Last Lie (17 page)

"And?"

Sam said, "His words to Luce: 'Woman is either Helena Bonham Carter or she was telling me the truth.' I had to look up Helena Bonham Carter online, by the way. Turns out she's Bellatrix Lestrange. Harry Potter? Good actress. Heath Wade, the cop who was with the vic right after, he didn't see Devil's Thumb, Alan. He saw Devil's Dick.

"Do you recall the media beating that the young woman took in Eagle County? Her mental health history revealed? Her sexual history revealed? Old boyfriends discussing private moments? Her family under scrutiny? I would imagine that the alleged victim in whatever happened in Spanish Hills on Friday night might prefer to avoid being dissected like that, or . . . that her lawyer, Mr. Maitlin, might be determined to keep his client from being dissected like that."

"What you're saying makes sense, Sam. I can see why the lawyers want silence. Maybe even why law enforcement wants silence. But I don't see why everyone buys into the need for silence. Even Diane won't tell me what she knows about the housewarming. Diane gossips like she breathes." He nodded at that. "Then why the complete silence? Even from people who have no . . . s'mores on the fire?"

"S'mores on the fire?" He snorted, then averted his gaze for a moment, as though he'd spotted something near the bar that deserved his complete attention. I turned to look. Nothing there. When he looked back at me, he said, "Everyone who knows anything about Friday night--before, during, after--has a s'more on this fire. Libel? Slander? Allegiance? Public ridicule? Guilt by association? Nobody likes their s'mores burned to a crisp."

Sam began to stand up. I asked Sam if I could ask him one last question. I told him I wanted a direct answer.

He said, "No promises."

"As a father, do I have something to worry about? Based on what you know?"

He considered my question for a moment. "Do you have more to worry about than you did last week? I doubt it. Maybe less, given the sunlight."

I watched his face for signs of equivocation. I didn't see any. I said, "Thanks, Sam." I stood up.

He let me take a couple of steps away from him before he added, "As a husband, though? That'd be a different question. If you asked it."

I spun. "What are you saying?"

"Your wife is an attractive woman. Way too pretty to have settled for you, by the way. She seems to hold your new neighbor in some professional esteem. Now, I'm no expert, but those things are on the ingredient list for the recipe for the kind of mess we've been discussing."

I tried to make my face blank until I turned away from Sam. Then I mouthed a profanity that involved my upper teeth grazing my lower lip.

Our waitress was passing by on the way to the bar. "Something wrong?" she asked.

"No," I said, lying.

22

L
auren was awake when I got home.

She hadn't stayed up for me. She had not chosen to stay awake because she was waiting to grill me about being out so late. Nor had she chosen to stay awake because she was desperate to have an intimate moment with me before the day ended.

The reason she was awake was so familiar in our world that it had become almost mundane. Lauren was awake because she was in pain.

While I was out having a beer and a grilled cheese sandwich with Sam, pain had jostled or poked or aggravated Lauren awake during the early hours of her slumber. She would have tried to ignore it at first, to overcome it by defying it, and attempt to return to the sanctuary of sleep. When that failed--and it usually did--she would have opened one eye and spied the bedside clock. Then she would have sighed as she calculated the number of hours of discomfort she would have to endure until dawn.

At some point that night she reached out, or more likely looked over, and discovered that the bed beside her was empty. How she'd felt about my absence I had no way to know. It was not the kind of complaint she would give voice to at that stage of our marriage. Until issues are worked through, infidelity changes the degrees of freedom for an offending spouse. Lauren and I weren't done with the working through.

As the aggrieved spouse, I had already decided that any advantage for me was illusory. For each of us there was an enduring price for her infidelity.

I wondered for a moment if Kobe, and Mrs. Bryant, felt the same way.

I'D ALREADY CHECKED ON THE KIDS. Gracie was sound asleep down the hall, lying sideways in her double bed, having managed to wrap herself in her pretty duvet as though she were the protein filling inside some tropical, ginger-red burrito. When I'd gone downstairs, Jonas was, I thought, pretending to be asleep. I whispered his name into the dark a couple of times, encouraging him to engage with me. He didn't.

His sleep patterns worried me. His recovery worried me.

The fact that maintaining the pretense of sleeping had more value to him than any immediate alternative involving contact with me worried me.

I told myself to give it some thought when I wasn't so exhausted.

I entered the bedroom in my bare feet. Lauren was sitting up in bed, her knees clutched to her chest, rocking gently from side to side. The sway was measured and kept a certain rhythm, like a human metronome. It was the kind of rocking a mother would do to goad a cranky baby to return to her slumber.

The dogs were nearby. I knew they would both be on alert. Emily got up to greet me. She nuzzled me in the crotch a couple of times before she forced the considerable weight of her flank against my thigh, herding me toward the bed. Toward Lauren. Fiji was on her side smack in the middle of the big bed. She wagged her tail maniacally as I approached, rolling onto her back at the last second so that I would rub her soft belly. The long silk of her tail was tangled in the bedclothes.

I would disappoint her about the belly rub.

The only light in the room came from the moon and from a muted match in Kitchen Stadium. Mario Batali versus some young guy with great hair who looked like he wanted to be somewhere without cameras, cooking something other than aubergines.

From the edge of the bed, I couldn't see Lauren's face. It was screened by her dark hair. She didn't speak. I didn't speak.

I knew her nighttime distress the same way I knew her distant cousins. We were related, but my knowledge was once removed.

When her deep, disabling pain erupted in the dark of night, I felt helpless. The dreaded aches covered territories in her legs and expanses in her long bones that didn't exist on any anatomical chart. There were never true culprits. No injuries. No bumps or bruises. Never any structures to identify, never any specific maladies to blame. The pain she experienced laughed at the puny efforts of ibuprofen. The pain mocked the maximum doses of Vicodin or Percocet. Lauren rarely bothered to take them at all.

The pain was in her head or in the trunk line of neural cable that was her spinal column--caused by the way MS had screwed up her wiring--but she felt the agony in her legs, so we acted as though that was reality.

Once I spotted her rocking on the bed, I inhaled slowly, checking the room for telltale signs of cannabis. She hadn't been smoking. Occasionally, weed was palliative for her. Science didn't seem to know why. Other times it wasn't. Science didn't seem to know why that was true, either.

One night as I joined her as she toked on her bong on the deck outside the bedroom--a night the cannabis was working--I convinced myself that there were angels in heaven who liked the aroma of burning weed. It was as good an explanation as any.

I approached the bed full of trepidation.

Our marriage was balanced on some kind of edge. Was it a high-wire or a wide causeway? I didn't know the margins of error. Neither did she, I suspected. All I knew was that there had been nights recently when my compassionate touch hadn't been welcome, and there had been nights recently when I hadn't bothered to offer it.

Chronic illness is not contagious, but somehow it spreads. Maybe it's fungal. There were times Lauren's illness brought out the best, the most generous, part of me. There were times that it brought out more callous instincts. That night I checked my tank for reserves. I had none. Hella's story about the rape and Sam's sermon about yet another rape had, together, exhausted me. Lauren was rocking herself as though the movement alone could take her someplace else. But it couldn't; I knew her tank was as empty as mine, or emptier.

I sat on the edge of the bed, reached beneath the comforter, and rested my open hand on the top of the foot of her left leg. She didn't cringe or pull away. That was a good sign. After a few moments of skin-to-skin contact, I gently extended her leg, bending the knee. She didn't stop rocking. She didn't resist me.

Next, I didn't so much begin to massage her leg as I began to caress it. I'd learned from numerous failures at amelioration that my goal wasn't to solve the mystery of her agony, not to try to find the muscles that needed release, nor to trace toward an insertion point, but my goal was to distract her central nervous system from its focus on her agony.

Simply, my goal wasn't massage. It was competition--to give her malfunctioning central nervous system a damn good game. An alternative. I had low expectations. I didn't expect to win. But if I could stir things up, maybe I could keep the match from being a rout. There were no guarantees. What worked one time failed the next.

I followed my instincts. That time, I began with her ankle. I used some pressure, wrapping the joint with both hands, intertwining my fingers, and closing them around the bony structures like a vise. I tightened my grip, released it, tightened it again. In between, I used some strokes, too. Gentle ones. I allowed my fingertips to circle the round bones, over and again, and let the pad of my thumb trace the length of the ligaments and tendons that tied the joint to the rest of her lovely leg.

I used my fingernails to scratch lightly and the flat of my palm to confound whatever part of her nervous system might be paying attention. I etched letters on her flesh with my fingertips, spelling out my wishes for her and for us.

After a while, I moved down from her ankle to her foot and worked it, instep, arch, and heel. I compressed her toes, one by one. I focused on the sole for an extended time until I thought I could feel tension seep from her toenails. How could I tell? I just could. Maybe it was her breathing. Maybe it was the fact that Emily, the big Bouv, had finally closed her eyes. I then changed my attention to the long bones in Lauren's leg, confusing the scene further, I hoped, by coming from two directions. At once, I moved up her calf with my left hand, slowly, and down her thigh with my right hand, slowly, until both my hands arrived at her knee.

I used both my hands to surround the knee the same way I had her ankle. Intertwined my fingertips. My hands squeezed. They coaxed. I caressed her knee. I soothed it, scratched it, pressured it. Confused it. Confounded it.

Then I started the process all over with her right leg.

The whole endeavor took a good half hour. More.

The timer in Kitchen Stadium was still counting down when I was finishing.

Mario never seemed to lose his cool. His competition had been defeated long before a single dish came off the fire. The poor guy was going through the motions.

In the kitchen of life, I wanted to be Mario, not the guy who was plating the sauce that hadn't set up quite right. I wondered if Preston Georges had ever been in Kitchen Stadium. Had ever taken on Mario Batali.

Toward the end, as I was tracing the femur on Lauren's right leg, she leaned forward and grazed the back of my shoulder with her dry lips before she lowered her head to the pillow. A few minutes later, when I gently lifted the comforter back over her naked legs, her breathing seemed to have found the rhythm of sleep.

For some time, I sat where I was and I watched her.

Sam was right. My wife was a lovely woman. And yes, she was probably also a bit too enamored with the legal accomplishments of the currently famous man who was our new neighbor.

Maybe I did have something to worry about. Tomorrow.

I found sleep quickly. When the alarm jarred me awake the next morning, that fact surprised me.

LAUREN FIXED BREAKFAST. The aroma of wheat toast and cheese and herb-crusted baked eggs in ramekins filled the kitchen. I hadn't been hungry when I got out of the shower. But the aromas had me famished by the time I made it to the kitchen.

Hot breakfasts weren't the norm in our house on hectic weekday mornings. Gracie--the one of the four of us least likely to pull her punches--asked, "So, is this like a pretend Sunday?" It earned a chuckle from her almost always taciturn brother.

When the kids rushed to their rooms to get ready for school, I said to Lauren, "Thanks for breakfast. I appreciate it."

"You're welcome," she said, her back turned. "Last night helped. I was at the end of my rope." She was busying herself with the kids' lunches. Almost like it was an afterthought, she said, "Our neighbors will be home later today. Thought you'd want to know. Because of his issues with Emily."

My breath caught, just a little. "Gotcha. You don't think I should let her run at night?"

"Maybe not until we reach an understanding with them. Once they get to know her, you know, things might change. We have to remember that she can be a scary-looking dog in the dark. Perhaps a little neighborly give-and-take will help? Maybe they'll come around and appreciate the fact that there's a tough sheriff in town."

"Sure, it's worth a try. They've been where? In . . . Napa, or Sonoma? Do I have that right?"

"Napa. They have a second home. Hake is a wine nut. Owns some vineyards. Dabbles."

When did Lauren start thinking of Mattin as Hake? Huh.
I bit my tongue, but I decided it would be weirder not to ask Lauren the next question in my head than to ask it. I said, "How did you hear they're coming home? Have they been in touch?"

Adrienne and Peter always kept us posted about their out-of-town plans. We had always done the same with them. We had keys to each other's houses. We picked up packages, collected each other's mail, watered each other's gardens. Responded to emergencies. Despite the initial tension with our new neighbors, perhaps they were reaching out a little bit to try to establish a similar routine.

Lauren was wiping the kitchen counter. She smiled at me, as though she was having the same kind of benevolent thoughts I was. "No, not with me, directly. Someone in the office . . . was in touch with Hake. That's how I heard."

I thought,
She didn't have to tell me that.
Lauren wanted me to know that the DA was still interested in whatever had happened Friday night.

Huh.
"Something official?" I asked as I tapped the last of the coarse grounds from the french press into the compost bucket under the sink. The compost was for Adrienne's garden. Adrienne had been dead for what felt like ages. I continued to dump food scraps into her compost pile and to turn the black soil with a pitchfork. I didn't know why.

I was thinking that it was possible that a prominent attorney like Mattin Snow might have a benign reason to be in touch with the Boulder County DA's office while he was at his second home in Northern California. But if the reason for the contact were benign, I didn't think Lauren would have offered me the tidbit about her office being in touch with him.

"Can't say," is how Lauren responded to my question about the nature of the DA's office's contact with our neighbor.

Lauren's "can't say" didn't mean that she didn't know. It meant that she was not at liberty to reveal what she did know.
She didn't,
I thought,
have to say that, either.
She could have left my query unanswered or white-lied me with a "don't know."

"Of course," I said. The dance steps were familiar. Lauren was leading, but we had rehearsed these steps often enough that I knew how to follow without tripping over her feet. By specifying what she couldn't tell me about work, she was informing me about her work in a completely deniable way.

My conclusion? Someone in the DA's office had asked Mattin Snow to return to town. Who? At the roulette table in my head, I slid my remaining chips to the spot on the felt marked "DA." But why did someone in the DA's office suddenly want Mattin to return to town? For an interview? I thought that was unlikely, even highly unlikely. He would decline the interview request. He was under no obligation to talk with Boulder County investigators. He was certainly under no obligation to cut short his vacation to satisfy the curiosity of the sheriff or the DA. The man was a prominent lawyer. He would know all that.

It had to be one of two other things. First, it could be about developments with forensics. Sam had said something the night before about pending forensics.

I didn't think the toxicology screen that had been done on Three-Wood Widow would be back so soon. The rape kit? After the few days that had passed, the most that investigators were likely to know would be whether or not viable DNA was present in the samples collected. The DNA results wouldn't be available.