With consummate grace, the large shingled house shared the last slope with the trees and faced onto a long lake that burned with the reflected fire of the sky.
A man escorted Tim down a set of softly lighted stairs from the deck, to the shore, to a pier that led out about a hundred feet into the water.
“You’re on your own from here,” he said.
Tim’s footsteps were hollow on the planks, and waves lapped gently at the pilings, and in shadowed water somewhere to his right, a fish jumped and splashed.
At the end of the pier stood an open pavilion large enough to seat eight for dinner. This evening, the table was small, and only two chairs were provided, both turned to face the western sky and the sky repeated in the water.
On the table were a tray of sandwiches covered by a glass lid, and a small silver-plated chest full of crushed ice in which four bottles of beer were nestled.
Tim’s host stood to greet him, and they shook hands. His host opened two beers. They sat to watch the fading twilight, drinking from the bottles.
Red bled to royal purple, and as the purple darkened, stars rose to crown the night.
At first Tim felt awkward and could not easily think of small talk and wished that nearby had been a nice work of masonry on which he could have commented favorably, but there was not a stone or brick in sight. Soon, however, he had been made to feel comfortable.
The pavilion lights were not on, but moonlight bounced off the dark water, and the night was bright enough.
They spoke of their mothers, among other things, and they both had stories as funny as they were tender.
Over sandwiches and the second bottle, Tim told about the killer with the hungry eyes and Wentworth and all that had happened. There were many questions, and he answered them, and then there were more, for this son of the Midwest was a thorough man.
Putting Mickey McCready’s DVD on the table, Tim said, “What I ask, sir, for the sake of my family, is you do your best to go at them from a direction that doesn’t look like you started from what I’ve brought to you.”
He secured a promise to that effect, and he believed that he could trust it.
In a sense, he was opening a door here. He had an instinct for doors, and this one felt safe.
“Sir, that video shows twenty men, all their faces clear enough, including Wentworth’s, whatever his name might be. They all work in law enforcement or in government somewhere, so they have photo ID on file. Run a comparison using facial-recognition software, you’ll find them. I figure each of those twenty will give up twenty more, and so on. But I’m telling you how to do what you know better than me.”
A while later, an aide approached along the pier. He nodded to Tim, and to his boss, he said, “Mr. President, that call you were hoping for is coming in five minutes.”
Tim rose with his host, and they shook hands.
The President said, “We’ve been a long while at this. My limit’s two, but would you like to have another beer before you go?”
Looking around at the black lake and every wavelet silvered with moonlight along its crest and the black trees rising at every shore and the black sky pierced at a thousand points, Tim said, “Thank you, sir. I don’t mind if I do.”
He stood until the President had walked back the entire length of the pier, and then he sat once more.
A maid brought the beer and an icy glass on a tray and then left him alone. He didn’t use the glass, and he nursed the beer.
From far away across the lake came the enchanting call of a loon, and the echoes were likewise enchanting.
Tim was as far away from home here as he had been at that white farmhouse on the plains, but he felt at peace because it was all home, really, from sea to sea.
Sixty-Seven
They could not afford the prices in the south or in the Bay Area, so they found a small town that they liked along the central coast.
Even there, they could not afford to live on the water or with a broad view of the sea, but they bought a 1930s house with good bones.
While they remodeled the property, keeping it true to its period, they lived in an on-site trailer. They did most of the work themselves.
His family—which in his definition included Pete, Zoey, Liam, and Michelle—came north for the housewarming between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Michelle brought the finished lion chandelier, and Linda cried at the sight of it, and cried again at the news that Michelle was pregnant.
He found a job building a wall, and then a patio deck, and each project led to another. Soon most people in town knew him: Tim the mason, he cares about his work.
With the house finished, Linda had begun to write again. A story that was not full of anger, in which the sentences did not drip with bitterness.
“This will go somewhere,” he said, after she gave him the first few chapters to read. “This is the real thing. This is you.”
“No, big head,” she said, shaking the pages at him. “This isn’t me. This is us.”
They did not have a TV, but they bought a newspaper some days.
In February, nine months after Tim had killed Linda’s would-be murderer, the media was full of stories about conspiracies and indictments. Two prominent politicians committed suicide, Washington quaked, and political empires fell.
They followed the news for a week, then didn’t.
In the evenings, they played swing music and old radio programs—Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Burns and Allen.
They had sold her ’39 Ford, in which the killer had left them a remembrance, and they talked about buying another one if her book did well.
Like Pete, Tim had sometimes dreamed of the severed heads of babies and of a distraught yet grateful mother who had lost one child but not two others, and who had in a fit of conflicting emotions torn her hair out by the roots to plait it into simple ornaments because she was poor and had nothing else to give to signify her gratitude. He dreamed of those things no more.
The wide world remained dark, and greater darkness threatened. But he and Linda had found a small place of light, because she knew how to endure and he knew how to fight, and together they were whole.