Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “There’s a lot we can just skip if you want to.”

  “We could skip this whole conversation from the sound of it.”

  “Things do need saying.”

  “Then you’re going to have to explain yourself.”

  “Okay, Mel. You took the stills of the cave with my camera. But you didn’t know that cameras leave tool marks on a negative, like a gun leaves marks on cartridge. The tool marks matched up perfectly, once the Bureau and Will Fortune got my old Yashica into the lab. It seemed to confirm the theory that I took the pictures. But I knew better, and I began to wonder who had access to it. I was pretty sure it was Ish, until Joe found your fingerprints all over the pictures you stole from Ardith’s notebooks. Those were still at Wytton Street.”

  I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. When I looked back at her she was leaning against the garage wall with her arms crossed, head tilted down a little, but her eyes fixed straight on me. It was easier to accuse her to the hills than to her face. I wanted her to defeat my case, shatter my evidence, provide me with a surprise but ironclad defense. But she didn’t and I knew she wouldn’t. So I turned back to the oblique spring haze.

  “It was easy enough to get the pictures of me—the raw material. You just took a day off, had a couple of drinks maybe, and played burglar while you knew Ardith was at work. It probably took you fifteen minutes, once you decided to do it. You knew those shots were somewhere in Ardith’s possession because I’d told you about them. Well, maybe it took half an hour—they were up in the closet. The hard part was getting to Shroud on the Web, fishing around as Mal. You knew it was one of my handles, and you did the fishing early or late, before work, and after everyone else was gone. You used Ishmael’s terminal. It took you close to forty conversations, once you were referred to the proper creator. I’d be willing to bet you did some horse trading right here at home, too. The artwork cost you thirty grand, because you wanted good stuff, real convincing, state-of-the-art images. You put them in the pink envelope and slipped it into Chet Alton’s house the night after we took him down. Ditto the negatives from the film recorder. Not really too difficult—you knew we were about to sting a creep so you were ready. All you needed to know was where he lived—easy enough to find out, with your terminal linked up to everybody else’s. But that’s why you came home late and headed straight into the tequila—lots of nerves needed cooling by then. Kind of a celebration, too. You figured Chet would have to explain away those pictures of me to cover his own pathetic ass, like all the other stuff he’d collected. They were just a handful out of a million pictures at that point, so when he said he’d never seen them before, nobody on the planet would believe him. Of course, he couldn’t argue away the negatives, too, could he?”

  One of my former neighbors drove slowly past and rubbernecked me from his car. I waved like a suburban dad: all systems normal, family life rolling along. “Amazing how your neighbors ignore you until you’re an accused child molester,” I said. “Then you could write a book and they’d line up at a mall to buy it.”

  “The whole world’s that way.”

  “Want me to keep going, close my case?”

  “Do what you want.”

  “You paid on your old joint account, which you never closed out or took Ish’s name off of. I don’t know why. Maybe you thought if I traced things that far, I’d figure it was Ish for sure and challenge him to a duel or something. But you didn’t have two payments of fifteen grand sitting around, so you got an unsecured loan at God knows what rate, figuring you’d cover it with what you could get out of the house equity here. You settled for a lousy deal because you needed the money sooner than later. Plus, you understood by then that you were helping to finance The Horridus, not some closet perv named Shroud. That made things kind of hot, especially inside your soul. Time to quit the game and get out. According to the papers I signed, you’ll get less than twenty of the original thirty you paid up for this place. Same with me. But that was enough to borrow against, keep the cash flowing and get you up to Portland. I could go on with more details, but I think you get the drift.”

  Silence.

  I turned. She had picked up one of Penny’s aluminum softball bats. She had the handle in one hand and the barrel in the other. She appeared to be studying the logo. Then she looked at me, her face glum but her eyes charged with something I had never seen in her before. Her irises were black. She fixed me with a look of pure fear and fury. and I understood what I was to her. I was a monster standing in the mouth of her cave. If I hadn’t turned to look just then—would she or wouldn’t she? A cold shiver blossomed across the middle of my back because I didn’t know the answer.

  Then, motion to my left.

  “Mom?”

  Penny’s face was uncomprehending as she looked at her mother. As uncomprehending as mine must have been.

  “Are you guys—”

  Mel looked at her as if Penny were a stranger. Then the rage passed and the pale gray returned to Melinda’s eyes. She dropped the bat back into the box like it was scalding hot. “We’re okay, honey. Just ugly adult stuff that you don’t need to hear. Go back in.”

  Penny’s doubt was mollified just enough that she could glance at me, then back at her mother, and pretend she hadn’t seen something that would stay with her forever. She looked down and absently petted Moe. “I can’t find the … the tubes we had for the posters.”

  “Under your bed.”

  A pause. Another look at me, then at her mother.

  “It’s okay, honey,” said Melinda. “Go back inside.”

  But Penny looked at me before she spoke. Her voice was soft, so girlish, but it was built of conviction and forethought. “I’m going to say something, whether you guys say I can or not. I liked us all here together. You both drank too much because you were totally sad but you were getting over it. You guys were trying. Everything was going to be all right. Things started going pretty good. Then this thing happened and it all got worse. I knew you didn’t do what they said you did, Terry. But I wish you would have told me that yourself. And I wish you two would, like, get your shit together, because it’s definitely not. And if it’s not, you’re just going to ruin everything again for everybody around you, no matter where you go.”

  Then she looked again at her mother before coming over to me and throwing her arms around my neck. I smelled the hot sweet tears on her.

  “ ’Bye, Terry.”

  “I’ll miss you, Pen.”

  “Then call.”

  She looked behind at her mother again as she walked back to the house. Moe tucked himself up close to her and followed her away. Then she was gone and I had the thought that it would be many years until I saw her again.

  “Proud of yourself?” Mel hissed. “That’s what I never wanted to happen, and it did anyway. You came here and you took her heart and you left. You fell in love with your TV cunt and you did exactly what I knew you’d do when we started out. I loathe you for what you did, Terry, but I loathe me even more for knowing it would happen from the very goddamned beginning.”

  “I had higher hopes than that.”

  “High as a kite, I’m sure. Like you were.”

  “Then why did you even let it get started?”

  She was silent, and some of the ferocious anger rose again in her eyes. I’d never really known, until that moment, how much of Melinda’s considerable willpower was tapped to keep a lid on the furies in her blood.

  “For me. To make me happy. To make me feel good again, like I was something of value. I’m too goddamned old to need a man to make me feel valuable. I know that But it doesn’t do any good to know you shouldn’t feel a way you feel. You pushed my buttons, Terry, you hung my moon for a while, and there wasn’t a lot I could talk myself out of. And you know something? I did it for you, too. I did it for your secrets and your son and your sadness and all the crazy, crazy shit you were going through when I first got to know you. You needed what I had. Hell, you needed everythi
ng. And it made me feel like an angel to give it.”

  I looked at her. The flesh of her face was red and sagging and she looked, in spite of her anger, defeated.

  “You put me back together, Melinda.”

  “But I liked you better in pieces, because you were mine then. And I’ll tell you, if I wasn’t going to keep you, no snot-nosed newscaster was going to get the man I fixed up, either. That’s a hateful thing to say, and what I did was a hateful thing to do. But I’ll stand by them, because that’s the way I felt. So I acted accordingly. By the time of your birthday I was ready to move. You deserved to have your cute little world busted up some, for what you did to me. That’s the thing about men, Terry—you take things and really don’t think of the consequences. You take and you take and you take, and you don’t think about what it’s costing. And when the bill comes due, you try to walk away. Nobody walks away from Melinda Vickers. I do the walking, when it’s time. So get out, and do what you want with what you know. I’m giving you something valuable here, Terry. I’m giving you the luxury of being thrown out. Take it Feel wronged. You can remember me any way you want, but don’t suck up to my kid anymore. You don’t qualify as a part of her life. You’re just history we’re going to forget.”

  I looked at her a long while.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry for what I did.”

  “I’m not, for what I did. I wish you could have sizzled on the grill a little longer.”

  “You lay it on pretty thick, Mel.”

  “Life with you was a bag of shit, Terry. What’s it matter how I spread it?”

  I nodded and walked away.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Am I poisonous?”

  “As in harmful, or as in fatal?”

  “Poison is poison, Donna.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me consider that a moment while you swerve to avoid the mule.”

  We were thirty clicks south of the border, between Tijuana and Ensenada, Donna with five days of vacation ahead and I still on leave. Donna, per usual, was shooting video, having never been to Mexico before. We were in her convertible and the top was down, so that made it easy. She had a polka dot scarf over her head. The morning was late and warm and the coastal fog was breaking up to reveal green hills and a hard blue Pacific. The dark highway flowed by under us, divided by a center railing of black and white posts that blurred if you tried to watch them up close. The road is good and wide and encourages velocity. I moved toward the center line on the sweeping downhill curve. The mule’s ears flapped in the slipstream of the car. The roads down here are better than they used to be, but shoulders are not a Mexican concern.

  I was driving fast and hadn’t said much, until then. I was anxious over what we’d do with five days together, because we’d never had more than twelve hours straight. Donna’s presence put me in a state of agitation so intense I couldn’t imagine five days with her being anything but good. But I have been misled by passion before, or, maybe, passion has been misled by me. More to the point, Melinda’s verdict was echoing loud in a soul made hollow by Johnny’s death. But I had not asked Donna to Mexico to lose myself in her, as I had tried to do in Melinda—to my shame, I know. What I wanted to do was find myself. And hopefully, to be able to stand the man I discovered.

  “First of all, I don’t think you should shoulder more than your fair share of the blame,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For anything. You see, that makes a man unhappy, and it makes him feel sorry for himself, and he hogs the road because he’s taken on such a wide load. It’s arrogant to take all the credit for good things, right? Well, taking all the blame is pretty near the same thing.”

  “You’re telling me I’m not poisonous.”

  “Naw, Terry. All of us choose what we drink. Except the children and the feebleminded, I suppose. They can get suckered.”

  “I tried not to misrepresent myself.”

  “You’re pretty obviously who you are.”

  “But then I messed up and had to lie about it. About you.”

  “That truth would have been told.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what I could have done about Johnny.”

  “Then don’t convince yourself that you could have done anything. Just mourn him, Terry. Don’t add him to a list of mistakes you made. That doesn’t do John or you any good.”

  I held up the bottle of Herradura we’d bought back in Tijuana. Good dark gold. It was still a little early in the day for power drinking, but I was considering a nip to build an edge, make things festive. Donna had suggested the liter rather than the quart.

  “You haven’t had much to drink the last couple of weeks,” she said.

  “Pretty light.”

  “Feel a bender coming on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pull over. I’ll drive. You can take on spirits, prod your conscience all you can stand.”

  I always liked being a passenger. You get to see more.

  Donna is a very good driver, fast and alert and aware. So I sat back and inhaled the perpetual trash-burn smell of the Baja coast and watched the blue water hit the black rocks and felt the unhurried sunshine on my neck and legs. Rosarito. Puerto Nuevo. Calafia. La Fonda. We pulled over at Teresa’s, a restaurant that stands alone at the edge of the rocks and has windows looking down a hundred feet to the violent shore. It was just before noon on a weekday so the place was empty of customers, just Teresa’s husband and one of her sons, and Teresa, who does the cooking.

  We took a table at the window. Teresa’s has pink walls with posters of bullfighters on it, and lots of Mexican beer advertisements. I’ve been here a lot This time of day the pink warmth of a room built by hand meets the cool blue of a coast indifferent to human effort, right there at the windowpane beside you. This border shimmers with a collision of forces old as time itself. It’s like the glass is the only thing that stands between the one thing and the other. You sit there and feel very mortal, which is to say very alive. Somehow blessed, too.

  And Teresa’s slender husband starts you off with a curt buenas dias and a shot of good tequila. We sipped and stared out the contested window glass.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “You’re not even looking at me.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “True story.”

  “All your stories are true, aren’t they?”

  I thought about this.

  “No.”

  “Should I know the difference?”

  “That would take time.”

  “Do we have that?”

  “I’ll give you mine if you really want it.”

  She looked at me and rested her hand over mine on the tabletop. What a nervy shiver that woman could send through me.

  “So,” she said, “if we have time, where should we start? What stories of yours shall we vet?”

  “There’s a lot to choose from.”

  “I want a specific one.”

  “Which?”

  “The one you always think about. The one that’s bigger than you. The one that eats at you all day and every day. The one that the tequila gives you the courage to face, and the comfort to avoid.”

  “Ah.” I looked at her dark bright eyes, her brown hair released now from the polka dot scarf and curling forth around her face, her pale skin.

  Just then, Teresa’s husband came to ask us our preference: small, medium or large lobsters. We got large. He poured us two more shots and Donna asked him to leave the bottle.

  “I can see where this is going,” I said, looking at it.

  “Drink it up, Terry, if that’s what it’s going to take.”

  I poured another shot and sipped it half down. Here we go, I thought.

  “Don’t you have some questions about the cause of Matt’s death?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”
r />   “Because you told me he drowned and that was good enough for me.”

  I looked at her for the slightest sign that she was lying. I saw none at all. A dishonest man never trusts someone else.

  “You didn’t read his death certificate?”

  “You asked me not to. So I didn’t.”

  “I asked you not to do a story about what happened to him.”

  “Well, we can argue semantics all day. Fact is, I didn’t mention your boy. I did everything I could to make you look good and strong. That interview was a ten-minute love poem to you, whether you understood it or not. Maybe I’m no poet. But I went to some lengths to keep the original out of my boss’s hands. You know, I could take some offense here. I’m trying not to.”

  “No, no. Please don’t.”

  I tilted back the golden liquid and poured more. I could clearly feel the warmth of our pink room and the cool of the Pacific just behind the glass and the roiling border zone between them where Donna and I sat and waited for the truth to be told. A squad of pelicans coasted by the window in formation, no movement of their wings at all, just big brown birds resting heavily in air. I thought of Matt. I thought of Johnny. I thought of Mary Lou Kidder. I heard a lovely twinkling sound and when I turned to it a girl in a pink dress stood beside the table with some curios to sell. Paper calla lilies in her left hand. An open box of Chiclets on a platform tied around her neck. And a mobile of small onyx birds connected with string in her right. She lifted the birds and in the invisible turmoil of our zone they moved and chimed sweetly against each other.

  “No,” I said.

  “Here, for all,” said Donna, and put down a twenty on the table. The girl smiled and set down the lilies, then the box of gum, then handed Donna the stone birds. She said gracias and ran for the stairs.

  “I like these,” she said, holding up the mobile. She hung it over the window latch beside us.

  I drank until the ocean outside was impossibly bright, every silver shard owning a specific life of its own, every flash a minor history. The least I could do was offer back a history of my own.