‘Don’t start again,’ he said. ‘You didn’t used to be this cynical.’
‘I’m not cynical, and I’m not the one who started anything,’ I answered him as my anger rose higher. ‘I’m not the one who started with an eleven-year-old boy and cut off patches of his flesh and left him naked by a Dumpster with a bullet in his head. And then killed a sheriff and a prison guard. And Jayne — Gault’s own twin sister. Remember that, Benton? Remember? Remember Central Park on Christmas Eve. Bare footprints in snow and her frozen blood dripping from the fountain!’
‘Of course I remember. I was there. I know all the same details you do.’
‘No, you don’t.’
I was furious now and moved away from him and gathered together my clothes.
‘You don’t put your hands inside their ruined bodies and touch and measure their wounds,’ I said. ‘You don’t hear them speak after they’re dead. You don’t see the faces of loved ones waiting inside my poor, plain lobby to hear heartless, unspeakable news. You don’t see what I do. Oh no, you don’t, Benton Wesley. You see clean case files and glossy photos and cold crime scenes. You spend more time with the killers than with those they ripped from life. And maybe you sleep better than I do, too. Maybe you still dream because you aren’t afraid to.’
He walked out of my house without a word, because I had gone too far. I had been unfair and mean, and not even truthful. Wesley knew only tortured sleep. He thrashed and muttered and coldly drenched the sheets. He rarely dreamed, or at least he had learned not to remember. I set salt and pepper shakers on corners of Carrie Grethen’s letter to keep it from folding along its creases. Her mocking, unnerving words were evidence now and should not be touched or disturbed.
Ninhydrin or a Luma Lite might reveal her fingerprints on the cheap white paper, or exemplars of her writing might be matched with what she had scrawled to me. Then we would prove she had penned this twisted message at the brink of her murder trial in Superior Court of New York City. The jury would see that she had not changed after five years of psychiatric treatment paid for with their taxes. She felt no remorse. She reveled in what she had done.
I had no doubt Benton would be somewhere in my neighborhood because I had not heard his BMW leave. I hurried along new paved streets, passing big brick and stucco homes, until I caught him beneath trees staring out at a rocky stretch of the James River. The water was frigid and the color of glass, and cirrus clouds were indistinct chalky streaks in a fading sky.
‘I’ll head out to South Carolina as soon as I get back to the house. I’ll get the condo ready and get your Scotch,’ he said, not turning around. ‘And Black Bush.’
‘You don’t need to leave tonight,’ I said, and I was afraid to move closer to him as slanted light brightened his hair and the wind stirred it. ‘I’ve got to get up early tomorrow. You can head out when I do.’
He was silent, staring up at a bald eagle that had followed me since I had left my house. Benton had put on a red windbreaker, but he looked chilled in his damp running shorts, and his arms were crossed tightly at his chest. His throat moved as he swallowed, his pain radiating from a hidden place that only I was allowed to see. At moments like this I did not know why he put up with me.
‘Don’t expect me to be a machine, Benton,’ I said quietly for the millionth time since I had loved him.
Still he did not speak, and water barely had the energy to roll toward downtown, making a dull pouring sound as it unwittingly headed closer to the violence of dams.
‘I take as much as I can,’ I explained. ‘I take more than most people could. Don’t expect too much from me, Benton.’
The eagle soared in circles over the tops of tall trees, and Benton seemed more resigned when he spoke at last.