Blue Diary (18 page)

It was the rain that made him snap out of it; rain had begun to fall in buckets, and it hit against the windows as it poured down, drenching fields and roads alike. Bryon forced himself to move; he grabbed his clothes and used a pink sweater he found on the dresser to clean his fingerprints off the window glass and the ledge. He slipped into the night, naked as the day he'd been born, with nothing in his hands but his own bloody clothes and the key to Rachel Morris's diary, which he'd grasped so tightly, he couldn't seem to let go. He went into the strawberry field, where he'd seen the scarecrow, and quickly reached for whatever he could find—a white shirt, black slacks, old, worn shoes—leaving his own clothes behind, shirt, jeans, and boots, blood-stained and burning hot, there beside the scarecrow. Still, he could taste blood, and to wash it away he grabbed a handful of strawberries. As he swallowed the sweet fruit he felt how alive he was. His mouth, his eyes, his ears, all alive in the dark rain-drenched night.

He could feel his old self sink into the field as he walked away, and the person he was about to become rose up to enter into the same blood and bones. He got into his truck and drove to Hell's Pond, the place where she'd taken him when the world seemed so splendid and he was certain he'd have whatever he wanted. He got out, but he left the engine running; he wedged a rock against the gas pedal, then leapt away as the truck lurched into the waters. Already, the rain was nothing more than a drizzle, gray and heartless and cold. He stood there in a bank of pickerelweed and wool grass, breathing hard as everything he'd ever been disappeared. His wallet and identification were stowed in the glove compartment, and thinking about the way he'd lost himself, he was as sober as he'd ever been in his life.

He was shivering, though the night air had turned mild and sweet as tears. The truck splashed and strained like a big fish. and then the waters closed over it. Bryon watched, but not for too long. He would need identification, a new name and a new history, but that wouldn't be difficult. He was the sort of man who could compartmentalize the different sections of his mind, and the segment that held all that was selfish and cruel, that small, evil section, was floating beneath the green water. Under the cover of the night, he washed his hands and prayed for guidance before setting off on his travels. As far as he was concerned, Bryon Bell was gone.

THE HEARING IS BRIEF, HELD ON A muggy day. when the sticky heat and the rain boil the dispositions of just about everyone in Monroe, including the most even-tempered citizens. Four years from now, when the referendum to overhaul the town offices and the courthouse comes up once again, people will remember this stifling day, they'll fan themselves and think of how they longed for air-conditioning and peace of mind. No one is fully prepared for what is to come, save Jorie, who sits behind Ethan with her head bowed, and Barney Stark, who has taken his place beside Jorie, his heavy, serious face showing nothing, though he is on alert, ready to pick up the pieces when they begin to fall. Collie, too, knows what is about to happen, but he is nowhere to be seen; he's off by himself, watching the steady rainfall from what was once the parlor of the abandoned house where he feels so comfortable, at the far end of King George's Road, just three miles as the crow flies from the courthouse steps, but a world away as well.

Mark Derry sits in the last row to watch the proceedings. He has worn a tie and a jacket for the occasion and is sweltering for his troubles. This morning he phoned Dana Stark to inform her he wouldn't be back till the end of the week to finish up their new bathroom. He waited for her to take him to task, more than ready to quit the whole damned project if she did, which would leave her without a commode or a sink, but Dana had surprised him and said there was no hurry. Mark had other things on his mind. Anyone could understand that. The Howards over on Sherwood Street haven't made a fuss either; they already know their kitchen won't be completed until well into the fall, despite the efforts of the handyman, Swift, hired to finish installing the cabinets and lay the floor. There are, indeed, more important issues to deal with, that much is true. There are circumstances that can't be put on hold, to be set aside and forgotten for a better day to come.

On the afternoon after Ethan was arrested, Mark had a fight in the hardware store with that harebrained Steve Messenger, wha'd started mouthing off about burning the Fords' house to the ground. They'd had to pull Mark off Steve in the paint-and-fixtures aisle, but now Mark feels confused about his loyalty. Sitting in the courtroom, hearing Ethan referred to as Bryon Bell, Mark can't quite believe what is happening. Perhaps it's all a joke, a scene filmed for a TV show; perhaps at the end of the afternoon, the actors—Ethan and the judge and the lawyers included—will rise to their feet and take their bows, thanking the clutch of reporters and the Fords' neighbors and friends for being in attendance.

For haven't these two men, friends for the past thirteen years, been there for each other no matter what the circumstances? Haven't they cried together over the death of Mark's father and rejoiced at Collie's birth, making themselves queasy with scotch and cigars? Ethan coached Mark's son Brendan, back when Brendan was in Little League, and is the godfather to Mark and Trisha's daughter, April. These things are real; they happened, there's no denying that. But are they as real as the moment when Ethan stands up to enter his plea, announcing his guilt with an open, untroubled expression? Mark Derry feels a shudder pass through him as he sits there in the courthouse. He is reminded of a magician he had once seen as a child who had terrified him by bringing forth scarves and birds out of the most unexpected places, shirt-sleeves and tabletops and the upswept hair of the birthday girl's mother. After that illusion, he'd gone home and hid beneath his bed and refused to come out for supper; for months following the party, he had half-expected to find doves on his bureau or trip over silk scarves snaking through the floorboards of his room.

Now Mark looks over at Jorie, seated beside Barney Stark. She's motionless, wearing a dark blue dress that makes her seem plainer and older. Mark is flooded by a memory of working with Ethan on one of those big new houses that went up on the far side of the high school a few years back; they had gone into the field at lunchtime, and after sharing the picnic Jorie had carefully packed, stuffing themselves with hard-boiled eggs and ham sandwiches. with apples and chocolate cupcakes and cold bottles of beer, they had stretched out to gaze at the sky.

I'm the luckiest man on earth,
Mark remembers Ethan saying.
That is a fact.

Mark slips out the back door immediately after Ethan states his plea, and goes directly to the Safehouse, where he orders a draft, which he drinks alone at a rear table. It's always dark in the Safehouse, but with the rain falling so hard, it's even gloomier than usual, thick with the damp smell of failure and alcohol. One night when they sat here, Ethan had said something that, looking back. Mark thinks, should have given him a clue.
Nobody ever really knows another person,
Ethan had declared as the wind rattled around the roof of the Safehouse and a sprinkling of snow began to fall. They'd had a few, and Mark remembers saying something on the order of,
Bullshit. If you think I don't know you, you're wrong, buddy. Hell, I'd trust you with my life.
Ethan had clapped Mark on the back, and as he thanked him he'd gotten kind of emotional. Now Mark feels cheated; he wonders if he's been conned. He has another beer; then he goes home, and before Trisha can stop him he takes out the piles of photograph albums she's worked so hard to put together and begins to rip up the pages.

“Stop that right now,” Trisha demands when she comes in from the kitchen to see the shredded paper on the floor and her husband down on his knees, searching for a pair of scissors in the bottom drawer of the bureau they inherited from his grandmother. Trisha grabs the album away. For a second she has a shivery feeling. Who is this man she's married to, who has already torn up a dozen or more photographs? And then Mark does the most unexpected thing of all—he starts to cry. Trisha sits beside him on the floor. Her face is mottled and red; she has the sense that some things will never be the same, that just knowing Ethan has somehow placed them in jeopardy.

“He had everybody fooled,” Trisha says, “including his own wife. There's nothing for you to feel bad about.”

Still Mark Derry knows that a man may have good reason to mislead his wife, but never his best friend. Mark decides he needs to think over what has happened, he needs to sort things out, and all the rest of that week he takes to staying late at the Safehouse. Most nights, he closes the place down, getting a ride home from Warren Peck, let out on the corner to stumble the rest of the way down his own driveway. Mark no longer shows up for his jobs, and the three Derry boys, Sam, Christopher, and Brendan, hardly see their father these days. Even April, the Derrys' eight-year-old daughter, notices the change, and she's started to mouth off to her mother, refusing to bathe or to go to bed on time, when in the past she's always been an angelic child.

It isn't as if Mark Derry had never had a drink in his life -he likes a good time as much as the next man—but now he's settled into drinking, as though he were falling into a soft netting that was swallowing him whole. Every time he thinks about Ethan, he has another drink, meant to clear his mind, but managing to do the opposite instead, leaving him fuzzy and far more confused. By the end of July, when Mark has lost ten pounds off his already thin frame and hasn't been home before midnight for eight nights straight. Trisha Derry goes to see Kat Williams's grandmother to ask what Katya might suggest to bring a wayward husband home. Katya is an unlikely friend for a woman as young as Trisha, but Trisha lost her own mother at a tender age and she'd always felt she needed some maternal counsel. When Brendan and Rosarie first started dating, Rosarie's mother didn't seem the least bit interested in the children's future, but Katya always welcomed Trisha to stop in for coffee whenever she was trying to track Brendan down.

Now Trisha goes to Katya in need of good advice, the sort her mother might have given if only she'd lived longer. She lets April play in the Williamses' yard, where nothing much grows aside from the feathery black mimosas, and she watches through the window as her daughter makes pies out of handfuls of weeds. In a surprisingly calm voice, Trisha tells Katya how her marriage has gone wrong. She has not been here since Rosarie broke Brendan's heart. and perhaps she would feel uncomfortable returning if Katya were not so understanding. A man who drinks is a man who's afraid of the truth in some way, and in Katya's opinion, it is Trisha's task to figure out what her husband is afraid of, then help him face whatever it might be straight on, with no alcohol inside him.

But how can Trisha help Mark when he barely spoke to her anymore? When he fell into bed beside her at the first light of morning, stinking of alcohol and shrinking from her touch?

“Wherever he goes, you go,” Katya says as they stand beside the window, watching April search for butterflies in the desolate yard. “Then you'll know what he's running from.”

Trisha decides to follow Mark the very next day, to take the same path he is now on, and in so doing, understand why he's running so fast. It's a splendid morning when she sets out after him in her Honda. It's already eight o‘clock, two hours later than the time Mark used to leave the house, back when their lives were normal. Trisha knows he has a job to finish at Barney Stark's, and Josh Howard had tentatively phoned that morning to report that the handyman, Swift, had recently disappeared, leaving the Howards' kitchen in ruins. But work is clearly not on Mark's mind, for he heads to Kite's Bakery on Front Street.

Trisha sits in her parked car. engine running, watching her husband get a black coffee, which he certainly could have had at home. She can see through the window that Charlotte Kite is back to work after the surgery people said she'd had over in Hamilton. Charlotte's parents had built the place up from nothing into a chain that crisscrossed the Commonwealth, and the bakery must have felt like home to Charlotte, because another woman might not have returned to work so fast.

Trisha had heard through the grapevine that there was some sort of cancer involved, and she'd brought over flowers earlier in the week, even though she and Charlotte had never been friends. Charlotte had accepted the zinnias and lilies, cut from the Derrys' own garden, but she hadn't invited Trisha in. She'd insisted she was doing just fine, the same cheerful speech she gave to everyone, including Jorie, who still didn't know the extent of her friend's illness. But Trisha Derry was not so easy to fool. She saw how gaunt Charlotte was as she stood in the doorway of her huge house, dressed in her bathrobe with some sort of bulky pump attached under her arm. They had been a year apart in high school, and Trisha had always thought Charlotte was too sophisticated for her, as her family was among the wealthiest in town. Trisha had often whispered that Charlotte was stuck-up and full of herself, a real ice princess. She'd made jokes at Charlotte's expense, but as she peered at Charlotte through the meshing of the screen door, Trisha thought maybe she'd been the cold one, and that's why they'd never been friends. Perhaps she'd been the one to reject Charlotte, because Charlotte lived over in Hillcrest, just as she'd avoided Jorie because of her beauty, a singular gift that had always seemed so unfair. She'd been jealous, and jealousy always curdles. Trisha can't help but wonder if she wasn't paying a price for her lack of understanding and if that wasn't the reason her loyal, dependable husband was drifting away from her.

When Mark leaves the bakery on the morning he's being followed, he gets into his truck and drives around town in what seems to be an aimless pattern. Trailing at a safe distance behind, Trisha quickly finds herself confused, although she grew up in Monroe and knows every turn. It takes a while before she realizes that he's heading for Maple Street. Mark stops across from the Fords' house and sits there for so long Trisha grows concerned that he's fallen asleep or become suddenly ill. She herself has pulled over beside a hedge of lilacs on the corner of Maple and Sherwood, a spot where the rangy shrubs protect her from sight. but after close to half an hour has passed, Trisha is growing restless. She's wondering how long she can wait here like this, when at last Mark opens the door of his truck. Trisha gets out of her Honda as well; she edges along the lilacs, hidden by their dusty heart-shaped leaves. Her breathing is ragged, and it's such a hot day she's begun to sweat. In order to keep out of sight, she has no choice but to go through Mrs. Gage's yard, even though Betty Gage, always so fanatical about her perennial beds, has been known to scare people off her property from the time Trisha herself was a little girl.