Best Friends Forever (38 page)

For a moment there was silence. The three of us were as stil as if we’d been frozen—Val and I on the bed, Jordan standing in his blood-spattered button-down shirt and boxers, Val stil pointing the gun toward his head.

“Swansea turned up,” he said, and Val exhaled in a gush and quickly made the gun disappear. Shakily, I rose to my feet and looked at Jordan. His face was closed up tight as the phone as he grabbed his pants.

“We’l be in touch,” he said, pul ing his pants on, pocketing the phone, and walking without a backward glance through the front door.

FORTY-NINE

Jordan had to give Daniel Swansea credit

—the man had his story, and he was sticking to it.

“Just one more time,” Jordan said for the fourth time that night. He was exhausted

—the two-hour drive back to the Miami airport, the delays waiting for the rental-car shuttle, the special security screening that buying a last-minute one-way ticket guaranteed you had al taken their tol . “You left your belt in the country club parking lot?

”

“If you found it in the parking lot, then that’s where I left it.” Seated across from Jordan at the conference table, with his hands folded in front of him, Dan Swansea was, as Christie had said, a good-looking guy, but he was wearing old man’s pants that left a good three inches of his hairy shins bare, and a shirt that smel ed like it had been exhumed from an attic, if not a coffin. Dan was tal and rangy, square-jawed and wel built, with a ful head of dark-brown hair and a dazed look in his eyes. He did not look like a man who’d trashed lockers and vandalized driveways, who’d raped a high school classmate. Sitting there, pale-faced and clean-shaven, he looked like a man who’d had al the fight taken right out of him.

“Do you remember leaving the party with Valerie Adler?”

Swansea rubbed at his head, saying nothing.

“Do you remember being struck by a car?

”

Dan looked puzzled. Then he shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that. I think maybe I fel in the parking lot.” He rubbed his forehead and gave Jordan what was meant to be a rueful smile, except it looked like he’d learned how to smile only a few hours before and hadn’t gotten good at it yet. “I was kind of wasted. They had an open bar. At the reunion.”

“And you went home with a woman.”

An odd look passed over Swansea’s face.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“You won’t tel us her name?”

Swansea shook his head. “A gentleman never kisses and tel s.”

Jordan bit back a frustrated sigh and looked down at his notes. “You spent Sunday and Monday with your friend Reverend Charles Mason.”

“Chip. He’s a minister,” Dan said.

“And you said that you wanted to confess to something?”

Dan bal ed his hands into fists, set them in front of him on the table, and stared straight ahead as he said, “When I was in high school, I was at a party with Valerie Adler. We’d both been drinking, and we were fooling around, and we went into the woods, and we…” He rubbed his head, swal owing again. “She told me no,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I didn’t listen. I raped her. I want to confess to that.”

“This happened when?”

“Senior year,” said Dan. “Fal of 1991. October, I think.”

Jordan slid a pad of paper and a pen across the table. “Write it down,” he said. Dan bent his head over the paper, holding the pen between his fingers for a minute before he started to write. Jordan slipped out of the room, easing the door shut behind him, and went to his office.

It took him a few minutes to get the county’s district attorney on the phone.

“One more time: He wants to what?” Glen Hammond asked.

“Confess,” Jordan said.

“Jesus, did he hear a real y inspiring grace at Thanksgiving?”

“Not sure,” said Jordan.

“And he says this happened when?”

“October of 1991.”

“Ancient history,” said Glenn Hammond, laughing to himself. “Look, I hate to be the bear-er of bad tidings, Chief, but your guy’s shit out of luck. Statute of limitation’s ten years. Even if he took a Betamax of himself and his buddies screwing third graders and their little dogs, too, the state of Il inois official y no longer cares.”

Jordan hung up the phone and sat at his desk, thinking. It was what Grandpa Sam would have cal ed a boondoggle, in his thick New England accent (“A boon-dawgul , Jordy!” he’d cackle, steering his Cadil ac one-handed

through

downtown

New

London, “that’s what this is!”). He couldn’t arrest Addie or Valerie. Without a victim wil ing to press charges, without witnesses, without any evidence of a crime, there wasn’t a case.

Nor could he charge Daniel Swansea with Valerie’s rape. Which left him with a hot, steamy bucketful of nothing, as his grandfather also used to say.

Back in the interview room, Dan lifted his head from the pad when Jordan came through the door. “I’m sorry,” Jordan said, feeling awkward. “We can’t prosecute you. The statute of limitation has expired.”

Dan pressed his hand against his forehead, then stared up at Jordan. “What does that mean?”

“It means that even if there’s evidence, even if you confess, we can’t prosecute. Too much time has gone by.”

Dan was shaking his head. “I did a terrible thing. I know that now. I want to make it right.

”

“Wel …” Shit. Jordan was good at many things:

solving

crimes,

punishing

wrongdoers, finding lost cars, lost cats, lost keys. Lost ladies, down in Florida. He was not equipped to handle a perpetrator’s plea for justice that the courts and the system couldn’t deliver. “You could do good things, I guess. Good deeds.”

“Good deeds,” Daniel repeated, looking unhappy. He got to his feet and, after a moment, stuck his hand out at Jordan. “I’m sorry for any trouble I caused,” he said. “If people were looking for me over the holiday weekend. I’m sorry.”

Jordan shook his hand. “You can see where we’d be concerned.”

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said again. He stared at Jordan intently for a moment, clasping his hand. “If I was guilty…if I got arrested

…where would you put me?”

Jordan frowned. “In one of the cel s here, until your arraignment.”

“Can I see?”

Figuring there was no harm in it, Jordan led Dan past the narrow metal bench with three sets of handcuffs attached, unlocked the heavy door, and pointed out the department’s three cel s, including his favorite. Dan sighed. It was the sound of a starving man seeing a feast, the sound of a man dying in the desert glimpsing water…a sound Jordan thought he recognized.

Hadn’t he heard similar sighs coming from his own mouth as he settled into his camp chair with his beer and his remote, hoping for a twenty-two-minute respite from thoughts of Patti and the dentist, of al the things he’d hoped for that had eluded him?

Dan extended one hand to the metal door and let his hand touch the bars. “Could I…”

“No,” said Jordan. “You can’t.”

“Please,” said Dan. “You don’t have to lock the door. You don’t have to tel anyone I’m here. I won’t cause any trouble, I just…I can’t…” He was trembling al over. “Please,”

he said, and Jordan, puzzled, unlocked the first cel and watched as Daniel Swansea walked inside. He spread the thin blue plastic-sheathed mattress on the metal bunk and curled on his side, with his shoes on and his back to the hal way and his cheek pil owed under his hands. Jordan watched him for a minute. Then he slid the door shut and left him there.

Something had happened to Daniel Swansea whether the man wanted to admit it or not.

Something had, as the kids said, gone down, and Jordan Novick, chief of police, was going to find out what.

FIFTY

“How was your Thanksgiving?” Dr. Shoup asked from the sink, where she was scrubbing her hands.

“Fine.” I couldn’t believe how little time had passed. It felt as if I’d lived a year since Valerie had shown up at my door. It was Thursday now; not even a week had gone by. The morning was unseasonably warm, the sky a mild blue, with a soft breeze stirring the remaining few leaves on the trees. I lay on the examining table in a gown and socks and panties, keeping the appointment I’d made a lifetime ago, while Valerie sat in the waiting room outside. “I was in Key West. Have you ever been there?” Dr. Shoup shook her head. “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

“Uneventful.” Dr. Shoup was not what you’d cal talkative. Then again, I hadn’t picked her for her scintil ating conversation.

“Let’s take a look.”

I stared up at the lights. This afternoon, unless I had to go right to the hospital, I’d go swimming. My bag was in the back of the car, packed with my swimsuit and goggles and towel. Maybe Val would come in the water with me. Maybe, after, I’d take her to the juice bar, point to the table where Vijay and I used to sit before he’d decamped for bluer waters and other adventures. Dr. Shoup’s cool fingers skimmed the contours of the bump, pressing lightly on one side, then the other.

“It isn’t my hipbone, is it?” I asked, knowing the answer.

Dr. Shoup didn’t reply. “That hurt?” she asked, pressing harder.

“Not real y.”

“How about here?”

I shook my head. “Is it my liver?”

Ominously, she didn’t answer. “How have you been feeling?” she asked me instead. My heart sank. “Fine.” I paused. “Worried.

”

Her fingers ran along my bel y, pressing and prodding. Final y she wheeled her little stool away from me, snapping off her rubber gloves. “Fol ow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ultrasound.”

Holding my gown closed behind me, I fol owed her down a long hal , so scared I could barely breathe. It must be bad if she was doing an ultrasound without scheduling it ahead of time, without asking for a referral, without bil ing Blue Cross. I lay on a little cot with my gown pul ed up and bunched underneath my breasts, afraid to say anything, afraid to even breathe.

She squirted gel on my bel y and pressed the transceiver against it. “Any nausea? Weight gain? Weight loss?”

I shook my head. “No. Nothing I’ve noticed. Just the lump.”

“What have you been using for birth control?”

“Huh? Oh.” I felt my face getting hotter.

“Condoms. Mostly.” The truth was condoms,

occasional y. Vijay hadn’t liked them, and I’d figured we were safe. He’d been tested, he assured me…and I, of course, had been a virgin, so if I had AIDS or something, I’d be the first person in the world to get it off a toilet seat, and as for pregnancy…“I never real y had regular periods, you know, when I was heavy, and then they were kind of random when I was losing weight.” Great. Now, in addition to late-stage liver cancer, I probably had a nasty STD, too.

She tilted the screen so that I could see

…what? Something bean-shaped and gray, flickering like a tiny strobe light. “I’d say you’re four months along.”

For a moment, I thought she was tel ing me I’d had cancer for four months. When I realized what she meant, I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. I could only stare at the flickering gray bean that wasn’t a tumor, that was the furthest thing away from a tumor that anything could be. “I thought,” I said. I swal owed, licked my lips, and tried again. “I never thought…”

She looked at me briefly, and her expression was not unkind, before she shifted the transceiver on my bel y and turned her eyes back to the screen. “I take it this comes as a surprise?”

“Surprise,” I repeated. “Wel , given that I thought it was cancer, yeah, I’d say that I’m surprised.”

I thought I saw the flicker of a smile. “It’s an understandable mistake.” Which was, of course, what she’d said about my hipbone diagnosis. Pul ing off her gloves, she turned her back to me and stepped on a lever that opened a metal trash can. “Do you want some time to think about your options?”

“No. No.” I shook my head and laid my hands on top of the lump. The bump. The baby.

Later, there would be the familiar embrace of the water, and the house I’d made my home. I would go out into the sunshine with my best friend and tel her my news, and we’d celebrate together. My time with Vijay, the kisses with Jordan, those would be memories to be cher-ished and polished and eventual y tucked away, like I’d once put away my old, sweet daydreams about Dan Swansea. I would turn my face toward the future and not look back.

“Thank you,” I said, and if Dr. Shoup was surprised when I hugged her and kissed her cheek, she hid it wel .

Valerie was sitting in the waiting room, hair swept up in the same messy ponytail she’d worn since Florida, floating in a pair of my sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, working her BlackBerry with her thumbs. At the Key West airport, as the porter loaded our bags in exchange for a tip of my father’s old car keys, Val found a pay phone and had a long, murmured conversation with Charlie Carstairs, who’d agreed with, Val said, surprisingly little fuss to give her a month-long leave of absence, which she’d promised to spend with me. She tucked her BlackBerry into her purse and got to her feet as I walked past the receptionist’s desk with my hands ful of slips of paper: the telephone number of an obstetrician, a prescription for prenatal vitamins, pamphlets about prenatal diet and fetal development.

“Is it okay?” she asked, her face tense and forehead furrowed. “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

I shook my head.

“So what, then?” I grabbed her hand and pul ed her out the door, down the stairs, out into the daylight. “What’s going on?”

I looked at her, smiling so widely it felt like my face would split. “I’m pregnant.”

“You’re…Wait. What? From the married guy? The doctor?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I bounced up and down, so ful of joy that I had to move. “It doesn’t matter. It’s my baby.”

“Oh my God,” said Valerie. She leaned against the side of her Jaguar, which she’d liber-ated from my garage as soon as we were back in Pleasant Ridge. “Oh my God,”

she said again, and grinned at me. “A baby!

Can I have it?”

I stared at her incredulously. “Can you have it?”

“Kidding! Kidding! Come on,” she said, and grabbed my hands. “Let’s go buy baby stuff and drink champagne!”