Chapter 11
We find Wallace outside. I give him a quick hug, and he holds it longer than I want. I pull away and notice he isn’t wearing his usual boyish grin. His face looks pinched with worry.
It’s the sketch.
“Smile,” I say. It’s a command I detest others giving me.
Wallace shows me his neat line of white teeth, and hugs Jess the way you’re supposed to hug a friend, grabs her bag, and throws it in the Jeep.
He pushes his sunglasses up into his wavy blond hair and fastens his startling eyes—the blue practically matching the summer sky—on mine, clearly winding up for a heart-to-heart.
I give him a slight headshake that says, Don’t. Don’t haul your worry out in front of Jess. Let’s not talk about it now. “I’m hungry,” I say even though I have zero appetite.
To his credit, Wallace shifts gears. Suggests getting breakfast, asks about the flight, accepts my blah answer with an amiable nod. I remove my jacket in the perfect weather and toss it and my carry-on onto the back seat.
When Wallace pulls onto the highway after we drop Jess off, he heads south instead of north, where both of us live—me halfway between the small towns of Columbia Falls and Whitefish, and Wallace right in Whitefish.
“We’re going to Kalispell?” I ask. It’s only about fifteen miles away, but why?
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“You want breakfast, right? Whitefish will be crawling with tourists.”
“’Kay,” I say, but I have a funny feeling. “What about C-Falls?”
Around the same distance . . .
“Well, this way . . . we can stop at the police station, too.”
“No!” I smack the dashboard to underscore my reaction. “Not your choice.”
“You don’t think it’s you?”
“No.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“This is my decision, my choice.”
“And what have you got against playing it safe?”
“Have you forgotten I used to work there? I know what they’re going to do. Not much. Not anything. There’s no protection they’re going to offer me that I can’t provide for myself. No one there wants to get within talking distance of me. They’d throw me to the wolves if they could find a pack.”
“I realize that, but still. It’s good to get it on record, right?”
I don’t answer.
“Look, Cros, Kerry finally called me back.”
“And?”
“He said he supplied those same earrings to several gift shops around Montana.”
“And did Walmart carry them?”
“No, you know they didn’t.”
I did know. It was wishful thinking. “How many did he make?”
“He said he sells about one hundred seventy-five to two hundred pairs a year, and he’s been supplying them to the gift shops since they got popular about five years ago. He says they’ve become trendy because of the Montana sapphire. Everyone loves ’em.”
“A thousand or so. That’s something,” I say. “And since so many visitors come through Montana in the summer, that really opens up the playing field.”
Possibly, but not entirely. We both know it.
“You were a cop, Cros. So you know it’s got to be good to get it on the record, just in case.”
I think of Rolling Stone Jeremy What’s His Face and how he quickly shifted from claiming to write about climate change to writing about my goofs and screwups. My misjudgments. My blooper reel. Blooper sounds too light, too inconsequential. It should be fuck-up reel.
And I still can’t get over the coincidence of seeing him in the hotel bar and being on the same flight to Montana.
“If not for your sake, then do it for Jess,” says Wallace.
He lets it hang. I feel the full weight of it. The implication is clear.
You didn’t do enough then, so do something now.
“Am I right?” he adds.
I think of Jess, with her insomnia and her nightmares when she sleeps. Of how, ever since the rape, she flinches if someone surprises her in the least. She’s like a soldier returning from war.
I think of what happened to me at the Kalispell PD, how it doesn’t begin to compare with the assaults on Sophie and Jess, but how it nonetheless made me feel powerless and inept.
There’s something inside me like a steady, slow bleed.
Time has not done its thing. For as much as I carry it around, it could have happened earlier that day.
“Okay,” I say. “I won’t say you’re right, but . . .”
“But?”
“Let’s go to the station. I’ll get it on the record.”