Tell No Lies (43 page)

"I'm staying at Mark's now."

He knew that would get her. Her eyes landed on him like a magnet.

"By choice?" Her voice was barely above a whisper.

He shook his head.

The door to the testing room opened and the examiner poked his head out.

"Ms. Dodson, I'm ready for you."

The proctor stood to accompany her but she hesitated, holding Jack's gaze with her own.

"Why didn't you ever call me back?" Her eyes welled up.

"I did, but . . ." There was no satisfactory answer. He could have left a message; he could have called again. So he said simply, "The damage has been done, Jenny. You can't protect me anymore. Just worry about protecting yourself."

She lowered her eyes as she followed the proctor into the testing room. Jack didn't know whether it was enough. He didn't know whether he'd persuaded her to come away from the front or whether he'd merely pushed her farther into the line of fire.

He learned later from Earl that Jenny had told the partial truth. She'd maintained her innocence, repeated that she had nothing to do with Maxine Shepard's murder, and, to Jack's relief, the test results bore that out. But when it came to Jack's alibi, she'd continued to insist that he was lying. Just as she'd told Jack she would, she claimed he was covering for her; that as a staunch death penalty opponent, he'd do anything to make sure she wasn't convicted of a crime she hadn't committed. She'd explained the wineglasses by admitting he'd been at her place early in the evening, when they'd shared a bottle of wine to celebrate the partnership decision, but then he'd left for Jefferson City. She had tried to explain the presence of the glasses in the bedroom by claiming they'd gone upstairs so she could show him the house, and that he had left abruptly once he realized he was behind schedule.
 

In the end, her lies—detected easily by the machine—helped in Earl's bid to have the charges dismissed. When Earl relayed the good news, Jack almost wondered if she'd known all along that they would.

PART 4

WINTER

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE FIRST THING Jack noticed as he approached the house was the Christmas lights. He knew they'd be up. She wouldn't have disappointed the kids. They lined the windows on the first floor and draped the bushes in front. She'd even wrapped a strand of lights intertwined with garland around the light pole near the front walk. It still seemed bare to him because no lights were strung along the roofline, none hung from the gutters or were wrapped in a spiral fashion around the towering pines at the edge of the woods to the west of the house. There were no lights whatsoever in the spots for which he'd always been responsible.

He parked in the driveway because she'd taken his garage opener when she took his keys. At the front door, he debated what to do. She was expecting him, but he still felt he would be invading her privacy somehow if he strolled in as though he were coming home from work.
 

He pulled open the screen door. Just as his knuckles were about to make contact with the wood, the door opened. Claire stood right in front of him, with Jamie on her hip. He was too big for that now, but Jack wasn't surprised to see him there. What surprised him instead was Claire's hair—or rather, her lack of it. She'd had it all cut off. In the thirteen years they'd been married, in the fourteen years they'd known each other, he'd never known her to have anything but long hair. Now it was short, and curlier, too, without the weight of length. It reminded Jack of Jamie's hair when he was a toddler, before he'd had his first haircut.

"You cut your hair" was all he said, still on the porch, waiting for the invitation to come in.

Jamie released Claire's neck and dived for Jack.

"Come in so I can close the door," she said, her voice betraying nothing.

He moved farther into the front hall, away from the path of the door as she swung it shut.

"You cut your hair," he repeated, thinking that maybe she hadn't heard him the first time.

She reached up self-consciously with both hands. "Yes, I know."

"Daddy, come see my new LEGOs. Grandma let me open them early."

Jack nuzzled his nose in Jamie's neck; he smelled of soap, as if he'd just had a bath. "Go get it set up for me, okay? I'll be right there. Let me talk to Mommy first."

"No. Now, Daddy." His voice was whiny, but it didn't bother Jack as it sometimes did.

"Hey, two minutes. I promise." Jamie acquiesced and wriggled free. Jack stood there, not sure what to do with his hands now.

"Why'd you cut it?"

She crossed her arms and leaned against the front door. "I needed a change."

He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. "It's easy for women, isn't it?"

"What?" Her voice was venomous, daring him to say the wrong thing.

"To make a change. You just need a new hairstyle."

She laughed sarcastically. "Yeah, it's that easy. Chop, chop, chop and it's gone. So easy."

He kept trying to see her as before, to remember what she looked like with it long, but he couldn't see her clearly. It was just some imagined Claire in his mind.

"You're an idiot, coming in here and saying that to me." Her eyes narrowed. "I think your two minutes are up, and I'm sure Jamie knows it. I'll find Michael to tell him you're here."

"I didn't mean it like—" He stopped and turned when he heard footsteps in the hallway, expecting to see Michael. Instead, Claire's parents rounded the corner, then halted when they saw him. She hadn't told Jack they'd be there, and from the surprised looks on their faces, she must not have told them that he'd be stopping by, either. Jack hadn't seen them since the election.

"Why, Jack," her mother said. "Hello."

She didn't look particularly angry with him, just uncomfortable, and he momentarily considered whether to go to her, to give her the customary hug and kiss on the cheek. But the stern look on Harley's face made him think better of it.

"Hi." He could think of nothing more to say. "Merry Christmas" or even "How are you?" just didn't seem appropriate.

"What is he doing here?" Harley asked, speaking to Claire as if Jack weren't standing there.

"I'm here to see Claire and my children," he answered before Claire had the chance. Harley had every right to be angry at him—he knew he'd feel the same if it had been his daughter—but this was still his home, his family, his problem, and he couldn't help but be defensive. "And I'd like some privacy."
 

Harley ignored him, looked to Claire for guidance. She nodded.

"We'll be in the family room, then," Harley said, as if his daughter might need rescuing.

When they left the foyer, Jack stood silent, watching Claire and waiting for her to look at him. When she finally did, he said, "What I said about your hair . . . I didn't mean it like that." He took a step toward her. She put her hand out.

"Don't touch me, Jack. I cringe at the thought of you touching me."

"Claire . . . I just meant it's easy to change how you look. That's all." She crossed her arms again and looked away. "Can we talk before I leave?"

"No."

"Claire . . ."

"What, Jack? What do you want from me?" Tears began to form in her eyes.

That was the question, wasn't it? There were a lot of things he wanted, but he knew she couldn't give them to him. He wanted to go back to the night in the garage, back to April, and tell Jenny no when she asked him to dance. No, he wanted to go back even further than that. He wanted to go back to the banquet, to go home right when he'd first planned. Or maybe just a bit more, to before Earl said he was resigning. That's what he really wanted. He simply wanted his old life back.

But he knew this wasn't the answer she was looking for. He thought that maybe she was giving him an opening, cracking the door just a bit to let him back in. It was a test, only he hadn't studied for it. All he could do now was wing it. All he could do now was pick one little thing, one small desire that might enable him just a glimpse inside. And it had to be honest. It had to be true.
 

"I just want to hold you again."

She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her cardigan and dabbed her eyes. "Well, I've got a news flash for you. Jack Hilliard doesn't get everything he wants." She crossed in front of him to the stairs. "I'm going up to the bathroom so the kids don't have to see me cry again. You can let Michael know you're here yourself."

"What's wrong with them seeing that their mom's sad?" he asked.

She stopped abruptly in the middle of the steps. The house had seemed cold before, but now it was as if every window had been left open. Her jaw tensed; her hand gripped the railing as if she were trying to draw strength from it. He knew something bad was about to happen. It was like those minutes in the courtroom before the jury announces the verdict, but not one juror has looked at him, not one has smiled. The only difference was that now, he was the one on trial.

She screamed. It was not a loud, high-pitched scream, but a low, rumbling growl of frustration from her deep in her chest.

"God! How can you be so smart but so dense?" she yelled. And then, as if struck by inspiration, she wheeled around and grabbed a ceramic vase resting on the shelf of a small, rectangular alcove. She hurled it over the railing. He ducked, and it shattered on the wooden floor behind him. "There! Does that look like sadness to you?" She ran the rest of the way up the stairs, but before turning the corner into their bedroom, she added, "And I wasn't aiming for you this time. If I was, I wouldn't have missed."

He retreated to Mark's "country" house, about five hours southwest of the city in the middle of the Missouri Ozarks. It was a few miles outside a little spit of a town known as Cape Fair, which Jack had always called Cape Fear to irk his brother. It hovered at the top of a large hill overlooking one of the skinny fingers of Table Rock Lake. It was a large barnlike structure built into the slope of the hill, and the only livable space was the small, dank apartment on the bottom level, which was cut into the ground.
 

Mark had bought the place for a few thousand dollars with dreams of someday renovating it and turning the barn into the main living area. But Jack didn't see much to renovate; Mark would probably have to tear it down and start over. Pieces of the barn were missing, exposing the interior to the elements, and what remained was rotted and hanging precariously from rusting nails.

In the meantime, Mark used the place for parties—big, wild, drunken beer bashes he staged for his friends and clients. He'd invite them all down for the weekend, hire a local bluegrass band, and make sure the food and alcohol flowed into the wee hours of the night.

But those parties had been in the summer, when the grass was green and the trees exploded with leaves. It was now January; winter had settled on the house and the surrounding hillside, and, at Mark's suggestion, Jack had gone there to seek refuge—to "get his shit together," as Mark was so fond of saying. But it hadn't turned out the way Mark had expected, or the way Jack had hoped. He'd originally planned to stay for a long weekend, maybe a week at the most. But the place began to grow on him. He began to enjoy his desolate isolation, the way the wind howled up from the valley and over the hill, rattling the weak slats of the barn and threatening to implode the whole massive structure on top of him as he tried to sleep at night. He'd lost track of how long he'd been there, but he suspected it was approaching a couple of weeks. Long enough, at least, to stretch the limits of his leave.

Within fifteen minutes of his arrival on New Year's Day, he'd moved a plastic Adirondack chair to a spot at the edge of the yard, just in front of a short, crumbling stone wall that blocked the steep embankment on the other side. Each morning he made instant coffee and went to the chair, where he remained for the length of the day with his feet propped on the wall, looking out over the dead valley. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but more often he stared straight ahead, for he found it was easier not to think with them open, at least not to think about things he didn't want to think about. With his eyes open he could think instead about the landscape in front of him, the brown gnarly trunks and branches of the trees that he couldn't identify without their leaves. He could wonder why his brother had bought this place and then let it go to ruin.
 

Most days were gray, and he had trouble getting his bearings, knowing which way was north, which way was south, east or west. It was on one of those gray days that Jack noticed the sound of a slowly approaching car on the long gravel drive leading to the house. He'd spent the morning shooting at empty beer cans with a shotgun he'd discovered in a closet.

There were a lot of people he could imagine coming down there, if he bothered to think about it. His brother, or Claire, maybe, if only to serve him with divorce papers. He could believe she'd want to accompany the process server herself, for the satisfaction of it. Even Jenny, possibly, if he stayed there long enough, to chew him out for something or other. But when Earl stepped out of the car and slammed the door behind him, Jack was surprised. It wasn't that Earl seemed out of place. To the contrary, he fit right in; he had always been more Fort Leonard Wood sergeant than St. Louis District Attorney. But Jack had long ago decided that Earl had given up on him. The surprise was the first emotion Jack remembered feeling for a while.

As Earl's stocky figure closed in on him, Jack turned back to the valley. He wondered what they could possibly have to say to each other.

"Christ, you look like you're about to waste away," Earl said when he reached him. When Jack didn't acknowledge him, he added, "Have you eaten anything since you've been here?"
 

"Enough."

Earl picked up the coffee cup from the armrest of the chair and tossed what little bit of coffee was left into the grass.