Chapter sixteen

She sat on the opposite edge of the bed awhile, her head hung down. Then she turned on her back and lay staring up at nothing. Finally she was just done in. She fell asleep without speaking to me again.

I sat beside her. I kept my hand wrapped around the pistol. I stared out into the next room at the front door.

I woke up suddenly. I got off the bed, rubbing my eyes. I wandered out into the other room. Charlie had just come home, carrying a paper bag.

“Hey there, ho there,” Charlie said. “That a pistol in your pocket or you just happy to see me?”

“It’s a pistol in my pocket.”

“Holy shit.”

I took it out.

“Aagh,” said Charlie. “What the hell is that for?”

“He tried to kill us last night.”

“Whodo?”

“The scarred man. With a rifle.”

I followed Charlie into the kitchenette. He set the bag on the counter. “The dude you made up.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” He removed a box of Ghostbusters cereal (with the marshmallow ghosts) from the bag. “So you’re standing guard.”

“Yeah.”

“Far out. So, basically, if I’m him, you’re a dead guy.”

“Basically, yeah.”

“Want some Ghostbusters?”

“Eagh, God, make some coffee, Charlie.”

“I just made coffee.”

“That was last week.”

“The roach still likes it.”

“The roach is fucking dead, man.”

“He is? Jesus, I hope you get this guy before he kills again.” Charlie grabbed the mug and rinsed the roach out. “How about you?”

I nodded, mentally checking my body for aches and pains. They were all there. I leaned against the kitchenette partition. “I’m alive. I hurt all over. I was dodging bullets.”

“Are you sure this wasn’t someone like … I don’t know. That Jell-O guy?”

“That’s what the cops said.”

“You let the cops in here?”

“He shot at me.”

“Oh man!”

“They didn’t find anything. Would you make the coffee, Charlie.”

Muttering, he set about cleaning the percolator. I went back into the front room, sat on the edge of his bed. I could hear him hammering, scraping, banging the pot against the side of the sink, cursing and screaming at the old grounds. I took the opportunity to tell him what had happened, what I thought.

“So what now, little butterfly?” he said.

“I figured we’d go to the library, see if we can run down the execution story and, you know, shatter our sanity with a truth too terrible to behold.”

“Sounds good.”

Susannah came in silently. She was still wearing my shirt. She sat on my lap, buried her face in my neck.

“I guess you can pretty well kiss the redhead good-bye,” Charlie called from behind the partition. “From the sound of it, McGill is in this up to his eye sockets.”

I held Susannah, kissed her. She hugged me hard.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“No, no.”

“It’s not your fault.”

I kissed her hair.

“Hey, maybe you can get a raise out of it,” said Charlie.

I rolled Susannah onto Charlie’s bed and lay on top of her. My hand moved down between her legs. We kissed.

I heard coffee perking. I heard Charlie say: “Or maybe, you know, you can get some big scandal going, just lay it out in front of McGill, right on his desk, and leave him alone in a room with a pistol, see? Say something like, ‘I know you’ll do the honorable thing,’ right? Then just leave the room.”

Sue combed my hair back over my ears with her fingers. She said: “We have to know everything. No matter what. It’s the only way.”

“Blam!” said Charlie. He hummed the funeral march.

We had some breakfast, Susannah and I, and headed over to Sixth Avenue. It was a bright, windy day. The Jefferson Market branch of the library—a brown-brick church of a building with a spire-capped clock tower, stained-glass windows, concrete finials—stood poised and impressive against the racing clouds. We went up the front stairs hand in hand. We smiled at each other. Wan smiles, like we were going bravely to face the guns.

Down a spiral staircase, under the doorways of arching brick: We went to the newspaper room in the basement. We asked the librarian for the New York Times, the one McGill read on the way to Trent. We waited for him while he went into the back room. We kept our hands to ourselves now, folded together in front of us. We still smiled at each other. Wanly.

The librarian brought us a reel of microfilm. Susannah and I went together into the little room where the projectors were. I sat before the machine. Susannah leaned over my shoulder. I loaded the reel.

It was like that. Each movement brightly lit, each sharply delineated, like a dance under strobes. I saw my hand turning the crank of the machine, I saw the projected pages racing in a blur across the screen in front of me. I saw them slow, resolve into the pages of the Times. I reeled it back a little.

“There it is,” I said.

I felt Susannah lean in over my shoulder. I heard her long breath shudder.

There was a short story in the “Around the Nation” column:

THE SUPREME COURT TODAY CLEARED THE WAY FOR THE MARCH 17 EXECUTION OF NATHAN JERSEY, CONVICTED EIGHT YEARS AGO OF KILLING A GUARD WHILE IN INDIANA STATE PRISON. THE COURT REJECTED THE APPEAL OF JERSEY’S ATTORNEY, WHO CLAIMED THE PRISONER IS MENTALLY RETARDED.

JERSEY HAD BEEN SENTENCED TO DIE ONCE BEFORE FOR THE KILLING, TWENTY YEARS AGO, OF A FAMILY FOR WHICH HE WORKED AS A HANDYMAN. THAT SENTENCE WAS COMMUTED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN 1972 WHEN THE SUPREME COURT OVERTURNED THE DEATH PENALTY.

I heard Susannah’s breath again, the intake of it sharp this time. I rewound the microfilm.

“Twenty years back,” I said.

I glanced up at her. There were tears in her eyes. I couldn’t imagine why. I simply refused to make sense of it. I left her there and went to the directory. I went back twenty years and found nothing. I went back another year, and there was the name Nathan Jersey. The librarian brought me the reel. Again, I threaded it, ran it through.

Susannah said—as my hand slowed down on the crank, as the blurred whirl cleared, just before I backed it up to the right date—she said, she moaned: “Don’t …”

But by then it was impossible to stop. The story came up before me on the screen, at the precise moment the deductions slipped into place in my head. I knew the answer to the scarred man—the obvious answer—even as I read it on the page.

It was still no more than a squib in the nationals: a minor killing in a little Indiana town named Hickman. Details were sketchy, but it seems that on the night of November 4, an innkeeper named Robert Turner had been gunned down in the country hotel he kept there. He was found on the second-floor landing. His wife Carol was beside him. The inn’s maid was at the foot of the stairs. They were dead too.

“Robert and Carol Turner,” I said. “They were my parents, my father and mother.”

Susannah said nothing. She just stood behind me, crying into her hands.

She wasn’t crying for the Turners.

The story went on to say that two children had survived the attack on the inn. They’d hidden in a basement broom closet. A state cop had found them there. They were in shock, but otherwise unharmed.

Two children, the article said, ages five and one. A boy and a girl.

A brother and a sister.