Eyes of a Child

by Richard North Patterson

  Paget stood. ‘I guess that’s it, then,’ he said, and shook Caroline’s gracefully extended hand. ‘Please let me know if you have any other thoughts.’

  ‘I shall. In the meantime, Christopher, try not to worry about this more than is necessary to help me. And do give Terri my best.’

  Paget headed for the door. ‘Actually,’ Caroline said, ‘there is one other thing.’

  Paget turned to her. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘When they give you back the Jaguar, put it in the garage. And mothball the Armani suits, or whatever they are. From now until you’re off the hook, I’d like you to imagine yourself on camera and the television audience as jurors.’

  When Paget raised his eyebrows, Caroline smiled. ‘You’re a very attractive man, Christopher. I’ve always thought so. But for a prospective defendant, you’re just a bit too elegant.’

  Chapter 11

  Terri sat on her living room couch, wearing a flannel nightgown and her first pair of reading glasses. Legal files were scattered around her, and the television news was on ‘mute.’ The apartment itself was bare – worn couch and borrowed chairs, a cheap wooden breakfast table for Terri and Elena – and the one floor lamp she had gotten from Richie highlighted the room’s bleakness. It was just past eleven.

  ‘We’re a long way from Italy,’ she said to Paget.

  ‘Not as long as I’d like.’

  She gave him a look that mixed worry and inquiry. It was the first time they’d been able to talk since the police had searched their homes. Wary of the telephone, and tied up in trials, they’d been reduced to meeting at Terri’s once Elena had fallen asleep. ‘What do you think is wrong?’ she said.

  Paget hesitated. ‘Politics is my guess. I think James Colt wants to stop me from running for the Senate.’

  Terri frowned. ‘Do you have any proof of that?’

  Paget felt a moment’s discomfort. His mind and Terri’s usually followed the same paths; tonight Tern’s professional skepticism seemed to open a distance between them. As foolish as it was, what Paget most wanted was an accepting lover.

  ‘No proof,’ he said finally. ‘Just logic.’

  Terri shook her head. ‘Politics only takes you so far. They think Richie was murdered and that one of us has lied. Maybe, because of politics, someone hopes it’s you.’

  Paget considered her. ‘I don’t think they even need that much. James Colt is clever enough to know that the stench of a criminal inquiry would scare most politicians and prejudice most voters. Particularly when the subjects are murder, adultery, and child abuse.’ Pausing, Paget realized how trapped he felt. ‘Never, in his wildest dreams, would Richie have believed that his obsession with us would outlive him.’

  Terri appraised him. Softly, she said, ‘Not unless he killed himself.’

  Her watchful expressions, the few quiet words, hit Paget like a shock. ‘What does that mean?’

  Terri placed her hand gently on his wrist. ‘That there’s something you’re not telling me, Chris. Perhaps more than one something.’

  He withdrew his hand, as if from a flame. ‘Would you care to give me an example?’

  Terri stared at his hand, then into his face again. ‘What I’d like, really, is for you to tell me.’

  Suddenly Paget felt cornered. ‘All right,’ he snapped. ‘I murdered the little bastard. So that you could afford new furniture.’

  There was a first flash of resentment in Terri’s eyes. ‘Do you think I like this? Wondering if there’s something I don’t know?’ Her voice slowed. ‘My entire relationship with Richie – maybe my whole life – was based on questions I never asked and thoughts I told myself to stuff. You and I can’t be like that . . .’

  ‘This isn’t relationship counseling, damn it. It’s a possible homicide, in which you and I are potential witnesses. And as long as we’re not married, there’s nothing I could say to you that Monk or McKinley Brooks or some hotshot assistant D.A. couldn’t grill you about for hours.’ Paget forced himself to speak more softly. ‘One of us might have to testify about anything we say to each other, perhaps against the person who says it. That’s why I so seldom ask you where you found the gun.’

  Terri gave him a startled look. ‘You don’t think that I killed him.’

  ‘No, as it happens. But if we’re ever forced to testify, even asking you the question could do great damage. Unless, of course, I simply lie about this conversation.’ He paused. ‘Or, perhaps, forget we ever had it.’

  Terri’s gaze broke. ‘Jesus,’ she murmured. ‘How can we be like this?’

  Paget raised the hand that had been damaged. He kept it there, in front of Terri, until she looked up. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve been doing? Forgetting things? Especially for Monk.’

  Terri could only stare at him.

  ‘Forgetting isn’t much fun,’ Paget went on. ‘Is it Terri? Especially when your forgetfulness is just another form of lying.’

  Terri’s face composed itself, and then she looked at him directly. ‘And not talking,’ she answered, ‘makes me feel dead inside.’

  Paget turned away. ‘I know. About that and several other things, I’m very, very sorry.’

  She searched his face for meaning. ‘You don’t have to be sorry. Just tell me the truth, please. No one else will ever know it.’

  Paget looked back into her eyes. ‘Only this, Terri.’ He emphasized each word. ‘I did not kill Ricardo Arias.’

  Terri stared at him. ‘And you have no idea who did.’

  ‘None. Unless it was Richie. Just as you said.’

  Terri glanced down the hallway to the bedroom, as if Elena might hear them. Paget saw a tremor run through her, half shudder and half sigh. Beside them, the television flickered silently: talking heads and news tapes – a fire, a double murder, an interview at a homeless shelter. Terri turned to him again. ‘But you think there’s going to be a trial, don’t you?’

  To answer truthfully, Paget found, made him feel as if he were calling down a curse. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘But I no longer assume there won’t be. That’s why I hired Caroline. And it’s why, as much as I might want to, you and I can never talk about this.’

  Terri sat back, as if absorbing this new reality, and then something at the edge of Paget’s vision became part of his consciousness.

  Turning to the television, he saw the face of James Colt, his lips moving without words. Terri had followed Paget’s gaze; reaching for the remote, she switched on the sound.

  ‘I’m running for governor,’ Colt was saying to a microphone, ‘on the basis of trust.’ His voice was light but pleasant; his suntan and his white-gold hair brought a touch of southern California to the blue-gray eyes and cleft chin, a replica of his father’s. ‘Private character is the key to public leadership. I believe that any person seeking high office in the state of California should live a private life that voters can respect and their children can admire. And no one who fails to meet that test has any place in public life.’

  ‘Maybe I’m paranoid,’ Paget murmured, ‘but did you just hear a message?’

  Terri looked at him as if about to ask a question, and then she seemed to think better of it. When they turned back to the television, Colt was gone.

  Chapter 12

  ‘So Elena had the nightmare again,’ Rosa said to Terri.

  They sat on a bench in Dolores Park, where Terri and her sisters once had played. It was a sunny morning, and the rolling sweep of grass, sheltered by thick and leafy palm trees, did not look like the drug exchange and gang refuge it became after dark. There were swings and slides some distance away; Elena, active for once but plainly tired, had climbed a playground structure to the top and was gazing out at the park, alone. She showed no interest in the children playing beneath her.

  Terri watched her daughter. ‘After Chris left,’ she answered. ‘For a moment, when I came to her room, she thought I was Richie.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘She called out
“Daddy.”’ Terri shook her head. ‘Maybe she’d heard Chris’s voice.’

  When Rosa turned to watch Elena again, it was with a heightened attentiveness. After a time, she asked, ‘Did Elena say anything else?’

  ‘Not really. She seemed to realize where she was, and then she put her arms around me.’

  Pensive, Rosa fell quiet, and Terri let the subject drop. She could not mention her conversation with Chris; whatever problems they had must stay between them, and Terri preferred that her mother believe the police to be satisfied and Richie’s suicide a settled matter. As far as Terri knew, this was so: since Richie’s death, her mother’s concern had been its effect on Elena, not its status with the police.

  Now, as usual, Rosa seemed to watch her granddaughter. Even sitting on a park bench, she was impeccable – a turtleneck sweater and wool slacks, earrings and makeup, a gold bracelet on her slender wrist. Looking at her, Terri sometimes imagined a second Rosa, an elegant woman who lived in the hills above Acapulco and flew to Europe when she wished to get away. A woman, Terri thought sadly, who would never allow a man to beat her.

  ‘And you?’ Rosa asked finally. ‘Are you still having your dream?’

  It was the closest Rosa came to speaking of Tern’s father. All Terri had told her was that she was having her dream again – ‘the one from junior high school.’ Terri did not have to tell Rosa whom the dream concerned. She had done that the first night it had come: Rosa, her husband barely two weeks dead, had held Terri close without speaking a word.

  ‘Every few nights now,’ Terri said. ‘I’ve been wondering if I should talk it over with Dr Harris.’

  Rosa grazed her hair with her fingers. ‘Do you think that’s wise, Teresa. To stir things up inside you?’

  It was, Terri knew, the credo by which her mother had learned to live. All at once, it struck Terri that there was too much silence in her life. Softly, she asked, ‘Why did you never leave him, Mama?’

  In profile, her mother’s eyes widened. But what cut to Terri’s heart was the way her body became rigid; it was how she had held herself when Ramon Peralta slapped her. Only when the silence continued did Terri realize that Rosa meant to act as if she had not heard the question.

  ‘Mama?’

  Rosa flinched, almost imperceptibly. Terri put a hand on her thin shoulder. ‘I love you, Mama. Talk to me, please.’

  Slowly, Rosa turned to her. The look on her face was frightening; each line seemed etched with pain, and her eyes had a depth of passion that was almost fierce. ‘You ask why I stayed with him?’

  The simple words carried the anguish of a life lived for others and, beyond this, of Elena’s problems now. Their impact on Terri was like a blow.

  ‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘You stayed for us.’

  ‘For you, Teresa.’ Her mother stared into her eyes. ‘I do not say that easily, and never to your sisters. But when I lay next to him at night, it was your face I saw.’

  Terri felt this with the certainty of a girl who had watched her mother in the living room, her face bruised, silently urging her child up the darkened stairs as Ramon Peralta took her from behind. It was as if Ramon had bonded them for life; yet Terri, the woman, felt Rosa use the guilty underside of this unspoken bond to silence her. ‘I believe you,’ she answered. ‘But what I need from you now is to help me understand my life. Our life.’

  Her mother’s eyes hardened. ‘For what?’ she demanded. ‘So that we can wallow in something that’s best forgotten?’

  Terri gripped Rosa’s shoulder. ‘The “something” is my father. And he’s never been forgotten. I dream about him. Even our conversations, the ways we find not to speak of him, are like a memorial to what he did to us. Like how we used to whisper when he passed out on the couch, afraid that he’d wake up and hit you again.’

  Rosa turned pale: suddenly Terri felt her mother’s humiliation at being confronted with what their life had been. ‘Mama,’ she said softly, ‘I don’t judge you. I never will. You loved me, and you got me to where I am, a mother with a child we both love more than anything. But there’s a part of you, a part of my life, that is lost to me. Sometimes I think, because of that, I’ve failed Elena without knowing why.’ She looked into her mother’s face. ‘Can you understand that.’

  Rosa lowered her gaze and then slowly shook her head; Terri could not tell whether this was Rosa’s answer or a plea to be left alone. But after a moment, Rosa asked in an ashen voice, ‘What is it you wish to know?’

  ‘Why, whether for us or for me, you stayed with him. And what happened to you because of that.’

  In silence, her mother peered up at Elena. The little girl was sitting atop the play structure, doing nothing of note: Rosa watched her still. ‘Elena’s so passive,’ she murmured.

  ‘I know.’

  Rosa exhaled slowly. ‘All right, Teresa. We will do this once. And never again.’ She gazed off into the distance. ‘The answer is this: I stayed with him because a girl I barely remember now, but who in my mind seems much like you, thought that all Ramon Peralta needed to escape his fears was her. And because by the time she knew better, her first daughter had been born.’

  Terri felt unspeakably sad. ‘What was he afraid of?’

  ‘Himself.’ Rosa’s voice was filled with irony. ‘His father used to beat him. Ramon was afraid of ending up like that.’

  ‘My God, Mama.’ Suddenly, Terri had the eerie sense of watching her mother head toward a fate that only Terri could see. ‘Before you were married, did you know that?’

  ‘You must understand the Ramon I met.’ Rosa leaned back, smoothing her slacks; she did not face Terri. ‘He was just out of the navy, handsome and eager for life. I thought it nice just to watch him. But then I saw how uncertain his smiles were, how much he wanted me to like him – that was when my heart went out to him. This man, who could be so much, needed me to help him.’ Her mouth set in a grim line. ‘I was right, Teresa. For as long as he lived, Ramon needed me.’

  Terri felt a kind of strange relief. Turning to her mother, she said, ‘So you didn’t know how he would be.’

  Rosa tilted her head, as if asking the question of herself. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said slowly. ‘There was one night, after a dance at the Latin Palace. Ramon had been drinking, and I had danced with someone else. When we got in the car, Ramon slapped me out of nowhere. There were tears in his eyes before I even knew that he had seen the blood on my lip.’ Again her voice took on an ironic edge. ‘He laid his head in my lap and began sobbing, begging my forgiveness. The next day, he sent roses.’

  ‘But weren’t you afraid of him?’

  ‘Because of that?’ Rosa gave a small shrug. ‘To be truthful, Ramon wasn’t so different from a lot of other men I had known, starting with my father. Except that Ramon wanted to be different.’ Rosa’s voice grew soft. ‘I had never seen a man cry, you see. It convinced me that he wasn’t like my father, brutal and unfeeling. Ramon, I told myself, had so much more love inside him.’

  Terri tried to recall Rosa’s father, her own grandfather. The memory was dim – a stern-looking man who spoke no English but once had bounced her on his lap. There was the faintest sense, perhaps a trick of the mind, that her mother had watched them closely. ‘After that one time,’ Rosa continued, ‘it was as if Ramon had scared himself more than he’d scared me. He never drank when he was with me. And until we were married, he never hit me again.’ She turned to Terri. ‘Do you know who reminded me of Ramon before our wedding? Richie. So watchful to see the impression he made on me, with all his plans and dreams and love for you. As if he had something to hide.’

  Terri felt herself flush. But Rosa, she saw, was not sparring with her; for this moment her mother spoke more honestly than she ever had before. Only the look in her eyes, remote yet touched with shame, betrayed how hard this was.

  ‘And after?’ Terri asked.

  Rosa reached for the thermos at her feet; on these mornings when they brought Elena to the park, Rosa made thick bl
ack coffee from Costa Rica. But until now, this morning’s coffee had gone untouched. Rosa filled a plastic cup and handed it to Terri, poured another for herself. ‘The night we were married,’ Rosa said at last, ‘we slept together for the first time. It wasn’t much, and it was over quickly. But I was happy we had done this. And then, as I waited in the dark for him to hold me, Ramon said that I was not a virgin. When I began to cry, he slapped me, and took me without asking. It was much more painful than before.’ Rosa’s voice became hushed with memory. ‘For two weeks after, out of anger and embarrassment, Ramon never touched me.

  ‘It no longer mattered.’ Rosa’s eyes became softer. ‘For the next eight months I wondered whether you were conceived the first time, filled with my hope, or the second time, the product of his hate. But when you were born, Teresa, and I looked into your face, I knew.’

  Terri met her mother’s gaze. ‘Couldn’t you still have left him, Mama? Even then?’

  ‘To where? A jobless woman with a child? And there was no question, back then, that I would have this child.’ For a moment, silent, Rosa turned to watch Elena. ‘When I told Ramon I was pregnant,’ she resumed, ‘tears leapt to his eyes. He called our families, made a crib for you with his own hands. We were having our first-born, he said, and would build our family around you.

  ‘After that, he treated me well for a time, and I tried to be happy again. Only later did I understand what a baby truly meant to him.’ Rosa’s eyes were hard now. ‘He was afraid of more than being his father. He had never loved his father or felt love in return – only fear. Once he became a father, he was afraid that no one could love him of their own free will or stay with him except from fear. In his mind, you took away my will and gave me something to fear for.’ Her voice softened. ‘The child I loved much more than him.’

  Terri took her mother’s hand. ‘It was as if,’ Rosa told her quietly, ‘Ramon knew I could not leave now. A month after you were born, the drinking started again.’