The Pact Read online

  Gus scrubbed her hands over her face. "I'd be lying," she said.

  "You'd be making it hurt less," Melanie answered, and without wanting to, both women thought of what James had done, and why.

  CHRIS WAS WAITING on the porch steps when Gus got home. "Daddy says Charlie's dead," he announced.

  "I know," Gus said. "I'm sorry."

  "Are we going to put him in a lifeguard?"

  "A graveyard?" Gus frowned. What had James done with the dog? "I don't think so, honey. Daddy probably buried Charlie somewhere in the woods."

  "Is Charlie an angel now?"

  Gus thought about the springer, who had always seemed to have wings on his feet. "Yeah. I think he is."

  Chris rubbed his nose. "So when will we see him again?"

  "Not till we get to Heaven," Gus said. "Not for a long time."

  She looked up at Chris, his cheeks silver with tears. Impulsively, she went into the house, Chris trailing her. There, Gus went into the bathroom and packed up her toothbrush and shampoo, her Bic razors and her apricot perfume. She wrapped these in her cotton nightgown and set them on the bed. Then she haphazardly pulled clothes from drawers and hangers. "How would you like it," she asked Chris, "if we lived with Em for a while?"

  GUS AND CHRIS SLEPT in the Gold guest room, a narrow space beside the veterinary examination quarters with a double bed, a rickety dresser, and a pervasive odor of alcohol. Aware of how awkward this was, and the imposition, Gus went to bed at eight o'clock when she settled Christopher in. She lay in the dark beside him, and she tried not to think about James.

  Michael and Melanie had not said a thing. Not that they could have; anything mentioned would have come out wrong, anyway. To his credit, James had phoned four times. Twice, he'd walked all the way over, only to hear Gus shouting from a room within the Gold house that she didn't want to see him.

  Gus waited until she could no longer hear water running through the pipes upstairs. She counted Chris's even breathing and then she gently eased herself up off the bed. She walked down the hall to the den, where the pushbuttons of the telephone were glowing in the dark.

  James answered on the third ring. "Hello," he said groggily.

  "It's me."

  "Gus." She could hear him coming awake in starts, sitting up, huddling the phone closer. "I wish you'd come home."

  "Where did you bury him?"

  "In the woods. Back by the stone wall. I'll take you there if you want."

  "I just want to know," Gus said, "so I can tell Chris." She had no intention of telling Chris, really. The reason she wanted to know was that she feared, in ways she could barely articulate to herself, walking in the woods several years from now after a rainstorm and finding a skeleton.

  "I didn't do this to hurt him. I don't care about the goddamned carpet. If I could trade that in and get Charlie back healthy, you know I'd do it."

  "But you didn't," she said. "Did you?" She gently set the receiver back in its cradle and pressed her knuckles to her mouth. It was a moment before she realized Michael was standing in front of her.

  He was wearing sweatpants with a hole in the knee, and a faded Tufts T-shirt. "I heard noises," he explained. "I came down to make sure you were all right."

  "All right," Gus said, turning the word over. She thought of Melanie's precision for words, and of what James had said that morning: The dog died. But the dog hadn't really, when you got right down to it. The dog was killed. There was a difference.

  "I'm not all right," she said. "I'm not even fifty percent right."

  She felt Michael's hand on her arm. "He did what he thought was best, Gus. He even took Charlie out hunting beforehand." He knelt down beside Gus. "When Charlie died, he was with the person he loved most. I could have given him a shot, but I couldn't have made him as happy before I did it." He stood up, tugged at her hands. "Got to sleep," he said, and he led her back to the guest room, his hand riding light and warm on the small of her back.

  THE NEXT DAY, Melanie and Gus took the children to the pond. Chris and Emily rushed toward the water while their mothers were still setting up the towels and beach chairs and coolers. Suddenly, a whistle sounded from the lifeguard's deck. A strong, tanned teenager in a red suit jumped into the pond, stroking quickly toward the rock. Melanie and Gus stilled in their beach chairs, paralyzed by the same sudden realization: They could not see their children.

  Then Emily appeared, led by a woman they did not know. In the murky blue water was a slow-turning oval, trapped beneath the surface. The lifeguard dove under and reemerged, swiftly split the water before him and dragged his quarry onto the sand.

  Chris lay perfectly still, his face white, his chest flat. Gus shoved her way through the crowd, unable to speak, unable to do anything but fall bonelessly to the ground a few feet away from her son. The teenager leaned down, sealed Chris's lips with his own, breathed life.

  Chris's head turned to the side, and he vomited up water. Gasping, starting to cry, he reached past the lifeguard to the safety of Gus's arms. The teenager stood up. "He should be all right, ma'am," the boy said. "The little girl? His friend? She slipped off the rocks and he jumped in to get her. Problem was, she landed in a spot where she could stand. Your son didn't."

  "Mom," Chris said.

  Gus turned to the lifeguard, shaking. "I'm sorry. Thank you."

  "No problem," the boy said, and walked back to the whitewashed stand.

  "Mom," Chris said, and then more insistently, "Mom!" He framed his hands, fish-cold and trembling, on both sides of her face.

  "What?" Gus said, her heart so full it was heavy on the baby inside. "What is it?"

  "I saw him," Chris said, his eyes shining. "I saw Charlie again."

  THAT AFTERNOON GUS and Chris moved back to the Harte household. They carried their toiletries and clothes up the stairs. With some careful unpacking and casual rearranging, by nightfall--when James came home from the hospital and checked on his sleeping son and saw his wife waiting in bed--it seemed as though they had never left.

  THIS TIME DURING THE NIGHTMARE Gus managed to hurl the keys farther than she ever had before, under another vehicle that was parked all the way across the street. She unstrapped her seat belt and got to the baby's door, managed to unlatch her and drag her free as she heard the footsteps behind her again.

  "You bastard!" Gus yelled, for the first time fighting back in this nightmare. She kicked the tire. She looked into the back seat, expecting to see Chris's face as they squealed away, but instead she saw her husband reach into the rear of the car to set him free. And she wondered why it had taken so long to notice that all this time, James had been sitting in the passenger seat.

  NOW

  November 1997

  "I'm hiring a lawyer for Chris," James announced Saturday, over dinner. The words erupted from him, like a belch, and he belatedly covered his mouth with his napkin as if he could take them back and declare them more politely.

  A lawyer. The serving platter dropped the last few inches from Gus's fingers, clattering on the table. "You what?"

  "I spoke confidentially to Gary Moorhouse about this. Remember him, from the Groton reunion? It was his suggestion."

  "But Chris didn't commit a crime. Being depressed is not a crime."

  Kate turned to her father, incredulous. "You mean they think Chris killed Emily?"

  "Absolutely not," Gus said, crossing her arms, suddenly shivering. "Chris doesn't need a lawyer. A psychiatrist, yes. But a lawyer ... "

  James nodded. "Gary said that when Chris told Detective Marrone it was a double suicide, he implicated himself. Just by saying there wasn't a third person, that it was just Em and him, turns the suspicion onto him."

  "That's crazy," Gus said.

  "Gus, I'm not saying Chris did what they think," James said softly. "But I think we ought to be prepared."

  "You will not," Gus said, her voice shaking, "hire a defense lawyer for a crime that never happened."

  "Gus--"

  "You will n