“But you’re more alive,” he says with exasperation. “Look, child victims don’t age any better than child actors. You’re a woman now, beautiful, independent.”
“You make that sound bad.”
“Not bad, just not helpful. You’re not as pitiable as you were then. And frankly, probably not as likable.”
“Thanks,” she mutters. “you’re a doll, too.”
“Nothing personal, Natalie. Besides, it’s not just you, it’s him. You have to understand—thirteen years ago, everyone hated this guy. But he’s used his time well. In the past few years, he’s recreated himself, made himself popular.”
“How? By claiming to talk to spirits?”
“He calls them angels, Natalie, Americans love angels. You want to retire rich, write a book about angels.”
“But it’s bullshit!”
“I’m not getting through to you, am I?” he asks. “Regardless of what you think, Natalie, this time around, everyone’s going to be a lot tougher on you, and a lot more willing to listen to his side of the story. Crazy, I know, but real. You want us to win this thing, you want us to have any chance at all, you have to give me something to go on. Now I need you to tell me what makes you so certain Ralston intended to pull that trigger.”
The anger that Natalie has been struggling to keep in check finally boils over. “You’re right,” she says, rising to her feet. “Things have changed. Thirteen years ago, I may have been the perfect victim, and Ralston may have been the perfect villain, but prosecutors also had balls.”
Ballard’s expression doesn’t change. “Maybe,” he says softly. “Or maybe it didn’t take balls to prosecute him the first time.” He tosses her the videotape, which she catches just as it clatters off the armrest of her chair. “Start paying attention to the opposition, Natalie. Maybe you’ll realize I’m not it.”
7
Love Ripens into Something Awful
“Sign my petition to save the mall?”
Maureen shoves a clipboard out at a man dressed in corporate casual wear—khakis, polo shirt, loafers. He accelerates past, muttering something about being in a hurry, not having the time. “Butthole,” she says to his back, and turns to Natalie. “So, why didn’t you just answer his question?”
Natalie shrugs. They are strolling slowly down the poorly lit corridor that constitutes the blighted heart of the Town Center Mali, an aging Mecca of cheap slated to be torn down soon to make way for a more exuberantly modern self-contained shopping experience. Carpeted in a dingy used-to-be-blue, the place is home to purveyors of discount merchandise so crappy it’s worthless to everyone but hassled parents slumming for bargains and the bus-ins from town who shop here because it’s the slice of the consumerist dream they can afford.
Maureen, who claims to have fond memories of hanging out here as a teenager, is determined to keep the wrecking ball at bay. It’s a strange obsession, but Natalie makes allowances for other people’s oddities.
“You’re going to have to eventually, you know,” Maureen tells her.
“Just like you’re going to have to give up on this dump eventually?”
“Don’t be so smug.” Maureen taps her clipboard. “I got another seventeen names this morning.”
“Seventeen poor people,” Natalie observes wryly. “That’ll make everyone sit up and take notice.”
“Just answer my question, smart girl,” Maureen laughs. “Why didn’t you play ball with the poor guy? He’s your ally, remember?”
“That’s just it” Natalie answers. “That’s what I went in expecting. I wasn’t ready for him to start putting me on trial like that. I mean, Jesus, I was there, I saw him do it. What more do they want from me?”
They pass between the costume jewelry kiosk and the booth where the chiropractors are peddling free spinal screenings. Another pair of women jostle past talking about the knock-off purses they just bought, oblivious to the little boy one of them is yanking along by the arm. At the t-shirt kiosk, a kid who’s maybe twelve and should be in school somewhere is trying on a shirt that reads SCREW THIS I’M OUTTA HERE. He plops down some money and heads out the
main door, just like the shirt says.
“Cute, isn’t he?” Maureen asks.
“Oh, Christ.” Natalie sighs.
“And single.”
“Forget it.”
“Kind of a jerk, though. They call him the daredevil, you know.”
“Who does?”
“His office. He’s into extreme sports, likes to take risks. Not too popular with the DA. though. Didn’t do enough to support her in the last election. She’s looking for an excuse to dump him.”
“Then why give him this case?”
Maureen stops and sighs. “To make him look bad. She doesn’t expect him to win, Natalie.” The two women stare at each other for a moment, not quite knowing what to say next. An older woman carrying bags from three stores shuffles past and Maureen holds the clipboard out in front of her. “Save the mall?”
The woman responds with that oh-god-a-crazy-person-who-wants-to-kill me expression that seems to have become the signature American facial gesture for greeting strangers. But when she realizes that Maureen is neither threatening nor kidding, her face thaws and she grins broadly.
“What in the hell for?” she demands.
“So we’ll have a place to shop,” Maureen offers.
“We’ll still have a place to shop, honey, just be nicer stores. Can’t happen soon enough, that’s my opinion. Sorry.”
“But it’ll just be like every other place! Too expensive, everything the same, no history.”
“History?” the woman scoffs. “Honey, this is a mall. You know what used to be here? Fields. I used to come here as a kid, flew kites, played games with my brother, my friends. Right out there” – she points toward the parking lot – “there used to be a big old barn. Wood creaked in the wind, scary. That’s history. This here’s just a place you come to buy stuff, and not much of one at that. There’s no history here.”
The old lady trundles off and disappears behind the man selling vintage LPs. “I need a cigarette,” Maureen mutters. “Can’t believe they won’t let us smoke in here anymore. Used to be, everyone here smoked.”
“She has a point” Natalie says.
“The hell she does,” Maureen counters. “I got my ears pierced here, my first date was here, my first husband proposed to me up at Vince’s there.” She points in the direction of the greasy coffee shop down the hallway. “I’ve got memories here, Natalie. May not be a spooky old barn, but it’s history.”
“You hated your first husband,” Natalie points out.
“I’ve hated all my husbands. That’s beside the point.”
They continue ambling down the hallway. Maureen succeeds in picking up a couple more signatures, but at last she has had enough and they head toward Vince’s for some coffee. “Forgot to give this to you,” Maureen says, handing Natalie a scrap of paper as they walk. “She called for you this morning. Wouldn’t tell me what it was about. just wanted you to have that.”
Scrawled on the paper are an address and phone number, and a name Natalie isn’t surprised to see: M Latham.
“Anything important?” Maureen asks.
Natalie starts to tell her about Marida’s phone call when the big screen TV outside the home appliance store snags her attention. At first, she’s not sure why, but slowly the image sinks in, and her eyes dart rapidly back and forth between the television and the crumpled slip of paper in her hand.
On the oversized screen, a tow truck is dragging a large white van from a body of water—could be a river, or a lake. Pixelated water is pouring from an open door, and grave-faced men in uniforms and wetsuits are milling about and peering inside. Superimposed across the bottom of the screen in hysterical type are the words: MASS SUICIDE.
The slip of paper burns against Natalie’s palm. A van in a lake, everyone dead. How many people, she wonders? Like the number is the important thing,
the thing she really cares about.
She may be wrong, of course; it may be something completely different one of those strange coincidences that sends chills up your spine and makes you marvel at how eerily the world works. But she doubts it.
All that water. How else would you find your way home to Atlantis?
* * *
Questions she asks herself:
Why did she have to yell at Stephanie that way and make her cry? Why did it have to happen then, of all times? If it had to happen at all, why that day?
Later, when Father was pointing the gun at them, why did she react the way she did? Why did she leap to her feet with Stephanie still wrapped around her like a vest, the non-bullet proof kind? Why didn’t she pull her little sister’s arms from around her neck before she jumped up?
And, failing that, why didn’t she turn to shield her? Why did she put Stephanie between herself and the gun?
Why, instead of standing up, didn’t she just stay put and die with the rest of them?
* * *
Natalie stares through her dirty windshield down the length of Marida Latham’s placid street, trying to get a sense for it. By all appearances, it’s a benign place, comfy and rich. The sort of established neighborhood where upscale people pay handsomely to keep the forces of malignancy at bay, and indeed their walkways are littered with metal-staked placards advertising fancy alarm systems. The street’s massive old homes convey a sense of solidity and security, like people here know about slipping through time unscathed, their families and perimeter defenses intact.
Marida Latham’s house is a renovated Victorian, a pastel peacock that dominates the tree-lined street with a vibrant glee that seems utterly wrong for the moment. But this is clearly the place: the three digits etched in the leaded glass above the front door match the number on the scrap of paper from Maureen. Natalie steps from her car with a sigh and climbs slowly to the front door, vaguely noticing the cool breeze but mostly imagining the sort of reception she’ll get. No worse than she deserves, probably. What could be worse than that?
Sorry. That’s all she wants to say—all she can say, really. Sorry for your loss, sorry I was such a self-absorbed idiot. It’s ridiculous in the extreme. and she knows it won’t help, either Marida Latham or herself; there really is such a thing as too little, too late.
Maureen told her not to come. “It’s not your fault, she insisted. “You couldn’t have done anything to stop it. By the time she called you, they were probably already playing Charlie Tuna.”
Probably true, but totally irrelevant. Hindsight’s pardons don’t count. You have a little girl’s fate thrust into your hands for the briefest of moments and all that matters is what you do with that. Either you shut out a mother’s pleas, or you don’t.
Either you use the child as a shield, or you don’t.
And if there’s blood and might not have been if you had acted differently, no matter how slim the chance, then it’s blood on your hands. No excuses.
At least this time there’s someone to apologize to. If you have been given that much, shouldn’t you take it? Shouldn’t you have the guts and the decency to face the person you’ve failed and say you’re sorry? Not because that will make everything all right—nothing can do that—but because it’s something you owe, a trivial but necessary down payment on the unthinkable debt you’ve accrued?
That’s why she’s here, and why she rings the bell. Almost immediately, the front door opens and an elderly woman eyes her disapprovingly from the other side of the threshold. “Can I help you?” she demands.
“Marida Latham?” Natalie asks, even though the woman seems older than she expected.
“I’m her neighbor,” the woman answers. “If you’re with the press—.”
“I’m not” Natalie interjects. “My name is Natalie Krill. Mrs. Latham called me last nlght— I just wanted her to know how sorry I am.”
The neighbor woman’s face softens slightly. ‘‘I’m afraid she’s in no condition for visitors right now, but I’ll let her know you stopped by.”
She starts to close the door when another voice can be heard murmuring in the background. The woman turns around to look at someone behind her. “It’s a young woman—says her name is Natalie Krill,” she explains. There’s more murmuring and the woman asks. “Are you sure you’re up to it, dear?” Another pause and then: “All right, then, if you insist.”
Obviously not pleased, she opens the door wide and ushers Natalie through a dark foyer into a sitting room that glows warmly in the daylight filtering in through two sheer-laced windows. It’s a cozy space, filled with elegant antiques and a hint of must. Books line the back wall, and beneath a lovingly restored sheen, the room’s hardwood floor displays nail holes and faint signs of ancient splotches, proud proof of heritage.
Natalie turns to thank the neighbor woman but she’s already gone. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else present and while she’s waiting Natalie realizes she’s in the midst of a quiet riot of crystal and porcelain—every square inch of surface space is covered in miniature dolls, figurines, small frames, tiny boxes with fragile clasps. Her hostess is one of those nick-knack ladies, a collector of minuscule things.
Across the room there’s a photograph mounted on the wall. In it a young girl with warm dark eyes and a slight l’m-bored-with-this-now-take-the-photo-please smile is holding up an impressive silver-and-brown fish. The sun sparkles in her hair and on the water behind her, and it’s one of those unsettling pictures that captures a moment of exquisite and unsustainable joy.
Natalie turns away. Because what she sees swimming up through the years is Stephanie’s face. They could be sisters, this girl and Stephanie.
Which would make her Natalie’s sister, too. She has a bad track record with sisters.
A winged chair by the far window moves, and from it rises a striking woman wearing a simple khaki dress. She has pale, white skin and shoulder-length black hair that encircles her round face so that it seems to float above her body like the moon in a night sky. Anxious lines tug her skin too tightly across her face, and her eyes—dark like the girl’s in the photograph—are red with pain, but she still has the timeless beauty of a pretty woman entering middle age.
“You came,” she observes in a low, empty voice.
“I saw it on the news,” Natalie stammers. “I just—.” Her voice dies in her throat. From her, from the woman who wouldn’t help, even sorry sounds like an absurdity.
“You want to help me now?” Selena’s mother asks.
Natalie came prepared for sarcasm, derision, anger, so that’s what she assumes this is, even though Marida’s tone is too flat and despondent to sustain irony. Natalie has trouble looking her in the eyes, and her wandering gaze settles on an end table covered in those Russian dolls that open up onto smaller and smaller versions of themselves. That’s how she feels right now, like a dwindling away of herself. Crack her open and all you’ll find is another shell, and inside that another, on and on until you get to the last one and find there’s nothing inside, nothing left. Just a series of inconsequential husks.
“Is that her?” she asks, pointing at the picture of the girl.
Marida nods. “Her father used to like to fish,” she says bitterly, “before he decided to become one.”
Natalie studies the photograph. A sweet father-daughter outing. Followed now by another one, so different, so utterly perverse in its similarities. Strange, how love gets twisted.
Here’s the answer to the question Ballard was so intent on forcing her to answer this morning. Here’s how Natalie knows with total certainty that Ralston intended to shoot Stephanie—and all the rest of them, for that matter, had he been given the time.
Because he loved them.
Because it’s not an act with him, the whole caring thing. it’s real. He loved them. And sometimes, love ripens into something awful.
But how do you explain that to people who think of love as the sentiment in a Hallmark card, all C
upid’s arrows and love’s eternal flame? How do you persuade them to pinpoint the source of a man’s evil in the depth of his affection?
“I should have tried to help,” Natalie whispers.
“Why should you be any different from everyone else?” Marida asks with a pained shrug. “You at least have an excuse. The rest of them, the police, they didn’t believe me before—what’s their excuse? They want to help me now, but now’s too late, isn’t it?”
Her eyes are so vacant, so emptied by loss, that Natalie has to look away again. Yes, now is too late.
“They’ll never find her in time, not now,” Marida adds. “Tethys is too smart for them, too smart for everybody, even dead.”
“Find her?” Natalie asks, confused. “What do you mean?”
The older woman focuses on her sharply. “You mean you don’t . . . oh.”
She bites her lip and turns away.
Natalie suddenly has the sensation of being watched, and her gaze is drawn back to the photograph. The girl staring through her father’s camera and the accumulation of years into the eyes of a stranger who stands impotently by while her mother grieves amid dusty collectibles. Did Selena catch a glimpse of Natalie then, in that click of the shutter, a silvery flash of connection across time?
It isn’t possible, of course; she shouldn’t even ask it, when the asking will just cause more pain. But the words are on her tongue and winging through the air before she thinks to stop them.
“Are you saying she’s still alive?”
Marida doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t have to. The way the question chokes her into frozen silence says it all, and Natalie realizes that the answer is neither yes nor no, but something infinitely more difficult, something in between, a transition playing out its inexorable progression, as predictable and unavoidable as a video you’ve seen too many times rolling by in painful slow motion.
Not dead, but dead soon.
How soon?
Ring of Years Page 8