The Silent Hour lp-4

by Michael Koryta

  Joe had been out with me for the morning but left around noon. I called him at the office now. “Guess who’s here. Parker Harrison.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Just showed up with another guy I didn’t recognize, and they aren’t in Harrison’s truck. You want to run the plate for me?”

  I gave him the license number, and a few minutes later he called back and told me the truck was registered to a Mark Ruzity.

  “Mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah. He was another of Alexandra’s murderers. The first one.”

  “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “Paying respects,” I said. “He brought flowers, Joe. I’m telling you, the place is a damn memorial at this point.”

  Ruzity and Harrison came back out twenty minutes later, sans flowers, and got back into the truck and drove away.

  So now I had an answer. I’d seen what I told him I wanted to see, and yet I knew nothing more than I had before. Ken’s bizarre prediction—she’ll come back to see it—was as foolish as I should have known it was.

  I stayed, though. For the rest of that day, and the three that followed. By the end of the week I was starting to lose my mind from sitting in one spot so long, and Joe was quiet on the topic, which meant he thought it was time to give up. Even Amy asked how much longer I intended to keep watch, and her tone made her feelings clear—it was time to call the surveillance off.

  I told them I wanted one more day. Spent twelve hours watching that lonely drive and the gate and didn’t see a soul.

  “You knew it was a long shot anyhow,” Amy said. “Time to let it pass.”

  I agreed with her, told her the whole thing had gone on too long. Then the next morning I got up and took my camera and my binoculars and drove back and watched nothing. I did it the day after that, too, then came home and told Amy I’d spent the day at the gym. The next morning I rose before dawn and returned.

  That was the coldest day of the fall so far, and by seven my coffee was gone and the sun wasn’t even up yet and the chill had already filled the cab of the truck and gone to work on my knotted back and shoulder muscles. It was time to quit, I realized. This was lunacy, or close to it.

  I was parked just off the road beside a cluster of saplings and brush, squeezed in the back of the extended cab with blackout curtains hung in the windows. I’d now spent about a hundred hours in this position, the most surveillance time I’d logged on a case in years, and I wasn’t making a dime from it.

  When the headlights crested the hill and slowed near the drive, I didn’t even lift my camera. I’d seen too many cars pass to get excited about this one. Then it came to a complete stop, and I sat up and pushed the blackout curtain farther aside and watched as the car—a small red sedan—turned into the gravel track and drove right up to the gate. I finally got my shit together then, reached for the camera and got it up and turned on as the driver’s door swung open. My zoom was good, but it wasn’t built for low-light conditions, and all I could see in the predawn gloom was that the driver looked like a woman, and she was walking around the gate and through the trees. She was walking toward the house.

  35

  __________

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. I just sat there holding my camera and looking at the dark trees she’d vanished into, wondering if I should wait for her to reemerge and then follow her, or set off now with hopes of catching her at the house. After a brief hesitation, I decided to take action over patience.

  I got out of the truck, leaving my camera but wearing my gun, and walked down the road toward the drive. I took my time, knowing that any attempt to follow her quietly through the woods around the creek would be hopeless. It was important to give her a little lead time. When I reached the red sedan, I knelt by the back bumper and took a photograph of the license plate with my cell phone’s built-in camera, a device I’d come to appreciate in moments like this. It was an Ohio plate. Surely, then, this couldn’t be Alexandra. She couldn’t be living so close to home. It would be an aggressive Realtor checking on the house before going to the office, and nothing more. When I walked around to the front of the car I spotted an Avis sticker, though. A rental.

  I walked toward the woods bordering the gate. The trees didn’t seem nearly so dark when I was in them as they’d looked through the camera, and I found I was able to walk without much difficulty. It was easier now, in late fall, than it had been in spring, when everything was green and growing and the water in the creek rode high on the banks. Once I was around the gate and away from the creek I slowed again, focusing on a quiet approach now. I made my way back to the rutted drive and followed it along, seeing and hearing nothing of the woman ahead.

  When the drive curled around its final bend and came out at the base of the hill that hid the house, I stopped and scanned the trees, searching for her. I gave it a careful study, made absolutely certain she wasn’t in sight, and then continued forward. I’d taken at least five steps toward the hill when I finally realized she was at the door.

  I hadn’t seen her at first because the door was beneath that stone arch, covered in shadows, and she was no longer standing. She was kneeling before the door, and as I walked closer, in slow, silent strides, I saw that her head was bowed and her arm extended, her palm resting on the oaken door.

  It was her. Other women might make a trip out to this home before the sun rose, but none would drop to their knees and touch its door as if at an altar.

  Alexandra had come home.

  I stopped walking when I was about thirty feet from her, stood and waited. She held her position for a while, maybe a minute, maybe two. Didn’t move at all, didn’t make a sound, just knelt there with her head bowed and her hand on the door. When she finally moved it was to rub her hand gently across the wood, and then she got to her feet and turned and saw me.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” I said. “One of a kind. Do you miss it?”

  Her eyes left me and flicked to either side, searching for others.

  “I’m alone,” I said, “and I don’t intend to bring you any trouble. I would just like to hear you talk for a while. I’d like you to tell me some things. I need that very much.”

  She stepped away from the door, out of the stone arch and into the light, toward me. She was not tall, no more than five foot two or three, with a slender build and graceful movements. When she came closer I saw that much remained from the face that had stared at me in photographs—the fine bones and small nose and mouth, the impossibly dark eyes. Her hair was different, chopped short and close to her skull, but for the most part she looked the same.

  “I wear a wig most of the time,” she said, watching me study her. “I have glasses even though I don’t need them. They’re clear, no prescription. I wear makeup now when I never used to, lots of eyeliner and foundation and other junk that I just hate to put on my face.”

  She came to within a few feet of me, then tilted her head, frowned at me, and said, “You’re Lincoln.”

  I hadn’t been mentioned in any newspaper article; there was no public record of my involvement with any of the cases surrounding this woman.

  “How do you know that?”

  She ignored me, turned and looked over her shoulder at the door.

  “You were right,” she said. “It is a beautiful home, and I do miss it. I miss it terribly, the house and all of the other things I left behind. The life I left behind.”

  “Alexandra,” I said, “how do you know my name?”

  “From Ken Merriman.”

  I stood still and silent and stared at the calm set of her face. Then I said, slowly and carefully, “You don’t mean that you spoke to Ken Merriman.”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “I hired him.”

  36

  __________

  The sentence left her lips almost carelessly and struck me like lead.

  “You hired Ken Merriman?” I said. “You hired him?”

  She nodded.

&
nbsp; “No,” I said. “Joshua’s parents hired him. That was in the papers. He’d been looking for you for twelve years.”

  “He looked for me for about nine months,” she said, “and then he found me.”

  “Explain it,” I said. It felt hard to get the words out.

  “You understand how it began. Joshua’s parents hired him. If there is one thing I felt worst about in all of this, it’s the uncertainty they had to deal with. That was terrible, I’m sure. They were not kind people, and Joshua’s relationship with them had been a painful and difficult one, but that was not enough to justify what I did.”

  She fell silent for a few seconds before saying, “There’s probably no way for people to understand the decisions I made. All I can say is that once I was gone, once it was already under way, I wasn’t brave enough to return. There was nothing that could be done to bring Joshua back, not for me or for them.”

  “Tell me about Ken,” I said. The sun was beginning to show pink through the trees. I could hear the birds and the wind but nothing of the road. “How did he find you?”

  “The same way you did.”

  “He watched the house?”

  “He asked everyone he talked with about the words by the door, the inscription that’s carved there. Everyone told him they’d not seen the carving until we were gone, and he believed that it had been left as an epitaph. He was right, of course.”

  She lifted her hand and waved at the eastern sky, now beginning to glow red with the rising sun. “Let’s walk up top, okay? I loved to sit up there and watch the sunrise. It’s just gorgeous.”

  She moved without waiting for my response, walked around to the side of the hill and started up, following a flagstone path that was now almost completely submerged in weeds. I followed.

  When we got to the top of the hill, she moved over to the old well house and leaned against its side, facing the sun. Again I marveled at how completely hidden the house was, nothing but grass and soil evident beneath our feet, only the lip of a stone wall indicating the drop-off on the other side where the windows looked out on the pond. I walked to within a few feet of her and stood silently, arms folded, waiting. She seemed at ease, and for a while she just looked off at the sunrise and did not speak. When she finally broke the silence, she didn’t bother to turn around.

  “How many days have you been watching?”

  “Quite a few.”

  She nodded. “This was going to be my last visit, you know. It will have to be. The house will have new owners soon. I can’t very well come by then.”

  “If you know everything that’s happened, why didn’t you announce yourself, prove that you’re still alive and keep the home? Why would you let it be sold?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did you kill him?” I said.

  Now she turned, wounded. “Of course I didn’t kill him. Joshua? I loved him so much. So very dearly.”

  “Then what are you hiding from?”

  She stepped away from the well house and dropped down to sit in the grass, cross-legged. It was tall grass, rising well above her waist, but she settled into it comfortably and pushed her sleeves up on her forearms. She was wearing dark jeans and a gray fleece jacket, and there were simple silver bracelets on both wrists. She had to be near fifty now, but she looked like a college student settling down outside of a dormitory. If she weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds I would’ve been stunned, and her skin was weathered but still smooth, every thin wrinkle looking as if it belonged and added something that you’d miss otherwise.

  “Are you going to continue standing?” she said, looking up at me. “It makes me uncomfortable.”

  So I sat in the grass with her, felt the moisture of day-old rain leave the ground and soak through my jeans, and watched the sun rise behind her as she told me the story.

  Alexandra’s life was shaped very much by her father’s, by the world of crime and violence that had surrounded her childhood. The money he’d left was something she’d viewed as an embarrassment at first and then decided to reinvest into the reentry program. Her vision for Whisper Ridge as a sort of work farm had not received the funding or support it needed. She decided to operate at a smaller level and use success to grow the operation in the future. It was at this point that she began to feel her husband’s resistance.

  “Joshua was not a direct man in times of conflict,” she said. “He wouldn’t come out and tell me flatly that he didn’t want to open our home to this, but I knew it was the case, and I pushed ahead anyhow. I thought he believed in the ideals, and that time would take care of the rest. It was a selfish thing to do, maybe. I’ve wondered about that a lot, and I think that it probably was, but at the time I could not imagine . . . I’m sure you know I could not imagine what would come.”

  What came was an increasingly troubled marriage. Alexandra’s version of events meshed well with John Dunbar’s. She described Joshua as growing withdrawn and distrustful. Then Parker Harrison was hired, a move that exacerbated the problem at Whisper Ridge.

  “My relationship with Parker was very close,” she told me. “I’d say that of all of them, of course, but not to the same level. Parker and I, we were similar spirits. I found his story truly tragic.”

  “I believe the family of his victim would agree,” I said.

  She stopped speaking and looked at me with a frown that was more sad than disapproving.

  “To say one is not to dismiss the other,” she said. “Can you understand that?”

  “Can I hear the rest of the story?”

  “As I said, my relationship with Parker was special. We were so close. I think that fueled the resentment that was already in Joshua.”

  “You say your relationship with Harrison was special. Was it also sexual?”

  “No, no, no. Absolutely not. Although during the first six months Parker was with us, Joshua’s personality changed. I now understand this was when he was in contact with the FBI and being pressured to inform on my brother, but I didn’t back then.”

  “It wasn’t the FBI,” I said. “It was one retired agent with some bad ideas.”

  “Nevertheless, my husband was withdrawing, and I finally began to understand just how much damage had been done. Then we began to discuss who would replace Parker, and Joshua told me that he wanted to do the interviews and make the offer, which was something I’d always handled in the past. I was confused by that but agreed, because I was so happy to see his enthusiasm returning. Then he decided on Salvatore Bertoli, who was very far from the profile we’d agreed upon at the start.”

  “You didn’t know Bertoli was associated with your brother?”

  “No. Salvatore didn’t know who I was, either, because my name was Cantrell, and my brother and I were not close. We saw each other, but only rarely, and we did not discuss his . . . associates. All of that is in the past, though. My brother’s crimes. He served two years, and when he got out his life changed. He kept no ties. Many who would’ve posed the greatest problems to him were in prison themselves, and the others accepted his desire to step away. My brother has not been involved with a crime in fifteen years.”

  “There are police who would dispute that,” I said. “I’ve met some of them.”

  Her arms unfolded and she leaned forward. “What proof did they show? What evidence? What did they tell you that was current, not historic?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and then, as the satisfaction crossed her face, “but some of those historic events included murder. There are people who feel those things are unresolved.”

  The satisfaction disappeared, and she dropped her eyes again. “I’m sure that’s true. All I can tell you is that he’s not been involved in anything criminal in years, that he’s led a life that benefits others. He’s a businessman now, a generous one. You should see the charities—”

  “All due respect,” I said, “I’m not here to evaluate your brother’s tithing history. I’m glad you don’t think he’s killed anyone lately. I’d agree th
at’s progress, but it’s not what I’m interested in.”

  I expected that would get a rise, some defensiveness, but instead she just considered me calmly. It was a gaze that made me uncomfortable, as if I fit neatly into a mold she’d been studying her whole life and understood well. When she began to speak again it was without rancor, leaving the subject of her brother behind.

  “I was losing trust in my husband and had none in Salvatore. I felt bad things coming into my home, and so I asked Parker to stay. I trusted him. That’s the decision that put Joshua over the edge. I didn’t see it at the time, of course, but apparently he’d had misgivings and was being bullied along by that FBI agent, Dunbar. When I said I wanted Parker to stay, though, it incensed him, and he decided to go ahead with it. The house became a very ugly place for a while, a distrustful, silent place.”

  “I’ve talked to Dunbar,” I said, “and he said he conceived the whole thing because he is certain that Bertoli witnessed your brother killing a man named Johnny DiPietro.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “According to your brother.”

  “No. According to Salvatore.”

  “What?”

  “He told Parker,” she said, “that he understood what Joshua was trying to do and that whoever had put him up to it was absolutely wrong, didn’t understand who they should be after, but that it was someone who wouldn’t hesitate to kill my husband.”

  “It seems logical that he’d say that.”

  “Perhaps, but Parker believed him, and Salvatore moved out.”

  “At which point Harrison reported all of this to you,” I said. “I’m supposed to believe you never chose to confront your husband about it?”