The White Road

From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love—that much I knew for certain—but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me. And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.

“It’s Elliot Norton,” she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s an old friend.”

I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.

“Hussy,” I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.

“Excuse me?” said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His southern accent was stronger than I remembered.

“I said ‘hussy.’ It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use ‘whore,’ or ‘leech’ if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?”

“Not usually. By the way, I found a nest of your peers at the bottom of my garden this morning.”

“I won’t even ask. How you doing, Charlie?”

“I’m good. It’s been a while, Elliot.”

Elliot Norton had been an assistant attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office when I was a detective. We had managed to get on pretty well together both professionally and personally on those occasions when our paths crossed, until he got married and moved back home to South Carolina, where he was now practicing law in Charleston. I still received a Christmas card from him each year. I’d met him the previous September for dinner in Boston when he was dealing with the sale of some property in the White Mountains, and had stayed in his house some years before when Susan, my late wife, and I were passing through South Carolina during the early months of our marriage. He was in his late thirties now, prematurely gray and divorced from his wife, a woman named Alicia who was pretty enough to stop traffic on rainy days. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the breakup, although I figured Elliot for the kind of guy who might have strayed from the marital fold on occasion. When we’d had dinner, at Sonsi on Newbury, the girls in their summer dresses passing by the open doors, his eyes had practically been out on stalks, like those of a character in a Tex Avery cartoon.

“Well, we Southern folks tend to keep pretty much to ourselves,” he drawled. “Plus we’re kinda busy, what with keeping the coloreds in check and all.”

“It’s good to have a hobby.”

“That it is. You still private detecting?”

The small talk had come to a pretty sudden end, I thought.

“Some,” I confirmed.

“You in the market for work?”

“Depends upon the kind.”

“I have a client due for trial. I could do with some help.”

“Maine is a long way from South Carolina, Elliot.”

“That’s why I’m calling you. This isn’t something that the local snoops are too interested in.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s bad.”

“How bad?”

“Nineteen-year-old male accused of raping his girlfriend, then beating her to death. His name is Atys Jones. He’s black. His girlfriend was white, and wealthy.”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“He says he didn’t do it.”

“And you believe him?”

“And I believe him.”

“With respect, Elliot, the jails are full of guys who say they didn’t do it.”

“I know. I helped to put some of them away, and I know they did it. But this one’s different. He’s innocent. I’ve bet the homestead on it. Literally: my house is security on his bail.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I need somebody to help me move him to a safe house then look around, check witness statements; someone who isn’t from around here and isn’t likely to be scared off too easy. It’s a week’s work, maybe a day or two more. Look, Charlie, this kid had a death sentence passed on him before he even set foot in a courtroom. As things stand, he may not live to see his trial.”

“Where is he now?”

“Richland County lockup, but I can’t leave him in there for too much longer. I took over the case from the public defender and now rumor is that some lowlifes from the Skinhead Riviera may try to make a name for themselves by shanking the kid in case I get him off. That’s why I’ve arranged bail. Atys Jones is a sitting duck in Richland.”

I leaned back against the rail of my porch. Walter came out with a rubber bone in his mouth and pressed it into my hand. He wanted to play. I knew how he felt. It was a bright autumn day, my girlfriend was radiant with the knowledge that our first child was slowly growing inside her, and we were pretty comfortable financially. That kind of situation encourages you to kick back for a time and enjoy it while it lasts. I needed Elliot Norton’s client like I needed scorpions in my shoes.

“I don’t know, Elliot. Every time you open your mouth, you give me another good reason to close my ears.”

“Well, while I have your attention you may as well hear the worst of it. The girl’s name was Marianne Larousse. She was Earl Larousse’s daughter.”

With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer. Now Elliot Norton was defending the man accused of raping and murdering Earl Larousse’s daughter, and that was a course of action likely to make him the second most unpopular person in the state of South Carolina, after his client. Anybody drawn into the maelstrom surrounding the case was going to suffer; there was no question about it. Even if Earl himself didn’t decide to take the law into his own hands there were plenty of other people who would because Earl was one of their own, because he paid their wages, and because maybe Earl would smile upon whoever did him the favor of punishing the man he believed had killed his little girl.

“I’m sorry, Elliot,” I said. “This isn’t something I want to get involved with right now.”

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“I’m desperate, Charlie,” he said at last, and I could hear it in his voice: the tiredness, the fear, the frustration. “My secretary is quitting at the end of the week because she doesn’t approve of my client list and pretty soon I’ll have to drive to Georgia to buy food because nobody around here will sell me jackshit.” His voice rose. “So don’t fucking tell me that this is something you don’t want to get involved with like you’re running for fucking Congress or something, because my house and maybe my life are on the line and…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. After all, what more was there to say?

I heard him exhale a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay,” I replied, but it wasn’t, not for him and not for me.

“I hear you’re about to become a father,” he said. “That’s good, after all that’s happened. I was you, maybe I’d stay up there in Maine too and forget that some asshole called you up out of the blue to join in his crusade. Yeah, I think that would be what I’d do, if I was you. You take care now, Charlie Parker. Look after that little lady.”

“I will.”

“Yeah.”

Then he hung up. I tossed the phone on one of the chairs and dragged my hands over my face. The dog now lay curled at my feet, his bone clasped between his front paws as he tugged at it with his sharp teeth. The sun still shone on the marsh and birds still moved slowly on the waters, calling to one another as they glided between the cattails, but now the transient, fragile nature of what I was witnessing seemed to weigh heavily upon me. I found myself looking toward the ruined shack where the garter snakes lay, waiting for rodents and small birds to stumble into their path. You could walk away from them, pretend to yourself that they weren’t doing you any harm and that you had no cause to go interfering with them. If you were right, then you might never have to face them again, or maybe creatures bigger and stronger than they would do you a favor and deal with them for you.

But, someday, you might go back to that cabin and lift up those same floorboards, and where once there were a dozen snakes there would now be hundreds and no collection of old boards and decaying timbers would be enough to contain them. Because ignoring them or forgetting them doesn’t make them go away.

It just makes it easier for them to breed.

That afternoon, I left Rachel working in her office and headed into Portland. My trainers and sweats were in the trunk of the car, and I had intended to go into One City Center and do a couple of circuits, but instead I ended up walking the streets, browsing in Carlson & Turner’s antiquarian bookstore up on Congress Street and Bullmoose Music down in the Old Port. I picked up the new Pinetop Seven album, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, a copy of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, and Leisure and Other Songs by a group called Spokane, because they were led by Rick Alverson, who used to head up Drunk and who made the kind of music you wanted to listen to when old friends let you down or you caught a glimpse of a former lover on a city street, her fingers entwined with those of another, looking at him in a way that reminded you of how she had once looked at you. There were still crowds of tourists around, the last of the summer wave. Soon the leaves would start to turn in earnest and then the next wave would arrive to watch the trees burn like fire as far north as the Canadian border. I was angry with Elliot and more angry with myself. It sounded like a difficult case but difficult cases were part of the job. If I sat around waiting for easy ones, then I’d starve or go crazy. Two years ago, I’d have headed down to South Carolina to help him out without a second thought, but now I had Rachel and I was about to become a father again. I had been given a second chance, and I didn’t want to endanger it in any way.

I found myself back at my car. This time, I took my kit from the trunk and spent an hour pushing myself as hard as I had ever pushed myself in the gym, working until my muscles burned and I had to sit on a bench with my head down before the worst of the nausea had passed. But I still felt ill as I drove back to Scarborough, and the sweat that dripped from my face was the sweat of the sickbed.