The Secret Hour (26 page)

 
Then the reality of Theresa’s death surrounded him with frigid clarity. Time to work things out? What a joke. Death had ruined all that. No one had to ask anyone for a divorce; John would never have to deal with that reality. And so he’d shut down a little more. Stop caring? Maybe he knew a little of how Kate’s brother felt.

 
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

 
“Not just for me, but for my brother,” she pleaded.

 
“Don’t stop caring,” he said suddenly, turning to face her again. “Like your brother.”

 
“I already have,” she whispered.

 
“No,” he said. “I saw that package you left for Maggie. It made her day…made her year.”

 
“It did?”

 
“Yes,” John said. “It’s what she wishes her mother could do for her.”

 
“Theresa.”

 
“Yes,” John said, cringing as she said the name. Did she know? Had people in Silver Bay told her what had happened?

 
“I’m sorry Maggie and Teddy lost their mother. And you lost your wife.”

 
“I lost her before she died,” he whispered. He couldn’t believe how the words came out, almost by themselves. He leaned closer to her. Suddenly he wanted to tell her—wanted her to know everything. Kate would understand him. She’d completely get it, know what it had been like, trying to love a person who didn’t want his love…The feelings pressed in on his heart, and God—all he wanted was to let them out.

 
“You did?”

 
“She left me…she was still living at home, but she was gone. Her heart was gone…”

 
 
“I’m so sorry,” Kate whispered. Her voice tore and trailed off. She looked away, as if John’s eyes were a mirror, and she couldn’t stand to see herself in them.

 
John raised his gaze, suddenly remembering the girl in her room. In just a few years, Maggie would be that age.

 
“He watched her, didn’t he?” Kate asked, now looking over. Was she imagining Willa as a young teenager? Strangers standing in a back lot, watching her undress?

 
“Let me handle it, okay?” he asked. His tone was soft. He had started to bare his soul to her; he wanted her to know she could trust him, that he would follow every clue and do his best to handle her sister’s disappearance. “I’ll tell you when I can.”

 
“I have to know!” she said, her voice rising, ragged.

 
“You will—I promise,” John said, reaching for her wrist.

 
Kate’s eyes were wild, mad. She stared at the girl. “We can’t just let her do that,” Kate said. “She has to know that people can look in.”

 
“I know,” John said.

 
Suddenly, Kate ran over to the fence. Like a trapped dog, she raced up and down the length till she found a break in the wire. John watched as she tore through a neighbor’s yard. She slipped on a patch of concrete—her leather shoes sliding, soles scraping across the rough surface. Falling to the ground, catching herself with one hand, running through the yard.

 
John had no choice but to follow her. He watched as she raced through the side yard—past an overturned boat—the one Merrill had mentioned, now moved to a new spot?—and a garden choked with dead tomato plants and grapevines. He followed her past an empty birdbath to the front steps, heard her bang on the door—knocking so loudly that a dog down the street began to bark.

 
“What is it?” a man said, coming to the door.

 
“Your daughter,” Kate said, out of breath.

 
“What about her?”

 
“People can see her undressing—through her bedroom window.”

 
“What the fuck?”

 
The man was tall, dark, overbearing. He raised his arm—as if to strike Kate, for her words, or for what she had seen. John bounded up the steps, stood between him and Kate.

 
“Don’t touch her,” John said loudly.

 
“What the FUCK?” the man repeated, his muscular, tattooed arm still in the air.

 
“She’s warning you,” John said. “Trying to help your daughter.”

 
“What the hell you know about my daughter?”

 
John heard Kate’s breath in his ear. The man’s eyes were hooded, menacing—as if he’d just been threatened in the most primal way. Two women—his wife and his mother?—stood behind him, the older one dressed in black from head to toe. And the girl—lovely, fourteen, fear in her green eyes—peeked around the corner, the white strap of her nightgown showing on her bare shoulder.

 
“Nothing,” John said, meeting the girl’s eyes. Wanting to reassure yet warn and protect her. “We know nothing about her. Your windows face out on the back parking lot—that’s all. Just take care.”

 
“Belle, c’mere,” the father said, his eyes still wild. “You doing what they say? Putting on a show?”

 
“No!” she yelped, running down the hall.

 
“She lying?” the man asked his wife, and the woman disappeared after their daughter.

 
“Don’t give her a hard time,” Kate said. “It’s not her fault.”

 
“Don’t go minding my family’s business,” the man warned. “Meddling bitch.”

 
John tasted metal in his mouth. He felt blood pouring through his veins into his nervous system; he felt as if he had just stepped into a domestic with a guy who didn’t like answering to women. He hoped Kate hadn’t just made the girl’s life hell. He hoped he wouldn’t throw the first punch and land in jail before the guy.

 
“Listen to me, sir,” John said clearly, in his best courtroom voice, his face two inches from the dark and surly homeowner’s. “It can’t feel good, having strangers come to your door, saying they saw your daughter through a crack in her curtains. Her
closed
curtains—you hear me? This IS NOT her fault.”

 
The man flinched, as if John had him by the throat.

 
“But I can’t have you calling my friend ‘bitch.’ Hear me? She’s trying to help your daughter…help you. There are monsters in the world, you know? People who could see an angel and want…to hurt her.”

 
“My daughter’s an angel,” the man said, the fight releasing from him. “You got that right.”

 
“See?” John said. “Then maybe we helped.”

 
“That fucking parking lot,” the man said, shaking his head. “Kids park there every Saturday night. I been afraid of boys climbing the fence since she turned fourteen. Fourteen going on thirty.”

 
You should have been worried at eight
, John thought.
Nine, eleven, twelve…there’s no magic number.

 
“Protect her,” Kate said, her throat husky, and John knew she was talking about Willa.

 
“Yeah,” the man said. “I will.”

 
He closed the door in their faces. Kate stood very still, looking into her cupped hands. Stepping forward, John leaned down for a better look. The heel of her right hand was scraped badly, bleeding and raw.

 
“I cut it when I fell,” she said. “In the backyard.”

 
“Looks like it hurts,” John said, holding her wrist loosely. If it was Maggie’s hand, he would bend down to kiss it. He touched the skin, wanting to.

 
Kate nodded, but she didn’t speak. She started to pull her hand back, step away from John, start back to their cars. But she stopped short because John couldn’t seem to let her go. He held her wrist, and he stroked the soft skin, and then he took real hold of her hurt hand.

 
Standing on the steps of a stranger, John looked into Kate Harris’s gray-green eyes. Her hands felt warm and thin, and he suddenly wished she would touch his face. His breath was deep and ragged.

 
“I’m a defense lawyer,” he said.

 
 
Kate nodded. “I know,” she said.

 
John weaved on the steps, as if a strong wind had started to blow, as if the tide had just changed and was pulling him out to sea. The current was strong, like a riptide. When he was a boy, he and his friends had skipped school and gone to Misquamicut for the day. John had gotten caught in the undertow, swept into a riptide. No matter how hard he fought it, the tide was stronger than he was.

 
“Swim parallel to shore,” his father had always taught him—wise instructions for a boy who lived by the sea, who was bound at some point in his life to encounter a rip. In his panic, John had forgotten for a few minutes and, following instinct, had tried swimming straight back to the beach. Getting nowhere, tiring quickly, he had felt himself being tugged out to sea.

 
“I’m in an ethical dilemma,” he said now, still holding Kate’s hands. His voice was so low, he wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

 
“What?” she asked.

 
“There’s what I have to do as a lawyer,” he said, “and what I want to do as a man…”

 
Tilting her head, her stone-gray eyes caught the light. They were deep and somehow warm, filled with unfathomable secrets and sorrow and mysteriously, at the same time, laughter and joy. Staring down, still holding her hands, John O’Rourke was almost overcome with the desire to kiss her.

 
“What’s the difference?” Kate asked. “Are the two parts so distinct?”

 
An interesting question, John thought. Usually, until right now, perhaps not. He had become a defense lawyer because he was a good man, because he believed in every person’s right to a fair trial, because he believed in the law. But this minute, John was at war with himself. He was Jacob wrestling the angel—only the angel was John’s own heart and soul.

 
“Yes, they’re so distinct,” John said.

 
“Then tell me what they are…”

 
Gripping Kate’s hand, John led her down the house steps, along the street—he wasn’t going to walk her through the backyards again.

 
The night was so cold, they could see their own breath. October ended with Halloween; at midnight, it would be November, the beginning of All Souls or All Saints—in spite of his Irish Catholic upbringing, John had never known one from the other. He had been a heathen in recent years. A stone church stood down the block—
Spiritus Santi
in Portuguese. Holy Ghost…

 
In local custom, the congregants filed out in a silent, solemn procession, holding candles to welcome the spirits of their dead, to greet their lost beloveds…

 
“Do you believe in anything?” John asked Kate as the people filed into the small cemetery.

 
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I do.”

 
“Can you tell me what it is?” he asked, then laughed. He was trying to make a joke, but she wasn’t even smiling.

 
When they circled around the block to the parking lot, they both looked at the house and saw the father hanging a blanket over the girl’s window. Five seconds later, not a crack of light was visible. The two of them stood very still, holding hands, watching to make sure they couldn’t see the girl’s shadow pass.

 
Kate lifted up ever so gracefully on her toes, and now John knew exactly what to do. He wrapped Kate in a tight embrace, gave her a long, lingering kiss. He would have kissed her all night; the second she broke away, he was already yearning for more.

 
“Kate,” he whispered.

 
“She’s safe now.”

 
“No one’s ever safe,” John said, stopping dead and taking her face in his hands.

 
“Don’t say that…” Kate said, her eyes filling with tears.

 
He wanted to kiss her again, but he wanted to tell the truth more. Lies had nearly killed his family. He was putting his entire career on the line right now, and he wasn’t going to mix it up with soft-pedaling the truth.

 
“I know it for a fact,” John said.

 
Kate shook her head, but he wouldn’t let her go.

 
“You know it too,” he said, his voice breaking. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

 
“What do you mean?”

 
“Your sister would be home…safe at home. She’d be in her nice warm house; you’d be in yours…the last six months wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have come into contact with my client.”

 
“What are you saying?”

 
“You know…”

 
“Say it,” she said, the words tearing out as she grabbed the front of his sweater. Her hand was bleeding, and the blood smeared across the green wool.