The Secret Hour (27 page)

 
“Your sister was here,” John said, holding Kate tight, so she couldn’t pull away. “And so was my client…”

 
“Merrill?”

 
“Yes,” John said. “He came into this back parking lot, to look at that young girl—” he gestured at the small house, the window now dark. “And he got frustrated. I think…”

 
“Willa was buying gas,” Kate whispered, her eyes wild with fire.

 
“Yes, I think she was.”

 
“And he came upon her…”

 
“He forced her into her own car,” John said, not sure, not positive of anything, but using his knowledge of his client’s psychological profile and his methods of operation, to try to answer Kate’s questions.

 
“And made her drive away?”

 
“Yes.”

 
“How do you know?” she asked with horror.

 
“Because that is what he does.”

 
“Did he tell you?”

 
“Yes.”

 
“About WILLA?” she asked, nearly screaming.

 
“No—not about Willa. But about the others. About watching the girl in that window.” There—he had done it—breached lawyer-client confidentiality. One call to the court by Kate Harris, and John O’Rourke’s career was over. Maybe it was anyway. How could he come back from this?

 
“Oh, no, oh, no,” Kate was saying, shaking her head.

 
“Sit down,” John said, leading her to her car. Pushing her down, so she could lean on the hood, holding her still with both hands on her shoulders.

 
There were lines in life that good people never crossed. To John they had always been completely clear. They weren’t like sins—lying, stealing. They were bigger; they had to do with vows, with the promises a good man made and had to keep in order to stay a good man.

 
A good man didn’t kill. Or cheat on his wife. And, if he were a lawyer, he didn’t break his client’s confidence. It didn’t matter whether the client was a thief, a rapist, a murderer, or all three. The crime was beside the point because the principle was larger than anyone, or anything.

 
The principle—the ethics of a lawyer keeping his client’s confidence, of making sure the client received a fair trial—was something that John had lived by his entire life. He had learned it from his father.

 
And his father’s word and lessons were worth everything to John O’Rourke. He hoped to pass them on, through the generations, to his son and his daughter, and to their sons and daughters.

 
“What do I do now?” Kate asked, beginning to shake.

 
“You go home,” John said. “You stop searching.”

 
“But Willa…”

 
“Let the nightmare be over,” John said.

 
“How can you say that? It feels as if it’s just begun…” Her voice rising, Kate reached out with her scraped hand. She needed to touch John—he understood. She had just come face-to-face with the monster he encountered every day.

 
“Kate,” he said. He knew he should leave now. He had given her what she’d asked for; holding her would only make it worse. But he wanted her so badly; he wanted to touch a human being who would touch him back, who would need contact as much as he did, a woman with river eyes and a loving gaze, who had been cheated on, who still cared enough about her sister to come all this long, long way.

 
“I still have to find her,” she whispered, her hand held out. “Willa…”

 
John shook, wanting to embrace her. He took her hand instead. “You have her, Kate. Where it matters most.”

 
“Where?” she asked, the word scraping from her throat.

 
“There,” he said, pointing at her heart. “Inside. Take her home to your brother…let this go. Just let it go.”

 
Sobbing softly, she bowed her head. John opened the car door. Brainer wanted to stay inside with Bonnie, but John grabbed his collar and urged him out. He stared down at Kate; if she looked up, if she reached for him again, he’d take her into his arms and never be able to leave. He almost wished she would; he wanted her to hold him, so he’d know he was still good.

 
Instead, as Kate Harris cried alone, keening for her sister, John strode across the parking lot. Brainer kept pace, and he leapt into the backseat when John unlocked the wagon door.

 
The girl’s window was curtained and dark. John checked his cell phone—no message lights blinking. That meant Maggie and Teddy were at home with the Judge and Maeve. Merrill was locked up on death row. Everything was for now, if not safe, at least okay.

 
Now, headlights on, John drove over to Kate. Sitting in his car, he watched until she raised her tear-streaked face and stared into the lights. His stomach flipped: How many of Merrill’s, of other killers’, victims had looked into headlights like his?

 
Waiting, not rolling down his window—afraid that speaking to her would keep him from driving away—he watched as she wearily straightened. As if sleepwalking, she moved around her car, opened her door, climbed in. Bonnie’s face peered over the dashboard, incongruously friendly and cute. Brainer barked.

 
The streetlights illuminated Kate’s face. She stared at him for a long moment. Then, raising her hand, she waved him away. John didn’t wave back, just sat there waiting—not wanting to leave her alone in that lot. Finally, she put her car in reverse, backed away, and pulled out. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he watched her head west.

 
He hung back a moment.

 
Rolling down his window, he felt a blast of cold sea air. Congregants’ voices rose, singing a hymn in Portuguese at the advent of All Souls. John thought he smelled the candle smoke. Turning his head, he saw them flickering in the distance, among the graves.

 
As he always did, whenever he passed a church or thought of it, he said—by way of a prayer for the women his client had killed—their names. “Anne-Marie, Terry, Gayle, Jacqueline, Beth, Patricia, Antoinette…” Tonight he added a new one.

 
“Willa,” he said out loud.

 
Kate’s red taillights disappeared around the corner, and John’s heart began to pound harder. He’d just delivered the worst news a sister could ever hear. He wished he could make it easier for her, but he knew he couldn’t.

 
He had kissed her. That was something, wasn’t it? Proved he wasn’t totally dead inside, that he was still capable of some kind of connection? That Kate was, too? That betrayal hadn’t killed them both? But her sister was gone, and the fact he had kissed her was nothing compared to that.

 
John was sure she’d already forgotten it.

 
The flight to Washington filled Kate with memories of flying with Willa, of taking her up in the small Cessna, banking over the Potomac and flying east over estuaries of endless green to the sands of Chincoteague. The images were so shimmering and happy that, when she closed her eyes, she smelled tidal waters and salt hay. She remembered John’s arms around her, felt his kiss…the happiness of touching someone again.

 
Followed by the terrible reality of what he’d told her about Willa intersecting with Merrill…

 
So, touching down at Reagan Airport, she didn’t even bother to go home. She and Bonnie just walked out of the terminal, straight over to the private aviation hangar; Kate slid her Amex card across the counter and chartered the only four-seater available—the same old yellow Cessna she and Willa had flown a hundred times.

 
The plane’s interior felt like home. The cracked leather seats, the small blue plastic visor, the old-style control panel. Bonnie, aware of the takeoff about to come, curled up in back. Kate ran through her checklist, waved the wing flaps, and took off into the wild blue yonder from which she had just landed. Instinctively touching her neck, she reached for her white scarf.

 
Of course, she had given it to Maggie. The scarf, a gift from Willa—purchased lovingly, with money from her savings account, from a Paris boutique—had been one of Kate’s most prized possessions. Its thick, creamy silk had felt so soft around her neck, the fringe so jaunty and brave.

 
“Every aviatrix should have one!” Willa had said.

 
How true that was; and that was why Kate had given it to Maggie. There was something about that little girl—so vulnerable and courageous—that had pierced Kate, had reminded her of her own sister at that age. She thought of Maggie, her brother, and her father, wondered what they were doing at that moment…Their families were connected now, in some deep and mysterious way, that had only a little to do with the kiss, with kissing John in the parking lot where Willa had disappeared, where his client had probably killed her…that kiss that Kate felt still, that told her body—her nerves and skin and heart—that she was still alive.

 
Isn’t it strange
, she thought,
that my sister isn’t here anymore? But I am? How can that be?
The truth hadn’t sunk in yet. The reality was buzzing in her brain, but it hadn’t made it down to her heart, her guts, her toes. Strangely and somehow upsettingly, John’s kiss felt more real than anything. Her lips still felt it—the excitement, the warmth, the gentle touch of another human being.

 
Heading east, the plane’s roar comforted her. She loved airplane engine sounds, even the surges and hums that had sometimes made Willa jump. Flying home to her Atlantic barrier island, Kate could almost believe her sister was right beside her.

 
The truth was so hard to accept, she pushed it away. Concentrating on flying the plane, she passed over the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, then took a hard right and flew down the Virginia coast to the grass strip she knew and loved so well: Wild Ponies Airfield.

 
The small yellow plane bounded down the flat and wide-open rutted ground of dry brown grass. Kate had called ahead, and she was met by Doris Marley, driver of the Bumblebee Taxi. Doris drove Kate to her brother’s cabin without one second of silence, filling Kate in on every aspect of island life: gossip, deaths, one marriage, one custody battle, the need for a new roof on the feed and grain store, Doris’s own difficulties with her mortgage, her septic tank, and her son’s education—the typical hard-luck story all island cab drivers delivered to every big-city fare.

 
The words ran together: “Another hard winter coming; gotta get my teeth fixed one of these days…lost another molar; Joe, Jr., wants to go to college, trying to scrape the money together for tuition, but it ain’t easy when the septic tank gave out, had to have a new one put in…”

 
“Thanks, Doris,” Kate said when they’d driven down the narrow road—drifted with blowing sand—into the pine barrens at the island’s south end. She pulled out a twenty, told Doris to keep the change, and arranged for a pickup an hour later.

 
“Thanksgiving’s coming,” Doris had called after her. “Tell your brother he’s welcome at our table…you, too, if you’re home from Washington for the holiday!”

 
Kate hardly heard, although she did notice that Doris hadn’t mentioned Willa. Their sister’s disappearance, though not officially explained, had made it into the island consciousness—and no one knew what to say.

 
Matt’s cabin was as weathered as the trees that surrounded it. Nestled among scrub pines, in a hollow of sand and dirt and pine needles, it blended in with all of nature. Brown owls made their nests in the holes of dead trees; Kate heard their great wingbeats at the sound of her approach. Bonnie, spooked, stayed close to Kate’s ankles.

 
Her brother’s rusty red pickup sat out back. Blue plastic barrels, reeking with oyster brine, were piled in its bed. Mountains of oyster shells, as high as the rooftop, glistened in the wan November sunlight. Kate’s throat caught; her brother was still searching for Queen Pearl.

 
She knocked on the door. No answer, so she knocked again. Pressing her ear against the dry and cracked wood, she listened for life. No sounds. She sniffed, smelling that omnipresent odor of cigarette smoke.

 
“I know you’re in there,” she called out. “So you’d better open up.”

 
No human reply, but a seagull landed on the mound of oyster shells, creating a small, scuttling avalanche. More seagulls arrived—perhaps, seeing life, hoping for food. An animal moved through the brush; when Kate turned her head, she saw that she was being watched by a scruffy pair of wild ponies. Bonnie growled, very low, flattening her body to the ground.

 
Finally the door was yanked open.

 
“Hi, Matt,” Kate said.

 
“Hi, Katy.”

 
He was tall and bone thin, stooped over like an old man. His hair had grown to his shoulders, and it was matted and tangled, like the bed of brown pine needles that blanketed the sandy ground. Crouching down, he tickled Bonnie behind the ears, and she shimmied with love for Matt. His cloudy blue eyes looked across her head at the ponies. Kate watched as he took in their whiskery faces, their huge watchful eyes, their dirty white-and-brown coats.