoiled my being a witness.”
He jerked his arm out of her grasp and ran toward the hall. A few seconds later she heard the slam of his bedroom door. There was a finality about it like the closing of the last page of a book.
It’s over, she thought. I had a dream, the alarm rang, I woke up and it’s over.
She could still hear the alarm ringing in her ears, and above it, the sound of Ben’s voice. It sounded very calm but it was the calmness of defeat.
“I should have forced you to leave. I would have, if I’d known what was going on in his mind. But this witness bit, how could I have called that?” He looked out the window. It was getting dark and foggy. The broad, leathery leaves of the loquat tree were already dripping and the street lights had appeared wearing their gauzy gray nightgowns. “Either the whole thing’s a fantasy, or he’s telling the truth but not all of it.”
“All of it?”
“That he attacked the child and killed her.”
“Stop it. I’ll never believe that, never.”
“You half believed it when you walked in this door. You came here for reassurance. You wanted to be told that Charlie arrived home early last night, that he and I had a talk and then he went to bed. Well, he didn’t, we didn’t. This isn’t a very good place to come for reassurance, Louise. It’s a luxury we don’t keep in stock.”
“I didn’t come here for reassurance. I wanted to see Charlie, to tell him that I love him and I trust him.”
“You trust him, do you?”
“Yes.”
“How far? Far enough to allow him to go to the police with his story?”
“Naturally I’d like him to get the details straight first, before he exposes himself to... to their questions.”
“You make it sound very simple, as if Charlie’s mind is a reference book he can open at will and look up the answers. Maybe you’re right, in a way. Maybe his mind is a book, but it’s written in a language you and I can’t understand, and the pages aren’t in order and some of them are glued together and some are missing entirely. Not exactly a perfect place to find answers, is it, Louise?”
“Stop badgering me like this,” she said. “It’s not fair.”
“If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
“Is that all I ever get from you any more, an invitation to leave, walk away, don’t come back?”
“That’s it.”
“Why?”
“I told you before, one of the three of us should have a chance, just a chance.” He was still watching the fog pressing at the window like the gray facelessness of despair. “Charlie’s my problem, now more than ever. I’ll look after him. He won’t go to the police tonight or any other night. He’ll do what I tell him to do. I’ll see that he gets to work in the morning and that he gets home safely after work. I’ll stay with him, talk to him, listen to him, play the remember-game with him. He likes that — remember when we were kids, Ben? — he can play it for hours. It won’t be a happy life or a productive one, but the most I can hope for Charlie right now is that he’s allowed to survive at all. He’s a registered sex offender. Sooner or later he’s bound to be questioned about the child’s disappearance. I only hope it’s later so I can try and push this witness idea out of his head.”
“How will you do that?”
“I’ll convince him that he wasn’t near the house, he didn’t see the child, he didn’t see anything. He was at home with me, he dozed off in an armchair, he had a nightmare.”
“Don’t do it, Ben. It’s too risky, tampering with a mind that’s already confused about what’s real and what isn’t.”
“If he doesn’t know what’s real,” Ben said, “I’ll have to tell him. And he’ll believe me. It will be like playing the remember- game. Remember last night, Charlie, when you were sitting in the armchair? And you suddenly dozed off, you cried out in your sleep, you were having a nightmare about a house, a child coming out of a house...”
He had to write the letter very quickly because he knew Ben would be coming in soon to talk to him. He folded the letter six times, slipped it into an envelope, addressed the envelope to Police Headquarters and put it in the zippered inside pocket of his wind-breaker. Then he returned to his desk. The desk had been given to him when he was twelve and it was too small for him. He had to hunch way down in order to work at it but he didn’t mind this. It made him feel big, a giant of a man; a kindly giant, though, who used his strength only to protect, never to bully, so everyone respected him.
When Ben came in, Charlie pretended to be studying an advertisement in the back pages of a magazine.
“Dinner’s ready,” Ben said. “I brought home some chicken pies from the cafeteria and heated them up.”
“I’ll eat one if you want me to, Ben, but I’d just as soon not.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Not very. I had chicken pie last night.”
“We had ravioli last night. Don’t you remember? I cut myself opening the can. Look, here’s the cut on my finger.”
Charlie looked at the cut with polite interest. “That’s too bad. You must be more careful. I wasn’t here last night for dinner.”
“Yes, you were. You ate too much and later you dozed off in Father’s armchair in the front room.”
“No, Ben, that was a lot of other nights. Last night was different, it was very different. First I took that delivery to the Forest Service. All that heat and dust up in the mountains gave me a headache so I went to the drug store for some aspirin.”
“The aspirin made you sleepy. That’s why you dozed—”
“I wasn’t a bit sleepy, I was hungry. I was going to take Louise some place to eat — I don’t mean eat her,” he added earnestly. “I mean, where we could both eat some food. Only she wasn’t at the library so I went by myself and had a chicken pie.”