Chapter 15 #2
Her eyes are the color I remember. Grey-green, deep set, the kind of eyes that have looked at a thousand liars and have a low quiet way of telling you they know the rate of one.
I sit very still under those eyes. I do not blink.
I do not swallow. I make my face the face I made on the stairs Wednesday morning before I walked into Val's office.
"Lieutenant Hale.”
"Detective."
"I'm going to want to talk to you alone next week."
What about?
"Yes, Detective."
"With your union rep."
"Yes, Detective." I am calm. I don’t react.
"Tuesday at ten."
"Yes, Detective."
"Good."
She closes her folder. She slides it into her bag. She stands. She nods at Val.
"Chief."
“Ms. Warren.”
"Thank you for your time."
"Thank you for yours."
Elise Warren walks out of the room.
The door clicks behind her.
The city attorney lets out a breath. Kessler lifts his coffee. The arson board flips a page. Val does not move.
I do not look at Val.
Val does not look at me.
The meeting goes another twenty minutes.
Kessler walks the lower-level panel room.
The arson board talks about electrical origin, not yet ruled out, pending further analysis.
The city attorney talks about the widow.
He uses the phrase whereabouts of the widow twice.
I sit with my hands flat on my thighs under the table and I do not look up.
Val closes the meeting at ten-forty.
The room empties.
I stay.
Val sits with her hands flat on the folder.
"She's cleared her name," Val says.
"Yes, Chief."
"She was put on leave in November. She was not put on leave for what we thought she was put on leave for. The woman who put her on leave was the woman who needed her put on leave. That woman is now under investigation in Sacramento."
"Yes, Chief."
"Elise Warren is back."
"Yes, Chief."
"She is not back as a friend, Hale."
"No, Chief."
"She is back as the detective who looked me in the eye in November and told me she did not believe a word I said about the warehouse fire and who was right."
I am quiet.
"You hear me."
"Yes, Chief."
"Tuesday at ten."
"Yes, Chief."
"You will not be in that room without me knowing every word you are going to say."
"Yes, Chief."
"Hale."
"Chief."
"Is there anything you want to tell me before Tuesday?”
She is looking at me. Her eyes look like they are black.
She is looking at me with the look she used Wednesday morning. The look has another inch in it today. This look has Elise Warren in it.
I have one second to decide to tell the truth or to keep lying.
"No, Chief."
"All right."
She stands. She picks up the folder. She puts on her jacket. She does not look at me again.
"Drive me home," she says.
"Yes, Chief."
---
I drive her up to the house on Beech.
She does not speak in the truck. I do not speak in the truck. The radio is off. The heater is loud. She sits in the passenger seat with the folder on her lap and her hand flat on the folder, and she looks out the window, and she does not look at me.
I pull into her drive.
The porch light is on. It is on at eleven-fifteen in the morning because Lena leaves it on for her.
The front door opens before Val is out of the truck.
Lena is in the doorway in jeans and one of Val's sweaters, with a mug in her hand, with her hair down.
She sees Val and her face does the thing her face does, which is a thing I have watched her face do for two years and which I do not have any envy about and which I am only now beginning to understand.
Val gets out.
Val stops at the bottom of the porch steps. She puts her hand on the rail. She turns back to the truck.
"Hale."
"Chief."
"Go home."
"Yes, Chief."
"To the cabin."
I blink.
"Yes, Chief."
"I'll see you Monday."
She turns. She walks up the steps. Lena meets her on the second step. Lena puts a hand on her face. Val lets the hand stay. Lena kisses her lightly. Lena says something I cannot hear and Val nods, and Lena takes the folder out of Val's hand, and they go in.
I don’t do a lot of work directly with Lena, but I know she is involved in everything now. I know Val confides in her and Lena holds Val and Val has become stronger since having Lena.
The door closes.
The porch light goes off.
I sit with my hands on the wheel.
Val told me to go to the cabin.
Val has never told me to go to the cabin.
Val has told me to go to the apartment, to the station, to Spokane, to a fire on Fourth Street, to an interview in Pittsburgh in 2009, and to a bar in Reno after a funeral in 2014.
Val has never said the word cabin to me as a destination.
The cabin has been the place she does not name.
The cabin has been the thing I drive to when I have not been told where to drive, which is the agreement we have had for fourteen years.
She has named it.
She has named it because she knows. She must know about Evangeline.
I sit with the truth of that for a count of ten.
Then I put the truck in reverse, and I back out of the drive, and I drive north.
---
Evangeline is on the porch when I come up the drive.
She is in my flannel and my sweats and she is barefoot still. She is sitting on the top step with a mug in both hands and a book open on her knee. The book is one of the biographies from the third shelf. She closes it when she sees the truck. She stands.
She is so beautiful with her golden hair loose around her shoulders. She takes my breath away every time I look at her.
I park.
I get out.
She walks down the porch steps to me.
She is looking at my face the way she looked at my face last night across the table, which is the way she looks at my face when she is deciding what kind of evening I am going to have. She stops in front of me. She puts her hand on the front of my jacket.
"Bad day?”
"Long." I sigh.
She does not ask. She has said she will not ask and she has not asked. She lifts her hand from my jacket and she puts it on my jaw, and she runs her thumb under my eye where the day is, and she lets her hand drop. She kisses me, lightly and tenderly.
"Take me out," she says.
I look at her.
"Out."
"In the truck."
"Evangeline."
"I have not been outside this porch in five days. I have not been in a vehicle since Tuesday morning. I am asking for a drive. I am not asking for a town. I am asking for half an hour with the window down."
I look at her.
"It's not a good idea."
"I know it's not a good idea."
"There is a detective in the city today who is going to interview me Tuesday."
"I know."
"You do not know that."
"You came home with a weird face and I know something is going on.”
I look at her.
"All right."
She smiles.
"Get some shoes."
She nods eagerly. She is beautiful and irresistible like this.
"And a coat."
She nods.
"And the hat in the closet."
She nods again.
She goes inside. She comes back in two minutes in a coat and the wool hat and a pair of my boots that are too big for her and that she has tied tight at the ankle.
She has put her hair up under the hat. She has the hat down to her eyebrows.
She looks like nobody. She looks like a small person next to my truck.
We get in the truck.
I drive west on the county road, away from the highway, away from any direction that goes toward a town. The road climbs. The pines thin. The sky opens. I have driven this road a hundred times and I have not driven it with anybody in the passenger seat ever.
She rolls the window down.
She leans her head against the door.
The cold air comes in. Her cheek pinks. She closes her eyes a count.
"Thank you," she says.
"Stop."
"No."
I drive.
---
The cliff is a turnout I have known about since I was twenty.
It is at the end of a forest service road that comes off the county road at mile fourteen.
The road is not paved. It is rutted. The truck takes it.
We go a mile and a half and the road ends in a flat clearing of pine needles that opens onto a long fall of valley to the west, and the valley runs out to a ridge of mountains, and behind the ridge of mountains the sun is six fingers off the horizon and going.
I park facing west.
I cut the engine.
We sit.
The valley is gold. The pines below us are black against the gold. A hawk is doing slow circles over the valley. The wind moves the tops of the pines and the pines below the cliff move like a slow tide. The sky is going pink at the rim.
She does not speak.
She watches the sun go.
I watch her watch it.
After a count she says, "I have not seen a sunset in a while. Not properly.”
The sun is lower. The sky is going red along the ridge. The pines are black. The truck is warm.
She unbuckles her seatbelt.
She slides toward me along the bench seat.
She puts her hand on my thigh.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Take me to the bed of the truck."
I look at her.
"You're cold."
"I am not cold."
"It's forty degrees out."
"I have a coat."
"Evangeline."
"There are blankets in the toolbox. I saw them yesterday from the porch when you were unloading."
She has been watching me unload my truck. She has been on the porch watching the woman who took her in unload her truck, which is a thing I did not know until this minute and which is a small bright thing I tuck away.
I look at her.
She is very close. The wool hat is pushed back on her head. Her cheek is pink. Her mouth is the mouth I have been thinking about all day in a meeting room.
"All right."
"Yes."
"The blankets are wool. They smell like the truck."
"I do not care."
"All right."
We get out.
I drop the tailgate. I pull the toolbox open and I take out the two wool blankets I keep there for fires I drive to in winter.
They smell like canvas and oil and pine.
I lay one flat over the bed liner and I fold the second one in half at the head end.
I lift her up onto the tailgate with both hands at her waist. She lets me.
She has let me lift her every time I have lifted her.
She lies back.
She lies back on my blanket in my truck bed under a sky that is going from gold to red, and she puts her hand up over her head and she rests it there, and she looks at me.
I climb up.
I close the tailgate. I crawl up the bed to her on my knees. I put one knee on each side of her hip. I bend over her. I put both hands on the blanket on either side of her head.
"Are you sure?”
"Yes."
"All right."
I bend.
I kiss her.
The kiss is the slow kiss. The kiss is not the kitchen counter kiss.
The kiss is the kiss I have been holding off all day in a meeting room and a truck cab and a porch step.
I kiss her until her hand comes up and finds the back of my neck and her fingers sink into the hair at the base of my skull, and then I kiss her another count, and then I lift my mouth.
"Pants."
"Yes."
I reach for the waistband of the sweats she is wearing.
I pull the sweats down. I leave them at her thighs.
I leave the boots on. I leave the coat on.
I leave the wool hat on. I am not undressing this woman in forty-degree air.
I am putting my hand under the coat and inside the henley and on her stomach, and I am kissing the side of her neck where the pulse is, and she is making the small sound she made at the kitchen table.
I put two fingers between her legs.
She is wet.
She is wet from the road, from the wind in her face, from the kiss, from sitting in my passenger seat with my hat on her head watching me drive.
She is wet and warm and ready, and I press the flat of my hand at her and she rolls up against me with a small sound, and I kiss the small sound out of her mouth.
"Tell me what you want,” I whisper.
“I want you inside me,” she breathes.
"How many fingers?” I ask. Because I care and I want to please her.
"Two."
She is sure. And I like sure.
I press two fingers inside her.
She is hot and tight and she gives as I enter her.
The blanket scratches under her shoulder blades.
The sky is red. The pines are black. The wind is cold on the back of my neck.
I curl my fingers inside her and I find the place that is not new to me anymore, the place I learned Tuesday and re-learned last night, and I press it.
Her G spot. Beautiful and highly responsive. Perfect.
She arches into the press of my fingers.
She moans loudly and I wish I could hear that sound forever.
I move slowly and deeply thrusting into her.
I have her in the bed of my truck under a red sky and she is mine under my hand.
I press and I curl and I press and I curl, and I bring my thumb up onto her clit, and I work the two together at the rhythm I know now is her rhythm, and she puts both hands on the front of my coat and grips.
The wool hat slides back. Her hair comes loose.
Her mouth opens and closes. She is moaning loudly and deliciously as I fuck her.
"Don't stop." Her voice is hoarse.
“I won’t,” I promise her.
“You feel so good,” she gasps. Her words are stilted and her breathing quick.
I feel her cunt tighten around my fingers.
“Come for me, baby,” I growl as I fuck her.
She comes against my hand under the open sky.
She comes quietly. She comes with her mouth on the side of my jaw and her teeth in the cloth of my collar and her hand fisted in my coat. She comes the way a woman comes who has been afraid all her life of being heard, and I let her come the way she comes, and I do not ask her to be loud.
I hold her through it.
I hold her with my fingers still inside, my thumb still on her, my mouth at her temple, my body over hers, the wool blanket scratching at the back of her thighs, the red sky going purple at the edge.
She breathes.
I breathe.
The hawk is gone. The sun is gone. There is a band of orange over the ridge and above it the sky is a deep violet and a single star is up.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Don't move yet."
"No."
I do not move.
I keep my hand where it is. I keep my body where it is. I keep my mouth at her temple. The wind moves the tops of the pines. The single star is up. There is a band of orange over the ridge and above it the sky is a deep violet, and the violet is going darker.
She is warm and perfect under me.
She is warm and breathing slow and her hand is still fisted in my coat, and her mouth is still at my jaw, and I am thinking about the woman named Elise Warren who is going to interview me in four days, and I am thinking about the cabin and the brass key and the bandage on the hand that is gripping my coat, and the all-of-it is in the truck bed with me under the open sky, and the all-of-it does not move me.
The all-of-it does not move me.
That is the sentence.
I love Evangeline.
That is another sentence.
She turns her face up to mine. Her cheek is cold and her mouth is warm and her eyes catch the last of the orange off the ridge.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Stay a minute."
"Yes."
I stay.