David failed to draw a breath. He saw that Jessup heard that subtle silence, and he breathed again, too late.
“Is she one of those bodies you’ve hidden?”
“Question for question, answer for answer. That’s only fair.”
“I’ve answered your questions, Ronny. Unless you mean the car. It was a black Buick sedan.”
“The car don’t matter. What you didn’t answer that matters is—were she a good girl?”
“But I did answer that one. You know I did.”
“You answered it the way you heard it, not the way I meant it.”
“I don’t understand.”
The big man wet his ripe lips with his tongue. The steel ring in the table apron, to which his right hand was cuffed, rattled not as though he was making a frustrated effort to break free, but quietly, as if he trembled with need or excitement. “She a good girl, Mr. Thorne? Were she as good as she looks? When you did her, when you was in her, were she tender?”
In all his meetings with this man, David had never given in to anger, for he didn’t want to waste the next visit assuaging Jessup’s hurt feelings and self-pity, repairing their relationship. And there would be a next meeting, another beyond that, another and another, as long as Jessup allowed, until he stopped playing games and spoke the verifiable truth, whatever it might be. This was David Thorne’s purgatorial passage, his penance, his duty to Emily, and the primary reason that he came to California for two months at a time.
Now he returned the photos to the envelope and closed the clasp and folded his hands on the table and stared at Jessup in silence.
The killer met his stare and produced no more tears. After a while, he said, “If she’d been one of my girls, which I’m not saying she ever were, but if she was and if I could bring her back alive, Mr. Thorne, I wouldn’t bring her back for me. I’d bring her back for you. I really would.”
Each minute David spent with Ronny Lee Jessup was a test of his own sanity.
He picked up the envelope and got to his feet. “I’ll see you in a week. Maybe sooner.”
“I always enjoy your visits, Mr. Thorne. They’re such a special part of my life.”
| 9 |
Friday afternoon, David sat in a window seat, southbound from Sacramento under high iron-gray clouds, winging over the San Joaquin Valley, once the most productive farmland in the world, now in places devastated by the state’s mismanagement of the water supply: decades-old orchards withered brown; vast fields blackened by recent wildfires. The mountains of the Diablo Range rose in the west, stark and sere. Beyond, the coastal plains lay sunless, and the clouds impressed their somber shapes and shadows on the dark waters.
When Emily disappeared, the world changed overnight, not just his life, not just his world, but the very world itself, as if the known universe intersected with another that was unknown, and in that quiet collision, an infinite number of subtle changes occurred. He could not define what was different, could not enumerate the many tweaks and twists, though he could feel the truth of them by the way the world loomed strange around him, by events that were too bizarre for the cosmos as it had been, but that unfurled in this new reality without seeming to amaze or disturb anyone but him.
For perhaps two days he had been in denial, certain that she would be found or would walk through the door with some bright story of comic adventure. On the third day, he realized he would never see her alive again. That he had loved her was not a belated discovery, nor that he had loved her more than he loved himself. They were so young, however, that he had never contemplated—or even imagined—the loss of her. He felt hollowed out and for weeks could not get warm. In his dreams, she wandered fields and forests; he glimpsed her on far hills or between trees, and though she called his name, she never seemed to see him, and she moved always farther away.
They had been together for five years, since he was twenty-two and she was twenty. He had achieved his success with her at his side, because she was at his side, because she centered him. In the wake of her disappearance, he couldn’t understand why they had not married. They were of a generation that often delayed marriage or even felt it wasn’t essential to shaping a life together. But when he had no hope of wedding her, he wanted her to have been his wife, to be able to say that by sanctification they had been as one. He felt that he had failed her by not committing in that fashion. Worse, he found himself lying awake, wondering if being married would have changed their actions, so that she would not have been alone that night and therefore would not have gone missing and, surely, to her death.