A Fugitive Truth (29 page)

Harry sounded defeated, confused. “I thought that I could implicate Michael by burning the diary at the residence. And I didn’t mean to hurt you that day in the library; I was walking by and I saw you through the door. I just reached in and yanked—but I just wanted to scare you, to get you to leave, I never wanted to hurt you. Because I know you’ll understand, I know you will. I had to do this. I’ve seen you at your work, you know what I’m saying.”

It was so much worse than when Michael said I should know better, and I knew that Harry must have said the same thing to Faith. I shook my head and slowed the car imperceptibly. I needed a few more moments and took a chance. “Harry, my work is a big part of my life. You do know that, that’s why I couldn’t leave.” I worked hard trying to think of something to distract him. “But it’s only books, only work. I couldn’t…do what you’ve done.”

“Are you sure?” His voice was different now, not pleading. Scary. I heard a rustling and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry remove something from his shirt pocket.

“‘My dear Cousin,’” the librarian read. “‘I am delighted to find myself alive, finally able to tell you that I am free…’”

There was a sharp turn in the road, and navigating the curve in the fading daylight slowed down my recognition. I couldn’t understand what Harry was saying.

“‘…My story is a remarkable one and had anyone described such a tale to me, I should have called him a liar.’”

Recognition dawned, and I turned and stared at Harry. “That’s the beginning of Margaret’s trial letter!”

“Watch the road!” Harry demanded, brandishing the pistol. He yanked sharply at the steering wheel.

We swerved suddenly, and fishtailing, the back end of the station wagon screeched, dragging against the guard rail before I straightened us out.

“You had it all along,” I said shakily. There had been less than an inch of metal between us and the hundred foot drop on the other side of the rail, the view that I’d admired so much driving to Shrewsbury that first day.

“I wanted to see the look on your face when I was able to ‘discover’ it for you, one day.” Harry’s voice hardened. “What would you give to see the details of her trial, Emma? What does this scrap of paper mean to you?”

I stared straight ahead and said nothing.

It was getting darker and more and more difficult to see the road. I felt like shit, I couldn’t think, not with everything that was happening, but more than anything, now, I needed to stay clear-headed. I knew what that letter meant, what it meant to me, what I’d sacrificed for my work. And now I didn’t dare imagine what I had risked by staying to see Margaret’s correspondence.

Suddenly, I smelled smoke. I looked across to the other seat in horror. Harry held a furled scrap of paper to his lit cigarette and it was catching fire. Slowly, then with increasing hunger, the flames consumed the fragment of paper that contained the answers to so many of my research questions.

“Jesus, no!” The car careened wildly as I lunged at Harry, trying to snatch the letter away from him. Again, he yanked the steering wheel back into position, keeping us from veering off the road.

“Watch the road, Goddamn it! Get your hands on the wheel!”

I was too late. Not much more than a scrap to begin with, the dry paper burned quickly. Harry let the last two inches of it curl and blacken, until there was nothing left but a wisp of smoke rising from the scrap and a smell of burning cotton thick in the air. He rolled down the window and threw the remainder out.

I gave him a look, full of malice and heartbreak, and turned to face the road again, gritting my teeth. Very soon now, Harry…I slowed the car again, ever so slightly.

Harry jammed the pistol in front of my face, emphasizing his words. “Just now you were willing to kill two people in order to save a letter, a sheet of paper, a
fragment
, written by a nobody, the wife of an insignificant provincial bureaucrat! Now tell me you don’t understand how I feel!”

It was a long moment before I could choke out the words. “How could you? The way you feel?”

“It was a small price to pay to make my point, Emma.” His reply was strained, tired and patient, as if he was trying to explain something very unfair to a small child. “I did this so you’ll understand.”

I glanced away from the road in front of me, as if considering this. I put aside mourning the loss of Margaret’s letter to try and save my life. In the side mirror, I could see the headlights of the police car tailing us.

“Maybe I do, just a little, Harry.” I ran my tongue around my teeth and tasted the warm slime of my own blood before I continued. “But you don’t want to make this situation worse than it already is. If Sasha loves you, she’ll love you no matter what. You need to—”

But I’d gone too far. “Nobody tells me what to do, Emma! Not the board, not Faith, and certainly not you!” He waved the gun again. “I’ll be the one to decide what I’m going to do!”

I passed the mile marker I had been waiting for. It was time, now or never. I took a deep breath, said a short prayer to no one in particular and got ready.

“But not about me, Harry. I decide for me!”

And then I did what I knew I was going to have to do all along. I jerked the steering wheel sharply to the right, pulling as hard as I could.

For a moment, I thought I’d waited too long, that I was going to take us through the barrier and over the cliff into the valley below. I hit the brake and swerved into a stand of trees that stood off the soft shoulder of the road, a scenic lookout. After bumping off the road, the station wagon slammed into a tall pine, and the impact seemed to ripple through the heavy steel frame of the car. It was only the fact that I had been slowing down that kept us from going through the windshield entirely; I felt the steering wheel slam into my chest as my forehead smacked against the glass. All was black.

When I opened my eyes, it must have been only moments later, for the light outside hadn’t changed. Harry was reaching over me and was trying to get the car to start again, to back the car away from the pine, but half the engine must have been embedded in the trunk. With the last ounce of sense I possessed, I surreptitiously reached for the door handle.

Harry was crying with frustration, screaming at the car to move, move you son of a bitch, when my hand slipped and the handle snapped back loudly into place. Harry quieted suddenly and then drew the pistol up, staring right at me. His face was even worse than after our fight, blood running down from his nose and forehead, where his glasses smashed in on the impact. He tore them off impatiently, blinking to see through the fresh veil of blood on his face.

“Get out of the car, Emma,” he said quietly.

I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and I stared at him. Harry’s eyes looked like they did the day I told him I’d cracked Margaret’s code, except now he looked utterly abandoned, bereft of hope and faith. My hand fell away from the door as I misunderstood his directions.

“No,” he screamed, “Get out of the fucking car! Get out of the fucking car, or I will kill you, I’ll shoot you here and now! Get out of the car,
now
!”

I found the handle and yanked it open. The door fell partly open with a resisting screech of crushed metal, and I had to throw my weight against it so that I could squeeze out. I thought I was going to pass out with the pain stabbing through my left side. “Harry, don’t, you can’t—!”

“Just once more, Emma. Just once more. Get out of the car, GET OUT—”

But even before I could squeeze myself through the partly opened door, Harry reached over and shoved me as hard as he could. I fell on to my left side and, expecting to feel the impact of a bullet through my head any second, tried to scurry away. I had just got myself to my feet when I heard the shot, loud and sharp, echoing forever in the cold dusk.

I flinched convulsively, clutching at myself. It had to have hit me in the shoulder, that’s where all the pain was. But even as I looked down to see how bad the wound was, I realized the truth.

Harry hadn’t followed me out of the car. He’d shot himself instead.

My relief at being left alive was only momentary, then the thought of what he’d done to me saturated my consciousness. I staggered forward a foot or two, unable to believe what had just happened.

“No, no, no, no!” Rage consumed me, ate away even at the agony in my shoulder. I couldn’t believe that he’d burned the letter and then taken away the last of Margaret’s secrets with him to the grave. I couldn’t believe what he’d forced me to do. What he’d forced me to see.

I spun around, picked up a branch lying near us and swung it like a baseball bat at the windshield. It bounced off uselessly, not even making another crack in the blood-spattered glass. That only made me angrier, but the impact had rendered my arm nearly useless again and I dropped the stick numbly. I was kicking at the driver’s side door with my good hand, in a rage at Harry and the stupid, brutal things he’d done, when Detective Kobrinski pulled up.

“This isn’t what I wanted!” I screamed at her, pointing at the car. “I didn’t mean it! I just wanted him to stop!”

“Oh man,” Detective Kobrinski whispered. “There’s an ambulance coming, but—”

“He’s dead! He fucking shot himself…stupid, stupid! He didn’t have to…! And now he’s dead!” I started to kick the car again, but the detective caught me.

“Oh God!” I wailed over her shoulder. “He told me to get out! If I’d stayed he wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t…he wouldn’t have—”

“If you’d stayed in the car, he would have shot you too,” she said quietly. “He would have shot himself anyway, there was nothing left.”

I struggled to free myself. “No, he wouldn’t! No, he wouldn’t!” I tried to shove her away, but broke down entirely. “He made me decide!” I screamed. “I liked him! And he’s dead and I’m just like him and I killed him!”

“Emma, don’t. You’re not, you’re nothing like—”

But I couldn’t hear anything more of what she was telling me. The horror of what I’d just been a part of was too much. I stopped struggling, but sank to my knees, not minding the cold of the ground or the pain in my shoulder, but realizing that at some point, I would have to stop crying and figure out how to cope with what had just happened.

Pam Kobrinski held me as I sobbed, until the ambulance pulled up beside us.

A
LMOST TWO WEEKS LATER
, I
SWIVELED AROUND
in my chair, staring at the books on the bookshelf. Outside the house that we lovingly call the Funny Farm, spring was happening and somewhere out there, Brian was fussing in the yard that was just recovering from its winter trauma. Although it was early still, he was planning what would go into the garden this year, his enthusiasm almost compensating for the still-weak sun. Like any new convert, he was attacking the chores with zeal if not finesse, a San Diegan intoxicated by the prospect of making something grow in this hostile climate. He was getting the hang of the seasons’ changes around here, in terms of planting and home repairs, and I could see how happy all this was making him. I suppose, too, that raking and pruning allowed him to imagine that I really was working as I’d claimed I had to when he invited me to help.

Back in the woods, the blood on Harry’s hands had been his own.

I took a drink. A quick look at the computer screen told me no surprises: I hadn’t written a word since I sat down several hours ago. No matter. People were treading cautiously around me, put off I guess by the bruises that were still visible. “You’ll feel better soon, just give yourself some time,” was what they generally said, and I was dishonest enough to take the excuse they were offering me. I felt okay, I’m a fast healer. I didn’t lose any teeth, my arm was feeling lots better, and all I’d needed was a couple of stitches where my head hit the windshield. Exceedingly small potatoes, considering that I could have been blown away at close range, but I felt as though I could never be carelessly happy again.

My real problem was that I was troubled with an excess of philosophy.

It had all been terribly simple. Harry had constructed a weatherproof hidey-hole in the ground in the woods near the library. Detective Kobrinski had found it and guessed that Harry had caught his hand on the heavy door that was covered with leaves. When she opened it and shone her flashlight inside, it was like looking at a separate wing of the library, she said. Harry had tripped the alarm a couple of times in figuring out his plan to remove the books, then tripped it periodically after that to throw the scent off himself. No one knew yet how many he might have moved away to some other location before he’d…

Outside, I heard the rhythmic rasp of a rake. Every once in a while, Brian would look toward the office to try and catch a glimpse of me, but I knew that he couldn’t see me where I was sitting. At one point, he stopped altogether, chin resting thoughtfully on the wooden handle of the rake, and I could tell he was debating whether to come in and give me a good shake, figuratively speaking. I half wished he would, so that I could yell at him, tell him to leave me alone, make him feel guilty for making me upset after all I’d been through.

The raking started up again and I sighed. I took another long, sour sip and tried not to think about thinking. A pile of mail on the desk held no interest for me, and the only thing I opened, from a gardening company in California, held a packet of lily of the valley pips. I couldn’t find a note with it, but I assumed it was from Brian’s mother and realized with a heavy heart that I would have to call to thank her for thinking of me, sometime soon. Maybe Brian had told her what had happened, and she was trying to cheer me up. I didn’t know, and couldn’t bring myself to care; I didn’t feel like talking to anyone either.

I crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it for Minnie to chase. She went after it with all the enthusiasm I lacked. As Bucky had promised, she was a slender cat the color of cocoa powder dusted over black velvet, with fine little bones, and dainty slipper feet. Her tail was like the short stroke of a calligrapher’s brush. It gave me no pleasure to watch her gamboling.

The raking ceased and I heard the side door slam. Uh-oh, I thought. Time for another round. I poured another half inch of bourbon into my glass and braced myself when I heard the inevitable knock on the door.

I took a sip and thought about it for a moment before I decided I could take it. “Yeah?”

As the door opened I deliberately swung around again so that I was facing the computer screen, ostensibly busy at work. “I’m sort of in the middle of something, sweetie—”

“I’ll say, Auntie,” said a familiar voice that wasn’t Brian’s. “About halfway through that bottle, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t open it today, if that’s what you’re asking.” I turned around and saw Michael Glasscock pick up the bottle of Maker’s Mark from the desk. “What the hell are
you
doing here?” I asked.

Michael was dressed as he always was, the eternal overcoat shrouding dark clothing and an Anna Sui tie. There was one significant difference, however. A bright turquoise silk scarf was tossed carelessly over one shoulder. A pinstripe suit and banker’s brogues would have been less a surprise.

Michael arched one eyebrow in response to my unwelcoming tone and set the bottle back down. “My, my. A tribute to Jack? Why are you drinking that stuff? I had you favorably categorized as a single-malt girl.”

“Bourbon’s for working days. What do you
want
?”

“Ah, working days.” He sauntered over to the bookshelf and began rifling through the titles. He picked out one book, read the back, frowned, and put it back. “A fine spring Saturday afternoon—for God’s sake, even
I’m
out—and
you’re
inside drinking and pretending to work. A bit Gothic, don’t you think?”

I stared. “Excuse me, Mr. Sit-in-the-Dark-and-Mope? People who live in glass houses—”

“Shouldn’t have sex,” he finished, “unless they
both
are exhibitionists. Besides, I’m not brooding, I’m composing.” Then squinting and sucking his teeth, oozing disbelief, he said, “And by the way, sitting in the dark is in my character, not yours.”

Michael paused in front of a stack of CDs and scrutinized them. He looked around the room, his face troubled. “This isn’t really the office I pictured for you. I had this very clear image of you when I was driving up here and this isn’t it. The National Geo’s are okay, but the science fiction? Real vinyl albums? An autographed photo of Ziggy Marley? Not you at all. It’s a nice collection, real nice, but it’s not you.”

“It’s not my office,” I said dryly. “How did you get in?”

“Your husband out there—Brian, is it? He let me in. He said you’d be here, staring and flagellating yourself.” Michael pulled a long face and pretended to knuckle away imaginary tears. “He’s worried sick about you, you know—”

“Brian never said any such thing,” I interrupted. Thinking of my husband, I wrestled briefly with a small pang of guilt, then decided it was below the legal size limit and threw it back. I took another drink and offered the bottle to Michael.

He looked at the bottle askance, then shrugged. “When in the rural backwater,” he murmured, raising the bottle to his lips. After a couple of glugs he grimaced. “Good God, that’s sweet.” He took another sip anyway. “No, of course, he did not say that. His words were, ‘Em’s in the downstairs office working. Stay for dinner.’ From which I deduced the rest correctly.”

I looked at him, doubtful.

Michael explained. “I’m sure he’s evolved as hell, but he’s a
guy.
And a guy does not admit to a comparative stranger that his wife is freaked out and drinking alone, pulling an Emily D.”

I was starting to lose patience. “Michael—”

“And then something—I can only assume it was a small wolverine that was blown off course—began to growl at me from under the hedge. Biggest goddamned teeth I ever saw outside of a Spielberg dinosaur movie. I swear to God it was winking at me when it charged—”

“Quasimodo is a cat.
Felis domesticus.
And he only
has
one eye.”

But Dr. Glasscock wasn’t concerned with accuracy or details. “Anyway, I barely made it in here alive. I could feel the hot breath of hell searing my ankles as whatever-it-was snapped at me.”

“And so it’s a pity that you’ll have to go past him on your way out,” I said, rising. “Still, if Quasi didn’t actually draw blood, he may just be playing. I’ll get Brian to distract him while you—”

“I’m not going. Show me your office,” he said unexpectedly.

I sighed. “If I do, will you leave me alone?”

He took another swig of my booze. “Nope. But I will tell you a secret.”

“What secret?”

Michael only rolled his eyes back at my simple question. “Upstairs, I presume? C’mon, you can take your glass with you. I’m not one to stand in the way of someone else’s party.” He opened the door and bowed with a broad flourish.

Just to show him I didn’t give a damn about his jibes, I took another big gulp and led the way up to the third floor. Minnie bounded along beside me, and then raced up ahead to check out this new territory. Bucky’d dropped her off a week ago, and she still hadn’t been up there yet.

The door stuck a little as I opened it; it was the first time I’d been up there in the weeks since I’d been home. The air was warm and stale and familiar and I felt another pang of remorse and loss.

Michael pushed past me to stand in the middle of the room. “Now
this
is more like it. All these bookcases, with the glass doors, 1920s Arts and Crafts, right?”

“They belonged to my grandfather. Oscar. Some of the books are his, too. The rest went to Harvard when he died.”

“Perfect,” he replied. “You’ve got your overstuffed couch, your Oriental carpet, also Oscar-vintage, right? You’ve got your desk and chair and”—he paused to count—“three work tables. Filing cabinets. You’ve got your collection of little bits of rock and cultural shit over there, pictures of dirty children—”

“Those are graduate students. Field crews.”

“—dirty children and postcards from exotic locales, lovely, good, more stacks of books on the floor, and papers, papers everywhere. A couple of color photographs of portraits of early 18th-century dead people, a couple of tasteful repros of Dutch genre paintings. This is much more like what I was thinking. Now what are we missing?”

Michael put his hands on his hips and tilted his head perkily and quizzically. I was starting to get tired of his antics, curious as I was. Minnie crawled under the couch and I could hear her sneeze; she backed out hastily, dust bunnies stuck to her whiskers. She glared at me with disgust, and then began to wash herself.

“Ah, that’s right. Just as I suspected.” He pranced over to the doorway and swung the door closed again. “Your diplomas. Hung up, but modestly, out of direct sight. Coolidge U., huh? I should have guessed. Classic archaeology background.”

“Michael, what do you want from me?” I said tiredly. My carefully cultivated buzz was wearing off and that annoyed me.

“Nothing, nothing. I just wanted to see if I was right, that’s all. And I was. I’m usually a very good judge of character.”

I looked hard at Michael, giving a healthy dose of a skeptical eyebrow. “Yeah, right.”

“Well, you know.” He shrugged. “Apart from wives.”

He walked over to a little glass-topped case where I had some of the earliest stuff I’d ever collected, things Oscar had given me—found out of context, of course. Without asking, Michael opened up the top and started picking up artifacts—my things—randomly, looking at them with no sign of interest, and putting them back any which way. I bristled.

“Give me that.” I took a little burin out of his hand, replaced it, and shut the case firmly.

Michael peered at my bookshelves as if he’d never seen books before, then yawned. Apparently none of my reading impressed him. “You know, Emma, I have a truly world-class collection of comic books.”

I should have been used to his nonsequitors, but I couldn’t conceal my surprise this time. “What, comics like
Archie
?”

“Oh, well. I’ve got a few of those.” He shrugged helplessly. “My mother thought they were nicer, say, than
Sergeant Rock
and
Ghost Tank
. But I kept right on collecting them, still do sometimes, started with
Superman
,
Batman
, and have you
seen
Miller’s
The Dark Knight
? Unreal. I eventually moved into indies, of course, with
Fat Freddy’s Cat
and
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
,
Love and Rockets
,
Stray Toasters
, anything at all by Bill Sienkiewiedz, Japanese
manga, H-manga—
”

I had to interrupt Michael’s monologue. “Aitch munga?”

“
H-manga
. Cartoon porn in books the size of small phone directories, really not to be confused with
Archie
,” he explained impatiently, as if everyone else in the world but me knew about erotic Japanese comic books. “The reason I still keep the collection is because I got two things from comic books that made me what I am today.”

I took another drink and mumbled, “I can’t wait.”

“The first was women. When I discovered Sue Richards—y’know, the Invisible Girl from
The Fantastic Four
?—it was the first time I was aware, really aware, of women. And that women had
breasts
—” he screwed up his face in near ecstasy, his hands reaching out as if to grab the items he was imagining. “When Sue appeared, I was in love; she was gutsy, she was gorgeous, she was powerful, and she was also a mom. She was perfect.”

Michael’s happy memory suddenly clouded over. “Well, shit. Now that I think of it, I seem to be running to type here. I never knew how profoundly the Invisible Girl affected me.”

“Huh? But you just said—”

“Yes, yes. But Mrs. Reed Richards was a blonde brainy bombshell with large ta-tas. Ring any bells for you? Rang ’em four times for me—wedding bells, that is—and now…” He looked troubled for a moment, then shrugged it off. “Ah, fuck it. At least I’m consistent. Next. You ever read any comic books? Any at all?”

“No.”

“Well, if you hadn’t been raised in a tightly lidded cultural Mason jar, you might have known that at the end of every main story line, there’s some sort of pious moralizing. Deathless prose like ‘If only they had used their power for good, and not evil.’ That was my first introduction to philosophy. I mean, if some alien race was trying to destroy Earth, but only to save their planet, was that really
evil?
It made me start to question things. And that led me to the glamorous, high-paying world of academic philosophy and its history.”