Bad Little Falls (22 page)

“And this is for me.” She unscrewed the top from the soda bottle and filled a glass to the brim with the fizzing liquid. “I had to wait for Lucas to fall asleep before I could come over here,” she said. “Tammi’s not much help with him. She forgets things. She almost burned the house down a couple of times because she forgot to turn off the coffeemaker.”

“That must be difficult.” I felt my hand growing numb from the unopened bottle of beer.

“It’s weird, mostly,” she said. “According to the state of Maine, she’s one of my dependents. I’m her legal guardian.” She raised the glass of soda to make a toast. “Here’s to family.”

She waited for me to open my beer and take a sip. She made eye contact with me the whole time. I felt my heart speeding up.

“Thanks for the beer,” I said. “But I don’t think your being here is a good idea.”

“Why was it a good idea when you came to my house, but I can’t come to yours?”

It was a question for which I didn’t have an immediate answer. We were standing in the narrow space beside the bed, hyperaware of its presence and everything it implied.

“Can we just have a drink together?” she asked with exasperation. “I just want to have a real conversation with an adult person for once. Sometimes I get coffee with Gloria—she’s my sponsor—but all she ever wants to talk about is booze and pills. ‘Are you using again, Jamie? You’re not using, are you? Keep the plug in the jug!’ I’ll tell her where to put her plug.”

She hadn’t meant it as a joke, but when I laughed, she laughed. The beer, I had to admit, tasted very good. “OK. But just one drink.”

She smiled and unzipped her ski parka. “I want to apologize for Mitch. He’s got that Napoléon syndrome. That’s why he learned karate. He works at the Shogun Studio out on Route One in East Machias. When we were married, we couldn’t go to the beach or the lake—anywhere with me in a bikini—without him challenging some dude to a fight. I asked if he wanted me to cover up, but he always said no, because he wanted to show off what a man he was despite being so little.”

I tried to avoid looking at the bed. “When did you get divorced?”

“A few years back, after the accident. But he’s had second thoughts ever since and keeps coming around like a begging dog.”

“He seems like the total opposite of Randall.”

“On the outside, maybe. But I’m glad you didn’t get in a fight with him. Mitch is tougher than he looks. Randall underestimated him, too.”

“Can I ask you a question about Randall?”

She narrowed her eyes with playful mock suspicion. “Is this a police question or a friendly question?”

“A friendly question. I’m wondering about that tattoo on his face.”

“He got it after I kicked him out.”

I felt a sense of relief, for some reason. “I couldn’t imagine your being attracted to someone who went around looking like Mike Tyson.”

“Yeah, he showed up at my door with it one night. It was all red still and bloody. I think he wanted to scare me into getting back together or something. It made me realize how fucked up I’d been to ever hook up with him.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I was an addict—and Randall had all the pills. He was handsome, before he got that tattoo, and he could be pretty charming and funny, but really it was the Oxy I fell in love with. That’s the thing about drugs. Once you start using, you’ll do anything to stay high, even convince yourself you love the man who’s giving the drugs to you.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“That’s why I’m here.” She removed her parka and spread it across the coverlet. She wore a tobacco-colored turtleneck, which clung to her in all the right places. She sat down on the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the first good man I’ve met in a long time.”

I thought about the violence inside me, the people who were dead in Rum Pond and Sennebec because of me. “I’m not a good man,” I said.

“You pretend to be all tough on the outside, but you’re just lying to yourself about who you really are.”

“So who am I?”

“Someone who could be a role model for Lucas,” she said, nodding as if in agreement with herself. “He needs a real man in his life, someone he can look up to. They say you’re not supposed to start a new relationship your first year of sobriety, but I don’t see how being lonely and miserable helps you stay clean.”

For the past few days, I had fantasized about this moment, but now I felt like things were moving too fast, and I needed to slow them down. Instead of sitting down beside her, I perched myself on the rickety wooden chair at the desk.

“What made you stop using?” I asked.

“Randall did. I used to think I liked bad boys, but there’s a difference between bad and evil. Randall was evil.”

My bottle was empty. “What do you mean?”

“Did you hear about that girl who died last year?”

“Trinity Raye,” I said.

“Randall sold her the heroin that killed her. She was just seventeen years old. Prester kept crying and crying when he told me she’d died. You don’t know him, but he’s wicked softhearted.”

Jamie got up and poured herself another Diet Coke. She brought me a second Bud. I opened this one without hesitating.

“When that girl OD’d,” she said, “I realized it could have been me. I thought about Lucas and Tammi and even Prester, and I wondered what would happen to them if I died. Who would take care of my family? And then I realized that it was a stupid question, because I hadn’t been taking care of them either, not for a long time. I was too busy drinking and drugging, trying to escape from how shitty my life was. Lucas started having these weird nightmares about a white owl, and Tammi seemed to be getting worse and worse. I tried to quit a few times last year, but it didn’t work, and then one day it finally did. I still don’t know what happened. My sponsor, Gloria, thinks it was my Higher Power telling me I’d finally had enough.”

“Maybe she’s right,” I said.

“I’d like to think so.” She put a hand on the back of her neck, pushing up her hair and massaging the skin underneath. “Gloria says I’m stuck on step two. She tells me to ‘let go, and let God,’ but I don’t know. When your parents die in a car crash and your sister gets paralyzed and brain-damaged, and you’re already on welfare with a kid, and now you have to take care of your sister, too, instead of opening your own real estate business like you’d always hoped—it’s hard to feel like there’s a lot of love in the universe. Having your brother get all deformed and accused of murder doesn’t help any, either.”

I felt the familiar urge to help her. “Prester hasn’t been arrested yet. That means the state police are still considering other suspects. You’re sure you don’t know who they met on the Heath?”

“Randall had a lot of enemies.” Her eyes glittered. “Maybe I can talk with Prester and get him to tell me who they met. He’ll confide in me. But not if there’s a cop in that room. Maybe you can help get that deputy out of there so I can have a private conversation.”

“I can’t do that,” I said, but in my imagination I was plotting how I might be able to make it happen.

Her cheeks flushed. “Didn’t you hear what I said before? Prester wouldn’t hurt another person, especially Randall.”

“We don’t know what happened out there,” I said. “Prester himself might not even remember.”

“What do you mean?”

“The symptoms of hypothermia include confusion and altered judgment. It’s possible Prester held Randall’s face in the snow without being aware of what he was doing. In his incoherent state, he might have even thought he was helping him breathe.”

“That’s not what happened.” Her eyes had grown wet again. “I’m
sure
that’s not what happened. You’re a cop. Can’t you convince them that Prester is innocent?”

“Jamie, it’s not that simple,” I said.

“Can’t you do something? Can’t you do anything?”

“I’m just a game warden.”

The words didn’t come out the way I’d intended; it sounded shameful, as if I were apologizing for my job instead of making a point about where my authority ended. What I’d meant was that I had no business involving myself in another homicide investigation—as both Rivard and the sheriff had reminded me. But any pretense I had entertained of being a responsible officer of the law had disappeared the moment I let this lovely woman into my motel room.

Jamie raised both hands to her face and began to sob. She bent over so that the hair hid her humiliation. I watched her for a while, and then I got up and moved to the bed and sat down beside her. I placed my hand against her spine, resting it between her shoulder blades.

As soon as I did, she wrapped her arms around my chest.

“It’s all right,” I said.

One of her hands found the side of my face. She looked up at me with tears streaking her makeup and her lips parted. I bent my head down and kissed her. Her other hand came up, and she gripped my head between both hands. She opened and closed her lips while she held me with real force, and then she thrust her tongue into my mouth. I could taste the sugar water she’d been drinking.

“Wait,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“Yes, it does.”

“I need to be with someone. Everything’s so fucked up, and I’m so lonely. You’re lonely, too. I know you are.”

I nodded my head, unable to say the word.

“You don’t have to be.” She framed my face again with her hands and lifted her mouth to kiss me.

Then her hand worked its way up under my T-shirt and she gripped my chest hair with such force that I stopped kissing her. We stared at each other without speaking and then her hand dropped to my crotch. She undid the zipper of my jeans and pushed me back on the bed.

With one hand, I ran my fingers through her chestnut hair, smelling the musky-sweet perfume rising from the warmth of her neck. I found myself whispering her name, the sound of it adding to my arousal, until I was afraid I might lose all control in her mouth. Before I could let go, she stopped and rose to her feet.

She unbuttoned her jeans and dropped them to the floor. She had a tattoo on her hip—a butterfly with blue wings.

“I don’t have a condom,” I said.

She laughed and went to the bureau and removed a foil packet from inside her purse.

She planned for this to happen, I thought.

She straddled me on the bed. Leaning forward, she guided me inside her. With her turtleneck still on, she began moving back and forth, rocking her hips with a rhythm that suggested she was hearing a sensuous song in her head and was keeping time with the music. We went on like that for a long time, and then she reached over her shoulders and pulled her top off. She unhooked her bra and lifted my hands to her round breasts. She bent forward to mash her lips against mine, her tongue darting, and that was how we both came, the first time.

*   *   *

Hours later, as we lay side by side on the damp sheet, she guided my hand to her hip and used my index finger to trace the outline of her tattoo. “I got this butterfly the day my divorce came through,” she said.

“To celebrate?”

“No, it was more like ‘Screw you, Mitch. Here’s something you’re never going to see.’ It was like a new beginning for me. That’s why I got a butterfly.”

She had other tattoos: a ring of thorns around her ankle, a Chinese symbol at the base of one wrist. She said she’d gotten them to mark important events in her life, which was what Sarah had also said when she surprised me after graduation with a delicate bird-wing design spreading across the small of her back. I had pretended to be pleased, but in secret I was heartbroken because something that I had loved in its natural state now had an unnatural mark on it.

With Jamie, these images were part of who she was. Even though I didn’t find them attractive, her tattoos told stories of personal significance about which I was curious.

“I got this when my folks died.” She pressed a red nail against the Chinese character. “It means ‘wisdom,’ because what happened seemed pretty random, and I was going to need wisdom to handle everything that was coming to me.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“Their car hit black ice on the Machiasport Road and they crashed into a telephone pole. They died at the scene. Mitch and I had to move into their house to take care of Tammi. Prester was still living at home because he wasn’t working, as usual. I wish the tattoo had brought me wisdom, though I guess I finally did wise up to what a loser Mitch is.”

I rolled onto my side and propped myself against the pillow. “It sounds like you’ve had a rough time.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to take care of Tammi and Prester. All I dream about morning, noon, and night is escaping somewhere.”

“Where would you go?”

“Someplace warm. The jungle, maybe, like Prester John.”

“Who?”

“Prester John.” She peered up at the ceiling, as if reaching for an elusive memory. “He was like this white Christian king who lived in Africa with all these natives in a city of gold. My dad was a Holy Roller at the Church of the Living Spirit. He was into all those TV shows about finding Noah’s ark on top of mountains and stuff. It was my dad who gave Prester his nickname, because he acted like a little king.”

“I never heard of that legend,” I said.

“It’s probably bullshit, like every other bullshit story,” she said. “But someday I’m going to escape from this land of winter. I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until find my own golden city in the sun.”

24

The next morning, I awoke to find myself lying naked across a bed that smelled of perfume, stale beer, and sex. A watery white light was leaking in through the window shades. I heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. I turned my head heavily on the pillow and saw fuzzy red numbers sharpen into focus on the clock face. It was 7:15.

The events of the previous night returned to me in a rush of sounds and images. Jamie and I had slept together. I’d wanted so much for it to happen, but now that it had, my emotions were all tangled and I couldn’t pick them apart. I was undeniably happy; the thought of being at the start of a relationship with a stunning, surprising woman filled me with excitement, if not fear. And yet the heedlessness I’d shown troubled me, too. Why couldn’t we have waited at least until the murder investigation was behind us? I’d worked so hard to leave my impetuous self in the past. But here he was again.