Head Wounds (17 page)

“She can share all this with a friend of the accused?”

“Are you and I friends?”

It’s true I hadn’t seen her for a while, ever since I took up with Amanda. I hadn’t been conscious of it, but I guess I’d steered clear to avoid misinterpretation. Or temptation.

She smiled at me.

“Don’t panic,” she said. “We’re still friends. Of a type.”

“I guess I deserved that.”

“You didn’t come to Dad’s funeral, but you sent a note to the rabbi, who slipped it to me. You didn’t sign it, but I knew who it was.”

“Never try to get one past a psychologist.”

“I told Edith about it. Didn’t do any good.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“And to answer your question, she didn’t share much with me. Just the vaguest outline. But I could fill in the blanks. I know an awful lot about you.”

“Awful waste of time.”

“I’ve had time to waste. Basically lived on the Internet. Doing research, after a fashion. You were one of my favorite subjects.”

She looked at me with her soft, sensitive eyes, made more
so by the dominating presence of the mountain ridge in between. They were moist blue, filled with commingled sadness and humor.

“Probably know more than me,” I said.

“Definitely,” she said with some conviction.

“Puts me at a disadvantage.”

She considered that.

“Yes, of course it does. Not a place you like to find yourself.”

“See, I didn’t know that,” I said.

When she smiled, razor-thin crow’s-feet flared up from the corners of her eyes.

“What I don’t know is why you’re here,” she said. “Specifically.”

“You’re good at research. Already been stipulated.”

“It bothers you that I’ve researched you,” she said.

“A little.”

“Did I ever tell you why I broke up with my husband?”

“No,” I said, knowing I’d never ask and would pray she’d never bring it up herself.

“Whenever I pressed him on anything, he’d push back. And the harder he pushed back, the more I pressed. The more you try to protect your secrets, the more curious I get. It’s a problem of mine.”

“You need a psychologist.”

“Or something to research,” she said. “A place to put all that curiosity.”

“What do you know about Southampton High School? Say about twenty-five years ago.”

“Robbie Milhouser was a student,” she said.

“I’m curious about what he did. Who he hung out with. His record.”

“His confidential record.”

“Yeah. The good stuff.”

“Which of course I can’t reveal.”

“Of course not. All you have to do is read it, then we sit around and you tell me what you think.”

“Why don’t I photocopy the file and bring it over to your house?”

“I don’t want the file,” I said. “I want to know what you think.”

“No one else cares.”

“About what you think?”

“About Robbie Milhouser,” she said, smiling again. “No one has asked.”

“Why would they? High school was a long time ago.”

“Then why are you?”

“Curiosity.”

She stopped tapping her fingers, but then started twitching her foot. She looked at it and frowned, perturbed by the errant body part.

“I am a very good researcher,” she said, looking back up at me. “If modesty will allow. Lucky for you, I’m also open to barter.”

“I liked your other business model. I asked you for favors and you did them for nothing.”

“My accountants have encouraged me to make adjustments. Anyway, your balance with me is paid in full.”

“With what?”

She pointed to her nose.

“This.”

Like she said, Rosaline knew me a lot better than I knew her. What I mostly remembered was sitting around her father’s living room, drinking tea or rye depending on the hour, and comfortably marking the final ticks of the old man’s clock.

“Okay. Now you’re out ahead of me.”

“The offended always has a clearer recollection than the offender.”

“Ah, thoughtlessness. Now I get it.”

“You told me I’d been hiding my insecurities behind my nose, so to speak. And if I fixed it, they’d have to live out in the sunlight. Or words to that effect.”

“You call that offensive? I can do better than that.”

“I took your advice, but did you one better. I kept the nose and shed the insecurities.”

From the way she looked, and was looking at me, you could almost believe her. Even if part true, it was all for the good.

“If that’s how my personality affects people, I’ve brought a lot of joy to the world.”

“Too bad I’m the only one gracious enough to tell you.”

“So, what sort of insult will score some more information?”

She held up her hand and pointed a long, slender index finger at the ceiling.

“Insults have been devalued in today’s market. I’m diversifying into historical fact.”

“Whose history?”

“Yours,” she said, as if disappointed in me for asking.

“I thought you already had that cornered.”

“I want to know why you did it.”

“You’ll have to narrow that. There’re a lot of ‘its.’”

“Why you punched Mason Thigpen in the jaw.”

Thigpen was chief corporate council for the big industrial company I worked for until the last board meeting they mistakenly invited me to, proven by my change of agenda.

“In the nose. I hit him in the nose. Only stupid kids and movie actors hit people in the jaw. The nose is handier and softer and hurts the owner a lot more than it hurts your fist.”

Patrick Getty could have verified that.

“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Rather a nasty thought for me personally.”

“You read about Thigpen on the Internet?”

She smiled another disappointed little smile.

“A professional researcher never reveals her sources.”

“It was no big deal,” I said, as I reached in my pocket for a cigarette, then withdrew my hand, remembering the evolved state of the teachers’ lounge.

“No. Only that it abruptly truncated the steady rise of a man being groomed for the executive suite. A man universally admired, even by his rivals, as technically brilliant and blissfully unconcerned about corporate politics.”

“See where bliss’ll get you.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Me neither. Nothing brilliant about engineering. It’s just engineering.”

“Not that. The corporate politics. I think you were in them up to your neck.”

“So, that’s the deal? You tell me about Robbie Milhouser, and I get to mess up your theory?”

She shook her head.

“I’m not that interested in corporations. There’s something else I want to know,” she said.

If I’d known Rosaline back in those corporate days I’d have tried to hire her. Harness all that obsessive persistence.

“Okay.”

“Why did you wreck those houses?”

I’d heard that question before, a long time ago, and didn’t love hearing it again. For the cops and prosecutors, and the lawyers on both sides, “I don’t know” seemed like a good enough answer. But not for the shrink I’d been forced to see as part of a plea bargain. He wouldn’t let up. Though unlike
Rosaline, he had a normal-sized nose and an oversized sense of self-importance. I wouldn’t give him an answer if I had one, which I didn’t.

I told Rosaline as much.

“I don’t believe you,” she said sweetly, leavening the bite of the comment.

“You don’t think it’s possible to not know why you did something?” I asked her. “Doesn’t the fact that people hardly ever know why they do anything keep you folks in business?”

Her smile grew.

“There was a time when I’d let you get away with that, Sam. But I got smarter when I shed my insecurities.”

I was tempted to ask her if she thought fear and anger made you stupider, but I was in deep enough already.

“Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said. “You give me what you can on Robbie, and I’ll give you an hour of couch time. You can ask me anything you want.”

She leaned toward me.

“Couch time it is.”

She used her long middle finger to trace the top of her blouse.

“I’ve already got one of those deals, Rosaline.”

“Highly revocable. But I’ll take a handshake as a down payment.”

The skin of her slender hand was cool and dry, but soft to the touch. Her fingertips slid across my palm when I let go. The door to the lounge opened and a pair of male teachers, delivered by divine forces, barged noisily into the lounge. Rosaline sat back easily into the couch, unruffled.

“Saved by the boors,” she said.

“Postponed, anyway,” I said, despite my better judgment, which as history proves has never been all that good.

She escorted me back to the centurions at the front desk. As we walked, some sort of electromagnetic effect disturbed the energy field between us. I knew this by the slight spike in my pulse rate. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Ditto that,” she said, handing me off and turning lightly again on her toe, then disappearing down the long institutional corridor, lined with lockers filled with secrets past and present, safe from all but the irresistibly curious mind of Rosaline Arnold.

W
HEN
I
FINALLY
located Amanda she was covered in soot. She was stationed with another blackened soul next to a large dumpster at the end of a relay line starting inside her burned-out house. Charred chunks of sheetrock, two-by-fours and melted fixtures were traveling down the line to where the pitch team tossed them over the seven-foot dumpster wall.

The day had turned bright, the hard light of the season flooding down through the bare tree cover and revealing the ugliness and wreckage of the destroyed property in stark detail. The air was clear, but thick with the bitter, sickly smell of soaked charcoal.

Amanda used the back of her forearm to clear a wave of hair from her face, exposing a smile for me and Eddie as we approached.

“Welcome to the glamorous world of real-estate development,” she said.

“Thanks. I think I’ll observe from here,” I said, standing clear of the ash and dust. Eddie didn’t like the smell and feel of the place, and was happy to stay close to my side.

“I hope we can talk,” she said as she took one end of a shredded piece of half-inch plyscore to help hoist it up and into the dumpster.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

Amanda stepped out of the human chain, which reconfigured itself without interrupting the flow of debris.

“I want to plead temporary insanity,” she said as she wiped her hands.

“You had a rough night.”

“I’ve had rougher. I’ve been storing up a little too much lately,” she said, moving out of earshot of the crew. “I wasn’t even aware. Not consciously. The fire triggered something. I took it out on you. I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s adequate.”

Like Rosaline Arnold, an excess of curiosity was one of my greater failings. But there were a lot of things I didn’t want to know about, that I preferred to leave unexamined. How I felt about Amanda was one of them. Maybe because of that I never tried very hard to understand her. As if I was afraid of what that understanding would reveal.

One thing I did know was she’d absorbed a disproportionate amount of sorrow in her life, probably more than you could withstand without some adverse consequences taking root. More than I could take, that was certain.

My wife Abby’s life was one of uninterrupted good fortune, if you discounted her choice of husbands. She honored that providence by filling nearly every waking moment with expressions of disgruntlement and complaint. I realized over time that she really didn’t care if I agreed with her or not, as long as I said something that sounded like I was listening,
which I did less and less. Eventually all conversation, acerbic or otherwise, dwindled to nothing and a permafrost of silence and disappointment settled into the structure of our relationship.

Long before I’d ever imagined I’d be sleeping with Amanda, I loved to talk to her. I used to go see her at Roy’s bank, pretend I was a worthwhile customer, which I wasn’t. It was the only pleasure I knew in those days. She didn’t know it, but she was the last and only tether I had to the world, more like a gossamer thread, barely holding on.

Standing there next to her burned-out house, I remembered what it was like to see her at her desk. To bathe in the glory of a welcome look. I didn’t trust it, but I loved it. I didn’t know there could be such a thing.

I’d said to Sullivan that it couldn’t be worth it. But it was.

“I won’t fight with you. I wouldn’t know how,” I said.

“I know. It’ll never happen again,” she said. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Just give it a little while, and you’ll see.”

Her voice was tired, but the words were clear and unstudied.

She reached up and took my face in both hands and kissed me on the forehead.

“There. Now we look almost the same,” she said.

“Hardly. You look like the inside of my hibachi.”

“I went to see my friends in the City. I hadn’t heard about Robbie until I read the paper this morning. They don’t really think you had anything to do with it, do they?”

“They have all this damning evidence and no other suspects. I’m new to this, but I think that emboldens the prosecution.”

“It was that dreadful scene at the restaurant,” she said.

“Didn’t help. Jackie’s going to want you to back me up on that one.”

“So ridiculous,” she said.

“That’s what I kept saying until they were sticking my fingers on pads of ink and asking me if I had a passport.”

She wrapped her arms around me and held on for about a minute.

“What a nightmare,” she said into my shirt.

“So you never wondered about it,” I said.

She looked up at me like she didn’t understand what I meant.

“About what?”

“The fire. Robbie.”

She looked at me carefully for a second, then shook her head.

“At first, of course,” she said. “But I’ve known Robbie Milhouser my entire life. He was all show. You saw that. Even if he was capable of the thought, he didn’t have, you know …”

“The courage?”

“That’s right. All bluster, no balls,” she said.