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  "Can I start by begging you to forgive me for what I did yesterday?"

  "I can do that, but it'll take some time. You threw me, Mike. And you betrayed me."

  Silence then. She glanced at him and saw the breath vapor coming from his nose. Mike's shoulders were slumped down into his sheriff windbreaker, his blond forelock hung down like the tail of a submissive dog.

  "I should never have drank all that liquor."

  "There's some other things you shouldn't have done, too."

  "I know I was wrong."

  She looked out at the windbreak along the orange grove. The eucalyptus trees hissed and heaved back and forth, the leaves flash silver facets in the moonlight. She knelt down and watched Tim stare at the big trees, with something like awe on his face. Above the treeline the stars twinkled and a jagged moonlit cloud slid by.

  Mike knelt in front of her. "If I could take a big black marker and draw a line across things, I'd do it. And I'd take everything that happened before yesterday, cut it off and throw it away. Merci, I've been trying awful hard lately to keep things contained. Keep things alive. I… this is not. . . this is the hardest thing I've ever said in my life, I'm not happy without you. I want you. I want a life with you and Tim and Danny. I want to get us a big house with plenty of room for everyone. I want to work hard, I need that, but when I come home I want I want you to be there. I'll give you all the time and space you need. You could do anything you want. You could work. You could maybe have a baby with me, if you wanted one. I'll be okay either way. I'm thirty-eight now, and my career is solid. Was solid. And I know who I am and what I want. I want you. Because I love you."

  He pulled something out of his windbreaker pocket and set it on her knee. Gray, rounded edges, a thin metal seam around the middle. Tim lured as always by small objects, tried to take it. But Merci's hand reached it first and she could feel the velvet against her cold fingers.

  "I know you can't answer now. But you can think about it. I want you to think about it."

  She looked at him. The wind ruffled his hair and he smiled.

  "How afraid were you?" she asked. "How afraid that Aubrey might do it? I read your letters and cards. You know what I'm talk about."

  In the cold light she saw his face go red.

  "Um . . . worried. Yeah. I thought she might try to . . . expose me. When she started talking about that I realized I didn't really know her all that well. I didn't know what she would do. I realized that everything I’d done could be turned against me, make me look real bad."

  Merci studied his puffy face, his tired eyes.

  "Did you love her?"

  "I never touched her. Except for those handshakes I told you about and one or two hugs. I never—"

  "But did you love her, Mike?"

  "I thought I was falling in love. And that's when I knew I had to end it."

  She let the words hang. Even in the wind they stayed right there in front of her, solid as boulders, impervious to the elements.

  "How were you going to end it?"

  "When I walked out after dinner that night I knew it was over. I'd come right up to the edge and looked in. I wasn't going to go there. Never. I'd learned what I needed to know."

  "And what was that, Mike?"

  "It's not something I'm proud of."

  "What was it you needed to know?"

  "That someone would find me, um, lovable, I guess. That was all. It was a question I had between me and me, Merci. Not me and you. Not anybody else."

  So you go to a prostitute to get your answer, she thought.

  She handed the box back to him. She picked up Tim and stood.

  Mike stayed down where he was. "I knew you wouldn't take it, and that's okay. I've had it for six months, but the time never seemed right. It sure isn't right now. But I wanted you to know where I stand. More important than that, though, more important than anything right now, is I want you to know how sorry I am for yesterday. Just know that. I'll keep the ring while you think. It'll be there."

  He stood and kissed her on the cheek. Her face was so cold she could barely feel it.

  Tim grabbed Mike's face and Mike smiled. In the harsh security light he looked like someone she barely knew, an exhausted man-boy with a smile cold as the stars.

  Mike put an arm around Merci and Tim, hugging them gently. Then she felt the fingers of his other hand against the inside of her thigh.

  "Let's go get warm together. I can hold you and you can hold me. It's been an awful long time. Maybe we can remember who we are."

  "I know who I am."

  He released her.

  "I'm not going to lose you, Merci. They can strip me down to nothing and you can never look at me again, but I won't lose you. You're here forever. I'm not letting you out."

  He made a gun of his hand, and aimed it at his heart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Merci rented a skiff in the Dana Point harbor early the next morning, Saturday, and guided the belching little outboard through the breakwater and into the bottomless sway of the Pacific. Her stomach went soft inside when she hit the open sea.

  She bore south. The morning was cold and clear and she could see the great sandstone cliffs where the cattle hides had been thrown down to the trading vessels just a hundred short years ago. A cold sweat slicked her brow.

  The bow of the little skiff took the swell hard and she felt the bench slamming up under her as she upped the throttle and sped south. She measured her velocity against the oncoming swell and it seemed considerable; she measured it against the breakwater rocks and it seemed almost no velocity at all.

  While the engine screamed, an assembly of voices quarreled inside her head.

  Mike is a good man, but you misunderstand him.

  Mike is weak and capable of error.

  You should help him.

  You should suspect him.

  You should abandon him.

  You should love him. .Merci looked out at the towering white clouds to the west, saw the gulls circling over a kelp bed. The bench knocked against her butt and she tried to get more speed, but the little two-cycle was tapped out she could smell the oil burning with the gas.

  She almost gagged on the fumes; almost gagged on the nausea rising and falling in her gut.

  She hugged the shore as best she could, staying a swimmable distance from the beach. She did not like the ocean, never had. It was untrustworthy and prone to violence. Nature's felon, she thought.

  She had almost lost Tim, Jr., to it. Not to mention herself. For reasons that had nothing to do with her own will, it had rejected them given them back their lives.

  But Hess had loved this ocean and Merci told herself that Hess had some influence out here, that some residual goodwill had surely rub off on her from him. As a lover of Hess.

  She thought of him and wondered why memory had to be a tribulation.

  She squinted to the south and saw the San Clemente Pier and knew she was just a mile or two from 23 Wave Street, from that tiny patch ocean that held the key to Aubrey Whittaker's murder.

  Half an hour later she was directly offshore of the Wave Street apartments. She tried to eyeball where that bullet had gone, assuming it flown in a straight line from the gun, through Aubrey Whittaker’s shocked heart, through the thin pane of the sliding glass door and into the infinite sea.

  She looked down at the water around the bobbing boat: indigo blur with silver facets that flashed like mirrors, countless variations, never the same arrangement twice.

  She realized that what she was hoping to find was roughly one-half inch square, maybe mushroomed out a little, but about that size. It would have sunk to the bottom, wherever that was.

  She looked at her beach bag, which had slid off the aft bench and now lay soaked by spray and spill against the hull. Through the mesh she could see the two red adjustable swim fins, the pink mask and clear snorkel. She touched the bag with the toe of her shoe. She hunched down deeper into her sweater against the cold day and told herself th
at she could suit up, don the mask and fins and make the dive. Make a hundred of them today. Make a hundred tomorrow and a hundred every day after that until the close of the age and she would never find the bullet. She would never even reach the bottom.

  This truth went against every grain in her, against her belief that hard work paid off, her sense of hope itself.

  Mike loved the girl.

  Mike thought he loved her.

  You can trust him with your life.

  He can't be trusted with anything.

  She sat for a long while, looking down into the shifting water, telling herself that miracles only come to the well positioned. And that was what she was.

  She looked back toward 23 Wave Street. She looked west to Catalina, visible as a low hump above the distant horizon line. A late morning wind came up and she could feel it rattling through her joints.

  Pulling the little outboard to life she carved a turn back the way she had come.

  • • •

  Two hours later she stood in Aubrey Whittaker's bedroom, contemplating herself in the mirrored closet door. The red leather dress fit tightly. Merci knew she was a slightly heavier woman than Aubrey. Slightly shorter.

  Slightly not as beautiful, she thought.

  She turned. The golden buckles caught the light. The leather smelled good, cool against her skin, a little stiff maybe, but leather formed to you, right?

  She held up her hair with one hand. Then the other. She put both hands on her hips and released the left one out to one side. Turned again. But no matter what she did Merci saw nothing attractive before her, nothing alluring or seductive or sexual. She looked like a big woman in a little dress with tears on her face.

  What had gone wrong?

  She knew that whatever it was, it was at the center of what Mike had done, or not done.

  Yes, because you are the key to him.

  No, Mike is what Mike does.

  You needed to love him, take those things out of him. They spoiled and festered and erupted.

  I am not the mother of menace. I have a heart. A big one. Big and cold. Big and cold.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sunrise, Monday morning, the last stars fading into a pale sky while Merci parked her car up the road from Mike's house, behind a tree where he wouldn't notice it. Oak branches vanished when she turned off the headlights. She killed the engine, felt her nerves bristle, then settle.

  She dangled an arm into the space behind the backseat, moving it around in the cool, comforting emptiness. She watched the smoke rise from chimneys up and down Modjeska Canyon, and she tried to banish the voice that told her she was wrong to be doing this.

  She'd spent the last forty-eight hours listening to that voice. She'd argued with it, agreed with it, disputed with it, screamed back at it. Now, decided, all she could do was tell it to shut up and leave her alone.

  At 7:02 she saw his van roll out of the driveway and down the road. Mike started work at quarter of eight, and Mike would rather be dead than late.

  You're betraying him so you can know him?

  You're investigating him to prove him innocent?

  Ten minutes later she drove over, parked in front of the house and let herself in as the dogs commenced barking.

  The house smelled of wood smoke and coffee like it always did. The fire was tamped down, just a glow behind the glass of the stove front. The animals in the pictures looked at her. The telephone desk was well organized, as all of Mike's things were organized. One message light on the machine, so she played it.

  Mike, this's your old man, you there or—

  The kitchen was neat, dishes washed, the empty Scotch bottle in recycle bin.

  She put her head into Danny's room, then into the spare bedroom, then went down the narrow hallway and into Mike's bedroom.

  Familiar smells: aftershave, deodorant, the humid bouquet of after-shower man. The room was large and dark, with the only window opening to a steep hillside that blocked the sun at almost every hour of day. She turned on two lamps.

  His bed was unmade. There was a desk along one wall—just an over turned door set upon file cabinets—with a computer and a printer. The cables went through the doorknob hole and down to the wall. Bloodhound pictures, bloodhound calendars, bloodhound books. A Navajo blanket hung from an adjacent wall, above Mike's framed collection of arrow heads. The other wall had a bookcase and shelves for photographs, valued fossils and seashells, little sayings from the Bible that Mike's mother written by hand on colored paper and set in small, standing frames.

  A good wife who can find?

  She is far more precious than jewels.

  The heart of her husband trusts in her,

  And he will have no lack of gain.

  Dear Lord, Merci thought, maybe You should just strike me dead right now and get it over with. The voice inside me would agree with You. Damn me. Damn me.

  But He didn't, and Merci turned to doing what she did best.

  It took her less than a minute to find the black sweater in the dresser. The date-night sweater. It was tight on him, with a crew neck, and he wore it when he wanted to look good. It showed off his blond hair and fair skin and hard muscles.

  . . . black wool and Orlon mix, definitely not from her dress, probably a sweater or outer garment of some kind . . .

  She read the label: 65 percent lambswool, 35 percent Orlon. Clean, folded, no blood. She told herself it meant nothing, fundamentally nothing at all— except that he had wanted to look his best for Aubrey. A little fury rippled inside.

  It meant little more than the beige carpet in the bedrooms of this house. The beige carpet she was standing on.

  Betray him because you care for him? Or because he's humiliated you?

  The closet was old and the runners were bad and she had to lean into it to get it to slide open. At the far end, jammed up against the side, were the things she left there: robe, a clean pair of jeans, a blouse, a light jacket.

  She knelt down and looked at the shoes. Mike was a shoe guy— probably twenty pair in all. Size twelve. She began pulling them out one at a time and looking at the tread patterns. Nothing like Evan O'Brien's print. In the far corner, behind a long duster she found a dusty old duffel containing a worn pair of moccasins, two tennis shoes caked in mud, and a pair of chukka-style boots.

  The tread pattern on the chukkas was like the one on the lab print. There was a dark, viscous buildup along one of the comma-shaped lugs that pointed toward the back. There was more trapped in the central circle of the right boot heel.

  She cursed him. And she cursed herself. And she cursed God, too, as the creator of all things.

  She put the shoes back into the duffel and put the duffel back behind the duster. She stood and leaned into the door to get it closed again.

  She told herself there was an explanation. There was an explanation. There had to be some explanation.

  Sweating now, heart pounding fast and hard, she went through his dresser, his bookshelves, his file cabinets, his desk drawers. If he wrote Aubrey Whittaker, she might have written back. Her affections. Her love. Her threats.

  She found the little box he'd offered her the night before, safe under his white athletic socks. She opened it. A plain gold solitaire setting with a diamond, big as a pencil eraser and much more beautiful. She closed it quickly, hoping this might make her feel less loathsome. It didn't. She imagined a stain starting on her heart, spreading out to the end of the universe and beyond.

  Easy. Easy now. There are explanations.

  She found the little bundle under the bed, in the gun safe contain the .357 Magnum Mike kept there for home protection. He'd made memorize the combination in case she needed it when he wasn't there: 4-4-5-7. Over and over he'd made her repeat it, 4-4-5-7, 4-4-5-7, now she used it to find his love letters from the whore.

  Her heart was thumping too hard and her brain was swimming with too much fury and guilt and hurt to read them. She just slapped them open and scanned: ... sooo cool of you t
o write . . . how outrageous a cop to say those things to a girl like me . . . I've felt those emotions toward you, too . . . agree that friendship is one of God's sneaky little ways of. . . good man you are ... be all right to meet you for coffee or walk on the .. . pretty huge differences in the ways we live our… fondly, truly, respectfully yours, yours, yours, yours . . . A. W., Aubrey Whittaker, WYW (you flatter me!) . . .

  Damn me, she said. Then said it again. The whore was in love with him. Slow now. Go slow and learn what there is to know.

  She checked the postmarks and dates. The most recent was a typewritten letter dated December 4.

  Dear Mike, Dark Cloud, Detective-man, Major Dude,

  I keep thinking about you all the time, no matter what I'm doing or who I'm doing it to! It's like having a friend with me all the time, glad you're not really there, though, a girl needs privacy sometimes, right? Now, I agree with you totally that I need a better way to make a living. Way down at the bottom of myself, the part of me that hates me tells me to keep doing what I do, but I know I shouldn't. It's just so . . . damned easy. And it also helps remind me what pigs men are, but you know, I wish that wasn't true. Now that I know you, I'm thinking maybe it's not.

  But you know something? I wonder when you'll do the cool thing and give me what I deserve. I've given and given to you—never charged you a dime, ha, ha—but when are you going to give something back? I get the fact you're ashamed of me. I'm just a whore. I understand you can't be seen with

  me, what would your mommy think? I even understand you have another chick in your life. But Mike, if she makes you happy then why are you so miserable all the damn time? I make you happy. I can see it on your D. C. face! I think it's time for you to admit what I really am and admit what you've done. Time to offer something back. Time to service your debt! I don't ask for much. I get that no one can know about me, especially the people you work with, but I wonder if that might be the best thing that could happen to you—to have them know what you think of me, what you do with me, what we are. Maybe telling them would be the best thing I could do for you. So how can I change if you won't let me? Will I always just be Aubrey the professional joint copper to you? Hey man, I'm thinking of going private!