Ben nodded, stood to walk out, but paused at the door.
“The Sinks,” he said, “Limestone Canyon, it runs north to south. If they’ve pushed the serial into the canyon, there’re basically only two ways out. There’re a lot of places to hide, but if you block up the north and south ends of the canyon, you’ve got him locked in.”
—
HE GOT HOME fifteen minutes before Rachel and Emma pulled into the driveway. When the wheels crunched on the gravel, Ben was there to meet them, and when Rachel stopped the car, he leaned his elbows on the door.
“Come take a walk with me,” he said to Rachel.
Emma was standing by the open door of the passenger side, watching the two of them.
“Em,” Rachel said, “go get started on your homework.”
Emma closed the door and walked up to the house, glancing backward twice before pushing through the front door.
Rachel waited until Emma was safely inside. “I’ve got Crucible essays to grade.”
“Rach,” he said. “Come on, I have to talk to you.”
“Talk to me here.”
“No,” he said. “Just, please, take a walk with me to the top of the hill.” He wanted to ride, wanted to get out on the horses, but he wasn’t going to leave Em here alone until they caught the serial. “It’ll be easier up there. I can’t explain.”
She stared at him and finally nodded.
They walked up the trail to Quail Hill in silence, an awkward five minutes that assailed him with doubt. Fog was pushing in from the ocean, and the sun turned to shadow and back again. At the top, they could see down into Bommer Canyon, where a front-loader was tipping over the last wall of the cowboy camp he and his dad used to rest at. They’d build a gated community here, homes with backyard pools, three-car garages.
“Come on, Ben. What is this?”
He turned to her and smiled nervously. He had almost told her, years ago. They had been married barely six months, and had just moved into the Marina Del Rey apartment. Ben was working on a criminal justice degree from Long Beach State—the only four-year college that would take him with his grades, without a scholarship, without swimming—and Rachel was up at UCLA working on an English bachelor’s. They’d just discovered that Rachel was pregnant, six weeks along, and they’d spent the evening looking through catalogs full of cribs, her face shining with excitement. He couldn’t sleep that night, and through their bedroom window he watched a police helicopter circling on the other side of the freeway, its spotlight flashing back and forth through the dark sky. Twenty minutes or more it kept circling, its rotors incessantly humming, the Nightsun flooding the ugly streets with white light.
“I have to tell you something,” he had said, finally.
“What?” she had said with a dreamy late-night smile, her hand on her belly as though she could already feel the baby there. He wanted the relief of sharing it, of having her take some of the burden of it from him. But in that split second he realized there was no relief in telling her. He would have to explain everything, tell her all the ugly details, explain how it happened, explain how he could have let it happen, and he didn’t have answers to those questions. She was carrying his child, and all he had to offer her was grief with the admission.
“God, I love you,” he said, the back of his throat swelling, threatening tears. “I don’t deserve you.”
“It’s because you know that,” she said, a wry smile on her face, “that I love you.”
They both burst out laughing, and then he was inside her, his head buried in her neck, her lips kissing the top of his head, the helicopter circling outside in the dark.
“Sit down,” he said now.
She gave him a skeptical glance.
“Please.”
They sat together on a jumble of rock, looking down over what was once their house. The city, still glowing in late-afternoon sun, spread toward the mountains in the east.
“A case is being built,” he said, “that implicates Lewis Wakeland in the abuse of boys.”
“What? Coach Wakeland?” She shook her head in disbelief. “What’s the evidence?”
He took a deep breath. “Me. I am.”
She jerked her head back to get a clearer look at him. The sun disappeared behind a ribbon of fog, reappeared, and then disappeared again. She stared at him, her hand on her lips.
“You?”
Then he told her—not everything, but enough; some things were meant to go with you to the grave. For ten minutes or more—he didn’t know how long, really—he watched the surfacing emotions upset her face until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he watched the fog thicken along the ridges, blurring the sloping lines between hills.
“My God, Ben,” she said, water in her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know.”
“Why now?” she said.
“There’re others,” he said. “It happened to others. If I had said something before, maybe—”
“Other kids?”
“Yes.”
“That man needs to be taken out of that school,” she said, standing up. “Right now.”
“We need a warrant first,” he said. “The statute of limitations is up on me. We need evidence about the others before an arrest.”
“How can there be limitations on such things?” she said, pacing.
“You’d have to ask the lawyers about that,” Ben said.
“We’ve known each other for almost twenty years,” she said after a long silence. “Shared the same bed fifteen of those years. What did you think I’d do if you told me?”
“It’s not what you would have done,” he said, looking at her now. “It’s what you would have seen.”
She shook her head. “What did you think I would see?”
“It was like I won the lottery with you,” he said, trying to explain. “Like I was an idiot, some disgusting fool who got lucky.”
“What did you think I would see, Ben?”
A weak, frightened man. “I don’t know. I would just always wonder, what you saw.”
She gazed out over the fogged-in valley with a look of shock on her face.
“God,” she said. “How many people know? I mean, a case is being built.”
“A couple.”
“Natasha?”
“Yeah. She’s one of them.”
“I wish you’d told me,” she said. “I could’ve helped. I was your wife; it was my job to help. I would have wanted to help.”
“I didn’t know how to.”
“You know what it was like living with you?” Rachel said. “You know what it was like to be ignored? Not to be touched? Then to move here and have it get worse…You sitting out there in the barn, every night. Do you know what that was like?”
How could he tell her, even now, that sometimes when she had rolled over to touch him, Wakeland’s face had flashed across the dark screen of his mind? Moving back here was like having Wakeland move in with them. He hadn’t expected that, didn’t know his mind was still so weak to allow that to happen.
“I thought I’d lose you, if I told you.”
She laughed bitterly at the irony, tears in her eyes. “Ben,” she said, “you don’t understand people at all.”
—