FORTY-FOUR
When Darren stopped for gas on the way home, Marcus walked across the street to the liquor store. He walked straight over to the inexpensive blends and pulled down a bourbon with a name so cheap it mocked the buyer. He ignored the pricier malts that glittered behind the cashier. He had no interest in anything that spoke of celebration or good times ahead. He wanted something foul and burning and acrid. Something that would smite him hard and hurt him the next day. It was the fate he deserved.
Darren and the man pumping gas both watched his return in silence. He said nothing to either of them, just climbed back into the Jeep and sat there waiting. He did not want any argument. He wanted oblivion.
Darren took his time driving home, meandering through the streets as though seeing them for the first time. Eventually they arrived, however, and pulled in past the SBI car and halted in the drive. Only then did Marcus wish for something to say, some words of thanks for all Darren had done, even an acknowledgment of the comfort Marcus had found in the young man’s hulking presence. But there were no words worthy of the man.
Marcus left the brown paper bag on the front hall table as he climbed the stairs and changed his clothes. But when he came back down, it was to the sound of another car pulling into his driveway. He walked out onto the veranda, not feeling much one way or the other, even when he recognized the blond head behind the wheel.
Kirsten climbed the steps in the breathless manner of one pretending not to hurry. She stopped on the third step when his face was clear in the veranda’s weak light. Whatever it was she saw there on his features, it stilled her smile of greeting before it had formed.
Marcus said, “I can’t even begin to guess how you’ve come to be here.”
“Darren called Deacon.”
“Let’s see. That must have been on my mobile while I was still in the liquor store.”
“Deacon called Alma. Alma started to come herself, but Austin said I should go.” She moved one step closer. “Austin said to tell you that sometimes solitude is just another name for death.”
Marcus was still trying to frame a reply, one that would keep his way open to temporary amnesia, when the phone rang. He walked back inside, picked up the receiver, and felt as much as heard Kirsten’s presence there with him.
Deacon Wilbur’s deep, honeyed voice asked, “You all right over there?”
“No.” He could almost smell the contents of that unopened bottle. “Not yet.”
“The good Lord above tells us He’s gonna look after His own.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Now you just hold up there. Don’t you go looking for fair. Don’t you expect a painless life. Don’t go hunting for an easy road. Just you settle for wisdom.”
The vision of the bag and the first scarring swallow wavered slightly, though Marcus tried hard to hold on. “I’ve failed. Gloria is lost, the case is lost, it’s all over.”
“Sometimes the hardest thing a man can do is accept his own humanness,” Deacon’s tone rumbled soft enough to make the words almost palatable. “Sometimes there ain’t no harder road to walk than the one that turns away from the past. Yes, cutting the cords that tie us to what was and never will be again, then turning toward what is yet to come.”
Marcus found the pastor’s voice rubbing out both the bottle’s image and his own desperate hunger. He wanted to hang up, to turn away from this kind man and his painful words, but he merely sighed his defeat and settled into the chair behind his desk.
Deacon waited a moment, and when Marcus remained quiet, he concluded, “Don’t know what’s harder, saying farewell to the dead-and-gones or hello to what’s coming. Sometimes hope is the worst burden of all. One you’ll never be able to carry alone. You just think on that, now. Think hard. Try to find some way to take that first small step.”
As Marcus hung up the phone, Kirsten walked in and sat in the client’s chair. Marcus was angry that they would care so much as to keep him from oblivion. Bitterness over the distance between him and the bottle turned his mood foul. “Gloria knew the whole time she wasn’t coming back.”
Kirsten nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“She went to China planning to place herself in harm’s way. She went expecting to destroy her parents’ lives.” He planted his good elbow on the tabletop and aimed a shaky finger at her. “And you knew it all along.”
Another slow nod. “Yes.”
“She had it planned down to your handing me the documents. She learned that from Dee Gautam, I imagine. Feed the information to the poor dumb slob of an attorney. Do it slowly. Let him hook himself good and hard, then reel him in bit by bit.”
“That’s right.”
Bile rose in his throat. “Shame she didn’t mention to Alma and Austin that they needed to find somebody better. Somebody who wouldn’t let them crash and burn.”
“Nobody could have done a better job,” she said, her voice too soft to vanquish even a flickering flame.
Yet it was enough to ignite his fury. He smashed his fist down on the table, but she did not flinch, did not even blink. “Gloria is dead, Kirsten. She’s dead. And the case is lost.”
Kirsten’s gaze seemed made from the same fabric as the night, empty and endless. “She was dead before she left.”
He leaned back, searching for a hold on his anger, feeling it seeping away like water through a fist. “What?”
“It’s the only thing that has kept me going. Knowing how she was. She was dead inside. She told me that a hundred times. A thousand. She was just looking for a place to lay her body down.”
It came to him then, the filtering down from the realm beyond logic. “The boyfriend.”
“Gary Loh was finishing medical school when they met. He was brilliant, he loved life, he loved Gloria. They were made for each other. Seeing them together gave you hope for love in a world …” She stopped, breathed hard, looked out the window. “Before he started his internship, Gary went to Hong Kong. That was, oh, eighteen months ago now. It was his second trip. There was a missionary group working there, one partnered with our outreach program. They worked in the red-light district down by the docks, mostly with prostitutes and homeless and addicts. They were Hong Kong’s only outreach program among the heroin addicts. Gary loved the work. He talked about it all the time. That was just a part of how he was, this mercy he felt for the helpless.”
Marcus nodded, not understanding yet, but knowing it was coming. “Britain gave Hong Kong back to China.”
“Hong Kong’s takeover occurred the year before Gary arrived. The Beijing government treats all addicts as capital offenders, the same as pushers. First they warned the clinic, then they raided it. Gary fought back. We heard about this later, from one of the survivors. He had a number of patients who were too ill to move. He tried to bar the soldiers’ entry into the clinic. They beat him with their rifle butts. His skull was crushed. He was flown home in a coma and died three days later.”
“And Gloria took it hard.”
“She just withered up inside. She was kept so sedated I doubt she even knew there was a funeral at all. For days and days she only said one thing to me that made any sense, one thing you could recognize as real words: Don’t tell my parents, I don’t want them to know. A week or so after the funeral, she called to tell them she and Gary had broken off the engagement. She had to say something. They knew the instant they heard her voice that she was torn apart.” Her gaze revealed a trace of the agony that had emptied her. “I made a terrible mistake then. I should have ignored her and told them everything. They would have stopped her. Had her committed or forced her to get help. I don’t know. Something. Then she wouldn’t have …”
Marcus waited until he was certain she could not go on. “But you didn’t.”