“Jilly said to me, ‘Laura betrayed me.’ What did she mean, Paul?”
Paul looked like I’d socked him in the jaw. He shook his head as if to clear it and said, “All right, dammit. There was a Laura, but I haven’t seen her in several months. I broke it off. I just lost my head for a while there, but then I realized that I loved Jilly, that I didn’t want to lose her. I haven’t seen Laura since March.”
“Laura was your lover then?”
“You find that hard to believe, Mac? You look at me and you see a nerd who’s a decade older than you are, and not a thing like you? No bulging muscles? No big macho cop with broad shoulders and a full head of hair who goes chasing after terrorists, for God’s sake? The only thing good you can say about me is that I’m at least an evolved nerd since I attracted your sister.”
I forced myself to take another bite of my tuna salad sandwich. So both this Laura and Paul had betrayed Jilly. I wanted to jump over the table and tear Paul Bartlett’s head off. I made myself chew slowly, just as Paul had done. It gave me time to cool down. What I needed most of all was control. I said after just a moment, no anger at all in my voice, “Let’s get something perfectly straight here, Paul. I find it hard to believe you’d sleep with another woman because you’re a married man, supposedly a happily married man. A married man isn’t supposed to screw around on his wife.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.” Paul rubbed his fingers through his light brown hair. “I didn’t mean all that, Mac. I’m upset, you can see that.”
“What’s Laura’s last name?”
“Scott. Laura Scott. She’s a reference librarian at the public library in Salem. I met her there.”
“Why were you at the Salem Public Library?” Paul just shrugged. “They’ve got great science reference materials. I do some research there once in a while.” “How did Jilly find out about you sleeping with Laura?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell her. Of course Laura knows Jilly. They’re friends.”
“So Jilly went to the Salem Public Library too?” “Yes, she liked to go there. Don’t ask me why, but she did. Look, Mac, Laura is shy, withdrawn. She wouldn’t have told Jilly. I just can’t imagine how she found out. The two of them, they’re opposites. Jilly is beautiful, talented, outgoing, like all of you-you, Gwen, and Kevin. She never just plain walks, she struts. She oozes confidence, is immensely sure of herself. She believes she’s the best. Laura isn’t any of those things. She’s so self-effacing she could be a shadow.”
“Why did you sleep with her, Paul, if she’s so damned self-effacing?”
Paul looked down at the remains of his roast beef sandwich. “What is that old saw about having steak all the time? Maybe I just needed a change from Jilly for a while.”
“Is Laura Scott still in Salem?”
“I don’t know. She was upset when I told her it was over. I don’t know if she stayed or not. Why does it matter? I tell you, Jilly should never have found out about her. Maybe I dreamed about her and happened to say her name, with Jilly overhearing. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not important, Mac. It wasn’t important as of over a month ago.”
I didn’t let on to Paul that it was more than important to me. Jilly had known that Laura had betrayed her. Laura was so much in Jilly’s mind that I’d somehow picked it up from Jilly when I’d been with her in the hospital. Was Laura the reason Jilly had driven her Porsche over the cliff?
An hour later, I was on the highway heading to Salem.
Salem, the capital of Oregon, sits in the heart of the Willamette Valley, on the banks of the Willamette River. It’s only forty-three miles southwest of Portland, just a short hop as the natives say. I remembered Jilly telling me once, on her third glass of white wine, that its Indian name, Chemeketa, meant “place of rest” and had been translated into the biblical name of Salem, from the Hebrew shalom, meaning “peace.”