The Pact

  "I won't need you," Thomas said. He gestured toward his father's bedroom. "Maybe I should go say hi."

  "Maybe you should get your butt back into your own room," Jordan said, smiling at Thomas, and then he whisked out the door with the feel of his son's admiration lightly riding on his shoulders.

  GUS LEANED INTO the rear of the car, buttoning Kate's jacket up to the throat. "You're warm enough?" she asked.

  Kate nodded, still too shocked by the thought of her brother being dragged off by the police to function fully. She would wait in the car while Gus and James and the lawyer sorted out this mess--not the best solution, but the only available one. At twelve, Kate was too young to be left alone at night, and who was Gus supposed to call? Her parents lived in Florida, James's would have had heart failure even hearing about this scandal. Melanie--the only close friend Gus would have felt comfortable phoning as a last-minute baby-sitter--thought that Chris had killed her child.

  But as much as Gus wished she could have spared her daughter all this, there was a niggling voice in her head that urged her to have Kate as close as possible. You have one child left, it said. Keep her in sight.

  Gus reached across the foot of space between them and smoothed Kate's hair. "We'll be back in a little while," she said. "Lock the doors when I leave."

  "I know," Kate said.

  "And be good."

  Like Chris wasn't. The thought leapt between Gus and Kate, a hideous, traitorous current, and they broke apart before either of them could say it aloud, or admit that they'd even thought it.

  GUS AND JAMES HARTE HOVERED in the small cone of light produced by the outside lamp at the police station, as if crossing the threshold without a legal knight in tow was unthinkable and surely risky. Jordan raised a hand in greeting as he crossed the street, reminded of that old adage about people who live together for a long time coming to look like each other. The Hartes' features were not so similar, but the singular, burning purpose in their eyes twinned them in an instant.

  "James," Jordan said, shaking the doctor's hand. "Gus." He glanced toward the door of the station. "Have you been inside?"

  "No," Gus said. "We were waiting for you." Jordan thought about hustling them into the lobby, but then decided against it. The conversation they were going to have was better done in privacy, and as a former prosecutor he knew that the walls of cop shops had ears. He pulled his coat a little closer and asked the Hartes to tell them what had happened.

  Gus recounted the arrest during dinner. Through the recitation, James stood off to one side, as if he'd come to admire the architecture rather than protect his son. Jordan listened to Gus, but watched her husband thoughtfully. "So," Gus finished, rubbing her hands together for warmth. "You can talk to someone and get him out, right?"

  "Actually, I can't. Chris has to be held overnight until his arraignment, which will most likely be in the morning at the Grafton County Courthouse."

  "He has to stay in a cell here overnight?"

  "Well, no," Jordan said. "The Bainbridge police aren't equipped to keep him in their holding cell. He'll be moved to the Grafton County jail."

  James turned away. "What can we do?" Gus whispered.

  "Very little," Jordan admitted. "I'm going to go in and speak to Chris now. I'll be there first thing in the morning when he's called in for the arraignment."

  "And what happens there?"

  "Basically, the attorney general will enter the charge against Chris. We'll enter a plea of not guilty. I'll try to get him released on bail, but that may be difficult, given the fact that he's up against a very serious charge."

  "You're saying," Gus replied, her voice shaking with rage, "that my son, who did nothing wrong, has to sit overnight in jail, probably even longer than that, and there's nothing you can do to stop this from happening?"

  "Your son may have done nothing wrong," Jordan said gently, "but the police didn't buy his story about the suicide pact."

  James cleared his throat, breaking his silence. "Do you?" he asked.

  Jordan looked at Chris's parents--his mother on the verge of puddling to the sidewalk; his father distinctly embarrassed and uncomfortable--and decided to tell them the truth. "It sounds ... convenient," he said.

  As Jordan had expected, James looked away and Gus flew off into a rage. "Well," she huffed. "If your heart's not in it, we'll just find someone else."

  "It's not my job to believe your son," Jordan said. "It's my job to get him off." He looked directly into Gus's eyes. "I can do that," he said softly.

  She stared at him for a long moment, long enough for Jordan to feel like she was picking through his mind, sifting the wheat from the chaff. "I want to see Chris now," she said.

  "You can't. Only during shift changes--that's several hours away. I'll tell him whatever you want." Jordan held the door of the station open for her, the perfume of her indignation following in her wake. He was about to move inside himself when James Harte stopped him. "Can I ask you something?" Jordan nodded. "In confidence?" Jordan nodded again, a bit more slowly.

  "The thing is," James said carefully, "it was my gun." He took a deep breath. "I'm not saying what did or didn't happen. I'm just saying that the police know the Colt came out of my gun cabinet." Jordan's brows drew together. "So," James said, "does that make me an accessory?"

  "To murder?" Jordan asked. He shook his head. "You didn't deliberately put that gun there with the intention that Chris use it to shoot someone."

  James exhaled slowly. "I'm not saying Chris did use it to shoot someone," he clarified.

  "Yes," Jordan said. "I know." And he followed the man into the Bainbridge police station.

  WHEN HE HEARD FOOTSTEPS, Chris came to his feet and pressed his face to the small plastic window of the cell. "Lawyer's here," the policeman said, and suddenly Jordan McAfee was standing on the other side of the bars.

  He sat down on a chair the officer brought and took a legal pad out of his briefcase. "Have you said anything?" Jordan asked abruptly.

  "About what?" Chris answered.

  "Anything to the cops, to the desk sergeant. Anything at all."

  Chris shook his head. "Just that you were coming," he said.

  Jordan visibly relaxed. "All right. That's good," he said. He followed Chris's glance toward the video camera trained on the cell. "They won't tape this," he said. "They won't listen to the monitor. That's basic prisoner rights."

  "Prisoner," Chris repeated. He tried to sound like he didn't care, like he wasn't whining, but his voice was trembling. "Can I go home yet?"

  "No. First off, you don't say anything to anybody. In a little while, the sheriff's going to come take you to the Grafton County jail. You'll be brought in and booked there. Do what they tell you to; it's only a few hours. By the time you get up in the morning I'll be there, and we'll go over to the courthouse for your arraignment."

  "I don't want to go to jail," Chris said, paling.

  "You don't have a choice. You have to be held pending your arraignment, and the prosecutor arranged it so that you'd have to wait overnight. Which means Grafton." He looked directly at Chris. "She did it this way to scare the shit out of you. She wants you shaking when you see her face tomorrow in the courthouse."

  Chris nodded and swallowed hard. "You've been charged with first-degree murder," Jordan continued.

  "I didn't do it," Chris interrupted.

  "I don't want to know if you did or didn't," Jordan said smoothly. "It doesn't matter one way or the other. I'm still going to defend you."

  "I didn't do it," Chris repeated.

  "Fine," Jordan said dispassionately. "Tomorrow the prosecutor will move that you be held without bail, which is likely given the severity of the charge."

  "You mean, like, in jail?" Jordan nodded. "For how long?"

  Something in Chris's voice struck a chord. Jordan tilted his head and suddenly the panicked features of his client reconfigured, and he was staring at Thomas, much younger, asking when he was going to see his mother aga
in. There was a universal tone of voice for a boy who had just realized he was not invincible, who understood how slowly time could pass. "For as long as it takes," he said.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, James awakened with a start. Disoriented, his mind took him back years, and he sat up abruptly to listen for the thick wail of Kate with an infant's earache, or the sound of Chris's padding feet as he untangled himself from a nightmare and crept into his parents' bed for comfort. But there was only silence, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness he realized that Gus's half of the bed was completely empty.

  He shook off sleep and started down the hall. Kate was snoring peacefully, and Chris--well, Chris's bed was neatly made. The fresh realization hit James just below the breastbone, a physical ache that made him stumble. He wandered downstairs, drawn by a humming sound. A small rosy glow emerged from the mud room. James walked softly across the kitchen, his back to the wall, stopping a few feet shy of the mud-room door.

  Gus sat on the cold tile floor, her back pressed to the spinning dryer, which she'd turned on to muffle the sounds of her cries. Her face was red and splotched, her nose running, her shoulders as bent and weary as an old woman's.

  She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else--with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James.

  He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself?

  James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

  THERE WERE HIGH METAL FENCES around the jail, capped off with curls of barbed wire. Chris closed his eyes, wondering with a child's tenacity if maybe he could block the whole ordeal out, so that it wouldn't really be happening.

  The sheriff helped him out of the car and walked him to the door of the jail. A correctional officer unlocked the heavy steel door to admit them; Chris watched it being secured into place again. "You got another one, Joe?"

  "Like fleas," the sheriff said. "They just keep on coming."

  They all seemed to think this was hilarious, and laughed for a while. The sheriff handed over a plastic bag, inside which were items Chris recognized--his wallet, his car keys, his loose change. A second officer took it. "You gonna do the paperwork? We've got it from here."

  The sheriff left without even making eye contact with Chris. Alone with two men he knew even less well than he'd known the sheriff, Chris started to shiver again. "Hands out to your sides," one of the officers said. He stood in front of Chris, patting his hands from Chris's neck down to his waist and then up each of his legs. The second officer began to catalog Chris's personal possessions.

  "Come on." The first guard caught Chris by the elbow and led him toward the booking room. He fussed with a placard, handed it to Chris, then stood him up against a wall. "Smile," he grunted, and there was a flash as a picture was taken.

  He sat Chris down at the single table, rolled his fingertips in ink again for prints. Then he handed Chris a cloth to wipe his hands off, and slid a piece of paper across the table. Chris glanced down at the questionnaire as the officer scrounged for a pencil. "Fill this in," he said.

  The very first question stumped Chris. "Are you suicidal?" His psychiatrist knew he wasn't. His attorney thought he was. Hesitantly, he checked off "Yes," then erased it and answered "No."

  "Do you have AIDS?"

  "Do you have any ongoing medical problems?"

  "Do you wish to see a doctor while here?"

  Chris chewed at the end of the pencil. "Yes," he checked off. Then wrote in the margin, "Dr. Feinstein."

  He finished the questionnaire and looked over his answers with the same attention to detail he'd given the SAT exam. What if someone lied? What if they were really suicidal, or dying of AIDS, and said they weren't?

  Who would care enough to check?

  The officer led him upstairs, to a control area filled with tiny TV monitors. He exchanged some information with the officer on duty, which made no sense to Chris, then guided him toward another small room. As the gate locked behind him, Chris shivered. "You cold?" the officer said dispassionately. "Lucky for you this room comes with free clothes." He waited until Chris stood up and then handed him a blue jumpsuit. "Go on," he said. "You put that on."

  "Here?" Chris asked, embarrassed. "Now?"

  "No," the officer said. "Aruba." He folded his arms.

  It's no big deal, Chris told himself. He'd stripped naked a million times in the locker room in front of a bunch of guys. One prison guard, and only down to his shorts--that was nothing at all. But by the time he pulled the zipper of the coveralls up to his throat, his hands were trembling so badly he hid them behind his back.

  "All right," the officer said. "Let's go."

  He escorted Chris down a hallway, into the maximum security division. With every breath, Chris's lungs had to work harder. Was it his imagination, or was the air inside a jail thinner than it was outside? The officer unlocked a heavy door and led Chris onto a narrow, gray catwalk. There were individual cells, two side by side along the catwalk, but the barred doors were open. At the end of the pod, outside the bars, was a TV. The nightly news was on.

  Suddenly there was a call through the air, which rippled through the open bars and hollow catwalks. "Lockdown," the voice yelled, and Chris heard the pounding of feet as prisoners slowly returned to their cells.

  "Here you go," the officer said, leading Chris to an unoccupied cell. "Bottom bunk."

  There were three other people in the pod. A small man with tiny, deep-set black eyes and a goatee walked into the cell beside Chris's and sat down on the bunk. At the end of the catwalk, the TV blinked black.

  The officer slid home the door of Chris's cell. The lights dimmed, but did not go out. Gradually the entire jail hushed, save for the collective breaths of the prisoners.

  Chris crawled onto the bottom bunk. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he could make out the form of an officer walking by on the other side of those bars, the flash of the man's smile.

  Chris rolled over so that all he could see was the cinderblock wall that confined him. He pressed a wad of jumpsuit into his mouth to muffle the sound, and he let himself cry.

  WHEN MICHAEL CAME DOWN to the kitchen the next morning, he could barely believe his eyes. Melanie stood at the stove, a spatula in one hand and a potholder gracing the other. He watched her flip a pancake and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and he thought, Ah, yes. This is who I married.

  He intentionally made a noise, so that she would think he was just entering. Turning, Melanie flashed a bright smile. "Oh, good," she said. "I was just going to get you up."

  "To eat, I hope."

  Melanie laughed. It was so unfamiliar a sound that both she and Michael stopped for a moment. Then, Melanie briskly turned away and picked up a platter of pancakes. She waited until Michael slid into his customary spot at the table, then set them down in front of him while never taking her eyes off his. "Buckwheat," she said softly.

  "Actually," he said, "the name's Michael." Melanie smiled at him, and without thinking it through Michael looped an arm around her thighs and drew her closer, pressing his head to her stomach. He felt her hand stroke his hair. "I've missed you," he murmured.

  "I know," Melanie said. She let her hand linger a moment longer, then pushed back. "You need syrup," she said.

  She carried a saucepan from the stove, maple syrup bubbling, and drizzled it over Michael's pancakes. "I thought we might take a ride this morning."

  Michael closed his mouth around a succulent bite of breakfast. He had to worm a litter of
puppies next town over, check a colicky horse, and pay a house call on a sick llama. But he hadn't seen Melanie this ... well, this together in days. "Sure," he said. "I just have to call some people to reschedule."

  Melanie slid into the chair across from him. When Michael stretched out his hand, she slipped hers into it. "That would be nice," she said.

  He finished eating and went to his office to make the phone calls. When he returned, Melanie was standing in front of the mirror in the foyer, running a thin coat of lipstick over her mouth. She smacked her lips together and saw Michael's reflection. "Ready?" she asked.

  "Sure," he said. "Where are we going?"

  Melanie linked her arm through his. "If I told you," she said, "it wouldn't be a surprise."

  Michael silently guessed where she was taking him. Not to Emily's grave; Mel wouldn't be chipper about that. Not out to eat, certainly, although they passed the main strip with all of Bainbridge's restaurants. Not shopping; it was too early. Not to the library, which was in the opposite direction.

  But then Melanie turned the car out of town. They passed barren fields and dairy farms, long stretches of road with nothing at all. A small green road sign announced that the town of Woodsville was ten miles away.

  What the hell was in Woodsville?

  He'd been there once, to put down a horse that had broken its leg. If he'd driven through the main part of town, he no longer remembered it.

  Melanie drove past a brick building, from behind which a tuft of barbed wire peeked. And Michael remembered that the county jail was in Woodsville. Conveniently down the street from the county courthouse.

  His wife turned into the parking lot of that courthouse. "There's something here," she said evenly, "that I think you should see."

  CHRIS WAS ALREADY AWAKE when the door to his cell screeched open at 5:45 A.M. His eyes felt like they had sand under the lids, no matter how much he rubbed them. The zipper of the jumpsuit was cutting into his skin, and he was starving. "Chow," an officer said, slinging a tray into the cell.

  Chris looked from the unappetizing lumps on the plate to the catwalk. The man with the black eyes was staring at him from the other cell. The man stalked away and disappeared behind a shower curtain.