Playing God (33 page)

"If I had, it would have been slow and horrible, and I haven't got the stomach for that. I'm pretty good at remembering and hating, but I'd be bad at execution. Too much of a coward. I didn't even sue the bastard."

"Why did you hate him so much?"

"Do," she corrected. "It's an on-going thing. He killed my sister."

"Your sister?"

"Skip the bullshit. You know this or you wouldn't be here. Somehow, you've found my letter. There's no other way you could have known. I don't run ads in the Press Herald." She swept her hair back with both hands, held it a moment, then let go with a sigh. "It's been six years since my sister put her life in that jerk's hands. Six years. I hear that normal people get over things. Are sad for a while and then move on. Well, I've been sad for six years. I've moved on, but I'm not over it. I'm not sure I'm ever going to be. You ever do the death by cancer thing?"

He hadn't provoked this, except by coming. This wasn't about him or his questions. He'd started this case thinking his own feelings about Pleasant weren't relevant. Everything that had happened since was proving him wrong. He understood what was going on here better than he understood most of the things he did. For example, he knew little about Sarah Merchant except that they had too much in common. That if he stayed here long, there wouldn't be enough oxygen in the room for both of them.

"Ms. Merchant. What do you do for a living?"

She took a deep breath. Smiled her understanding. "I used to be a banker. Now I make memorial quilts."

"Memorial quilts?"

"I'll have to show you. I made one when my sister died. Showed it to a few people. They told other people, and suddenly, the phone was ringing. It was..." She stared out the window. When she spoke again, her voice was strained by that closing of the throat one can't control. "It was such a surprise. I made my first one as therapy for myself because of all the feelings I had no place to put. Then I discovered how many people needed to do some tangible thing."

She pulled out a tissue and wiped her eyes. Gray-green eyes exactly the color of the shirt she wore. Her eyes rose to his face, studied it, fell again. She lifted her mug with both hands and took a sip. "I'm not going to be able to say this well. I think about it. I live it. But I speak about it awkwardly. Too close, detective, even now."

She swallowed. "When someone dies, the people left behind need ways to remember them. People want to perform tangible acts of respect, of memorializing, that don't end with funeral services. That's why people with money donate buildings or scholarships. People with less money give books. So the person's name goes on. But it's more than that. What we really want for people we've loved is for their stories to go on. For the goodness of them, the special things that made them who they were, not to die. We want something we can show to other people, and say, 'This is who my loved one was.'"

She lowered the mug, which she'd been holding before her like a shield. "Do you know what I mean?"

He felt stirred as he rarely did and unsettled by it. His job was to unsettle others. He was the one who pried and probed, stirred up emotions and caused desired responses. He knew exactly what she was talking about. He wanted to stay and share stories. To run from here before she pulled him into her emotional firestorm. He wanted to stop her from saying more. To grab her and wring out a confession.

"Show me your sister's quilt," he said.

She led him back up the stairs, through the dark entry, and into a bedroom. She flipped some switches, illuminating a quilt on one wall. In the center was a big square with a tombstone on it. A large black tombstone with grayish black wings. In the center, embroidered in white, the name, Carman Merchant, and the dates of her birth and death. The other squares varied. Some were color photographs copied onto fabric. Some were fabric pictures, some extremely simple, others elaborate. There were two pink panels, marking the births of baby girls. Four panels together made an elaborate embroidered vegetable garden, surrounded by a white picket fence.

"That stuff where you make the pictures out of cloth. What's it called?"

"Appliqué."

His eyes roved over the pictures—one simply an enormous blueberry, another a potato. There were fish poles and cigarettes and sewing machines. A stack of books. Pies with lattice crusts and loaves of bread. A pizza. A shapely waitress staggering under the weight of a tray. A mother sledding down a hill with two children. A dog. A red heart with an arrow through it and two sets of initials, like kids made in grade school.

"If I say my sister died, she was a very special person, you don't know anything about her. If I show you this quilt, you know things about her life, her children, the fact that she was in love. You know about her cooking. Her green thumb. Carman could hold her hand out over a patch of ground and plants would spring up to touch it."

Burgess stared at the quilt and thought of his mother. She would have loved this. He saw Carman Merchant's story and wanted his mother's life so tenderly sewn and quilted and appliquéd and embroidered. He wanted a wall for his mother. A wall for Kristin Marks. Her life had been brief, yet he could think of a dozen things for her quilt. He thought about Sarah Merchant's wall and his closet door. Their shrines.

He turned away, looking instead at the framed pictures on her dresser. Sarah and her sister and her sister's children. Sarah and a handsome guy posing against a truck with a black dog. Husband? Boyfriend?

He repeated his question. "Did you kill him?"

"Let me show you some others," she said. "Downstairs."

She walked him along the wall, showing him the three quilts hanging from the railing. "These are waiting to be picked up. This first one is... well, why don't you tell me?"

But he was here for a purpose. He was tired. And this walk down memory lane was tearing the scabs off his wounds. "The quilts," he said, feeling the constriction in his throat, hearing it in his voice. "How long do they take?"

"Each one is different. A few weeks. A month, perhaps."

"You can't make a living."

"I do make a living. You'd be surprised what people will pay for something like this. For something that matters... all that money they spend on fancy caskets and gravestones..." She interrupted herself. "I don't need much. I have a little money. I do it to make a connection, because it matters."

She pulled off the heavy flannel shirt and flung it over the back of the sofa. The tight thermal shirt outlined her body. She was smaller than he'd first thought, with a compact female roundness that was very appealing. God, he was like a bear waking up from hibernation. So long not noticing women much, suddenly they were everywhere, filling his wintry landscape with buttocks and breasts. Chris Perlin, yesterday, and now, Sarah Merchant. This case had shaken him, stirred up his own bad memories and violent impulses. Violence and lust, he knew, were close on the emotional spectrum.

She sat across from him, her face sad, her arms wrapped tightly around her body. Six years later, it still hurt. He asked his question again. "Did you kill Dr. Pleasant?"

She shook her head. "I considered it but I'm not brave enough. I've been trying to work out my anger through the quilts. By helping other people with their anger. And sorrow. Sometimes it feels like I have this anger inside..." She made a circle with her fingers and rested it on her stomach. "Here. Like a big ball of yarn. I'm drawing it out, bit by bit, unrolling the ball, so that the hurt and anger get smaller. It takes so long."

"Do you know of anyone else who might have wanted to harm Dr. Pleasant?"

She tensed. "Wanted to? Or would?"

"Someone who might have killed him."

It was getting dark. The water was deepening into an angry lead color. It looked cold and unfriendly. Even in the warm room, he felt the chill of it.

"Someone who wanted to? I don't know," she said, finally. And then, as though that gave too much away, "No. No. Of course I don't." Too loudly. He could tell by the stiffening in her body, the way she drew back, that she regretted the words the instant they left her lips.

Aucoin would have to wait. He opened his notebook. "Who is it, Sarah?"

She walked to the window and stared out at the water, her body outlined against the light. "No one. I told you. I have no idea who killed him."

"I think you have a pretty good idea."

Tension had erased all ease from her body. In the silence, the woodstove popped. Waves slapped the rocks. And he could hear her breathing.

At last she said, "I don't know, detective. I need to think about this. I'm not saying I know something, but even if I did, it's a pretty serious business, telling a cop that someone you know might have information about a murder. I mean, it's really up to them to decide whether to talk to you, isn't it?" She kept her back to him. "I think it's time for you to go."

Someone she knew pretty well. Someone who, if it wasn't Sarah herself, shared the same reason for hating Pleasant. "It's not okay to kill people, Sarah," he said, using her name, trying to reach her.

She turned, but now she'd mastered her face and it gave nothing away.

"It wasn't okay for him to make a fatal mistake, if that's what you think he did," Burgess continued "But even if that happened, it's not remedied by killing him. We have rules about killing, a social compact we have to keep, or everything becomes chaos and safety becomes random."

She listened politely, but he felt his words bouncing off a blank wall. He was being too abstract. "Look what you've been saying. Six years of sorrow and anger. Maybe that can make you, or this person you know, think revenge could be a cure. But it isn't, Sarah. I've seen the corrosive effects of revenge. It's not sweet or satisfying. It doesn't end anything. The one who kills Pleasant is dragged down to his level. If you kill him because he killed your sister, you become like him. You lose your reason for hating him. Your justification."

"So hating's okay, but acting on it isn't? Doesn't hating end up just as corrosive?"

"I'm a cop, Sarah. I've seen people so bad the whole society would be better off if they were dead. I can't let myself start thinking that it's okay to make those judgments and act on them. None of us can. You know that." He watched her face for understanding or agreement. All he saw was sadness.

He searched for another approach. He was supposed to be good at getting people to talk. It was especially frustrating because he liked this woman, felt a kinship with her. But that was personal. He was here because he was a cop on a job, with a cop's distrust and caution, facing another woman who had something he wanted and wouldn't give it to him. He understood divided loyalties, but sometimes he wanted to grab the whole damned world and shake it.

The bright room had grown gloomy. Eventually it would all be dark except the glowing eye of the stove, the eerie white plume of steam from the dragon's mouth. Across from him hung the banners of three lives. They, too, would fade into darkness. This whole place was about memory and loss and sorrow. There was too damned much pain here. He wanted her cooperation. He needed to get out. The gut instincts of three good cops had led him through a painful day to this room. He didn't want to leave without getting what he'd come for.

"Will you tell me?" he asked. She didn't answer. "Will you at least talk to this other person? Ask if they'll talk to me?"

She moved to a lamp and turned it on, bathing their part of the room in warm yellow light, illuminating a long blonde hair on the cushion beside him. Too long to be hers, and too blonde. Casually, he wrapped it around his finger. Slipped the finger into his pocket. Felt the hair unwrap.

"I'll think about it," she said. "But I'm not sure I agree with you. I think sometimes it's okay to take matters into your own hands. As you said, there are people out there who do more harm than good. It's not my decision. We're talking about other people's choices, about an anger that's even stronger than ours. Or maybe a hate." She refused to look at him. "I'll see if there's anything to tell you."

He'd been tantalizingly close. He snapped his notebook shut, shoved it in his pocket, and stood up.

She stood, too. "You're angry," she said.

"I'm frustrated. A man is dead and it's my job to find his killer. I've spent my day showing up on people's doorsteps and reminding them of their sorrow. Sometimes that's what I have to do to find the answers. You're not making it easy."

"But living with hate isn't easy, is it?" She lifted her arms, as though she was going to embrace him, then dropped them again. She wasn't trying to be seductive yet he felt seduced. There was something here that he longed for. Comfort, maybe, or understanding. The neutral expression she'd put on had gone. She looked wounded. It took effort not to put an arm around her. Not to say he understood.

"I wish I
could
make it easier," she said, stepping away. "How do I reach you?"

He gave her a card, writing his home number on the back. Something he never did. "Call me," he said. "Any time."

"I will. God," she said, "it's gloomy in here, isn't it?"

He didn't answer. He followed her up the stairs—this time she put on a light—and across the small hall to the door. "My sister," she said softly. "Carman was so funny sometimes. She had this way of... I don't know... giving me a look... when someone was being pompous. It would just crack me up. And she was such an iconoclast. I'd get all puffed up about being a banker and she'd skewer
me
with one of those looks. God, I miss her."