THIRTY-FOUR

Culhane lived on the second floor of a two-story building in a complex twenty minutes from town. As I drove there the skies lowered and darkened and then light rain spattered on my windshield and the road turned slick and shiny. It was raining harder when I knocked on her door.

“You’re wet,” she said awkwardly.

I stepped into her living room: white walls and sliding glass windows opening to a porch where Swedish ivy hung. Culhane stood to one side, watching me, her expression stiff and cautious. “You’d better show me the papers,” I said.

She was still for a moment. Then she went to the kitchen and brought back a small pile of Xeroxes. The top paper was headed: “Napoleon Partners—Certificate of Partnership,” with signature lines for five partners. The last name was signed in a small, careful hand. The i in Kris Ann was looped. “Is it hers?” Culhane asked.

“It’s hers.”

She looked small and serious. “I’m sorry, Adam.”

“No need. It’s nothing you did.”

“But you still love her, don’t you?”

“At least the idea of her. Maybe that was never fair.”

“Please, tell me what this means.”

“It means that Henry Cantwell didn’t kill his wife.”

She stared. “Then you’re going to the police.”

I shook my head. “This is mine to do, Nora, like the story is yours. Surely you see that.”

She stood taut. “Call Rayfield. You’ve already been hurt. You’re begging for something worse to happen.”

I handed her the paper. “Then you’d better keep this for your story.”

“For Christ’s sake, Adam, don’t you see what you’re doing?” I started for the door. She grabbed my arm. “Damn you, you’re acting out the case that killed your father.”

Her face when I turned was pale and intense. “Just … where did you dredge up that?” I asked softly.

“It’s so fucking obvious. The chances you’ve taken, this obsession to prove who killed her—it’s more than saving Henry Cantwell or your wife. It began making sense when Rayfield told me how your father died. So I got the clippings from when it happened and then called police who knew him. They told me everything. It’s incredible. He was thirty-two, like you are now, and a homicide lieutenant. The wife of a policeman—your father’s closest friend—was found raped and murdered. Your father was assigned to the case. He found out that the dead woman had been sleeping with a police captain named Tyrell, a man he’d never liked. His friend’s wife had broken it off—”

“I know the facts, Nora. He was my father.”

“Then let me finish. For almost a year your father tried to prove Tyrell had killed her, until they hated each other. Tyrell spied on your father and tried to have him busted. Each time Tyrell interfered, your father documented that, for evidence. It became obsessive. Tyrell stopped doing anything but worry about Kieron Shaw. Your father never got a warrant: Tyrell was over him, and made sure of that. But when your father was very certain, he went to Tyrell’s house alone to face him. He told Tyrell what he had. Tyrell pulled a gun and shot him through the heart. They sentenced Tyrell to life. Your father was buried, with photographers and newsmen everywhere. His picture ran in all the papers. You look exactly like him.” Culhane’s eyes were sad and knowing. “Adam, you’re not doing this for Henry Cantwell. The man you’ve done this for was murdered twenty years ago. You’ve given him too much already.”

I waited. “Are you through now?”

“Yes.”

I opened the door. Then I paused, turning back in the doorway. “You left something out, Nora. Things I haven’t let myself remember for years. My father was a good and decent man. He never made a promise—no matter how small, or how busy he was—that he didn’t keep. He never lied, and hated lies and liars. We played baseball. He was tall and slim and had this way of looking at people, even the priest, that said he saw them through their words. He was proud. He even walked proud into Mass, kneeling so quick and graceful by our pew that he was up in an instant. He seldom smiled, but when he did it was bright and sudden, and without knowing it he made people want to be like him. We—my mother, Brian, and I—lived on his strength. And when he died, my mother found her strength in hating him for that, and Brian in God, and I became someone I was never meant to be and made a mess of Krissy’s life, and now that’s mine to face. But there’s the other thing.”

Nora looked up. “What’s that?” she asked.

“My father was right. Tyrell killed the woman.”

“Oh God, Adam.”

I touched her cheek. Then I turned and walked to my car through the rain, to find Kris Ann.

The skies had turned black and slantwise rain battered my hood in the metallic beat of the night seven years ago, when I knew how I’d begun to lose her.

We had come back late from a movie and parked at the end of Cade’s driveway in a cocoon of rain and darkness, not wanting to go in. Thin vapor from our breathing glazed the windshield. Through it, the house was vague and dark and massive, its single light a blur of yellow from Cade’s bedroom. Kris Ann and I slid down in the seats, faces turned to each other, debating whether she would come to my room again. “But it’s unnerving,” she said, “like making love in a fire drill.”

I grinned in the dark. “It develops intense concentration and singleness of purpose. Someday our children will be banging on the bedroom door demanding water, and we’ll have either learned to concentrate or else—”

“Our children,” she smiled, “are one thing. My father is something else.”

“He is that.”

Her smile faded. “What are you going to do about his offer?”

“I don’t know. We’ve been planning on Washington, after all. Of course it’s a fine firm and a better start in some ways: more money, a good practice if I make partner. I suppose our life might be easier.”

“What about that apartment in Georgetown we were going to find?”

There was something in her tone I couldn’t place. “It still sounds good. I just wonder whether Birmingham might have more of a future for us. And it is where you’ve grown up.”

She looked away. “Of course Daddy’s here,” she said slowly.

“I’ve thought of that. The other way you wouldn’t see him very much.” I smiled. “Fortunately, once we’re married he won’t be sleeping next door. What do you think?”

She turned to face me. “It’s up to you, Adam. Please, just think about what you really want. I need to know that.”

I nodded. “Then I’ll consider what your father said.”

For a long time she was silent. “If you like.”

She sat straighter, facing toward the windshield so that her face was in shadows. The rain beat down. “Let’s go in now,” she said abruptly. “I’m getting tired.”

She didn’t come to my room that night. The next morning she said nothing about it, nor in all the years since, living in the house her father bought us.…

When I got there, Cade’s car was next to hers.