Silent Witness (25 page)

Sam glanced at his watch, already anxious. He had forgotten some papers, he had told Sue, and so would work at school. That gave him roughly an hour to leave Marcie still adoring, still committed to secrecy.

‘No one knows you're here?' he asked.

A quick bob of the head, a kiss on his cheek. ‘Right now, people wouldn't understand.'

The sad thought struck Sam that this girl, who had given him her innocence, did not know what name to call him. Then her meaning hit him hard: in some illusory future, Marcie Calder imagined that Lake City
would
understand.

‘Let's just talk for a while,' he said.

With a trust that touched him, Marcie slid into his lap, nuzzling her head against his face. She felt more slight than ever; Sam had the jar-ring memory of Jennifer, wearing a cotton nightgown on Christmas Eve, nestled in his arms as Sue read aloud from ‘'Twas the Night Before Christmas.'

‘I think we should get married,' Marcie murmured.

Holding her in the dark, Sam was speechless with surprise. How could he have missed that this girl was so young, even for sixteen; that her feelings were so like an adolescent's fixation on a movie star – or, as bad, a father substitute.

At last, Sam answered, ‘I don't think we ever could.'

She leaned back, gazing into his face. ‘Why not?'

Where to start? he wondered. ‘There's my wife,' he said simply.

As he watched her absorb this, Sam's sense of the grotesque overwhelmed him – he was discussing Sue, his wife of twenty-four years, with a teenage girl who imagined replacing her. ‘There are a lot of things,' he went on. ‘Your parents, my job, the way people would look at me. The way they
should
look at me – a middle-aged guy who betrayed his student's family, her school, her natural affection for him –'

‘
No
.' Sam heard sudden tears in her voice. ‘My feelings for you are so much more . . .'

‘Then I'm lucky.' Desperate, Sam called on his gifts of flattery. ‘I'm lucky even to have been a part of your life –'

He stopped abruptly. Headlights had appeared in his rearview mirror; turning, Sam prayed that it was not a cop. Then he saw the car park some distance away, extinguishing its lights. When he held Marcie close again, heart racing, her body felt wiry, resistant.

‘I want you to
be
my life.' Her voice became strong, eerily certain. ‘Once we get married, people will accept it. I can finish high school and go to college, just like my parents want –'

‘Marcie,' Sam cut in, voice rising. ‘I've
met
your parents. Can you imagine your father with a son-in-law older than he is – your track coach?' He caught himself, fearful of angering her. ‘It's possible for us to love each other, Marcie. But I'm too far along to ever become your life. You'd have ten years with a guy way too old for you, and then throw away the next twenty taking care of an old man.'

She was very still now. In a different voice, cooler and older, she said, ‘You can't leave your wife, then.'

The undertone in her words worried him, but he seized on their bracing realism. ‘No,' he answered. ‘I never could.'

Tense, he hung on Marcie's silence. ‘All right, Sam.' The name, used for the first time, held a note of youthful contempt. ‘I won't tell anyone. Is that what you want?'

Sam's next breath was almost a sigh. ‘Yes. It would be the best thing for
you
, Marcie. And it would help me too.'

‘I'll help you,' she said coldly. Then her face appeared in a sliver of light; her skin was pale, her tears like streaks on marble. Abruptly, she pulled away, jerking open the car door. ‘I'll start helping you right now –'

Sam grabbed her sleeve. ‘
Wait
–'

Marcie jerked it away. ‘For what?' she asked with vehemence. ‘For you to give me more precious memories . . . ?'

Her voice caught, suddenly she was out the door, running away.

Sam opened his door without thinking. As the cool air hit his face, he squinted to spot her, a swiftly moving shadow, outlined by the moon above the lake. He started after her; as he stopped, remembering the other car, Marcie vanished in the darkness.

He froze, irresolute. And then he felt his real life pull him from this precipice – he had to leave, put himself somewhere where he could be, once again, the Sam Robb whom people expected. Marcie's car was parked less than a quarter mile away: when her emotions had subsided, she could find her way back, become a sixteen-year-old girl with a curfew. By tomorrow, at school, Sam could begin the edgy work of pretending she had never been anything else.

Glancing over his shoulder, he got back into the car.

The seat next to his seemed too empty. Leaning over, he shut the passenger door, turned on the radio for reassurance. He was still shaken; driving from the park, the last thing he saw in his headlights was a shadow of the parked car, a single head, barely visible above the dashboard, which seemed to watch him leave.

He could not go home. Instinctively, he drove to school, where he had told Sue he would be working – the easiest lies to tell, Sam knew, contained an element of truth. He needed time to think.

Beneath the bleak fluorescent light, Sam slumped in his chair.

His thoughts were jumbled, fretful. All that he could do was try to reenter his life, step by step.

The first step, he decided, was to call Sue.

He dialed, bracing for the sound of her voice. When, instead, he heard his own voice on the answering machine, he had the sudden fear, as piercing as superstition, that Sue had somehow followed him – that it was
her
head in the shadowy car, that
she
, even now, was confronting Marcie Calder in Taylor Park.

On the telephone, his last taped words were followed by a beep.

‘Hi, honey.' He tried to make his voice sound normal, perhaps a little tired. ‘This stuff took longer than I thought – staff evaluations. Another few minutes, and I'll be home . . .'

Putting down the telephone, he felt a moment's peace – this would be his last lie. And then, riding the roller coaster of anxiety, he wondered again why Sue had not answered.

The drive home, perhaps two minutes, was shadowed by his imaginings of Marcie. Perhaps she was still in the park. Sam wondered if he should go back. Then, more vividly, he envisioned Marcie with her parents, telling them – in a sudden, hormonal outburst – everything Sam Robb had done with her. He found himself opening his own front door, a coward.

Downstairs was dark and quiet. In this mood, the silence made him nervous.

Slowly, he walked upstairs.

Voices came from the bedroom. Softly, he walked down the hallway, pausing with his head to the bedroom door. And then, heart pounding, he entered it.

Sue was in bed, filing her nails, half listening to the eleven o'clock news.

‘I tried to call you,' he said.

She looked up at him, incurious. ‘I must have been in the shower,' she said, and then frowned. ‘Broke another nail – my hands look like a washerwoman's.'

Sam stood there a moment. ‘You've got beautiful hands, babe. Long fingers.'

Sue smiled a little. ‘Well,' she said, ‘they're not as beautiful as Jenny's.'

Somehow this made Sam want to kiss her. But he stopped himself; he did not know what behavior might seem odd, or repentant. He changed into his boxer shorts and crawled into bed.

‘I'm tired,' he said, content to tell the truth.

Sue reached for the remote. ‘Go to sleep, then,' she answered, and turned off the TV.

Another step taken, Sam thought. Reflecting on Marcie, dreading their first meeting tomorrow, he lay awake in the darkness of their bedroom, very still, so as not to draw attention to his restlessness.

The next morning, three cups of coffee feeling like acid in an empty stomach, Sam Robb, the assistant principal of Lake City High School, sat waiting in his office for the homeroom attendance sheets.

Jane Moore, his old classmate's wife, was the front-office secretary. He poked his head out the door.

‘Have the attendance sheets come in yet?'

She turned to look at him, brow furrowed. ‘No,' she said. ‘But we just had a call from Nancy Calder, Marcie's mother. . . .'

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing, I hope. But they don't know where she is.'

Sam cocked his head; at this worst moment of his life, with the ground slipping out from under him, he was proud of how professional he sounded – concerned, not panicked, just the right note of worry. ‘When was the last time Nancy saw her?'

‘At about eight o'clock last night. Marcie said she was going to a friend's, but she never came back. Nancy's called the police.'

Watching her, Sam felt the weight of his own silence. ‘Keep me posted, all right?'

At nine-thirty, no one had seen Marcie.

Leaving the office, Sam sat in the parking lot, alone. In the worn felt of the passenger seat he imagined seeing the smallest indentation, the imprint of her body.

Moments of calculation passed. With every minute, Sam saw his cowardice more clearly. Desperate to reclaim himself, reckless of consequence, he drove to the police station.

Two detectives, Jack Seed and Carl Talley, stood holding cups of coffee. Somehow this was a relief: both had sons in high school, knew Sam as someone who liked their boys. Jack Seed raised his eyebrows. ‘Hi, Sam. What can we do for you?'

‘I'm here about Marcie Calder. I saw her last night, after her parents did. From around eight-thirty to maybe ten.'

‘Ten?' Jack Seed sounded relieved. ‘Where?'

‘Taylor Park.'

For the first time, Sam noticed how keen Seed's eyes were. ‘Taylor Park,' the detective repeated. ‘Think you can go there with us?'

The squad car stopped in the parking lot, Sam in the back seat. Sometime in the night, it had rained; the park looked slick, and a chill mist hung over the lake.

Sam leaned over the front seat, pointing. ‘There,' he said. ‘That's where I last saw her, running.'

Jack Seed turned to him, his thin face reflecting only mild curiosity. ‘At night? Know why she was running here?'

‘We'd been talking. She was . . . upset.'

Seed pursed his lips. ‘Oh,' he said, and turned to Talley. ‘We'd better take a look.'

It was a moment before Talley stopped watching Sam's face. They got out of the car; when Sam followed, neither protested.

Crossing the grass, Seed looked around him. ‘Shitty day,' he said.

‘Shitty night,' Talley answered. It was as if Sam were no longer there.

A few feet from the cliff, Seed stopped, staring down at the ground. Turning, he murmured, ‘Can you stay back, Sam.' Stopping, Sam saw the two detectives change direction slightly, as if not wishing to step in something.

The two walked to the edge of the cliff, peering downward.

It was Talley, Sam saw, who slumped a little; Seed became quite still. ‘Damn,' Seed said softly.

Sam walked over. When he stood between them, gazing down at Marcie, no one spoke.

She lay near the foot of the cliff, face turned up, still wearing the track team sweatshirt she had worn the night before. It hid her secret, she had said flirtatiously, sliding into Sam's car – no bra. From here, she looked tiny, a rag doll.

Sam sat at the edge of the cliff, numb. Above him, he heard Seed murmur, ‘Better call the EMTs.'

Only then did it strike Sam that his life, as he had known it until now, was over.

For a long time, Tony did not speak; the narrative, he realized, had taken him deep into the past, to Alison. He could imagine Sam as himself – innocent, horrified, trapped by circumstances. And yet Tony was more touched by Marcie's tragedy: he could remember too well the operatic emotions of a teenager, felt without warning. Even taken as true, much of Sam's story – the self-indulgence, the betrayal of trust – was selfish and despicable.

Tony stood, feeling the stiffness of sitting too long on hard wooden bleachers. Next to him, Sam remained sitting, his gaze abstracted. ‘I was responsible for her,' he murmured. ‘I knew it, and now there was nothing I could do.'

It was clear to Tony that Sam could not look at him. ‘What did you tell the police?'

Sam seemed to gather himself. Softly, he said, ‘I told them bullshit.'

‘My question was what kind of bullshit.'

It came out harsher than Tony had intended. Sam sat straighter. ‘About what you'd expect. That she'd had a crush on me and that I'd rejected her. That it was stupid to be alone with her, especially there, but she'd been so damned irrational that I thought she must be in terrible trouble – drugs or something. All I could think of, I told them, was to help her. But all I could
really
think of was to somehow save myself.'

‘What made you think that story would fly?'

Sam turned to him, eyes glinting with an old defiance. ‘She was dead, Tony.'

The baldness of this made Tony pause: the remark, ruthless in its practicality, was as true of the story Sam had just told to Tony as of the one he had told to the police. Unsettled, Tony wondered what part might be manipulation, what part true. And then Tony remembered, as clear as yesterday, lying to the police about Alison.

‘And Sue?' he finally asked.

The look of defensiveness vanished. ‘I told her the same thing.' Sam paused, standing. ‘Was I supposed to confess sleeping with Marcie and then ask my wife to lie if someone asked her? I did Sue a kindness, really. Even if she doesn't believe a word.'