The Juror (35 page)

She doesn’t answer.

They emerge at the old railroad right-of-way. Just a straight trail through the woods. She asks him, “If we go this way, where
would we come out?”

“Morris Road,” he says.

“No, I mean farther,” she says. “If we cross Morris Road, keep going?”

“I don’t know. Croton Falls?”

“That’s fine.”

“But that’s like seven or eight miles.”

“So let’s get a move on.”

They walk. Soon a drizzle starts up. Gray drizzle and a gray junco flitting above a gray wall. Oliver’s bewildered, and frustrated
by her silence. But as they walk a strange contentment falls over him. Are they running away? If they run away forever, math
quizzes and Laurel Paglinino will no longer be a concern. Only problem is he’s going to miss Juliet. He’s already missing
Juliet.

They walk for hours. This long mysterious side-by-side trudge down the straight path through October trees and pastures, through
the soft rain.

Once he asks her, “Couldn’t we have stopped in the house to pack something? Anything?”

“What do you want, Oliver? What do you need?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

But after a while he says, “That skull that Juliet gave me. Would have been nice to have that. For good luck. Does Juliet
know where we’re going?”

“No.”

By the time they get to Croton Falls, to where this old right-of-way connects with the active commuter line, it’s past noon
and he’s starving. They grab sandwiches at the village deli and then cross to the station and take a train down to the city.

From Grand Central Station they take a cab to a luggage store. She buys them each a suitcase. Next a quick spree in a cheap
clothing store. Then a cab to La Guardia Airport. She buys the tickets under the name Juliet Applegate. She uses Juliet’s
passport—she won’t tell him why. She’s changed a few numbers. She’s changed the height from 6′2′′ to 5′3′′, she’s taken thirty
pounds off the weight.

At the ticket counter she pays cash. When she hands over Jesse’s passport she says, “My nephew.” She ruffles Oliver’s hair
and tells the lady, “I finally made him cut it. Don’t you think it looks better?” She lies with such grace and easy polish
and insouciance.

The plane to Guatemala is leaving in thirty minutes. She sets him into a plastic scoop-chair at the boarding gate, and she
goes off to make a call.

C
AREW
turns down the sound on the Islanders game. His wife sets the phone on the coffee table in front of him and he picks it up
and it’s Annie Laird. He hears some kind of public jostle and bustle in the background.

She says, “I’ve decided I
will
work with you.”

“Good.”

“He killed Juliet,” she says. “Did you know that? He made it look like a suicide but he killed her.”

“I don’t, um, who is that?”

She’s silent.

He says, “They killed someone? What was the name again?”

“Juliet Applegate,” she says slowly. “My friend. The doctor. You didn’t know she’d died?”

“I don’t know anything about her,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Why not what, Ms. Laird?”

“Why don’t you know?
He
knows. He knows
everything
about my life.”

“Well, maybe he knows because he’s looking for ways to hurt you. Me, I’m not looking to hurt you.”

“But you
are
hurting me,” she says.

“Now that you’re working with us, we’ll stop him.”

“Right,” she says. No irony in her voice. No enthusiasm either. Nothing he can read.

He says, “Do you want to come down to the office now?”

“Not now.”

“OK. We’ll start in the morning?”

“Soon,” she says.

“When?”

But then his call-waiting goes off, and he says, “Could you hold on for just a second?”

It’s Harry Beard on the other line, telling him, “Annie Laird has flown the coop.”

“Huh?”

“There’s no lights on in her house. We checked, she’s gone. So’s the kid. The car’s there. Somebody smashed up her studio—”

“Harry, she’s on the phone with me right now.”

“Oh shit. Where is she?”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Carew. “Let me ask.”

But of course by now the other line is a dial tone.

A
NNIE
and Oliver ride in the back of a bus that threads through the sprawls of Guatemala City. They’re headed north to the mountains,
to Huehuetenango, where they’ll look for a ride to Turtle’s village. They have to share their seat with two stout Mayan women.
Oliver sits nearest to the window. Next comes Annie, then the two women in their bright complex
huipiles
.

All four of them shoehorned into this one school bus seat.

Annie’s trying to sleep. Her head droops forward.

An antsy hen leaves its basket in the seat up ahead. It tries to perch on the seat-back in front of Annie. The bus lurches
and the hen opens its wings and flutters them against Annie’s face. She starts. The hen ogles her with one eye. Annie has
never strangled a chicken and she wonders what it would feel like. But the hen seems to read her look, and it hops back into
its basket.

Annie prays for sleep. Anything. Even just a little drifting around the fringes of this rage would do her good.

She and Oliver spent all night in the bus station, waiting for this bus. Afraid to rent a car. She didn’t have any of Juliet’s
credit cards, and she didn’t want to use one of her own—because then the investigators might find out she was down here.

They’d know, and then
he
’d know.

Salsa music blares on the bus driver’s radio. The windows are open, and the fragrance that rushes in is a mix of exhaust and
cedary woodsmoke and rancid garbage and some kind of tropical nightbloom.

He knows anyway. Because they’re all working for the Teacher. The whole thing with the investigators was a ruse, a setup.
Even the trial itself was a trick. They want an excuse to kill my child, so they set up the trial and Juliet’s murder and
they’re waiting for me to make a slip.

Oliver barks, with a laugh, “All right, who laid it?”

No one back here knows English but they all understand Oliver’s disgusted sniff. The women laugh and the owners of the hen
laugh. The word is passed around. Finally a drunk, with breadcrumbs and flecks of perhaps butter clinging to the stubble on
his chin, rises and bows to Oliver. He seems to be confessing to the crime.

The others laugh at him, and Oliver laughs as hard as anyone. Plainly he’s having a good time down here. She’s seldom seen
him so excited, so cheerful. He hasn’t complained once since they boarded the plane. Get him away from that video screen,
get him out on a renegade jaunt like this, he thrives. Right now he’s laughing so hard he has to clutch his stomach.

But Annie thinks that the Teacher is watching him.

She thinks that the Teacher knows precisely where they are. She thinks that somehow he’s found a way to listen in on Oliver’s
laughter. This fear is so vivid that she puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him, “Not so loud.”

“Why not?” he says.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Because these people don’t know what you’re laughing at.”

“We’re all laughing at the same thing. At the guy who farted.”

“OK.”

The bus pauses, to squeeze a few more passengers aboard. Out the window a horde of orphans gathers. Wheedling, whimpering,
hawking peanuts. One of these kids has no legs and he rides a sort of low-slung soapbox cart, propelling himself with his
hands. As the bus pulls away he races alongside it, digging his knuckles into the asphalt, staring up at Oliver and Annie,
saying nothing, just keeping up.

“Jesus, Mom,” says Oliver. Horrified and rapt. “This city, it’s like a nightmare, isn’t it?”

She hadn’t noticed.

T
HE TEACHER
gets gas and then parks and goes into the all-night coffee shop of this rest area. He uses the men’s room. When he comes
out, he goes out the rear door. Back to where all the trucks are. The vast lot is lit up like a ballfield. He crosses to the
edge of it, to a copse of dark beech trees and a picnic table.

Eddie’s waiting there.

He says, “Vincent, she’s gone.”

The Teacher takes note of how the skin tightens at the back of his neck just below the hairline.

Says Eddie, “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. Can’t use the phones no more, Vincent. They gotta be on to us. Shit’s
gonna come over the dam. I mean it’s gonna come over the fuckin dam.”

The Teacher says evenly, “She disappeared?”

Eddie nods.

“When?”

“This morning. I think the fuckin feds got her in a safe house somewhere. Or the state, she’s working for the state. She’s
working for
somebody
now.”

The Teacher weighs the possibility. Then he shakes his head. “No. She’s been learning too quickly, and she needs some air.
But she won’t betray us.”

“You fuckin crazy? They got
to
her, Vincent. Time for us to say goodbye. Go down to Curacao, they’ll never find us. What the hell, we did our best for Louie.
Let’s go. Right now. Leave your car here. Get my daughter, we’ll take the early bird to Miami.”

The Teacher asks, “Where’s Frankie?”

Eddie shrugs. “Now? Four in the morning? He’s asleep for shit’s sake.”

“I need him to check out the woman who owns that gallery. Annie’s close to her, she might be hiding with her. Or maybe with
the man she called Turtle. In that picture of him it looked like he was somewhere in Guatemala. We need to find out if—”

“We need to get the fuck outta here!”

“No. Flight’s not called for. What we need now is to maintain the pressure. Annie’s stunned, that’s all. She’s in a vulnerable
state. A friend of hers died last night.”

“What friend?”

“That doctor.”

“Died?”

“According to the papers she took her own life.”

“You killed the doc? Oh Jesus, Vincent, what did you do that for?”

“There’s no suspicion of foul play.”

Eddie glowers at him.

Thruway headlights ooze up and down the trunks of the beech trees.

“Eddie.”

“What.”

“
The Sage is impartial. The Sage sees the people as straw dogs
. So don’t stare at me. If there are things you don’t understand, I’ll try to explain them.”

“I don’t want your fuckin explanations, Vincent. All I want’s this shit to be over. If they clip you? They gonna clip me too.
You know what I’m saying? I’m saying you’re being a fuckhead. I’m saying I love you, but it’s time for you to take a break.”

The Teacher looks at Eddie’s dark-socketed eyes, and at all the flesh-baggage beneath them. “You’re not sleeping these days,
Eddie?”

“Who gives a shit?”

“Are your dreams keeping you awake?”

“Like what dreams?”

“Do you ever dream about Annie?”

“Fuck you. She did what we asked her to, OK? Now let her the fuck go.”

“I’d like to. I can’t. It’s as though we were married, Annie and I. How can I let her go?”

O
LIVER
and his mom ride in the back of a pickup with fifteen people from T’ui Cuch, on a precarious dirt road that switchbacks higher
and higher into the mountains above Huehuetenango.

Oliver has made a friend, Juan Calmo Cruz, a kid about his age or maybe a few years older. Oliver is teaching Juan Calmo a
little English, and Juan Calmo is teaching Oliver a little Mam—the local Mayan language.

Oliver points and says, “Cigar.”

Juan Calmo points and says, “
Sich
.” He flicks imaginary Groucho-ashes.

Oliver points and says, “Woman.”

Juan Calmo practices getting his mouth around the globe of that word: “WO-mun. WO-mun.”

Oliver shivers and says, “It’s cold.”

Juan Calmo doesn’t understand.

“Mom, what’s cold in Spanish?”

“I forget.
Fría?
”

“
Sí, frío
,” says Juan Calmo. He regards their thin shirts. He turns and leans over the cab of the pickup, toward the driver’s window,
and shouts something.

After a while they pull up at a little thatch-roofed store on the side of the road. Juan Calmo takes Oliver and Mom inside.
He helps Mom to bargain, and she buys Oliver a heavy cotton shirt with red and white stripes like Juan Calmo’s—like the shirts
of all the T’ui Cuch men. Also a woolen jacket embroidered with the figure of a bat.

She buys herself a heavy wool coat lined with rabbit’s fur.

When they get back into the pickup everyone applauds.

These T’ui Cuchians look nothing like the moon-faced lowlanders on last night’s bus. These people are tall, with carved cheekbones,
emphatic chins, a cocky grace to their stance. They sit steady, even on this jolting ride, with their shoulders thrown back.

The road climbs up to the top of the mountain, then dips again. Into the belly of a cloud. Oliver and Juan Calmo stand side
by side behind the cab and look forward, the white wind in their faces. They stand silently, bouncing along for nearly an
hour.

Then the mist lifts, and they can see down this long valley of Oz-green acres to a hillock girdled by mountains. And there,
amid cornfields and potato fields and dwarf apple trees, is the village of T’ui Cuch. Merely a cluster of thatched roofs.
And way up on a slope above them, the stone ruins of a church. And smoke. And waterfalls tumbling down the steep sides of
the mountains.

Oliver turns. “Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re here.”

She raises her eyes. Her expression doesn’t change. She asks Juan Calmo, “
Conoce, conoces… un gringo… se llama… Turtle?
”

“
Cómo?
” says Juan Calmo.

“Or Walter Reisinger?”

“
Cómo?
” says Juan Calmo.

She shouts over the wind. “Walter Reisinger?”

Juan Calmo shakes his head.

She asks some others. Nobody knows the name.

She says, “
Es un, un médico?
”