“What do you mean?” I said.
“It was never the warmest between us. And when I stopped playing ball, which was so important to him, it turned hard. But after this, after him thinking I had killed Jesse, where the hell could it go after that?” He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, and his cheeks glistened in the pale light of the lantern. “He made me stay until the coroner ruled it an accident and the investigation was closed, made me stay in the house without a word passing between us. Then late one night he came into my room, just the shadow of him with the light coming in from behind. He was holding a drink, I remember, the ice clinked against the glass. And he told me to go the next day, to just up and go and to never come back. And so I did, the very next day.” He wiped at his eyes once more. “I never did see him again.”
He lifted his beer and drained it. Skink rescued another from the death ring of plastic and tossed it to him. Grady popped it right open and swallowed all the foam that spurted out and then drank half of that one, too.
“After he died, well, he left most everything to my stepmom, who went down to live in Florida with some guy named Lenny, and he left me nothing except for one stinking used-car lot here in Weston. I thought it was him giving me another chance, thought I could turn it into something like he would have wanted me to, maybe a whole chain of dealerships like he had built. But inventory sucked, and sales, they’ve never been what they should have been, and with the kids vacuuming up the money there’s nothing left for expanding, and every day I go into that place it squeezes more life right out of me. I thought he was giving me a final chance, and now I know it was his final punishment for doing what I never did do.
“But I didn’t begrudge Hailey what she got out of it, and I still don’t. It wasn’t her fault the way she was, and she never fooled me about nothing. In fact, in the whole mess, what she did for me in the jail was the one decent thing anyone did for me. In fact, we was still friends, even after she moved east. I sometimes would drive up to see her in Philadelphia. So maybe you’re right, maybe I still had a crush. Hell, more than maybe. But she never encouraged it or let me do nothing about it. She was just always kind to me, and seeing her even for a little sometimes made me feel the way I felt before, when we was at the quarry at the start and I was still that guy and she was my girl and everything coming was going to be just so smooth.”
WE SAT in that truck most of the night, finishing the beers. Just like it was Grady who did most of the talking, it was Grady who did most of the drinking, and I figured he had cause. I asked him if he knew who it was who really killed Jesse Sterrett, and he said he always assumed it was an accident after all. I asked him about Hailey’s sister, Roylynn, and he told me he had heard she was in a place just south of Wheeling. And after I asked him that, we sat in that flatbed and drank up the beer and didn’t say much of anything, listening instead to the rustle of the night. We stayed quiet and listened until the electric lantern dimmed and died and the stars overhead turned bright and cold and hard.
I drove him home. He wasn’t in any condition to drive and I was, so Skink followed as I drove the black truck into the little town of Weston, to an old Victorian house that was nicely painted and well kept, hedges trimmed flat. When we pulled into the drive, a light went on in the upstairs window.
“Nice house,” I said as I shut off the engine and handed him the keys.
“My wife takes good care of it.”
“It doesn’t look like it turned out all bad.”
“She is sweeter than I deserve. And my kids, well, you know, they’re my kids.”
“Then why spend your nights at a dive like the Log Cabin?”
“All this ain’t what I had in mind.”
“Maybe it’s time to grow up, Grady.”
“Funny, that’s what Hailey used to tell me, too.”
“Where were you the night Jesse Sterrett died?”
“Nowheres.”
“There’s no such place.”
“Sure there is. You just haven’t spent enough time in West Virginia.”
“Where were you?”
Pause. “You don’t believe it wasn’t me.”
“I feel more comfortable with all the details nailed down.”
He took a deep breath. The lights in one of the downstairs rooms turned on.
“She’d wanted it from the start,” said Grady Pritchett, “I knew that, but I’d been good. Despite the temptations, I’d been a good boy. He was my daddy. But when things turned bad, she was the only one who came. And I grew so angry, so damn angry, that I couldn’t even think no more except about hurting someone, especially him, so I stopped being good. She left word she was meeting friends at the club, but that’s not where she was. She was with me, in a motel in a town down the highway, smoking reefer, getting down and nasty. I was still so banged up, it hurt so much, and that was the best damn thing about it.”
I took that in. “You preferred your father to think you were a murderer than to know you were screwing his wife?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t have an answer.
The front door of his house opened, and a slim figure clutching closed her robe stood leaning in the doorway.
“Anything else?” he said.
“That about does it. If I need you to testify…”
“Forget it.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll forget it.”
He turned to me and smiled weakly and then opened the door and hopped out of the truck. He walked slowly down the driveway to the house, stopped to kiss the figure, and, without looking back, shut the door behind them.
36
THERE WAS one last place to visit in West Virginia.
The man in white led me through a well-lit hallway. He had broad shoulders, and his head was shaved, and his name was Titus. Titus didn’t check behind him that I was following, but then he didn’t need to. I was spooked, yes I was. It was not my normal venue, behind the walls of an asylum.
It hadn’t taken much to find the place. I had simply called the West Virginia number on the singed records from my cellular phone and they had kindly given me directions. It certainly didn’t look like what I had pictured a mental hospital to look like. From the outside, in fact, in its attitude at least, it suspiciously resembled the Desert Winds retirement home where we had met with Lawrence Cutlip in Henderson, Nevada. It was neat, well trimmed, seemingly deserted. A new, gabled structure with vinyl siding in a pleasing pastel, its grass freshly mowed, its bushes pruned into cute round balls. It appeared to be as much a spa as anything else, a place to restore the frazzled nerves of society wives. I could imagine that Hailey Prouix chose it personally, just as she personally chose Desert Winds for her uncle. She seemed have a thing for tidy places in which to store her various relatives.
The patients I passed as I followed Titus through the hallway were dressed in normal clothes, and they seemed pleasant enough, but I could tell they were patients. Some were impossibly thin and their jaws jutted with a strange prominence, still others wore long sleeves even in the uncomfortable warmth of the building, still others moved with an unnatural sluggishness. I tried to guess what they each were in for, anorexia, self-mutilation, schizophrenia. Look there, that older woman in the corner of that room, she was staring into the sky as if hearing the voice of God. Or was there maybe a television bolted into the upper corner of the room? And that woman there, wearing the long-sleeved blouse, look at her hands marked with cigarette burns. Or were they just birthmarks? And that woman sitting quietly in another corner, staring at her lap, was she a paranoiac ax murderess drugged into a stupor? Or was that a paperback book hidden in her lap?
Well, anyway, I could tell they were patients, absolutely I could. There was just something about them. And the something about them, I realized, was that they were here. But, of course, so was I.
Titus led me into a large common room and stopped at the entrance, waiting for me to step up beside him. “You can’t take her from
this room without prior approval,” he said, his voice deep and commanding. “You can’t give her anything without prior approval. You can’t take anything from her without prior approval. There is to be no physical contact without prior approval. Do you have any prior approvals?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“That settles that, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What happened to your eye?”
“An accident.”
“It accidentally got in the way of someone’s fist?”
“Something like that.”
“It doesn’t make me happy, you coming in with an eye like that. Miss Prouix is a favorite of mine. Whenever I see her, it brightens my day. We all need a little bit of sunshine. I’d hate for anything to disturb her equilibrium.”
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, does it? The supervisor said you had some questions for her.”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m sure you’ll be careful in digging for your answers.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Does she know you?”
“No. But I knew her sister.”
“Well, then, go on and introduce yourself, Mr. Carl. She’s over there, by the far wall.”
A bright golden beam fell through the window, illuminating the slim woman on the coach in a halo of sunshine. She was leaning toward the glass, one leg curled under the other, one arm resting on the sofa’s back. She was holding a book, thin and black, but the book was closed, and her face pointed toward the light. I remember quite clearly the bright golden light, but I’m wondering whether the magical beam exists now in my recollection much more vividly than it did that day. Maybe it was overcast, I seem to remember that it was. Maybe the light is an inventive trick of my memory, but I am not inventing that the woman on the couch was the very image of Hailey Prouix. And I am not inventing the emotion that clutched at my chest when I saw her there, across the room, gazing out the window, bathed as she was in gold.
What is love? It is a question that runs like a silver thread through this whole sorry tale, an elemental question that at each point seems to provide a very different answer. But if you had asked just then, as I stood beside Titus and saw Roylynn Prouix within that golden glow, I would have told you that love is a Pavlovian response to certain very specific stimuli. Because if I was feeling something for Hailey Prouix’s sister, and I was, and I believe that what I was feeling was a shimmer of love, then it was based nothing on her, because I had never met her, and it was not a communal emotion flowing back and forth between us, because as of yet she didn’t even know of my existence. It was instead an unavoidable remembrance of how I had felt before when I had seen that same face.
I glanced nervously at Titus, who smiled reassuringly and urged me on. Slowly, I made my way across the room to Roylynn Prouix.
She turned her face to me and smiled as I approached. It was a lovely smile, but different from her sister’s. Where Hailey’s had always been filled with a sad, calculating irony, this smile was guileless and genuine. I had adored Hailey’s calculating smile, which evidenced so many strange depths, but after the multitude of ways I had been twisted and turned since first I saw it, I found Roylynn’s all the more radiant.
“Miss Prouix?” I said.
She continued to smile without saying anything, and I began to worry.
“My name is Victor Carl.”
No response, just that smile. Was there anything behind it? Was the guilelessness I had so admired just an instant before nothing but a lobotomized emptiness? I stared for a moment, overcome with a brief horror at what I imagined might be lacking in the woman before me.
“You, I suppose, are the visitor I’ve been told to expect,” she said finally, in a voice curved by the same accent as affected Hailey’s voice in her unguarded moments.
I breathed a great sigh of relief that someone was at home in the mansion. “Yes, that’s right. I am so sorry about what happened to your sister.”
The smile faded, she looked away to stare again out the window. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
“I knew her in Philadelphia.”
She turned quickly to peer at me. “Really. Tell me, was she happy in Philadelphia?”
It was a setup for a joke, but I resisted. “It’s hard to say, she was a complicated woman, but I think there were moments of happiness.”
She smiled again. “Well, I’m glad to hear that at least.”
“Did she keep in touch with you?”
“Oh, yes. We talked frequently. She often called to see how I was doing, to ask about my day. She was always a very concerned sister.”
“So you knew about Guy Forrest.”
“Pardon?”
“Guy Forrest. Guy and your sister were living together. They were engaged to be married.”
“No, she never mentioned him. I’m sure she would have, if she was really planning to marry him. But generally when we talked, she was more interested in how I was doing.”
“Mr. Forrest was indeed engaged to your sister. There was a proposal, an acceptance, a ring. But now the state has accused him of killing her.”
“Really? I hadn’t heard. That is truly shocking. But I’m sure this Mr. Forrest did no such thing. Men didn’t kill Hailey, they killed for Hailey.”
I was taken aback by that comment, and the cheeriness with which it was dispensed.
“Sit down, Mr. Carl,” she said, gesturing me to a spot at the other end of the couch. “No need to stand over me like that.”
“You should know, Miss Prouix, I’m a lawyer representing Guy Forrest in the murder case. I’ve come to ask you some questions.”
“It’s not contagious, is it, being a lawyer?”
“Excuse me?”
“I won’t start babbling in Latin or start charging for phone calls if you get too close, will I?”
“I can’t guarantee it, but no, I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, I think maybe we can risk it.” She gestured again to the other end of the couch, and I sat.
She shifted to face me, still holding her thin black book, dog-eared and dirty, still smiling, kindly now, with a deep assurance, and I thought suddenly that her being here had to be a mistake. Had to be. She was smart and charming and funny and full of kindness. It was quite a shift from my thinking her lobotomized only a few moment ago, but my whole experience in that place had proved disorienting, and the emotions I was feeling, the Pavlovian love that still clutched at me, made me certain. I didn’t want at that moment to talk about Hailey or Guy or even poor dead Jesse Sterrett. My basest instincts kicked in and I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to chat her up like I would chat up a cutie in a bar.
“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.
She took tighter hold of the black volume in her lap. “It’s my favorite book. I read it over and over.”
“It must be something fun,” I said, twisting my head to read the battered spine. “Well, maybe not. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.”
“Do you know of him?”
“Hawking. Isn’t he that guy in the wheelchair?”
“Yes. He’s marvelous. I think I’m a little bit in love with him, though I hear he’s terrible to his wives. He has Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he was supposed to have been dead years ago, but instead he sits in that chair and lets his mind wander out to the far edges of the universe. And the strange thing is that in writing about what he sees there, it is as if he is writing the story of my life.”
“Your life?”
“Do you care much for physics, Mr. Carl?”
“E equals MC squared and all that?”
“Yes, and all that.”
“No, I don’t, actually. I don’t understand it. But how is that the story of your life?”
“You know that the universe is expanding at tremendous speed. Of course you do. Can’t you feel it? I can, every moment of every day I fe
el everything rushing away from me.”
I thought suddenly of the way the points of darkness had rushed away from me during my sleepless nights and the terror that engendered. What must it be like to feel that every moment of every day?
“All this…disintegration,” she said, “is an aftereffect of the big bang.”
“The big bang?”
She leaned forward now, as if she had something urgent to relate to me, as if she were proselytizing about some great new religion that would save my soul. “The big bang. The very beginning of time, when the universe was formed out of a single great explosion. Before that, nothing happened that mattered, because it had no effect on what happened after. And after, nothing was ever the same again, because the explosion just kept hurtling everything far, far away.”
“And that happened to you?”
“Yes. Of course. I thought you said you knew my sister. It happened to her, too. But at some point all this hurtling away is going to stop. It’s slowing down already and the force of gravity is at work every moment and someday, someday soon, the universe is going to stop expanding and slowly, slowly begin to contract. And then the contraction will speed up, speed up, speed up, until boom.” She smashed her palms together. “The big crunch.”
“The big crunch?”
“Yes. And that will be the end of everything. The end of all time, because nothing that happens afterward will be affected by anything that happened before.”
“And that’s coming soon?”
“We can only hope,” she said with a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye.
I wondered just then if she was putting me on. She must have been, and I smiled back at her even as I was feeling a confusing sadness.
“Is that what happened to Jesse Sterrett?” I said. “The big crunch?”
She seemed taken aback at the name. She turned her head and stared for a moment out the window.
“Is he in your book, too?” I said.
Without looking at me, she nodded and then looked down, opening the battered book in her lap. The pages were badly smudged, as if each had been fingered hundreds of times. She paged through the volume, stopping now and then, her attention caught by certain passages, in the way that some page through the Bible. She stopped finally and lifted the book to show it to me.
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