Locust Lane(83)

“Have you ever been inside?” she asked.

“A few years ago. There was a party. It’s what you’d expect.”

“We’ll never touch this kid, will we?”

“Let’s go talk to them. Tell them what we know.”

“Somehow I don’t think that would go down very well.”

She spoke with a rueful laugh, but she could see that he was serious.

“This isn’t the way to do it, Patrick.”

“I think maybe it is.”

“Please. Let’s leave.”

For a moment she thought she’d convinced him. And then he was out of the car. He watched the house. He’d seen something. She tracked his gaze. A woman’s silhouette filled a window. She and Patrick stared at each other, like two cats before trouble started. And then the woman vanished. Danielle leaned across the seat and rapped on the window with a ring but Patrick ignored her. She looked back at the house; there were two figures in the window now. Patrick started to walk up the lawn but froze when a light came on. Danielle reached for the door handle, ready to end this, but just then Patrick turned and walked back to the car. There was a dead little smile on his face she wasn’t thrilled about.

“We go,” she said when he got back inside. “Now.”

She didn’t speak until they were several blocks away.

“You do anything like that again and we’re done with whatever it is we’re doing.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He offered to take her home but she couldn’t abandon him now. So she spent another night at his place, a very different night. The stunt at the Parrish house had driven him into a bad place. He poured himself a whisky the moment they stepped through the door and bolted it and then he poured himself another. She drank nothing. She tried to get him to talk but he was beyond speech. He finally passed out in a recliner chair. She covered him with an afghan and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, she woke to the sound of him vomiting. She nursed him for a while and then decided she didn’t want to nurse him. So she went out to get some food. He told her to take some of the cash that he’d cunningly hidden in an envelope lying on the counter with his bank’s name on it. She counted it. There was just over two thousand dollars inside. At Whole Foods, she bought groceries that were so expensive she almost broke into laughter at the register. He was asleep when she got back to his condo, so she got an Uber home. She needed her own car. Whatever happened next, she didn’t want Patrick Noone behind the wheel.

At home she checked online to see what was happening. The prevailing opinion seemed to be that Jack Parrish was a very bad egg. Reading this, her attitude toward Patrick softened. Maybe he wasn’t such a crazy man after all. She remembered how she’d felt when she saw Christopher Mahoun and his father in court. She remembered her daughter’s purple eyeball as she lay on the stainless steel table. Just because Patrick was losing control didn’t mean he wasn’t the one who knew the truth.

He called in the afternoon.

“Did you just leave or are you gone?”

“I need you to stop drinking long enough for us to deal with this situation in a way that doesn’t end with us in handcuffs.”

“I think I can manage that.”

She drove over at dinnertime. He cooked for her from the food she’d bought. She’d never known a man who could cook. He made chicken and rice with a lemon sauce. As he worked, he drank from a wineglass filled with clear liquid. She took a sip without asking. It was water.

They ate. It was delicious. This man.

“So where did you learn to cook?”

“My ex-wife and I took a course in Italy.”

“Yeah, I was thinking about doing that.”

“Really?” he asked.

She shot him a look and he smiled sheepishly. His neck actually reddened and she thought she could fall for this guy, if only every last thing was different.

“You and I really are from different planets,” she said.

“And yet here we are, at the same table.”

“So what’s the plan, Patrick?”

“What do you want the plan to be?”

“I think you should talk to the police. Positively identify the Parrish kid as the one you saw. Put it on record.”

“I’m not sure how much water that will carry.”

“All right. Then we go to Mahoun’s lawyer. He’ll listen to you.”

“I’ll go to the cops. If you come with me.”

She wanted him to call the police right away but he wasn’t yet ready for that. They agreed to do it first thing in the morning.

“This needs some wine,” he said, referring to dinner.

“As long as we don’t graduate to the harder stuff.”

“Well, wine can be the harder stuff. But point taken.”

The three glasses he drank seemed to be just enough to keep him from crawling out of his skin. She cut herself off at one. They went to bed at some point and finally made love. It was awkward at first. But he was gentle and patient and persistent and after a while she began to lose herself and then they were off to the races. A lot of things were released in both of them. At one point they were basically grappling. She bit him on the shoulder and tasted the sweat. He didn’t complain. He held his own. When it was over she cried for the third time in a week and he held on to her until she was quiet. And then there was sleep and there were no dreams and that was the first good thing that had happened to her since the two cops walked into Slater’s shop.