“Ain’t love grand?” I inquired of the night.
I noted both the disappearance of tolerance and the sound of disgust in my own words. I thought of Geof, with the responsibility for so many lives on his hands now, and with the bitter knowledge that none of this would be necessary if people would only behave themselves.
“I’m beginning to understand, love.”
But I was a long way from understanding love.
“Where are you, Marsha?”
I’d never before realized how many silver four-door Honda Accords there are in the world, or at least in Port Frederick. No wonder the United Auto Workers were ticked off. Accords seemed to inhabit every driveway, to be stopped just ahead of me at every stoplight, to torn at me suddenly from other streets, and the sight of every one of them kicked an electrical jolt through my insides.
“Where are you, girl?”
I cruised the perimeter of the shelter, knowing I couldn’t get within a block of the police lines and thinking she would have had to park outside of them like everybody else. Unless she rammed the police barricades.
No. Please.
“Bingo.”
I saw it: She’d run it halfway up a curbing so it tilted into the street as if to display its roof, which gleamed without color under the streetlight. It was about four blocks east of the shelter on a residential street. The driver’s door hung open like the mouth of an accident victim, and the roof light was on. I parked behind it, walked over and closed the door. The light went out. I stood by the car for a moment, looking around me, wondering what route she’d taken next to get from here to there. I imagined her running awkwardly through dark backyards, climbing clumsily, painfully, over backyard fences, stopping on the other side to catch her breath in frightened, determined gasps. Or maybe she’d simply walked dumbly, straightforwardly, down the sidewalks. Or, maybe she wasn’t even there yet, maybe she was hovering, frightened, working up her nerve, hugging the darkness under one of the trees between here and there. Maybe she’d lose her nerve. I hoped shed lose her nerve.
I summoned mine and proceeded to trace the route I thought she might have taken. It lay straight ahead up one driveway, into a backyard, over a fence, through another yard, down another driveway—more fences, dogs, lights coming on in dark houses. It was logical, but it was stupid. And it was all a lot of effort for nothing. At the end of my quest, I came up against a sold wall of police and spectators, three lines deep down the block from Sunrise House. The neighbors had converged like believers at a revival meeting. It was a carnival. Lighted like day. Noisy with nerves and commotion and outrage and titillation. I’d sneaked up on a three-ring circus, coming in under the tent flap when I could have just walked in the front door like everybody else.
I didn’t see Marsha.
I didn’t even, couldn’t even, see the shelter, except in brief glimpses between the bodies of the spectators. It was first come, first see. They’d staked their claims to ringside seats. Nobody who had a good seat was moving out of it.
I walked the edges of the crowd, feeling frustrated.
A television crew was setting up its cameras in a space cleared by the cops. I walked over to their van. The rear doors were open, allowing a clear view of their monitors inside. I edged up, close enough to see on their monitors what they were viewing through their cameras. It was weird, like going to a rock concert and only being able to see the performers on the overhead movie screens. I was hearing everything live, but I was seeing it as if it were a weekly cop show on television, scripted, cast, directed, produced, shot. My mind veered from the word “shot.”
Nervously, I watched the little screens for the actors I knew.
Nothing was happening.
Or maybe everything was happening, offstage.
Where was the negotiating team—in one of the neighboring houses? Working out of their cars with a field phone? Were was Geof? What the hell kind of job was it that asked this of a man? And that caused this fear like a fist in my heart?
“Be careful,” I whispered. “I love you.”
There was a sudden movement of the crowd, exclamations, a shouted “Stop, stop!” On one monitor, the camera’s eye was swinging around past excited, anonymous faces in the crowd, finally settling on a pale, round figure of a person who was running, stumbling, running toward the front steps of the shelter. On the monitor, Marsha’s hair looked as white as her bandages, and she appeared a lot heavier than she did in real life.
Real life ...
This was real life, I reminded myself. I was watching a girl run up the stairs to the front door of a battered women’s shelter where her husband was keeping mothers and children hostage at gunpoint. I was watching her pound on the door, hearing her scream, “Ernie, Ernie,” hearing the police shout, “Come back, come back,” but knowing they were helpless to do anything but also watch her.
We all watched the door open a crack.
We watched her slip inside.
And then we waited. The spectators who could see the front door stared at it. I stared at it on the monitor. We waited for half an hour. On the monitor, there was no commercial, there was no station break from reality.
The front door opened again.
Smithy was the first person out, poking her head out first, then following it with the rest of her body. A cheer went up from the crowd, but it was quickly muted as a police officer grabbed her, and pulled her to one side. The door opened again. This time it was a young white woman carrying a baby. She was grabbed, too, removed from danger. Then came a middle-aged white woman leading two small children by their hands, followed by another young white woman whom I guessed to be a volunteer staff member.
The last people out were a trio: a short, thin black woman who was coughing and two youngsters. The woman was trying very hard to hide her face.
Startled, I stared at the screen, trying to see her better, straining for a clearer look at that face, but the camera was keeping a discreet distance from these women who used to have secrets. I wasn’t absolutely sure of her identity until a police officer rushed up to haul them out of the line of fire.
It was Willie Henderson.
He scooped one of the children into his left arm and put his other arm around their mother, who held the second child’s hand. The woman placed her free hand across her abdomen as if to protect the baby inside. The short, thin black woman who looked so much like Gail Henderson was Gail Henderson, and the children were, I had to assume, Willie and Gail’s children.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, and one of the news crew glanced at me.
“You know her?” he inquired, his pen hovering above his notepad.
“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t know them at all.”
He turned away to more interesting interviews.
I walked around the crowd until I located Smithy. But she was being questioned, and I could only stare. She happened to look up and catch my eye. At that precise moment, there was a gunshot from inside the shelter.
People in the crowd began screaming.
My line of vision froze on Smithy, as if to eliminate the possibility of anything—particularly anything dreadful-happening outside of it. She closed her eyes. She looked as if she were praying. When she opened her eyes again, I had managed to move up quite close to her.
“Maybe we got lucky, Cain,” she said in a shaky voice.
“Lucky?” I asked.
“Maybe he didn’t shoot her. Maybe she shot him.”
“Lucky, Smithy?”
“You know what I say, Cain.” She was pale, shocked looking, unsmiling, and most likely a mirror image of me. But’ she said it anyway: “I say the only good abuser is a dead abuser.”
At a shout from the crowd, we both turned in time to see a weeping Marsha McEachen stumble out the front door of Sunrise House. She looked confused by the lights and commotion, and terrified.
“Hooray for our side,” Smithy breathed.
It appeared to be over.
I w
alked back the long way to Tommy’s car, and drove home to find out the details from the morning newscasts on the television. The anchorwoman told me that Ernie McEachen, nineteen years old, had been shot by his wife, and lay seriously wounded and comatose in a local hospital. It had not yet been determined whether any charges would be filed against Marsha McEachen, also nineteen years old. There was no mention of any police officer having been shot or wounded in the affair.
“Still here, m’dear,” I said to myself, and then replied to myself: “Never doubted it.”
After the news, the policewoman came into the house and took the children away. I took a shower and changed clothes, woke up Tommy, and he drove me over to pick up my car. I thanked him for everything, and then I went to the office.
Once there, I looked at my calendar. It said this was Tuesday. The calendar said I was getting married on Saturday. It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t even seem real. Maybe if I saw it on TV, I’d believe it.
It wasn’t until late that Tuesday night that Geof or I got to bed, and we even managed it at the same time. We lay side by side, sprawled naked on our backs on top of the bedspread.
“I’m too tired to get under the covers,” I admitted.
“That’s okay.” He groaned. “I’m too tired to roll over anyway.”
“I’m too tired to breathe.”
“Too tired to live.”
“Are you too tired to talk?”
“I’ll try.” He groaned again. “At least until my mouth stops moving or my brain dies, whichever comes first. What do you want to know first?”
“Ernie and Marsha.”
“When we went into the house, we found him in the kitchen. He was bleeding from a chest wound. She said be told her she was ‘killing him anyway,’ so she might as well go ahead and go the whole way. She claims he forced her hands around the gun, pointed it at himself and forced her finger on the trigger. But she doesn’t think he really meant to do it. she thinks he was trying to scare her, to make her feel bad and to get her to do what he wanted, and that in their struggle, he accidently caused her to set the gun off. I don’t know how the hell a judge is going to figure this one out.”
“How is she?”
“She is hysterical.”
“Who’s got the kids?”
“Her mother.”
“Tell me about Gail and Willie.”
“Gail and Willie.” He sighed. “Gail and Willie. Willie has been suspended. Considering what we found out about Willie today, I’d say that Willie’s tail is nailed.”
“What did you find out?”
“One—Gail Henderson not only has asthma, Jenny, she also has scar tissue that was the result of broken ribs she suffered about a year ago when Willie took out some of his frustrations on her.”
I was too tired to be able to accept information like that without having a physical reaction to it; on hearing it, I felt as if I too had been struck in the chest. It was suddenly difficult to find enough air to breathe.
Finally, I said, “Why was Willie so frustrated?”
“Two—he’d been suspended while his department investigated allegations of excessive force against suspects. Brutality, in other words. They began his first week as a rookie, Jenny, that far back. And they weren’t just citizen complaints, either. Some were filed by his fellow officers, so it must have been pretty damned bad.”
“You didn’t know this when he was hired?”
“No.” He sighed again. “Cops can be like doctors, you know, for good or ill, we don’t like to rat on our own. So somehow that piece of information never made it out of Boston when Willie applied for the job here. Maybe they wanted to be rid of him, maybe we were a good dumping ground for a bad cop, or maybe they just wanted to give him a chance at a fresh start. What nobody considered, though, was that when he tried to suppress his violence on the job, it would explode onto his family.”
We lay in silence for a while.
“Do you know how long Wille’s been in Port Frederick, Jenny?”
“A month?” I guessed. “Two months?”
“Six weeks. And suddenly we have this explosion of domestic homicides in a town where they happen, but never this frequently, or this close together.”
“What are you saying, Geof?”
“I don’t know, it’s just odd, that’s all.”
“Do you think she’s safe with him tonight?”
“Oh, Christ, yes. He wouldn’t dare touch her. Gail has never been safer with Willie than she is right now.”
I suddenly wanted very much to touch Geof, to get near to the warmth, security, and decency of him; I felt as if crawling into his skin with him wouldn’t bring me as close as I wanted to be at that moment. But I tried. I pushed the bedspread back, pulled the covers over us, and moved over into the warmth of his side. He put his arms around me. I would have liked to have gotten even closer to him, but we fell asleep without being aware of our passage from consciousness into dreams. It was the bedside telephone, ringing repeatedly, that awoke us just after sunrise. When Geof answered it, we learned it was not Gail, after all, for whom we should have been afraid that night.
When he finished talking, Geof put the receiver back gently.
“Willie’s dead,” he told me.
22
AT GEOF’S REQUEST, I WENT ALONG.
Gail was new to town, he pointed out, she didn’t have any friends, wouldn’t know any lawyers, might need’ somebody to look out for the children when the police arrested her for Willie’s murder. So I went, to play the role of best friend to a woman I hardly knew.
“I know you think I killed him!” she exclaimed to Geof the minute we walked into the small rented house. Her hair was wet, as if she’d just washed it, her face looked freshly scrubbed, and her jeans and blouse were clean and unwrinkled, as if she’d just put them on. “I know you hate me, but I didn’t kill Willie!”
“Gail,” he said, “I don’t hate you,”
She went into a coughing fit that seemed to grate on the nerves of the cops that were crowded into that tiny living room. I went to sit beside her on the couch. Still coughing, she looked at me as if she barely recognized me, which could have been true, since we had only met twice before. I wondered where the children were. I also wondered where Willie was. Willie’s body. Tentatively, I patted her between her thin shoulder blades, but then I pulled my hand back. Finally, she stopped coughing, looked up at Geof again.
“What happened?” he said.
“We were asleep,” she told him, her voice a high, rough croak. She spoke in staccato sentences as if she were trying to get the words out between breaths. “In our bed. Double bed. Willie was asleep. Beside me. I was asleep. Deep asleep. I’d taken a . . . Valium. Prescription . . . I have this prescription. Help me . . . sleep. They help me sleep. Woke up. Because there was this . . . noise. Explosion. I was confused. I thought maybe I’d . . . dreamed it. Or sonic boom. Something. Deafened me. I didn’t know what happened. I sat up. There wasn’t anybody there, but Willie was. He was. Willie . . . he was.”
“Where’s the gun, Gail?”
“Gun? I don’t know. . . . Gun?”
Unexpectedly, she screamed as if she had just that moment discovered his body. We all jumped, even though it was only a weak, shuddering scream a doll might make if you pulled its cord too fast. Gail began to shiver. I put my arm around her tightly. The quivering turned to shaking. I felt as if it were only my embrace that held her bones together inside her skin and kept her from flying apart into fragments of flesh and bone. “Bad,” she got out, gasping between the words. “Blood. Willie. Pillow. Over me. My hair. Nightgown. Horrible. Couldn’t stand it. Washed it. . . out. Horrible. It was . . . so . . . horrible.”
She clawed at her chest, as if to rip it open to let air in.
“Where’s your inhalator?” I asked her in a loud voice, and she pointed wildly toward the left. Geof ran in that direction, and soon I heard the sound of plastic pill bottles falling to a tile floor. H
e came running back in with a plastic inhalator, which he thrust at her. She placed the mouthpiece between her lips and sucked in deeply, her eyes wide and staring. She did it a second time, and a third. But she was still frantically gasping for air when she removed the mouthpiece. It fell to her lap.
“Breathe,” she gasped. “Can’t.”
Geof lifted her from the couch and started out the door with her, shouting instructions as he ran: “Call the hospital. Tell them I’m bringing them a pregnant woman who’s having a serious asthma attack. I need a driver!” A uniformed officer ran out of the house behind Geof and Gail, and in a few seconds we heard doors slam and a siren start up.
I sat on the couch until it occurred to me I was in the way.
When I inquired about the children, one of the cops told me they had gone to a neighbor’s until the grandparents could make it down from Boston.
“Poor kids,” I said to myself.
“Yeah.” The cop heard me and shook his head. “God shouldn’t trust them-to us adults. Kids ought to be born ready to run, like calves, so they can get the hell away from us.”
They were bringing Willie’s body out of a back room.
I left immediately and set off for Sabrina’s house.
* * *
It was about a three-mile walk.
You can do a lot of thinking in three slow miles, one mile per dead husband. Three dead husbands in two weeks. And it might turn out to be four, if Ernie Mc-Eachen didn’t pull through. The fact that he had lived through the attack wasn’t the only thing that made him exceptional. For once, they had the gun that killed him. For once, they had a wife who admitted pulling the trigger. Sort of. Guns were not usually the weapon of choice for women, and yet here were four wives using four guns on four husbands. A contagion, as Kathy Ingram had suggested? If so, it was being spread by a virulent bacteria, some powerful, catalytic force that destroyed the women’s immune system and contaminated them with their husband’s violence. I had the feeling of a powerful, unseen, and murderous agent at work in the troubled marriages of our town.