Signs lined Old William Penn Highway, GUNS AND AMMO—THIS WEEKEND. I found the convention center out by the Monroeville Mall, next to a Babies “R” Us, the lot full, spillover parking in the lot of the abandoned big box across the street. Nine-dollar tickets to get into the show, the ticket taker asking if I was carrying a weapon.
No need for pretense, fake IDs, as Nestor might recognize me anyway. I showed my badge. “Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”
“Are you with Gibbs?” he asked.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“From the TV show,” he said, tearing my ticket, stamping my hand with an eagle.
“I’m a federal agent.”
“You know, the TV show,” he said.
Snaking lines of folding tables filled out the convention hall. I looked through the crowds for Nestor. Ammo and beef-jerky vendors, some tables like a flea market of random junk, old AK-47 banana clips and rusted-out Winchesters. Tables of blades—switchblade knives with jewel-colored handles. Neon-green axes labeled for hunting and killing zombies, I wondered if that was actually a thing. Someone asked if I needed a canister of mace to keep in my purse.
“You’d look good in this one,” one of the sellers said, a woman with platinum curls, holding up the skimpiest pink tank top, Hello Kitty with an AK-47: KALASHNIKITTY.
Other T-shirts, the Pillsbury Doughboy in a Nazi armband WHITE FLOUR, shirts for the USMC, the Screaming Eagles. Browsing guns, I liked the feel of weapons with wooden stocks, the warmth and heft, rather than the plasticky feel of some semiautomatic rifles. My attention caught on pink camo shotguns meant for gun babes, I figured, but there were only a half dozen other women here, and they didn’t look like the pink-camo type to me.
“My God, Shannon Moss—is that you?”
“Nestor?”
In his thirties then, he’d be in his fifties now. Handsome still. His eyes were still stunning—I’d almost forgotten how brilliant. Powder blue, lit from within. His hair had grown a shade darker, and his mustache and scruffy beard had gone gray at the tips. He’d been thin before, but even so he’d lost weight—wiry, like a long-distance runner. Flannel, blue jeans. His table was called the Eagle’s Nest, a pickers’ table. Nazi gear, almost all of it—antique rifles, bayonets, a glass case of pistols, P38s and Lugers, matched with patches from the officers who’d carried them, letters of authenticity. Some American stuff, an autographed picture of Patton. Nestor came around from behind his table.
“It is you,” he said, and he hugged me. Pipe smoke. It felt good to put my arms around him. “You haven’t changed,” he said. “I mean, you haven’t changed—you look just like I remember you. Look at you. How long has it been?”
“Nineteen years, about,” I said.
“Nineteen,” he said. “You know, when I first saw you coming up the aisle, I thought I recognized you, but my first thought was you might be your daughter.”
“Ha, no—no kids—”
“Let me look at you,” he said. “God. You look . . . you look damn good, I’m telling you. You took care of yourself.”
“Well, I don’t feel so young,” I said. “Dying my hair now.”
“I noticed, it looks good,” said Nestor. “I like the dark hair.”
“All the gray, I had to do something.”
“I’ll be honest, I’m happy to see you. You just left,” he said. “And then, I thought you might have, you know, with CJIS. When CJIS was attacked. Your office was in CJIS, wasn’t it? I’m remembering that right?”
“It was,” I said. “But I was at sea. I’ve been at sea.”
“You know about Brock?” he asked. “I mean about his wife? Lost his wife at CJIS, his two daughters also.”
“Rashonda,” I said. “I haven’t seen Brock since Canonsburg. How is he?”
“They used the day care at that building,” said Nestor. “He lost everyone. And never really got over it, never remarried or anything, just buried himself in his work, kept busy. He’s all right, last time we talked—you know, he got all those promotions. He’s at Quantico now. I used to ask him if he knew what happened with you, but he didn’t know. No one seemed to know. We figured you might have been caught up in the attack, too—but you’re here. I used to look through the names of everyone that was killed, all those memorials they televised. But you’re here. My God, Shannon. It’s good to see you.”
His demeanor had changed, chattier, a man used to patter, but his voice had the warmth I remembered.
“How about you?” I asked him. “What is all this stuff?”
“The Eagle’s Nest, takes up all my time. This was my dad’s collection. He was a hoarder—anything military. World War I or II. I was just going to sell all this stuff off at once, but a buddy of mine convinced me to do gun shows, and I’ve been at this . . . almost six years, I guess. I do American memorabilia, British, but the Nazi pieces are the big sellers here. It beats a desk job.”
“You aren’t with the Bureau anymore?”
“Not for a long time,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, let me get my neighbor over here to watch my table for a while. Do you have a few minutes? I’ll buy you some lunch. Their chicken fingers aren’t bad.”
I accepted a cup of coffee. The convention center’s café was near the bathrooms, a few tables set out. The coffee Nestor handed me smelled a little like barbecue sauce, and I barely sipped it but was happy to hold something warm. Nestor’s forehead wrinkled as he talked, just like I remembered, only the creases were deeper. His eyebrows were bushier, softer.
“It’s good to see you,” I told him.
A familiarity between us—I had barely known him in 1997, and even though the years were a gulf between us, I felt like no time had passed at all, like we were resuming a conversation neither one of us had wanted to end.
“What brings you around?” he asked.
“You,” I said. “What have you been up to?”
“I quit the Bureau—2008. Did some freelance photography for a while. The work I do now suits me. I travel the circuit, meet people. It’s all right. I’ve always been interested in history.”
“You’ve lost weight,” I said. “You’re just a skinny thing, look at you.”
“Yeah, well,” he said.
“Moved back to West Virginia?” I asked. “You grew up in Twilight?”
“Always been my home. I have a house just outside this little town called Buckhannon,” he said. “Quiet. Away from everything. They have a good strawberry festival every year.”
“I used to go there as a kid,” I said. Strawberry parfaits and idolizing the Strawberry Pageant queen in the parade. I imagined Nestor with his camera, snaps of Americana. “I haven’t been in years.”
“Sure, you grew up around here,” he said. “You grew up in Canonsburg, right? You grew up in our crime scene—”
“Why Buckhannon?” I asked.
“Things just came together. I needed a place with a garage to store all my junk. The place I have has a small barn on the property. You should see it sometime. I get pickers coming through to look at the war stuff.”
“That sounds like a nice life.”
“It’s a better life than the one I had,” he said.
“I don’t want to dance around something,” I said. “What happened? Why’d you leave the Bureau?”
“You know, you take something like what happened out in Nevada a couple years ago,” said Nestor. “All the FBI ready to storm that man’s ranch—and for what? Over cattle grazing? What’s the point of that? Of all that violence? I just . . . couldn’t take part anymore, I guess. Couldn’t be a jackboot.” He lost himself staring out over the heads of everyone at the gun show, the clamor of the convention hall grown distant. He cleared his throat, coughed. “I was involved in a ‘use of force’ incident—I took someone’s life. That shook me, almost destroyed me. I was having trouble handling what happened and just couldn’t deal with all the political bullshit. All the Bureau’s bullshit,” he said. “Drank too much, I admit. For a time . . . I had to come to terms with a few things.”
“You’re all right now?” I asked.
“I’m all right,” he said. “So you tracked me down. Came all the way out to Monroeville to see me.”
“I need to talk with you about Marian Mursult,” I said.
“Marian Mursult,” said Nestor, running his palm over his chest, reacting as if the name wounded him. “Why her?”
“She was found,” I said.
“We found her, long after.”
“I read up about the investigation, but I need particulars,” I said.
“After all this time? For what?” he asked, his forehead rippling, an expression like begging for mercy. “Why?”
“I’ve been assigned to a review board,” I told him, a standard cover that didn’t inspire questions—vaguely administrative, the tediousness of paperwork. “She was found out near Blackwater Falls?”
“Out in the woods, that’s right. Buried out in the Blackwater Gorge,” he said. “You, showing up here. You’re like a ghost, asking about ghosts. You really want to talk about that? Marian Mursult.”
“I need to know what you can tell me about her,” I said.
“Why don’t you go through the Bureau? Why track me down? Brock’s still around, out in Virginia. He can talk with you. He’d know more.”
“I need to talk with you,” I said.
“Not here, though,” said Nestor. “I don’t want to get into all that stuff here. Hell, most of these people, if they found out I used to work with the FBI, they’d blacklist me, they’d think I was spying on them. Can you meet up? Tonight even? This whole show closes down at four.”
“Anywhere,” I said. “Where are you staying?”
“I’m heading back home tonight,” he said. “You want to have dinner before I go? There’s a place over here some of us went to last night, the Wooden Nickel.”
“You’re down in Buckhannon, that’s not too far from the Blackwater,” I said. “Can you show me where you found her?”
“Seriously? After all these years, you track me down and want me to take you out there? Well, what the hell. It would take a few hours to get there and back,” said Nestor. “It’ll get dark. How are you with your leg? Can you hike at all?”
“I can hike.”
“All right. Well, why don’t we meet at the lodge, then—Blackwater Lodge. I can leave a little early from here, meet you down there, let’s say by six or six-thirty. I didn’t get a chance to buy you chicken fingers, but I’ll get you dinner after. I know a place.”
I arrived early, twenty minutes or so, waiting in the car with the radio on, shredding the napkin that came with my Starbucks into tinier and tinier scraps of confetti, ashamed at how nervous I was. Nestor had said I was like a ghost asking about other ghosts. Waiting for him outside the Blackwater Lodge, not yet dark, but I remembered how black the woods were that night—the hemlock pines around the lodge seemed to have grown denser over the years, this whole place thick with ghosts, a feeling like I could walk back to Cabin 22 and still see Patrick Mursult slumped there, drained of life.
Nestor pulled his F-150 beside my Camry and waved me into the cab.
“Are you driving?” I asked.
“We can only get one car up there.”
We left the main roads, taking narrower routes that cut uphill, the towering pines cooling what little remained of the day.
“Shannon, I don’t understand how you can still look so young.”
“Come on,” I said.
“I’m serious, Shannon,” said Nestor. “I turned into an old man, and you look—”
“Thanks, but I don’t know. I work out, I eat right,” I said.
“Well, you figured it out,” he said. “You should write a book about the fountain of youth, I’m telling you. You could be a millionaire, on the talk shows.”
Nestor turned onto a path just wide enough for his truck, an access route or maybe a logging road, that rushed uphill at a dizzying incline. The truck wheels spun out, but Nestor gunned the gas—the tires caught and the truck lurched upward. I leaned back in the seat, holding on, imagining the truck would tip backward, like we’d fall end over end.
“Here we are. They still have the trail marked.”
Nestor pointed ahead, and I saw an orange ribbon tied around a tree trunk. He maneuvered his truck, scraping against the pines, to where the path leveled out into a narrow clearing where he could park.
“This was as far as any of the trucks could get,” he said. “Couldn’t get an ambulance up here, so they brought her body down in the back of a pickup.”
Her body. Careful of my footing, climbing from the cab. The pines were silhouetted, but the sky overhead was a circle of evening, a violet eye staring down on us. Colder, here.
“We still have to walk,” said Nestor. “A little.”
The trail we followed was obscured by underbrush, but Nestor could still pick it out, stomping at the growth and holding back branches so I could make my way behind him, single file. We climbed a progression of naturally formed steps, clinging to trees for balance. He brought me to a runnel that might have been a creek, long dried. A bracket of five hemlock trees, black soil, emerald moss furring half-submerged stones.
“Here,” said Nestor.
Marian, I thought. This is where they found your body . . .
“This place was discovered by accident,” said Nestor. “A couple ginseng diggers came through, had gotten lost higher up the elevation and figured they would hit the river if they just kept walking downhill, figured they could follow the river back to the falls. Up the hill a bit, they found the first of what we called ‘cairns’—these stacks of flat rocks. Markers. They figured maybe some other diggers were marking a patch, so they came further down and spotted another cairn, and another. The cairns seemed to lead them to this spot, where we’re standing. I don’t see the cairns anymore. Someone must have knocked them down. Do you know what I’m describing, these markers?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Stacks of rocks.”
“So these guys stopped to take a look around. Well, they spotted the red berries, so they knew they actually found some ginseng here. They dug for roots but found bones instead—thought maybe an animal was buried here but knew the whole setup wasn’t quite right. They abandoned their dig and called in what they’d found.”
“You dug her up?”
“Park Service,” said Nestor. “Found human remains, called us in. And we figured right away, we just knew. It’s funny—I remember when Brock came into the meeting room, he said, ‘They found Marian.’ All we knew at the time was that Park Service had dug up some bones, but Brock knew it was our girl. Instinct. Got her ID by matching against her dental records.”
I breathed—the air rich with pine sap, the smell of damp stone. A beautiful place to rest.
“I read what Brock said, in the newspapers,” I said. “That stuff about Mursult killing himself? He knew that Patrick Mursult was murdered. He never believed Patrick Mursult killed his own family, did he? I was told his story was a cover.”
Nestor laughed, “Yeah, you could say that,” he said. “In fact—you asked why I quit the FBI? There were other things, but we had Patrick Mursult’s body. It was a clear homicide, but word comes down through Brock that we talk about it like a suicide. We were told a man killed his family, then killed himself, stick to the script. I couldn’t handle that, the outright lies we were supposed to live with. Then we find Marian’s body years later but hold to that same line. Patrick Mursult was killed, plain as day—he didn’t kill himself. It just didn’t wash with me.”
“They still investigated the homicide, though, didn’t they?” I asked. “You interviewed a woman? Onyongo?”
“Nicole,” said Nestor.
“We found pictures of her at Fleece’s place,” I said. “I saw in the case file she was having an affair with Mursult, lasted a few years.”
“Yeah—I remember who she is,” said Nestor. “If I remember right, the lodge kept license-plate numbers, tracked her down that way.”
“Nothing panned out with her?”
“No, not at all,” said Nestor. “We brought her in the day after you found Mursult, maybe a day after that. I interviewed her for two days straight, but she couldn’t tell us much.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Mursult picked her up in some bar,” said Nestor. “Knew that Nicole was a nurse and wanted to talk with her because he was suffering PTSD. She worked at an assisted-living facility, didn’t know how to help him, but that interaction started their relationship. They’d meet at the lodge.”
I recognized the Nicole I knew—she inhabited that bar like a conversation piece hung in a dull room. Maybe only a trick of fate that Mursult had drifted into May’rz, but once he saw her, once he heard her speak, he wouldn’t have wanted that voice to silence. I knew nothing about Mursult but pictured him falling in love with Nicole, a quick fall.
“Did you talk to her again once you found Marian? Ask her again about the daughter?”
“No,” said Nestor. “We took another look at the case when we found Marian, wondering if we’d missed anything, seeing if any leads would come out of the discovery. But this was . . . what, 2003? 2004? Our priorities had changed after 9/11. We didn’t have the resources to track down all the loose ends with this—our office was focusing on cybercrime and the war on terror. Brock had made peace with Patrick Mursult, the DA was happy. NCIS was still investigating, but without our involvement for the most part. We tried to consult with you, actually, bring you in, but no one could track you down. I thought you would have wanted to be here when we found her.”
“I would have, yes,” I said. “Where was she laid to rest?”
“Back in Canonsburg, with her family.”
“Her dad, too?”
“Yeah. They were all cremated.”
“You remember Fleece’s place?” I asked. “The ship made of fingernails?”
“I remember.”
“Whatever came of that?” I asked.
“Fact, I remember we were working with the coroner,” said Nestor, “trying to figure a way we could tell if the fingernails and toenails were missing on Marian, but it was impossible.”
“What happened when you found her?”
“Nothing. There was some play in the newspapers,” said Nestor, “but Brock didn’t want to release all the details, didn’t want people traipsing up here.”
“You never came close to figuring out who killed her?” I asked. “After all this time?”
Nestor shook his head. “Never came close.”
Shadows had gathered in the trees. I saw fireflies. Nestor sat on a rock, bundled in his wool jacket. We can observe this place, I thought. There’s plenty of tree cover. We can have someone posted in a blind, watch who shows up, who builds the cairns.
“I need you to show me this place on a map,” I said. “I need detailed instructions on how to get up here. What roads, and that access route you took. Detailed enough so that if I had to get back up here sometime and didn’t have any of these markers, I could still get here. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll mark it all out on a map for you,” he said. “You must be freezing. Let’s get you back. I’ll buy you some supper.”
Nestor lit our path with a Maglite, but even so, finding my footing was difficult coming downhill. Never sure where to plant my silicone foot, I couldn’t feel if dirt or rocks were about to give way in slides. I misstepped, tumbling, gashed my knee. I held on to branches and grabbed hold of boughs, still slipping, my palms sap-sticky and roughed up from catching myself on needles.
“Here,” said Nestor, offering his arm. I took it, steadied myself against him. I put my arm around him, clamped myself to him, walking hip to hip the rest of the way down the hill. He held me beside him.
“Thank you,” I said, frustrated that I’d needed his help at all. “I don’t like to get myself in a position like that—to rely on people.”
“I was all right with it,” he said.
We ate together in Buckhannon, at a place near the river called the Whistle Stop Grill. We sat in one of the booths, the tablecloth brown gingham covered with a heavy plastic sheet. The decor was like a country kitchen—an old hutch, a fireplace. The walls were wood paneling hung with wreaths. We each ordered steak, onion rings. Nestor poured from a pitcher of Yuengling.
“I like this place,” I told him.
“Yeah—I’m kind of a regular here. They have good food.”
“She’s pretty,” I said, catching sight of the bartender, a woman who looked black Irish. “You ever talk with her?”
“Annie, yeah,” he said. “I bet I’ll have to explain you the next time I’m in.”
“Is she your girlfriend? I don’t want to mess things up for you.”
“No, not a girlfriend. I had someone serious for a while, a few years back, but one day you wake up and realize you’re ruining each other,” he said. “Sometimes even the good things don’t quite stick. Sometimes they do.”
Warmed by the flirtation kindling between us. No consequences here. I wanted to take his hand in mine. I brushed my knee against his, and he didn’t pull away. “Thanks for taking me out there,” I said.
“You think that’s everything you’ll need?” he asked. “Do you have to present your case review or anything? Write a report?”
“Not for a little while yet,” I said. “I’ll be around.”
“Good. It’s been good seeing you,” he said.
I lingered with Nestor out by his truck, wishing he didn’t have that muff of a beard, but when he said, “I’ve thought about you so much over the years,” I kissed him anyway, finding his lips soft through the field of hair. I could tell he wasn’t expecting me, not so readily, but he kissed me and gave in like he was trying to drink me—I could feel the want in him. He cupped my breast as he kissed my neck.
“There’s people around,” I said, and Nestor said, “I’m sorry,” stepping back like he’d offended me or had transgressed, so I said, “Where do you live? Near here?”
I followed his taillights down 151, Old Elkins Road, about twenty minutes until he pulled in to the long gravel drive. A front-porch light. I parked behind the truck, followed him to the side door. “I could never fix this lock,” he said, nudging it open—he let the dog out, a jumpy setter, who scrambled into the yard and ran off into the dark. Nestor kissed me in the mudroom—pulled me to him. I kissed his eyes, kissed him. I felt him hard through his jeans, so I touched him, rubbed him while we kissed. He touched my hair like something precious and kissed the strands. He led me through the kitchen. “Through here,” he said, into the living room. A mirror above the mantel reflected our dark forms. He approached in the mirror behind me. His hands folded over my breasts—I felt him push against me from behind. Breathless, he turned me toward him, fumbled at my shirt buttons—so I helped him, spreading open my clothes, revealing myself. Nestor unbuttoned my jeans, fell to his knees as he guided my clothes down over my hips. He kissed my prosthesis, kissed my other thigh, kissed the length of my leg, higher, tasted me. He reached up and held my breasts, and my knee went weak, and I collapsed down with him to the carpet. I helped him remove my prosthesis, laughing with him at the release of the vacuum seal, the sound it made, peeling off the liner, embarrassed when he kissed my stump, knowing how it would smell—how the liner would have made my skin smell—but he kissed me there, kissed me. He kissed the line above my hair, golden there, working his way up my belly before taking each breast in his mouth and sucking. I shivered, arched myself, welcoming, and he pushed at me, entering me, pulling out only as he came. “I’m sorry,” he said, “that was so fast, I’m sorry,” and he used his mouth and then his fingers until I clenched and shuddered and cried out, panting. We slept for a little over an hour on the living-room carpet, woke up kissing. I used my mouth on him, then guided him into me. We watched each other’s eyes this second time—less needy than before. Throw pillows and a blanket from the back of the couch, we curled up together on the floor. He touched my left thigh and kept his hand resting there—I wondered if he thought it was a sign of courage to touch me there, or a gesture of acceptance, or if he was attracted to the missing limb, as some men were, but I didn’t want to ask him, just wanted him to indulge in whatever he needed from me.
“How did you lose your leg?” he asked, sometime after midnight. “Or were you born like this?”
My eyes had adjusted, and in the ambience of moonlight I noticed the strange painting above the television. A painting of a body, lying supine, and I worried it might be a naked woman, something tacky like Davy Gimm’s swimsuit posters, but realized it was a painting of a dead man.
“What is that?” I asked. “You didn’t paint it, did you?”
“No, I didn’t paint it. It was here when I bought the place, and I just never took it down,” he said. “The guy who facilitated the sale of the house wanted me to have it, said it has something to do with a Russian novel. It’s just a poster of some old painting. A picture of Jesus.”
“You could hang one of your own photographs,” I said.
“A painting of the dead Christ is worse than crime-scene photographs?”
“You’ve got to have something else.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I’ll swap it out. I have some shots of Yellowstone I like, one of the Grand Prismatic Spring. But you know, that painting—I used to be religious, I was raised in the church.”
“I remember you asked me if I believed in the Resurrection,” I said. “You thought it might help me, being around so much death.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That sounds like something I would have said. But I had an experience around that time. Like a religious experience, but in reverse I guess you could say. Have you ever had a religious experience? Like you heard the voice of God?”
I thought of seeing Earth from the distance of space, the near-holy connectedness to every facet of creation in that moment. “No,” I said. “Nothing religious, nothing like that. I’ve found beauty in nature, but nothing like hearing voices.”
“I had—it was like I had a vision of God, but God was like a black hole,” said Nestor. “The vision overwhelmed me. People talk about what infinity is, and they think of things that are never-ending, but infinity cuts the other way, too. Infinity can be a negation. We grow from dirt, and our cells multiply, and we grow and wear out and rot, and more are taking our place—it’s disgusting, all the bodies and death, billions of us, it’s like the tide, washing in and washing out. All that religion, that bullshit about God, it’s like that shit you believe as a child and one day wonder how you ever believed anything at all. Childish things. And everything changed for me after that vision, that experience. I started drinking to blunt the terror I’d felt. I was just so scared of the world. I couldn’t stomach the Bureau anymore, I moved out here, just drinking to lose myself. And I would watch that painting of Christ, convince myself that he might sit up, hoping he would somehow sit up to prove me wrong, but every night . . . I figure this painting is a depiction of Jesus after he’s been taken from the cross, and he’s just dead, a dead body, and everyone’s waiting for the Resurrection, and he’s waiting for his own Resurrection, but it’s not going to happen. I hated that painting because of how unchristian it felt to me, but then I realized what its message was. I dug deeper, found deeper meaning.”
“You’re an atheist,” I said.
“No, I believe in God. I believe God exists. I had an experience, I had that vision, and in the vision I saw God. God is a pestilent light ringed with black stars. I’m still a man of faith because I believe, but when I think of God, I think of something like a parasite.”
His heart was racing; he had broken into a cold sweat. His body was silvery in the moonlight. A small constellation of moles dotted his chest, like the belt of Orion over his heart. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry—and I’m sorry I asked about your leg,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. You must get tired of everyone asking you about it.”
“The truth is, I don’t even remember it happening,” I said. “I was lost in the woods, hypothermia had set in. My leg had turned gangrenous. They had to amputate. I remember the amputation.”
A car passed on 151, and the headlights flashed momentarily on the wall, crept in a grid of windowpanes across the ceiling. I wondered if we had turned cold to each other—just like that, after getting what we’d wanted, but Nestor put his hand on my hair, petted me, pulled me closer to him. I put my arm around him, and he lowered his head onto my breasts. I felt the rising and falling of his breath, knew he could hear my heartbeat.
“I had a local anesthetic, but was awake,” I told him, remembering the surgery in zero-g, the blood globules squirting in rushes, smearing against the ceiling, the walls. “I was awake, but I couldn’t watch. I just looked at the ceiling the whole time. They cut across my shin first, removed my ankle and foot. That’s the cut I sometimes think I still feel—a phantom sensation. Sometimes I feel a sever across my shin. The infection had already risen to my knee, though, so they had to take the rest.”
After a time Nestor helped me put on my prosthesis. He said, “It doesn’t bother me, just so you know. The moment I first saw you, I wanted to be with you—”
“You don’t remember when you first saw me,” I said.
“I saw you for just a second that night at the crime scene. You caught my eye. And in that meeting room the next morning, I was supposed to introduce myself to you. I already knew you were good-looking, but Jesus Christ, Shannon, when I saw you that morning—”
“All right, that’s enough.”
“And after you left, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. There was this other case, and I thought we might cross paths, but we never did. I was hoping—”
“I would have liked to cross paths,” I said. “What did I miss?”
“Just a waste of time, for us. Some guy from Harrisburg, some lawyer,” said Nestor. “He was killed in a carjacking. We wanted to consult with you.”
“What did he have to do with me?”
“Nothing. Erroneous reports,” he said. “We were working with a database of ballistic fingerprints, and the bullets they recovered from this lawyer matched the bullets we’d recovered from Mursult, so I thought of you, but we’d had the gun in our evidence room all that time. We wanted to call you in, to testify that this match was a false positive, but we couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find you.”
“What happened with the prosecution?”
“The judge threw everything out,” said Nestor. “That damn database spit out a handful of ballistics matches, everything went under review.”
“You miss the work?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “But after I—”
“You don’t have to talk about this.”
“I shot a man, in the line of duty. It was justified, in self-defense, but I couldn’t live with what I’d done,” said Nestor. “He’d pulled a gun on me, fired shots.”
I tried to reconstruct him, reconstruct his past—a past he might not ever come to have. Visions of God, a parasite, a pestilent star. Some sort of break maybe. Or maybe killing the man had broken him.
“Who was he?” I asked.
“Some big shot, a computer guy—an engineer,” said Nestor. “His name came up as part of an investigation, military secrets used for private gain. I went to interview him, that’s all—we weren’t even targeting him, but he panicked. I was put on leave, the shooting became an internal matter—they tell you you’re innocent until proven guilty, but that wasn’t my sense. I was ostracized within the Bureau even though I was cleared. Graham v. Connor.”
“And you left the FBI,” I said.
“I hope this doesn’t sound pathetic,” he said, “but I’d search for you on the Internet, hoping for a picture. Just one picture of you. But there was nothing. I would just let my memory of you play around in my mind, imagining what a life would have been like with you. I even asked around about you, but no one knew. Brock didn’t know. But here you are.”
“Here I am,” I said. “And I’m thirsty. What do you have around here?”
Looking at the picture of the dead Christ while I waited for my drink. The body was gray. Holbein, it read. The canvas was narrow, the body stretched out. Impossible to imagine that the body would breathe again.
We sat in lawn chairs out on his front porch, bundled in quilts. We drank cognac from coffee mugs, watching distant headlights. Nestor’s dog, Buick, curled at his feet, snoring as he chased some rabbit in his dreams. Comfortable in each other’s silence nearing 3:00 a.m., my mind wandered to Marian’s body buried among the pines and roving cities built in the shape of pyramids.
“What’s deeper than Christ?” I asked. “You said you looked at that painting and found something deeper than the miracles you once believed in. What’s deeper than Christ?”
“The eternal forest,” said Nestor. “All around us. Everything you can see.”
Too cold to stay outside. We went to his bed, and he drifted off but I stayed awake and watched the dawn glow pink and orange on the walls. I remembered Nestor’s father’s dream. He had dreamed he was trapped in a mine and crawled through the black tunnels until he came to a labyrinth of forest. The mirrored room, the tree of bones. I, too, had been lost in the eternal forest. I considered waking Nestor, to talk with him or kiss him one last time, but left my cell number on the nightstand and let him sleep.