The Pact Read online

  Chris's hands tensed on the edge of the blanket. He looked up at the detective. "Do you know what happened to Emily?"

  It took a moment for Anne-Marie to decide if the boy was asking her for information, or offering his confession. "Emily," she said, "was taken to the hospital, just like you." She flicked the ballpoint of her pen. "What were you doing at the carousel tonight, Chris?"

  "We went to ... uh, fool around." He picked at the edge of his blanket. "We took some Canadian Club with us."

  Gus's mouth dropped open. Chris, who had done volunteer work with her for MADD, had been drinking and driving?

  "Was that all you had with you?"

  "No," Chris whispered. "I sort of took my father's gun."

  "His what?" Gus exclaimed, stepping forward at the same time James began to object.

  "Chris," Detective Marrone said, not batting an eye. "I just want to know what happened tonight." She stared at him. "I need to know your story."

  "Because Em can't give you hers, can she?" Chris said, curling forward. "She's dead?"

  Before Gus could approach the bed and put her arms around her son, Detective Marrone did it for her. "Yes," she said, as Chris broke into loud sobs. His back, the only part of him Gus could see in the policewoman's embrace, spasmed with coughs.

  "Did the two of you have a fight?" she asked quietly, releasing Chris.

  Gus recognized the exact moment that Chris realized what the detective was suggesting. Get out, she wanted to say, that feral defense spilling out of her, but she discovered that she could not speak at all. She found herself, like James, waiting for her son to object.

  Wondering, for a flicker of a moment, if he would.

  Chris shook his head forcefully, as if now that Marrone had planted the seed in his thoughts he needed to physically dislodge it. "Jesus Christ, no. I love her. I love Em." He brought his knees up beneath the blanket and buried his face against them. "We were going to do it together," he mumbled.

  "Do what?"

  Although Gus had not been the one to ask the question, Chris glanced up at his mother, fear stamped on his face. "Kill ourselves," he said softly. "Em was going to go first," he explained, still speaking to Gus. "She ... she shot herself. And before I got a chance to do it, too, the police came."

  Don't think about it, Gus ordered herself silently. Just act. She ran to the bed and held Chris, her mind numbed by disbelief--Emily and Chris? Committing suicide? It simply was not possible--but that only left another, more sinister alternative. The one that Detective Marrone had posed. As unthinkable as it was that Emily would kill herself, it was even more ludicrous to believe that Chris could have killed her.

  Gus raised her face above Chris's broad shoulder to see the detective. "Leave," she said. "Now."

  Anne-Marie Marrone nodded. "I'll be in touch," she said. "I'm sorry."

  Gus continued to rock Chris as the detective left, wondering whether she had been apologizing for what had taken place, or for what would happen when she returned.

  MICHAEL PUT MELANIE INTO BED, drifting on the Valium a sensitive ER physician had prescribed. He sat on the opposite side, waiting until he heard her breathing level off into sleep, unwilling to leave until he knew for certain that she, too, would not be taken from him unawares.

  Then he walked down the hall to Emily's room. The door was closed for privacy; when he opened it a rush of memories tumbled out, as if the essence of his daughter had simply been bottled up inside. Dizzy with the gift of it, Michael leaned against the doorjamb and breathed in the sweet nutty fragrance of Emily's Body Shop perfume, the waxy, ethylene odor of the drying canvas where a recent oil painting stood. He reached for a towel slung over the footboard, still damp.

  She was coming back; she had to be coming back; there was too much left unfinished here.

  At the hospital, he had spoken to the detective assigned to the case. Michael had assumed a masked assailant, a mugging, a drive-by shooting. He had been fantasizing about wrapping his hands around the throat of the stranger who'd taken his daughter's life.

  He hadn't realized that person was Emily.

  But Detective Marrone had spoken to Chris. She said that although any case like this--one survivor, one dead--would be treated as a homicide, Chris Harte had talked of a suicide pact.

  Michael had tried to remember details, conversations, events. The last discussion he'd had with Emily had been over breakfast. "Dad," she had said, "have you seen my backpack? I can't find it anywhere."

  Was that some kind of code?

  Michael walked over to the mirror hanging over Emily's dresser and saw, in the reflection, a face that looked too much like his daughter's had. He flattened his hands on the dresser, knocking over a small tub of Blistex. Inside, pressed into the translucent yellow paraffin, was the imprint of a finger. Was it her pinky? Was it one of the ones Michael had kissed when she'd been tiny and had fallen off her bike or gotten it caught in a drawer?

  He rushed out of the room, quietly left the house, and drove north.

  The Simpsons, whose prize Thoroughbred had almost died giving birth to a pair of fillies last week, were surprised to see him in the barn at dawn when they went to feed the horses. They hadn't called him, they said, and everything really had been fine for the past few days. But Michael waved them away, assuring them that a free follow-up visit was always included for difficult labors. He stood in the stall with his back to Joe Simpson until the man shrugged and left, and then he stroked the slender flanks of the mare, touched the spiked, downy manes of her offspring, and tried to remind himself that he'd once had the power to heal.

  WHEN CHRIS WOKE UP he felt like a lemon had wedged itself right in the middle of his throat, and his eyes were so dry the lids might as well have been closing over splintered glass. He had a hell of a headache, too, but he knew that was from the fall, and the stitches.

  His mother was curled at the foot of the bed; his father had fallen asleep in the only chair. There was nobody else there. No nurses, no doctors. No detective.

  He tried to imagine Emily, where she was now. At some funeral home? In the morgue? Where was the morgue, anyway ... it was never listed on the elevator stops. He shifted uncomfortably, wincing at the thunder in his head, trying to remember the last thing Emily had said to him.

  His head hurt, but not nearly as much as his heart.

  "Chris?" His mother's voice curled around him like smoke. She had sat up at the bottom of the bed; the blanket had etched a waffle print onto her cheek. "Honey? Are you all right?"

  He felt his mother's hand on his cheek, cool as a river. "Does your head hurt?" she asked.

  His father, at some point, had awakened. Now both his parents were flanking the bed, a pair of matched bookends, with pity and pain scribbled over their faces. Chris turned onto his side and pulled the pillow over his face. "When you get home," his mother said, "you'll feel better."

  "I was going to rent a wood splitter this weekend," his father added. "If the doctors say you're up to it, there's no reason you can't lend a hand."

  A wood splitter? A frigging wood splitter?

  "Honey." His mother's hands fretted over his shoulders. "It's all right to cry," she said, repeating one of the zillion platitudes the ER psychiatrist had preached the night before.

  Chris showed no sign of removing the pillow. His mother grabbed the edge of it, tugging gently. The pillow tumbled off the hospital bed to reveal Chris's face, scarlet, dry-eyed, furious. "Go away," he said, spitting each word carefully.

  It was not until he heard the bell of the elevator at the end of the hall that he raised his shaking hands to his face, touching the span of his brows and the slope of his nose and the empty windows of his eyes, trying to discover who he had become.

  JAMES CRUMPLED HIS PAPER NAPKIN into a ball and stuffed it into the bottom of his coffee cup. "Well," he said, glancing at his watch. "I ought to go."

  Gus looked up at him through the steam of her forgotten tea. "You what?" she asked. "Where?"