Pariah
Page 29
He shrugged. “Skiing,” he said. “Naked. I wish you could’ve been there.”
She tossed back her head and laughed. After a few moments of awkward silence she touched his hand again. “You haven’t told anyone, have you? Not even Corky. You’ve kept my dirty little secrets to yourself.” Her cool smile was tempered with suspicion. “When a man does that, it usually means he expects something in return. Are you expecting something, Kurt?”
He remembered what Muffin had once told him. You need to find yourself a nice stable lady who loves dogs and children and putters around in her garden. Somebody who isn’t beaten up by her past.
“Your secrets are your business, Carole,” he said. “You’re the one who has to live with them.”
She stood up and sauntered to the railing and gazed down the slope of Red Mountain toward the gingerbread village of Aspen. “I tried out a lot of things when I was younger,” she said with her back to him. “I guess we all did, didn’t we? Some of them took, some didn’t. You remember how it was.”
He remembered. “How about you and Nicole?” he asked. “Did that take?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “No, it didn’t. She married Westbrook, I found other partners. I wasn’t into women for very long. Like you said, it was the times.”
“Did you stay in touch with her?”
“We didn’t see each other for years,” she said. “The trial was too scary to hang around for, so I left town. I couldn’t have helped her, anyway. The Bauer family locked her up to keep her away from all her old friends. The marriage to Westbrook was Papa Bauer’s bright idea. After that, none of us could get near her.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
She paused, calculating. “About nine months ago,” she said. “We met for lunch.” She turned around to offer him a sad smile. “She knew that you and I were friends, and she wanted my advice. She wanted to know what she should do to get you back.”
Kurt dropped his eyes. He had been cruel to a good woman.
“She called me again a few weeks ago, when the letters started coming. She was convinced Rocky was alive. She wanted me to tell her it wasn’t so.”
He stared at her. “Because you would know for certain,” he said. “Because you were there the night he died.”
Her face betrayed the truth. She made no effort to deny what he had said.
“And that’s why you went to see old Doc Brumley,” he said. “You had to be sure yourself.”
Without answering him she slowly crossed the deck to the patio doors and peered through the glass. Her children were somewhere in the house, lost in a fantasy world of their own. She tested the door, closing it tightly. She didn’t want anyone to hear what she was going to tell him.
“He was beating and choking her, Kurt,” she said, turning to face him with her hands behind her back, clutching the door latch. “I was asleep on a couch downstairs and I heard her screams. When I got to the bedroom they were fighting out on the deck. It was slick with ice. She kept slipping down and he kept kicking her and calling her horrible names.” The memory brought tears to her eyes. “I thought he was going to kill her.”
He rose from his recliner and walked toward her and took her in his arms. “It’s okay,” he said, rubbing his hand up and down the back of her vest “It was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said, her voice husky and breaking. “I ran out onto the deck and grabbed him from behind and, and—”
“Shhh,” he said, touching his finger to her lips. “That’s enough, now. Everyone knows what happened. He slipped and went through the railing and it was all an accident.”
“No, Kurt,” she cried. “That’s not exactly how it happened.”
“Hush, now,” he said, holding her close. “Don’t say another word. It doesn’t matter. It’s ancient history.”
Looking over her head he saw Corky approaching the glass doors with a champagne bottle in his hand. The door slid back quietly and Kurt’s old friend stood watching their embrace with a pained expression. He seemed hesitant and confused. When Carole turned and saw him, she pulled away from Kurt and rushed into her husband’s arms.
“Hey, is everything okay?” Corky asked, stroking her hair with his free hand.
She was crying too hard to speak.
“Delayed reaction,” Kurt explained with a warm smile for his friend. “It’s going to take her a while to get over what happened.”
He patted them both on the arms and went inside the house to give them some private time together. He checked on the boys, who were jabbering away, taking turns with the joysticks, oblivious to his presence. They wouldn’t need him until they got hungry or wanted a ride somewhere.
He walked into the study and closed the door behind him. Sitting at his father’s old desk, staring at the heavy Underwood typewriter, his thoughts turned fondly to Nicole Bauer. Whatever else she had done with her life, however distraught and unstable she had become, she had never betrayed her old friend. She had borne the burden of guilt and spared Carole from an indictment for homicide, and she had carried their secret to the grave. Nicole had been a woman who valued loyalty and friendship, no matter how poorly she was treated in return.
He opened a desk drawer and searched through the clutter. Somewhere in there he had stashed the notes Nicole had sent him last fall. A faint scent of jasmine led him to her stationery, buried in the back behind the unpaid bills and loose rubber bands and box of paper clips. He dragged out the small stack of envelopes and opened one. Darling Kurt, the note began. Why don’t you call? I know you’re a busy man but I would love to see you for a few hours, if you can spare the time. Have you forgotten me?
No, he hadn’t forgotten Nicole Bauer. And he promised her he never would.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Annette Carlozzi, Jim Magnuson, and the late great Rick Roderick for their careful reading of the manuscript and their generous support and encouragement. Although I no longer live in Aspen, it occupies a special place in my memory. There were many good friends who enriched my life there, too many to name in this space. They know who they are. I will always cherish them and the town where my son was born.
About the Author
Thomas Zigal is the author of the critically acclaimed Kurt Muller mystery series set in Aspen, Colorado, and the thriller The White League, set in New Orleans. He is a graduate of the Stanford Writing Program and has published short stories and book reviews in literary magazines and fiction anthologies for the past thirty years. He grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast and in Louisiana and now lives in Austin, Texas.