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Chris said — and Marguerite thought she heard a concealed edge in his voice — “Would it be possible to look at his things?”
“Well, I don’t think so… I mean, I should probably talk to Dr. Goldhar first. Won’t this all eventually be police evidence or something?”
“I won’t disturb anything. Just a glance.”
“I’ll vouch for Chris,” Marguerite added. “He’s a good guy.”
“Well — just a peek, maybe. I mean, it’s not like you’re terrorists or anything.” She gave Chris a somber look. “Don’t get me in trouble, that’s all I ask.”
Chris sat with the pilot a while longer. He whispered something Marguerite couldn’t hear. A question, an apology, a prayer.
Then they left Adam Sandoval, whose chest rose and fell with the exhalations of his breathing apparatus in a queerly peaceful rhythm, and Rosalie took them to a small room at the end of the corridor. She unlocked the door with a key attached to a ring on her belt. Stored inside were medical sundries — boxes of suture thread in various gauges, saline bags, bandages and gauze, antiseptics in brown bottles — and, on a foldout desktop, a plastic bag containing Sandoval’s effects. Rosalie opened the bag cautiously and made Chris put on a pair of throwaway surgical gloves before he touched the contents. “In case of fingerprints or I don’t know what.” She seemed to be having second thoughts.
Chris pulled out Sandoval’s wallet, charred, and the items that had been salvaged from it: his cash card, melted beyond utility; an I.D. disc with his digital bona fides, also charred, but bearing the legible name ADAM W. SANDOVAL; his pilot’s license; a photograph of a middle-aged woman with a wide, pleasant smile, the photo three-quarters intact; a receipt from a Pottery Barn in Flint Creek, Colorado; and coupon for a ten-dollar discount at Home and Garden, six months past its expiration date. If Mr. Sandoval was a terrorist, Marguerite thought, he was definitely the domestic variety.
“Please be careful,” Rosalie said, her cheeks flushed.
The items gleaned from his burned backpack were even more sparse. Chris handled them quickly: a fragment of a smartbook, a blackened plastic pen, and a handful of loose, partial pages from a print magazine.
Chris said, “Has anyone else seen this material?”
“Only Dr. Goldhar. I thought maybe we should call Ray Scutter or someone in Administration and tell them about it. Dr. Goldhar said not to. He said it wasn’t worth worrying Ray about all this.”
“Dr. Goldhar is a wise man,” Chris said.
Rosalie checked the corridor again, looking guiltier by the minute. Chris kept his back to her. She didn’t see — but Marguerite did — when Chris picked up one of the magazine pages and slipped it under his jacket.
She wasn’t sure Chris knew she had seen him take the page and she didn’t mention it during the drive back. What he had done was probably some sort of crime. Did that make her an accomplice?
He didn’t say much in the car. But she was sure his intent had been journalistic, not criminal. All he had taken, after all, was a scrap of singed paper.
Several times she got up enough nerve to ask him about it, several times she refrained. The sun had set and it was almost di
“There’s a car in the driveway,” Chris said.
She recognized it instantly. The car was obscure in the wintery dusk, black against the asphalt and the shadow of the willow, but she knew at once it was Ray’s.
Eighteen
“Stay in the car,” she told Chris. “Let me talk him out.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“I lived with him for five years. I know the drill.”
“Marguerite, he crossed a line. He came to your house. Unless you gave him a key, he broke in.”
“He must have used Tessa’s key. Maybe she’s with him.”
“The point is, when people go this far beyond the boundaries it starts to get serious. You could get hurt.”
“You don’t know him. Just give me a few minutes, all right? If I need you, I’ll scream.”
Not fu
“You’re telling me to sit in the car?”
“Sit in the car, walk around the block, anything you want, but it’ll be easier to get rid of him if you’re not there putting his back up.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. She climbed out of the car and walked resolutely to the front door of her home, more angry than frightened. Fucking Ray. Chris didn’t understand how Ray operated. Ray wasn’t there to beat her up. Ray had always aimed at humiliation by other means.
Inside — the living room lights were blazing — she called out Tessa’s name. If Ray had brought Tess there might be some excuse for this.
But Tess didn’t answer. Neither did Ray. Fuming, she checked the kitchen, the dining room. Empty. He must be upstairs, then. Lights were burning in every room in the house.
She found him in her office in the spare bedroom. Ray sat in her swivel chair, shoes on her desk, watching the Subject cross a waterless graben under a noonday sun. He looked up casually when she cleared her throat. “Ah,” he said. “Here you are.”
In the diffuse light of the wall screen Ray looked like a chinless Napoleon, ridiculously imperial. “Ray,” she said levelly, “is Tess in the house?”
“Certainly not. That’s what we need to talk about. Tessa’s been telling me about some of the things that go on here.”
“Don’t start. I really, really don’t want to hear it. Just leave, Ray. This isn’t your house and you have no right to be here.”
“Before we start talking about rights, are you aware that your daughter was left in the snow for almost an hour while your boyfriend played hero last week? She’s lucky she doesn’t have frostbite.”
“We can talk about this some other time. Go, Raymond.”
“Come on, Marguerite. Just drop the bullshit about ‘my house, my rights.’ We both know you’ve been systematically ignoring Tess. We both know she’s having serious psychological problems as a result of that.”
“I won’t discuss this.”
“I’m not here to fucking discuss it. I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be. I can’t in good conscience continue to allow my daughter to visit with you if you’re not willing to provide her with appropriate care.”
“Ray, we have an agreement—”
“We have a tentative agreement written under radically different circumstances. If I could take it to court, believe me, I would. That’s not possible because of the lockdown. So I have to do what I think is right.”
“You can’t just keep her,” Marguerite said. But what if he tried? What if he refused to let Tess come home? There was no family court in Blind Lake, no real police she could call on for help.
“Don’t dictate to me. Tess is in my care and I have to make the decisions I think are best for her.”
It was his smug, oily certainty that infuriated her. Ray had mastered the art of speaking as if he were the only adult on the planet and everyone else was weak, stupid, or insolent. Under that brittle exterior, of course, was the narcissistic infant determined to have his own way. Neither aspect of his personality was particularly appealing.
“Look,” she said, “this is ridiculous. Whatever’s wrong with Tess, you can’t make it better by coming here and insulting me.”
“I have no interest in your opinion on the subject.”
Without thinking, Marguerite took two steps forward and slapped him. She had never done that before. Her open palm hurt immediately, and even this brief physical contact (the coarseness of a day’s growth of beard, his flabby jowls) made her want to wash her aching hand. Bad move, she thought, very bad move. But she couldn’t help taking a certain pride in Ray’s astonishment.