Death Qualified Part 30

For what seemed a long time Mike was without movement.

He could do that, go utterly still without giving a hint of what was happening in his head. Whatever it was then he did not mention, but said, "Let's go to bed."

She felt herself tighten at the words, and found it curious that she could react like a schoolgirl at the idea of having her father find out that she was having s.e.x. And that was really stupid, she knew, because he was throwing them together like a paid matchmaker.

"Not together," Mike said, getting to his feet. He stretched and made creaking noises.

"I as much as promised that I would stay in the guest room."

She looked at him incredulously.

"He brought it up?"

Mike laughed.

"I did. I think what he was doing was giving me permission to creep into your tent."

They went through the house together turning off lights, making certain the fireplace screen was in place, the stove was turned off; then they went upstairs hand in hand. He kissed her cheek at her bedroom door and continued down the hall to his room.

It was just as well, she told herself as she undressed, groaning now and then. She was one big bruise, sore from top to bottom, but more, she found that she was growing angrier and angrier. That long silence, and then no comment after she explained why she wanted Brandy wine, what did that mean? She knew what she would mean with that kind of distancing silence. She was angry enough to go to him and demand .. . what? an explanation? apology? a replay?

She withdrew her hand from the doork.n.o.b, went to the bathroom and began to run water for a long, soaking bath to relax her sore muscles, to relax her mind.

By the time she was prune like the anger had changed; it was no longer hot and demanding immediate appeas.e.m.e.nt, it no longer drew her face into a furious scowl. Now it was more like a forest that had been ravaged with fire and looked benign again, but to the knowledgeable eye there would be evident a layer of hot embers under the surface of forest duff, needing only a breeze, a scuffle, a nudge to flare again hotter than before.

Sunday afternoon Nell leaned against a tree trunk at the small beach and watched the river moving away, always moving away. It was almost black and very swift, but quiet.

The shallow water that played over the rocky beach was gray. It edged in, left, edged in again endlessly, always the same, never the same. Here it had a whispery voice, the voice of someone so ancient that words were no longer needed; the whisper, the rhythm was enough. She closed her eyes and tried to make that rising and falling voice sound out words, tried to make it become her grandfather's voice, but it remained the ageless river engaged in its ageless monologue.

Grampa was up on the ledge, not down here, and she could not go up there ever again. She stared at the river. Sometimes when she had a problem she could take both sides of a dialogue and work her way through it, but not now. Clive was a problem that eluded her. He was a good man, she felt reasonably certain, even though he had worked to fell the forests. She was unable to continue. She made herself add another sentence. A lot of good people do things that other people see as evil, there is no absolute, and people change all the time. But the second sentence was abstract, and she could not apply it to Clive.

"I've changed," he had said last night.

"All my training school, the job, everything I did, everyone I talked to, they seemed to accept that trees grow, you cut them down, and they grow back. I thought the other side, the environmentalists were crazy, selfish even. I was wrong.

Can't you see that people change?"

"I know," she had said.

"It's not that. Really. I just can't think now. Not about you, about anything. Let's leave it at that until.. .. Let's just leave it at that."

The problem was that she was paralyzed with fear, something he could not help. She could not think of him, of Doc, of next month and Christmas and shopping, of anything. She was caught in a great invisible net whose sides were inexorably closing in around her; she would feel them with her hands if she dared reach out to try. She felt that her breath hit the wall before her and doubled back, stifling her, and when the net drew in close enough, Tuesday, Wednesday, whenever it happened, she would die of suffocation. She caught herself drawing in air deeply now and then, as if testing that there was enough.

"It doesn't matter what Barbara brings in as evidence," she whispered to the whispering river.

"It really doesn't matter, does it?" She was terrified of the prosecutor. Tony De Angelo with his sharp face and cruel eyes and his contempt for her, for Barbara. He would convince the jury that no one else could have done it. Maybe he already had convinced them of that, and no matter how hard Barbara tried, how many lies she uncovered, how many others she drew into the defense case, that one fact would remain.

No one else could have done it.

They we remaking Lucas out to be a monster, an insane monster who had done monstrous things to that poor girl.

If she took the stand and said how afraid she had been of him, not for herself, for the children, if she said he had threatened her children, his daughter, if he had threatened her, and suddenly he was shot and she could not remember firing the gun, if she did all that, those cold looks from the jury would turn to compa.s.sionate looks, she felt certain.

They would understand that. What they didn't understand was denial when no one else could have done it.

A bit of wood swept by, in the place where Travis had been in the drift boat back in June. She had a clear image of him contented out there in the boat, that lazy grin on his face, that incomplete gesture that was so like Lucas's gestures. And over his face was juxtaposed the image of Lucas on the ledge, laughing, the college boy she had fallen in love with restored for a single moment. Swiftly there came another image, their first time in bed together.

She had been a virgin, and he had confessed that there had been only one girl before her. How awkwardly they had started, and then, afterward, he had rolled to his back and laughed that same joyous laugh, and she had laughed with him.

In November when there was no sun, only low-hanging clouds, daylight yielded to darkness imperceptibly, like a light on an automatic dimmer, fading, fading. It had grown nearly dark before she shook herself and turned to climb back up the bank, back to her house, to change her muddy clothes, face dinner with people who could still talk about things that didn't matter at all. She paused at the top of the bank to look back briefly at the small beach, the only place she had left that was still wholly hers, wholly private.

After a step or two, she could no longer see the beach or hear the whispers of the river.

In her house on the table was a pan of cinnamon rolls and a sc.r.a.p of paper with the note: A snack for the kids when they get home. T. She wanted to cry. Just a few weeks ago she had come home to find a cord of firewood stacked by her garage, a gift from James. And Clive was being so good to her and the children. She folded the note carefully and took it to her room to put away.

She had asked if dinner could be early because she wanted to be home when John and Amy brought the children back, and she had said she would stop by for Barbara and Mike. Barbara had never been to dive's house, which was hard to find in the dark. But really she had not wanted any argument when it was time to leave and had not wanted Clive to insist on picking her up and bringing her back.

This seemed easier.

The house was on a dirt road at the western edge of Turner's Point, up on the side of a mountain.

The road was narrow and winding, pressed hard by dense forests on both sides. Clive met them at the door.

The first few minutes were okay as Clive took their coats, asked about Barbara's injuries, and showed them to the living room. Nell had never been inside the house and looked at it with some interest, a bit surprised to find it so comfortable. The ceiling was low with exposed beams.

Twin couches were covered with Indian throws, and a Navajo rug was on the floor. A wood-burning stove with a gla.s.s door was in one corner, and there were two walls of bookshelves jammed so full that books had been wedged in on top of those that were upright.

Clive was mixing and pa.s.sing drinks, but when that was finished it seemed that no one had anything to say. Nell found that she didn't care. She watched the fire shadows dancing on the door of the stove, but she was aware of dive's gaze, which left her, only to return instantly.

Almost desperately Clive asked Mike where he was from; he appeared vastly relieved when Mike actually began to talk about Indiana, and then went on to talk about other schools he had attended or taught at--Texas, Louisiana.. ..

"They're all running scared," he said.

"Too many problems these days with communicable diseases, not just AIDS, but herpes, venereal diseases, and, of course, drugs. What kind of test do you administer to reach all the bright young people who might also be infected with something, or addicted?"

"Jesus," dive said, "You don't reach them. Those shrinks, let them earn their pay, find a way to identify them all. Especially the gays, the perverts. Toss them out to sink or swim. Who gives a d.a.m.n about what they do, as long as they don't involve the rest of us? Sure, we should let them choose, with the understanding that they pay the price, they don't come begging us to bail them out when things get rough. I say old Mother Nature has found a way to weed out the perverts and we should just get out of the way and let it happen."

The silence that followed this was prolonged and awkward, until a bell went off from somewhere.

"Timer," Clive said, jumping up in relief.

"Be right back."

Barbara got up to look over his books, many of them on forestry. He was just voicing what two out of three people believed, she said under her breath; it simply sounded shocking to hear the honest words. She pulled out an oversized book of photographs and opened it on the coffee table. Beautifully photographed trees, page after page of trees from all over the world.

A sequoia tree on facing pages stopped her. Nell had come to her side, was looking at the pictures.

"My grandfather used to say that the trees have hearts that pump fluids just like hearts in people pump blood. He said a sequoia tree has to pump two hundred gallons of water a minute to survive."

From the doorway Clive said, "It isn't exactly like that, but close enough. I think of the whole world as alive with a giant pump sending rivers to the ocean, water vapor back into the air to rain down on the forests and start it all over again." He looked embarra.s.sed then as he said, "You guys want to see some of the photographs I've collected here in the state?"

He led them to his office, where two walls were covered with his photographs, not as professional, not as perfectly printed as those in the book, but an impressive display.

He pointed, naming them: n.o.ble fir, spruce, alder, lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, incense cedar.. ..

In his office were the tools of his trade, several cameras, one on a tripod; binoculars, one small, one very large; a telescope on a tripod, and a wall full of maps, some rolled in slanted bins, some mounted on the wall, some on pulldown rollers.

The timer went off again, and he glanced at his watch.

"I think it must be dinner," he said.

"Right back."

Nell looked at the room and felt herself shrinking. He had planned this whole evening in order to show her this room, his pictures, she thought then. She had turned down several invitations to come to his house, and he had found a way to get her in this room with the pictures that proved how much he actually cared about the forests, the trees.

It was undeniable; he did care. There was a picture of a glade where vibrant, green moss covered everything, the rocks, a log, the tree branches; a single shaft of sunlight penetrated the s.p.a.ce to land on a gleaming golden fir cone.

How long had he waited for the right moment, for the sunlight to reach the cone with its Midas touch?

Clive returned and said that yes, indeed, it was dinner.

He was looking at her, not the others. She said softly, "Thanks for showing us all these. Your pictures are wonderful."

His big weather-beaten face broke out into a jacko'lanterm grin, and for the first time that evening he relaxed.

His dinner was very good baked salmon, and he admitted that he was a fisherman, just like everyone else up and down the river.

"And let me tell you, it's a b.i.t.c.h getting the boat up my road, but worth it. Take it down in the spring, bring it home in the fall, cursing both ways." He said to Nell, "Sometime I'd like to take you on a white-water trip down the Owyhee." Now that he had relaxed, he talked with animation about the places in Oregon that were little known, places so far off the trails that for days and days you could wander and never see a sign of human destruction, human trash, not even a candy wrapper. Hard to get to in many cases, he admitted, and worth every second of misery to reach.

Although the evening had gone better than she had dared hope, by nine Nell was back in her own house with her children and her in-laws, just as she had planned to be.

They ate the cinnamon rolls from "fawna and talked about the farm and the trip, and she watched her children, touched Carol, touched Travis; she listened to their words, and their silences, and she began to relax. The earlier part of the evening faded from memory so fast it might never have been.

In Frank's house, Barbara said to Mike, "I think you should go on home tonight. I have work to do, and you have cla.s.ses in the morning. As you can see, I'm perfectly fine."

He regarded her for a moment, then nodded.

"If that's what you want."

She wanted to yell at him to ask what was wrong, what had happened, so they could sit down and talk it out, let her explain her position as a lawyer for a defendant in a murder trial. At the same time, she was afraid for him to ask that, because she feared that she would sound like her father defending the indefensible. So be it, she thought bitterly, as he waited for some response. He had seen this side of her; let him go away and think about it. It was his move. She nodded, and neither spoke again as he started to gather his belongings and then went to tell Frank goodbye.

She stood at the door, where he hesitated; after a moment his face tightened and he said, "So long. See you around."

When she turned away from the door again, Frank was in the hall scowling fiercely.

"You're both two d.a.m.n fools!" He wheeled, went back inside his study, and slammed the door.

TWENTY-THREE.

on tuesday, when the trial resumed. Tony was as angelic as his name suggested; he didn't challenge a single character witness; he looked supremely bored.

"Doesn't mean a d.a.m.n thing," her father had grumbled once about character witnesses.

"Even the devil has pals who swear by him. But you've got to do it." Tony would agree and would not prolong anything he didn't have to, Barbara knew, not now. Time was running out for catching Ruth Brandywine, and Tony had a very good sense of timing.

She had no doubt that he had timed her defense almost as carefully as she had.

Tony's first objections came when she called Pete Malinski. She argued that the prosecution had introduced the subject of Nell's shooting at people and the issue had to be clarified. Pete Malinski took the stand after ten minutes of a near shouting match. He was twenty-eight with a smooth, rather babyish face, and brown eyes as pale as b.u.t.terscotch. His hair was lush and curly, reddish brown.

He worked full time for Clovis in the summer, he said, and part time during the school year, when he was studying engineering. He looked like the son every mother yearned for, earnest, honest, good-humored, and now very nervous.

He told how he and his partner had been hired by two men to play a joke on a lady, how he had gone to Nell Kendricks's place with one of them, who said his name was Sam. When he got to the gun part, he looked at Nell with some admiration.

"What a shot!" he said.

"That beer can sailed off to heaven just like that."

"And then what?"

"We got back in the truck and got out of there. I was feeling that it wasn't such a hot joke by then. I stopped at the store in town and got a c.o.ke and told the woman there that she"--he nodded toward Nell--"said she'd shoot anyone who put a foot on her property. Thought I should warn someone." "What about the man who called himself Sam? Did he go inside with you?"

"No, Ma'am. As soon as we got in the truck he kind of slouched down with his hat over his face and went to sleep. Didn't say another word all the way back to Salem."

Barbara had him describe the two men, and then she was finished.

Tony looked lazy and not very interested as he got to his feet.

"Mr. Malinski, did either man say who hired them?"

"No. Just a guy." "No more questions." He sat down. "You said he paid you in cash," Barbara said then. "Two hundred each, isn't that right?" He agreed that it was, and she went on, "And another hundred for the use of the truck. Five hundred dollars in cash. Did you see him take the money from his wallet?"

"Yes, Ma'am, and he had a stash you wouldn't believe in it."

"He paid you in fifty-dollar bills?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

She thanked him and let him go. Judge Lundgren decided that it was lunchtime, and the courtroom began emptying as soon as he left the bench and the jury was led out by the bailiff. At Barbara's side Nell said softly, "He'll just claim that Lucas hired them."

"And I'll prove otherwise. It's going okay, believe me."

It was what one said, she told herself as Nell left with John and Amy Kendricks, and besides, what else could she have said?