Before He Finds Her (25 page)

“Thanks for taking me here,” she said, going back over to him. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a past. So... thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. He reached out and clasped her shoulder, then moved his hand away. The gesture brought unexpected tears to her eyes. She turned to face the pond.

They stayed like that a minute—him sitting on the table, her standing beside it—their eyes adjusting to the dark. A gentle breeze moved the leaves in the nearby trees.

“Back at the house,” Melanie said, looking at him again, “you told me I could ask you whatever I wanted.”

“Okay—I might have said that.”

“You did.”

He nodded. “All right.”

“After the murder, why did the police talk with you several times?”

“Who told you that?”

Melanie held firm. “You said you’d answer my questions.”

A bullfrog honked from the pond. “You’re being tough,” he said. “That’s a good journalistic instinct. I used to be a tough journalist, you know. Pretty legit. I have those instincts. But I like having money, too. Sometimes it’s a trade-off. God damn, I make a lot of money.” He shook his head. “I’m just so glad you’re alive. You have no idea how mind-blowing this is.”

She returned the smile. “The police...”

“Right. Okay. My mistake was that I was honest to them up front about being friends with your mother. And also...” He shrugged. “I had a shit alibi for the time of the murder.”

“What was it?”

“It was that I didn’t have one.”

“You mean they thought—”

“No, they didn’t think anything. This wasn’t a whodunit, you know? But the police like tidiness—people verifying other people’s stories. And God forbid if anyone is ever alone. I was married then—bad idea, by the way. I highly recommend never doing that. But I was married and my wife was in New York that night. Anyway, these local yokel cops were looking for the same thing you’re looking for now: something that might help them find your father. Well, I didn’t know anything. I barely knew the man. But you know how it is. I’m a public figure, and there are people in this world who make a lot of money running with nonexistent stories about public figures. Which is why I don’t ever talk about that time in my life, or about knowing your mother. I was very fond of her, and what happened was horrible, and I don’t like being reminded of it.”

“You didn’t say ‘fond.’ You said you loved her.”

The bullfrogs were louder now, and the crickets. It reminded her a little of West Virginia, the woods teeming with life.

“She was a beautiful, complicated woman,” he said.

“And you loved her.”

“Yes,” he said. “I loved her very much.”

David Magruder had interviewed movie stars and astronauts and every living president. Yet it felt less strange than she would have imagined, driving a drunk celebrity around in his fancy convertible.

“I wish I’d brought a six-pack,” he said from the passenger seat, his eyes closed. Though her hotel was only a couple of miles from the park, by the time she arrived David was fast asleep.

She pulled the car into a parking space and shut off the engine. She nudged his arm, rousing him.

“You need to call your driver,” she said.

“He isn’t on twenty-four-hour call, Melanie.”

“Then a cab.”

“I’m a grown man,” he said, and yawned.

“Well, there’s no way you’re driving yourself home,” she said.

“Of course I am.” He sounded wounded. “I’ve been my driving—” He tried again. “I’ve been driving since dinosaurs roamed the earth.”

Her room had two beds, but no way. “There’s a sofa in the hotel lobby,” she said. “You can sleep there for a couple of hours.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Your concern for me is wildly endearing. Tell you what—leave me here. The seat reclines way back. I’ll just rest awhile.”

“I guess,” she said.

“She guesses!” He grinned drunkenly. And when she handed over the keys, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Absolutely amazing,” he said, reclined his seat, and shut his eyes.

“You’ll probably want to put the top up,” she said softly. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Good night, David,” and shut her door, leaving him there to sleep in the Sandpiper parking lot. She did it reluctantly, suspecting that the minute she entered the hotel, the Corvette’s fancy engine would roar to life. Which was exactly what happened.

16

September 22, 1991

After standing over his sleeping wife for a serene minute, Ramsey left their bedroom and went downstairs. His hands needed something to do, so he put on his coat and work gloves, went outside, and began carrying the sheets of plywood and two-by-fours from the garage to the backyard. It was still more night than morning outside, and cold—but the work encouraged a sweat. When he’d finished moving all the wood, he went inside again to wait for Eric.

The tap came only a couple of minutes later. The two men shook hands. Ramsey would’ve offered Eric coffee, but his friend was already carrying a cup from 7-Eleven, so they cut through the house and went out back.

“ ’Preciate your help,” Ramsey said. “I know it’s cold out here.”

“Cold nothing. We’re a band, aren’t we?” Eric said. “Band needs a stage.”

One good thing about the cold, everyone’s windows would be shut. Ramsey didn’t want the neighbors moaning about the pounding of nails on a Sunday morning. Not that this would take long. The plans were so simple, Ramsey barely needed to explain them to Eric: six pallets supported by thirty-six-inch sections of two-by-fours, which the hardware store had precut yesterday. They’d finish in time for Eric to get to church.

Ramsey offered up his work gloves, but Eric declined and blew into his cupped hands. The ground was wet, so they knelt down on one sheet of plywood while working on another. Each man started on a pallet, working apart, not talking for a spell, the rhythmic hammering like a drumbeat to a song you can’t quite remember. Just as Ramsey expected, a project like this was what he needed. It was good to build something. After a few minutes, Eric broke the rhythm, saying, “So Wayne tells me you’re cracking up.”

Ramsey looked up from his work. “What’s that now?”

Eric set down his hammer. “The end of the world, Ramsey?” He said it disappointed, the head shake implied. His father had used the same tone when Ramsey was young and his rap sheet still in its infancy.
Shoplifting, Ramsey?
Vandalism, Ramsey?

Ramsey had never intended to tell Eric, whose clay brain religion had baked hard, but now he knew anyway. Which explained why he’d agreed so readily to get up in the dark and come over here. He’d decided to be a one-man intervention.

“I know it to be true.” Ramsey shrugged. “That’s all there is to it, my friend.”

“Ramsey—”

“I
know
it.” He said it final like, and made a point of returning to the two-by-four he was hammering into place. The morning was getting lighter, beginning to feel like today and not yesterday.

“So you know the world is ending, but you don’t bother mentioning it to me?”

“Didn’t see the point,” Ramsey said.

“You told Wayne.”

“Yeah, I told Wayne, but I hadn’t planned to.” Outside the music store yesterday afternoon, after arranging the P.A. rental, Wayne was smoking a cigarette and moaning to Ramsey about how he’d barely gone surfing all summer. So Ramsey told him he’d better get to it on Sunday morning, and he told him why—not too much detail, just the
Reader’s Digest
version.

“So why’d you tell Wayne and not me?”

Ramsey stopped working again. “I’ll bet you never knew that Wayne grew up in some shitty orphanage till he was ten. Or that when he was eleven, his foster dad broke his arm for fighting at school. Cracked it right over the kitchen table.”

Eric said nothing for a few seconds. “I’m sorry to hear that, but what’s your point?”

“My point is, Wayne’s had it rough. And he hasn’t had one damn person in his whole life to look up to, and for some crazy reason he looks up to me. He confides in me. So I was returning the favor.”

“Well, you shoulda confided in me, too.”

“Oh, come on, man, don’t look all hurt—I knew you’d think I’d gone loony. Or worse, you’d believe me and start to freak out about your standing with Jesus.”

“Strange, how I don’t remember reading about this in the newspaper.”

“Make fun if you want,” Ramsey said, “but it’s no joke.”

“So what’s your source?”

Ramsey remembered everything about that late-afternoon: the roped-off seating, the other trucker, the way time had seemed to stop. “Saw it in writing a couple months back. In a science book.” Eric still had that parental look on his face. “I read it cover to cover. Trust me—it adds up.”

“You’re no scientist,” Eric said.

In a tree near the back fence, a couple of squirrels sounded like an old couple bickering. When they quieted down, Ramsey said, “Let me ask you something. Do you believe in God?”

“What?”

“Come on—do you or don’t you?”

“You know I do,” Eric said.

“But you ain’t a priest or a prophet or nothing, are you?”

“It’s different.” He set his hammer down and drank some coffee. “My belief is about putting trust in Jesus Christ. It’s about having faith in the Holy Spirit.”

Ramsey tried to imagine a time before Eric’s conversion, when he was just another drunk, one more fuck-up in over his head.

“So on a scale of one to ten,” Ramsey said, “how much do you believe in Jesus and God and all that?”

“Don’t ask me that,” Eric said. “It’s crass, putting it on a scale.”

“So you won’t do it?”

Eric sighed. “Whatever, Ramsey. Ten. All right? I believe it a ten.”

Ramsey lowered his voice. “You can knock that number down a peg or two if you want.” He smiled. “No one’s listening but me and the squirrels, and we won’t tell.”

“I don’t need to lower my number.” Eric glanced up at the sky. “And there’s always someone listening.”

“Ah, so you’re only saying ‘ten’ out of fear. That’s messed up.”

“You got it wrong.”

“Then you’re hedging, so just in case Jesus
is
real you don’t end up on his bad side.”

“Ramsey, it’s a ten, okay? You asked me, and I gave you my answer. I have complete faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“All right, all right,” Ramsey said, hands raised in defense. “You don’t need to get all nutty about it. So your faith is a ten. And so is mine. You wouldn’t know it, because I always said the concept of God was a bunch of—” Seeing Eric’s eyes narrow, he softened his words. “I’ve never been a believer.”

“That I know,” Eric said.

They started working again, and Ramsey knew what was coming and waited for it. He’d forgive Eric, because his friend was an addict. Eric used to be addicted to booze, and now he was addicted to God.

“Maybe this is the right time for you to reconsider your own relationship with Jesus,” Eric said after a long-enough pause that not saying it must have felt like ignoring the world’s worst itch.

Ramsey smiled. He knew people. “Nah, it’s too late for me.” He said it to lighten the mood, self-deprecate a little. But when it came to Eric and God, there was no mood lightening. “What I’m saying is, I already know all about faith. In fact, I have more of it in my little finger than most people have in their whole body, even religious kooks.”

“
Hey
...”

“I only mean that without faith I’d be dead by now.”

Eric said, “I’ve always respected how you pulled yourself up, with God’s help.”

“God nothing, man—
you
pulled me up. And Allie did, too. That’s what I’m talking about: For twenty-seven years I never had faith about one damn thing in my life, and then out of the blue I decide to put my faith in some douchebag stranger hanging from a utility pole who’s giving me lip—I decide
that
guy’s gonna save me... and he does! You. You fucking did.” Eric cringed from the double blow of a compliment and an obscenity, but Ramsey could think of no other way to make his point. “And when I’m in dire straits again, some college girl enters my hospital corridor, and I take one look at her and somehow I know with complete certainty that lightning’s gonna strike me a second time and now
she’s
gonna save me. And she does. But it’s more than that. She keeps on saving me every day since, twenty-four/seven/three sixty-five—just like I knew she would.”

“Does all this by any chance have to do with—” Eric took a breath. “With what I
saw
a few months back?”

Since their phone call back in June, Ramsey and Eric hadn’t ever talked about what had taken place in the Millers’ driveway.

“We were never supposed to meet,” Ramsey said. “The damn flowers weren’t for me. But okay, we meet and I say to myself—
put your faith in her
. And believe me, I’ve had enough hours alone in my truck to consider the matter from every angle. And now the end is almost here.”

“So you say.”

“Listen—up till now, in my whole entire life I’ve only ever known two things for sure: that I needed to put my faith in you and in Allie. Almost every other decision I ever made was a bad one, but not those. And that’s because it wasn’t ever a decision. It was a feeling—I just knew. And now here’s this third thing that I know even stronger than the other two put together. Ten times stronger.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but I don’t need to.”

“I still say we’d have heard about it on the news.”

“Not if the government doesn’t want to alarm everybody and there’s nothing they can do about it. Then they’d keep quiet so there’s no mass panic. It’s like if a thousand nuclear warheads were about to obliterate the U.S. They’d keep it to themselves. Nobody ever fucking tells the truth.”

“Ramsey—”

“No, I get it. You think I’m wrong. But the fact is, my faith is better than yours, because there’s science to back it up.”

“So where exactly is this science book? You keeping it to yourself, or can I have a look?”

“I don’t have it any longer,” Ramsey said.

That parental look again.

“For what it’s worth,” Ramsey said, “I never once asked you what makes you so sure about Jesus and Mary and all the rest.”