The Pact

  They had been going over the discovery from the attorney general's office for three hours. It was the longest continuous stretch that Chris had ever spent away from his cell. He waited for Jordan to ask him another question, absently reading the names on the spines of the New Hampshire statute books arranged on a metal cart for the convenience of the visiting counselors.

  Jordan had told him, almost immediately after arriving this morning, that his defense strategy would be based on a double suicide that had not been carried through to its end. He had also told Chris that he would not be taking the stand in his own defense. It was the only way, Jordan insisted, to win the case. "How come," Chris said for the second time, "on TV, the defendant always takes the stand?"

  "Oh, holy Christ," Jordan muttered. "Are we back to that again? Because on TV the jury says whatever the hell the script tells it to. Real life is considerably less certain."

  Chris's lips thinned. "I told you that I wasn't suicidal."

  "Exactly. That's why you won't be on the stand. I can say whatever I want to at the trial to get you acquitted, but you can't. If I put you on the stand, you have to tell the jury that you were never going to kill yourself, and that weakens the defense."

  "But it's the truth," Chris said.

  Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not the truth, Chris. There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it. If I don't put you on the stand, all I'm doing is giving my idea of how I perceive what happened. I'm just not asking for yours."

  "It's a lie of omission," Chris pointed out.

  Jordan snorted. "Since when did you become a good Catholic?" he asked. He leaned back in his chair. "I'm not going to go around and around on this," he said. "You want to go on the stand and do it your way? Fine. First thing the prosecutor's going to do is hold up the police interviews and show the jury how you've already changed your story once. Then she'll ask you how come, if you were going to save Emily, you brought a gun with bullets in it, instead of an empty revolver for show. And then the jury will hand back a guilty verdict and I'll be the first one to wish you well at the State Pen."

  Chris muttered something under his breath and stood up, facing the rear wall of the conference room. "According to the ballistics report," Jordan said, ignoring him, "the shell of the one bullet that was fired was still in the revolver chamber, along with that second bullet. Your fingerprints were on both, which is a good piece of evidence for us: Why put two bullets in the chamber unless you were planning on one for yourself? I also like the fact that her fingerprints are on the gun, along with yours."

  "Yeah. But they only found her fingerprints on the barrel," Chris said, reading over Jordan's shoulder.

  "Doesn't matter. All we have to do is cast a reasonable doubt. Emily's fingerprints are somewhere on that gun. Therefore, she held it at some point." He spread his hands.

  "You sound confident," Chris said.

  "Would you rather I wasn't?"

  Chris sank down in his chair. "It's just that there's an awful lot of evidence there to explain away."

  "There is," Jordan briskly agreed. "And all it does is place you at the scene of the crime--something you've never denied. It does not, however, prove what you were doing there." He smiled at Chris. "Relax. I've won cases with far less to go on than this one."

  Jordan opened up the medical examiner's report with the details of Emily's autopsy. Entranced, Chris reached out and twisted the folder, reading the distinguishing marks of her body that he could have cataloged himself, the measure of her lungs, the color of her brain. He did not have to read the careful number to know the weight of Emily's heart; he'd held it for years.

  "Are you left-handed or right-handed?" Jordan asked.

  "Left," Chris said. "Why?"

  Jordan shook his head. "Trajectory of the bullet," he said. "What about Emily?"

  "Right-handed."

  Jordan sighed. "Well, that's consistent with the evidence," he said. He continued to leaf through the records that had been sent by the prosecutor's office. "You had sex before she killed herself," Jordan stated.

  Chris reddened. "Um, yes," he said.

  "Once?"

  He felt his cheeks burning even hotter. "Yeah."

  "Straight intercourse? Or did she go down on you?"

  Chris ducked his head. "Do you really need to know this?"

  "Yes," Jordan said evenly. "I do."

  Chris picked at a nick in the table. "Just straight," he murmured. He watched his attorney flip through the autopsy report. "What else does it say?"

  Jordan exhaled through his nose. "Not enough of what we need." He stared at Chris. "Is there any physical condition you know of that could have accounted for Emily's depression?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like some kind of hormonal imbalance? Cancer?" Chris shook his head twice. "What about the pregnancy?"

  For a moment, all the air in the room thickened. "The what?" Chris said.

  He was aware of Jordan watching his face carefully. "Pregnancy," Jordan said, turning the autopsy report toward Chris again. "Eleven weeks."

  Chris's mouth opened and closed. "She was ... oh, God. Oh, God. I didn't know." He thought of Emily as he had last seen her: lying on her side, her blood spreading beneath her hair, her hand draped over her abdomen. And then the room went black, and he imagined that he was falling into place beside her.

  USUALLY A VISIT TO the jail's nurse cost three dollars, but apparently fainting in the middle of a meeting with one's attorney won an inmate high triage status and a free trip to the small room used for medical treatment. Chris awakened to the feeling of cool hands on his brow. "Are you all right?" a voice said, high-pitched and muted, as if through a tunnel. He tried to sit up, but the hands were surprisingly strong. After a moment, he took deep breaths and tried to focus, and his eyes seized upon the face of an angel.

  The nurses rotated, on loan from the old folks' home next door. Chris knew of certain inmates who'd fill out the request for a medical visit and pay the three bucks just to see whether they'd get Nurse Carlisle, hands down the hottest of the three women. "You passed out," Nurse Carlisle said to him now. "Just keep your feet up, yes, like that, and you'll be fine in a few minutes."

  He kept his feet up, but turned his head on the scratchy pillow so that he could watch Nurse Carlisle move with economical grace around the small closet that passed for a sickroom. She returned with a glass of water--filled with, oh, God, precious ice. "Drink this slowly," she said, and he did, slipping the small cubes into his mouth the moment she turned away.

  "Have you fainted before?" Nurse Carlisle asked, her back to him, and he almost said no, until he remembered the night that Emily had died.

  "Once," he said.

  "Well, I've been in those little conference rooms," the nurse confided. "I'm surprised anyone makes it through without fainting, given the heat."

  "Yeah," Chris said. "That must have been it." But now that she had mentioned the conference room, it was all coming back. The discovery he'd been going over with Jordan. The small black letters that made up Emily's autopsy report. The baby.

  He felt himself sinking back down on the table, and almost immediately the nurse was at his side. "Are you feeling sick again?" she asked, propping his feet up again and covering him with a blanket.

  "Do you have kids?" Chris asked thickly.

  "No," the nurse laughed. "Why? Am I acting like a mother?" She tucked the blanket in at his sides. "Do you?"

  "No," Chris answered. "No, I don't." His hands fisted on the fabric.

  "You stay here as long as you want," Nurse Carlisle said. "Don't worry about the officers; I'll let them know what's happened."

  What had happened? Chris wasn't even certain he knew anymore. Emily ... pregnant? He had no doubt that the baby was his; he knew this in the way he knew that the sun would go down that night and that the sky would be blue the next morning--a fact that had always been that way and would always continue to be. He squinched s
hut his eyes and tried to remember whether her stomach had been any less flat; whether her features had seemed different; whether the truth had always been there for the taking. But all he could seem to recall was Emily, drawing away from him every time he touched her.

  Maybe Jordan had been right; the pregnancy had been the thing that made her so depressed. But why? They could have gotten married and had the baby; they could have gone together for an abortion. Surely she would have known that they'd figure it out together.

  Unless that was exactly what she was afraid of.

  All of a sudden a powerful rage shuddered through Chris. How dare she depend on him for the one thing, but not the other?

  With great precision, Chris rolled to his side and put his fist through the plasterboard wall.

  SELENA SAT ON a high stool, waiting for Kim Kenly to finish rinsing her hands. She let her eyes roam about the classroom, taking in the wide, black tables and the wall of shelving that held a rainbow of construction paper, a brace of easels, a festival of paints. The art teacher wiped her palms on the front of her denim apron and turned toward Selena with a smile on her face. "Now," she said, briskly pulling up a stool. "What can I do for you?"

  Selena opened her notebook. "I'd like you to tell me about Emily Gold," she said. "I understand she was one of your students?"

  Kim smiled wistfully. "She was. A particular favorite."

  "I've heard that she was very artistic," Selena prodded.

  "Oh, yes. She designed the Thespian Club's stage sets, you know. And she won a statewide high school art contest last year. With her grades, we had discussed her going to a college of fine arts, or even off to the Sorbonne."

  Now that was interesting. Pressure could come from many angles, not only parental, to make a kid feel overwhelmed. "Did you ever sense that Emily was worried about living up to everyone's expectations?"

  The art teacher frowned. "I don't know if anyone was harder on Emily than herself," she said. "Many artistic personalities have a wide streak of perfectionism."

  Selena sat back, patiently waiting for Kim to explain.

  "Well, maybe a case in point would be best," she said. She stood up and rummaged in the back of the room, emerging with a medium-size canvas painted with the spitting image of Chris.

  Emily Gold had been better than good; she was an accomplished painter. "Oh," Kim said, "that's right. You'd know Chris."

  "Do you?"

  She shrugged. "A bit. I have every high school student, for some small block of time in ninth grade. The interested ones sign up for continuing art classes, the others beat a path to the door." She smiled ruefully. "Chris would have been among the first ones out, if not for Emily."

  "He took art classes, too, then?"

  "Oh, God, no. But he came here quite a lot during his free periods to pose for Emily." She lifted a hand toward the canvas. "This was one of many."

  "Were you always here with them?"

  "Most of the time. I was impressed by the maturity of their relationship. In my line of work, you see a lot of giggling and necking in the halls, but rarely the connection those two had."

  "Can you explain that?"

  She tapped her finger against her lips. "I guess the best example would be Chris himself. He's an athlete, always in motion. Yet he thought nothing of sitting perfectly still for hours just because it was something Emily asked of him." She lifted the canvas, preparing to put it away, and then remembered why she'd brought it out in the first place. "Oh--the perfectionism. See here?" She peered closer to the canvas, and Selena did too, but only made out the layered shadings of paint. "Emily must have reworked the hands six or seven times, over a period of months. Said she couldn't get them exact. I remember that Chris, who was getting awfully sick of modeling at that point, told her that it wasn't supposed to be a photograph. But, you see, it was, to Emily. If she couldn't capture a portrait the way it was in her own mind's eye, it wasn't acceptable." Kim slid the canvas behind some others. "That's why I have it," she said. "Emily wouldn't take it home. In fact, I'd seen her destroy some others that didn't work out precisely the way she wanted, slashing the canvases or painting over them entirely. And I couldn't let that happen to this one, so I hid it and told her one of the custodians had misplaced it."

  Selena penciled a note in her little book, then looked up at the art teacher again. "Emily was suicidal," she said. "I wonder if she seemed depressed to you over the past few months, if there was any change in behavior at all."

  "She never said anything to me," Kim admitted. "She really never said much of anything at all. She'd come right in and get down to business. But her style had changed," she said. "I thought it was just experimentation."

  "Can you show me?"

  Emily's most recent work was propped beside an easel near the big windows of the art room. "You saw her painting of Chris," Kim said, by way of explanation. This last canvas was washed with a red and black background. A floating skull grinned out from the picture, bone white and gleaming, a painfully blue sky streaked with clouds showing through the holes of the eye sockets. A realistic red tongue snaked out from between yellowed teeth.

  At the bottom, Emily had signed her name. And titled it Self-Portrait.

  JORDAN'S CLEANING WOMAN, like the six before her, finally got sick of dusting and vacuuming around heaps of papers that were "absolutely, positively not to be disturbed," and quit. Well, actually, she'd quit a month ago, but that was just when Chris's case arrived on his doorstep and he'd put it out of his mind entirely. Until that evening, when he'd been leafing through his notes while reclining on the bed and realized that the smell which wouldn't go away came from his own sheets.

  Sighing, Jordan hiked himself off the bed and carefully set his notes on the dresser. Then he stripped the sheets from the mattress, wadding them into a ball and heading toward the washing machine. It was only when he passed Thomas, doing his homework in front of Wheel of Fortune, that he realized he probably ought to get his son's sheets, too.

  All in all, if Maria hadn't quit, Jordan might never have found the Penthouse. As it was, when it tumbled into the tangle of sheets, all he could do was stare at it, stunned.

  Finally, he shook himself into motion and picked up the magazine. Emblazoned on the front was a woman whose breasts defied gravity, her privates shielded by a low-hanging pair of binoculars. Jordan rubbed his hand along his jaw and sighed. He was completely at a loss when it came to this part of fatherhood. How could he tell his son to get rid of a porno magazine, when he himself paraded in bimbo after bimbo?

  If you're going to have this conversation, he told himself, you might as well have Thomas listen. Tucking the magazine beneath his arm, Jordan walked into the family room.

  "Hi," he said, sinking down on the couch. Thomas crouched over the coffee table, a textbook spread in front of him. "What are you working on?"

  "Social studies," Thomas said, and before Jordan could stop himself, he thought, A little too social.

  He watched his son write in his three-ring binder, his left hand carefully printing so that the pencil wouldn't smudge. Left-handedness; Thomas had gotten that from Deborah. And also the thick black hair, and the shape of the eyes. But the promised breadth of his shoulders, and the long line of spine, all that was straight from Jordan himself.

  Apparently he'd also bequeathed his son a healthy lust.

  Sighing, he pulled the magazine out and threw it over the looseleaf paper. "Want to tell me about this?" he asked.

  Thomas flicked a glance at the cover. "Not really," he said.

  "Is it yours?"

  Thomas rocked back on his heels. "Seeing as how only you and I live here, and you know it's not yours, then I guess that's pretty obvious."

  Jordan laughed. "You've been hanging around lawyers too long," he said. Then he sobered, capturing Thomas's gaze. "How come?" he asked simply.

  Thomas shrugged. "I wanted to see it, is all. I wanted to know what it was like."

  Jordan glanced at the Binocular
Babe on the magazine cover. "Well, I can tell you, it's not really like that." He bit his lip. "In fact, I can tell you anything you feel like asking me."

  Thomas blushed, the color of a peony. "Okay, then," he said. "How come you don't have a girlfriend?"

  Jordan's mouth gaped. "A what?"

  "You know, Dad. A steady girlfriend. A woman who actually sleeps with you and then comes back."

  "This is not about me," Jordan said tightly, wondering why it was so much easier to keep control in front of strangers at a trial. "We're talking about how you came to have a Penthouse in your possession."

  "Maybe that's what you're talking about," Thomas shrugged. "I'm not. You said I could ask you anything, but you won't answer me."

  "I didn't mean about my private life."

  "Why the hell not?" Thomas exclaimed. "You're asking about my private life!"

  "What I do with my free time is my own business," Jordan said. "If it bothers you when I bring women home, you may voice your opinion, and we'll discuss it. Otherwise, I expect you to respect my privacy."

  "Well, what I do with my free time is my own business, too," Thomas responded, and he slid the Penthouse beneath his stack of schoolbooks.

  "Thomas," Jordan said, his voice terrifyingly soft, "give it back."

  Thomas stood up. "Make me," he said.

  They squared off, tension thickening the air, their differences punctuated by the applause of the studio audience on the television. Suddenly Thomas grabbed the magazine from beneath his books and dashed toward his bedroom.

  "Get back here!" Jordan roared, striding in the direction of Thomas's room only to hear the door slam and the lock twist home. He was standing in the hall, considering breaking down the door on principle, when the doorbell rang.

  Selena. She would be coming over to discuss the Harte case. Which actually might be the best thing for all concerned parties, right now.

  Jordan walked to the front door and opened it, surprised to find an unfamiliar man in a uniform. "Telegram," he said.

  Taking the envelope, Jordan walked back inside. GETTING MARRIED DEC 25 STOP WOULD LIKE THOMAS TO BE THERE STOP PLANE TICKET TO PARIS BEING SENT TO YOUR OFFICE STOP THANKS JORDAN STOP DEBORAH.

  He glanced in the direction of Thomas's closed bedroom door, and thought, as he had a thousand times before, that timing was everything.