Kirsten stared at Marcus with red-rimmed eyes. “You think you’ve finally got enough for a case?”
“This is not admissible evidence,” Marcus said, his voice sounding hollow to his own ears.
“What a perfectly legal thing to say.” Kirsten was too spent to give the words more than a trace of bitterness. “Looks like you’re safe, then.”
“There is no definitive trail of custody, no way to authenticate the tape. We must demonstrate both before-”
“Oh, spare me. What you’re really saying is you still don’t need to commit. Am I right?” She stood and walked from the room. From the stairs she said, “Let me know when this garbage is gone.”
“Don’t mind her,” Alma said quietly. “Those two girls were close as twins.”
Austin Hall sighed his way to his feet, taking it in careful stages. He stepped over to the bookshelves by the television. “Where did you put the photographs?”
Alma replied softly, “Bottom-right shelf, there in the corner.”
Austin opened the little doors, picked out one framed print, straightened, then stood there a long moment. His stillness caused Alma to start sniffling again.
Slowly he turned back to the room. Only then did Marcus notice how unraveled the man had become. From the back he was still the tightly wound professor in his vest and starched shirt and suit pants. But the vest dangled open and the tie was gone and the shirt was unbuttoned to reveal a T-shirt and a trace of graying chest hair. He carried the burden back and stood over Marcus, swaying slightly. “Alma put these things away when she saw how it hurt me to look at them.”
Marcus nodded. He understood that perfectly.
Austin turned the picture so that it faced Marcus. “This is my Gloria. Not what you saw there on that screen. This is my baby girl. Right here. You see what they did to her?”
“Yes.” The woman in the photograph was electric. She laughed so loudly he could hear her voice. More than that. He heard his own children, his son singing in the backyard and laughing like the chimes of heaven.
Gloria Hall wore a cocktail dress of emerald green, probably silk. She was graced by a corsage and the grandest smile he had ever seen. She was a tall enchantress, not beautiful by any means, there was too much of her mother’s strong frame and her father’s sternly powerful features for that. Her shoulders and arms mocked the fragility of the dress. She was aware of this, and she did not care. Marcus stared at the picture and knew he had never met a person happier with her own skin.
“Whatever it takes,” Austin said, his voice burning the words to charred cinders. “You understand me? Whatever you have to do.”
Marcus waited through the police inquiry. He handled the Halls’ refusal to give up the original video, which meant traveling with them to have it duplicated. This was followed by telephone discussions with various State Department people and a visit from a local FBI agent, all of which were utterly futile. By the time the last police officer left the Hall home, Marcus was more than spent. He was afraid.
He took the first exit into eastern Rocky Mount and drove until he found the first bar. It was perfect for his needs. The place was full of shadows and serious drinkers, men who weightlifted with forklifts instead of barbells, women who put up with a tirade-ridden world for six bucks an hour plus overtime. The bartender managed to take his order without meeting his eye. They didn’t care that Marcus wore the only tie in the place. He was just another drifter looking for a drink and a jukebox that would cry for him.
By the third drink the shadows were whispering hated memories and the air had turned hard and mean. Marcus bought a bottle of vodka and carried it out with him. Back home, the drinks went down smoother but the air stayed heavy. Marcus drank until the whispers stopped, or at least until he stopped hearing. He stumbled upstairs, the railing somewhere far out of reach.
He awoke in the hard blackness of another predawn. His breathing sighed like a woman weeping, and he remembered then why he had stopped drinking. It wasn’t anything so noble as a vow, or a hope of righting the past or trying for something better. None of that. The drink chained him down where he could not escape the nightmares. They were free then to eat at him for hours, long enough to stain the bed with his sweat. Marcus left his bedclothes in a soggy mass on the bathroom floor and went looking for his running gear.
Exercise had once come natural and easy. Except for work around the house, however, Marcus had done almost nothing since the accident. It took him a half hour to find his running shoes. By then his headache had diminished from lightning flashes to rolling thunder.
The first half mile was pure agony. He breathed fire and tasted bile. The second half mile he sweated the remnants of booze and bad dreams. Even so, the mental metronome kept steady count, and when he reached a mile he knew he had to either stop or die.
When Marcus finally caught his breath, he looked around and realized he had no idea where he was.
He took almost an hour to wind his way home. Long enough to grow mildly hungry and to map out the day’s work. By the time he had showered and brewed coffee, the rain had returned. He ate his breakfast standing at the counter, watching crystal curtains close down his world.
The phone rang as he was sorting through papers and mail. Netty said, “Jay is having one of his bad spells.”
“Then don’t come to the office.”
“I could make it after lunch, I guess. Right now it’s pretty bad.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He could hear a high-pitched howling in the background, a single note that went on and on, as though being born mentally deficient had granted Jay the ability to scream without drawing breath. “Are you all right?”
“I should be asking you that. Was the video as bad as they’re saying?”
He tried to tune out the shrieking. “How did you hear about the Halls’ video?”
“This is a small town inside a small town. Somebody heard about it at church and called around. Word gets out about everything. Including where you stopped off last night.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Listen up, Marcus. You want to do some more drinking, you do it around friends. There could have been a night rider with a New Horizons paycheck in his pocket last night. Somebody who’d love to brag he was the one who turned you into mush.”
“Sounds like a time warp.”
“No it doesn’t. It sounds like good old common sense. Now, was the video bad?”
Marcus replied softly, “It was awful.”
“Those poor people. We gonna help them out?”
He found himself liking the way she said that. We. “I think we’re going to try.”
“That’s real good. You call me if you need me.”
“I’ll be fine.” And for a time after he hung up the phone, he really believed it was so.
Marcus labored all day in his water-enclosed world. His corner of Netty’s office became ringed by law books opened and stacked one upon the other. Marcus had purchased them years earlier for his home office, when an attorney died and his widow auctioned his effects. At the time Marcus had felt sorry for the man. The books were dusty and smelled of disuse. After a while the odor faded into the background with the rain. Noon came and went, and hunger became just one more faint rumble upon the horizon, noted but not acknowledged.
By three-thirty he was done. Marcus showered, then ate eggs and toast standing by the kitchen’s tall sash windows. Sometime in the previous hour the rain had let up. Now the mist did not fall so much as float in the still air. Beyond his back window, sentinel pines stood patient in the gray afternoon, their branches turned to heavy green crystal. He stood and listened to the patter of drops falling off the roof, the sound keeping time to his quietly thumping head. Marcus set down his plate, reached for his keys and jacket and folders, and departed for the Hall residence.