Heartsick (43 page)

“Sure,” Henry said. He glanced at his watch and turned to Claire. “You still up for heading back to McCallum’s?”

“For what?” Archie asked.

“He wants to see if he can find that goddamn cat,” Claire said. She made a face at Archie. “He’s such a softy.”

“What?” said Henry as he and Claire left the office. “I like cats.”

Archie’s hair and clothes glistened with condensation. He looked like something that had been left in the yard overnight and now was covered with dew. Susan wanted to leap into his arms. “You’re all wet,” she observed.

“It’s raining,” Archie said.

“Thank God,” Susan muttered. And then she started to cry. She felt Archie kneel down next to her and put his arm around her and pull her into his wet corduroy blazer. She let herself sob. Not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t stop it. Her whole body shook, gasping for air. She hid her face. Archie smelled like rain. His sweater scratched her cheek, but she didn’t care. After a few minutes, she looked up and saw that Henry and Claire were gone.

“Feel better?” Archie asked softly.

Susan held her hands out in front of her and watched them quaver. “No.”

“Afraid?” he asked.

Susan considered this. “The expression ‘scared shitless’ comes to mind.”

Archie looked her in the eyes. “It’ll pass,” he said.

She examined his face, his eyes full of kindness, his pupils tiny. That had been quite a performance on the boat. If it had been a performance. “What are you afraid of, Archie?” she asked.

He slid her an amused, suspicious glance. “Is this for your story?”

“Yes.” She looked at him for a minute and then laughed. “But we can go off the record if you want.”

He was thoughtful and then his face grew dark and he seemed to shake some prickly idea from his head. “I think I’m done being a subject for a while,” he said.

She nodded, and in that moment she realized that Archie had never told her anything, never let her see anything, that he didn’t want her to know. It didn’t matter. He could have his secrets. She was done with hers. “He said that I was his person,” she told him. “He said that we all have people in the world we belong to. Connect with. And that I was his. He said that there was no denying it.”

Archie laid his hand on her arm. “He was wrong.”

She rested her fist on Archie’s chest. “Well, anyway,” she said, “this is going to sound dorky, but thanks for saving my life.”

“It doesn’t sound dorky at all.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. It was a light kiss on the lips. He didn’t move. He didn’t reciprocate, but he didn’t pull away, either. When she opened her eyes, he smiled at her gently.

“You’ve got to get over that,” he said. “The older men in authority thing.”

She made a face. “Right. I’ll get right on that.”

Susan walked out
of the office into the foyer of the patrol office. She saw her mother before her mother saw her. Bliss’s red lipstick was faded and she looked small in her big leopard-print coat. Quentin Parker, Derek the Square, and Ian Harper were huddled a few yards away from her, and Bliss stood by herself against the wall. Ian saw Susan and smiled, but Susan barely gave him a glance as she went straight to her mother. Bliss looked up and burst into tears and wrapped her arms around Susan. She reeked of menthols and wet old fur and pressed against Susan like they might merge into one person. Susan was aware of her colleagues watching, but she was only slightly mortified.

“They told me about Reston,” Bliss said in a shaky whisper. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Susan said. She peeled her mother off of her and kissed her on the cheek. “I think it’s going to be okay now.”

She squinted past them through a bank of rain-splattered windows and for a second she thought it was daylight, until she realized that the lights were from the TV cameras. She was news and they all wanted a shot of her for the local morning shows. She was definitely going to have to do something different with her hair. Maybe dye it blue.

“Hey,” Susan said to her mother. “Can I bum a cigarette?”

Bliss’s brow furrowed. “You’ll get lung cancer,” she said.

Susan fixed her steely gaze on her mother. “Give me a cigarette, Bliss.”

Bliss dug a pack of menthols out of her enormous purse and held one out toward Susan. Then withdrew it when Susan reached for it. “Call me Mom,” she said.

“Give me a cigarette.” Susan paused and scrunched her face up with effort. “Mom.”

“Now try Mother dearest.”

“Give me the fucking cigarette.”

Bliss laughed and handed Susan the cigarette and then pressed a plastic lighter into her hands.

Parker stepped forward. “We need to talk,” he said to Susan. “And only partially because I want to scoop the assholes waiting outside.”

“I’ll give you the facts,” Susan said. “But I’m filing a harrowing personal account in the morning.”

There was Ian. He was wearing a Yankees sweatshirt and jeans, clearly pulled on after a middle-of-the-night phone call, and all she could think was,
You went to sleep when you knew I was missing? You asshole.

But he looked at her like nothing had changed. Like she hadn’t changed. Well, she hadn’t changed. But she planned to. She put the cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and handed the lighter back to her mother. She only vaguely noticed that her hand was still trembling.

She took a drag off the cigarette, putting a lot of elbow in it, like she had seen in old French movies, and she appraised him—arrogant, condescending, professorial. And she saw in Ian every boss, every teacher she’d ever slept with. Yeah. It was probably time to consider therapy. She wondered idly if the paper’s health-insurance policy covered it. This probably wasn’t the time to ask. “Once this whole thing is done,” she said to Ian, “I want to work on the Molly Palmer story. Full-time.”

“It’s career suicide,” Ian protested. Then, in a final attempt at dissuasion, he added, “It’s tabloid journalism.”

“Hey,” Bliss said. “My daughter—”

“Mom,” Susan warned, and Bliss was silent. Susan was composed, indomitable. “Molly was a teenager, Ian. I want to find out what happened. I want to get her side of the story.”

Ian sighed and rocked back on his heels. He opened his mouth as if to argue, then seemed to think better of it and threw his hands in the air. The smoke from Susan’s cigarette was getting in his eyes. She didn’t move it. “You won’t get her to talk,” he said. “She hasn’t talked to anyone. But if you want to try…” He let that trail off.

Bliss didn’t drive, and Susan’s car was back in the Pearl District. “I don’t suppose you have money for a cab?” Susan asked her mother.

Bliss frowned. “I don’t carry money,” she said.

“Your purse,” Parker said to Susan, extracting her small black purse from the pocket of his coat and handing it to her. “They found it in Reston’s car.”

“I’ll drive you both home when you’re ready.” It was Derek the Square. He hadn’t had time to blow-dry his hair, and it protruded straight out from his skull like grass.

“I’m going to need you to file the story, kid,” Parker said. “Get it up on-line before we get scooped. You go home early, don’t expect to see your byline.”

Derek shrugged, throwing a glance at Susan. “There’ll be other stories.”

“I need a new mentee,” Parker said to Ian. “This one isn’t working out.” But Susan could tell he didn’t mean it.

“What do you drive?” Susan asked Derek. “Let me guess. A Jetta? No. A Taurus?”

Derek dangled a ring of keys from his fingers. “An old Mercedes,” he said. “It runs on biodiesel.”

Susan tried to ignore the slow grin she could see spreading on Bliss’s face.

“First, I’ll need to go to my apartment for my laptop,” Susan told Derek as she took a drag off her cigarette. “Then I want to go home. To Bliss’s.” Derek’s eyebrows shot up. “My mom’s house,” Susan explained quickly, digging through her purse for her cell phone. “She lives in Southeast.” She looked at her phone screen. She had eighteen new messages.

“Bliss?” Derek said.

Bliss held out a hand. “How do you do,” she said.

Susan was going to say something clever, but she got distracted by her voice mail. The first message was from Molly Palmer.

Anne shrugged on
her long leather coat. She wasn’t needed. But she always liked witnessing the wrap-up. It gave her a sense of closure. She dug for her car keys as she exited the patrol office. The damp Northwest weather had officially returned. Anne didn’t know how the natives stood it. It just made her feel like the entire world was rotting away around her.

“Good job today.” It was Archie, standing in the drizzle just outside the door.

Anne smiled. “You want a lift?” she asked. “I’m headed back to the Heathman. I can drop you.”

“No. I’ve got a cab coming.”

Anne looked inside, where Claire and Henry were conferring with the crime-scene techies. “Someone here will drive you.”

Archie shrugged. “I’ve got to make a stop.”

“At this time of night?” Anne asked. She had an idea where he was going. She had gone to see Gretchen Lowell herself, in those first few days when Archie lay in a medically induced coma. Anne’s bad profile had stung, and she’d thought she might learn something from the Beauty Killer. But Gretchen had refused to talk. She’d sat mutely for an hour in her cell while Anne peppered her with questions. And then Anne had gotten up to leave, and Gretchen had finally spoken. One sentence: “Is he still alive?”

“You heading back tomorrow, or are you going to stick around for all of the congratulatory press conferences?” Archie asked.

Anne let him change the subject. “I’m on the red-eye.” You couldn’t force it, she knew, until he was ready for help. But it hurt her to see him suffer, and it hurt her more to not be able to do anything for him. “So I’m around during the day,” she said. She was going to skip the press conferences. There were two pairs of size fourteen sneakers at the Nike outlet with her sons’ names on them. But she added, just in case, “If you want to talk.”

Archie fingered something in his coat pocket and looked at his shoes. “I need to talk to someone.”

“But not to me,” Anne guessed.

Archie glanced up and smiled at her. He looked exhausted to Anne, and she wondered if she looked similarly worn.

“Have a nice flight,” he said warmly. “It was good to see you.”

Anne took a small step toward him. “Anything that happened. While you were with Gretchen. Anything you felt or did. You can’t judge it. It was an extreme situation. She constructed an extreme situation. To push you.”

He looked away, into the night. “I gave up everything I loved in that basement,” Archie explained. His voice was low, controlled. “My children. My wife. My work. My life. I was going to die. In her arms. And I was all right with that. Because she would be there.” He looked right at Anne. “Taking care of me.”

“She’s a psychopath.”

A yellow cab pulled into the small parking lot behind the office. “Yeah,” Archie said, taking a step toward it. “But she’s my psychopath.”

CHAPTER

49

A
rchie wakes up
completely disoriented. He is still in the basement. He is still in the bed. But everything is different. The bed has been moved against the wall. The stench of rotten meat is gone. He looks for the corpse. It has vanished; the cement floor is washed clean. His bandages are fresh. The sheets have been changed. He has been bathed. The room smells like ammonia. He searches the fractured images in his mind for some recent memory.