“So when he came here,” Kimble said, “he came to apologize?”
“That’s right. The lighthouse had been off that night. It seems Wyatt had done some drinking the previous night. He was arrested. You can verify that easily enough. By the time he got out and made his way home, it was dark, but the light wasn’t on. He went up and got it going and then he saw me.”
“So he wanted to apologize that he didn’t have the light going?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess he thought it would have helped. He seems to understand the place very well. Much better than I do. He said if I spent time there, I’d understand it better myself.”
“Well, I’ve been out there. I don’t understand a damn thing.”
She said, “Take me there, then.”
“What?”
“That might help. If Wyatt was right, I’ll be able to understand what you can’t.”
“Jacqueline, I can’t take you anywhere. You’re in prison.”
“I’m aware of that. But you’re a police officer. You can get me out there.”
The thought of it was alluring and frightening. The two of them, outside these walls and alone together. No guards.
He said, “I don’t think that’s an option.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.
He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees, and looked her in the eyes. It was not an easy thing for him. Meeting her eyes had a way of tightening his lungs, a way of shrinking the walls around him, making doors seem impossibly far away.
“Please,” he said, “tell me what you’re holding back.”
“Kevin, I would like to make parole. Do you understand that?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know how much my chances will be hurt if I begin telling stories that make me sound like a lunatic?”
“It’s you and me in this room. Not your parole board.”
“They’ll ask your opinion.”
“So did the prosecutor,” he said.
She knew well what that meant. She remembered the details he’d chosen to forget during her trial. Some of them, at least. Others—I’m sorry, I don’t remember—she either did not remember or had been lying about for year after year.
“I’ve earned this from you, damn it,” he said, thinking of the months of physical therapy, the nights of insomnia, the constant ache in his back that lived within him like a draft in an old house. “This much I have earned.”
She winced, then nodded. “Fine. That’s fair enough. You want to hear the story? Wonderful. It’s a ghost story.”
“A ghost story.”
“That’s right. Still want to hear it, or shall I save us both the embarrassment?”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “You asked me how I wasn’t hurt, landing on a rock like that. I was hurt badly. I was dying when he came for me.”
“Wyatt?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, Kevin. Not Wyatt. Not anyone you’re going to be able to find and interview. There will be no testimony from him, there will be no fingerprints. Still want me to go on?”
No, he thought, so vehemently that he almost spoke it aloud. He had the sense that if he let her go on like this, then it would all come crashing down, every hope that he’d held, that he’d somehow patched together through overstretched threads of logic and thick ropes of fantasy.
“Go on,” he said.
20
HE WAITED. She looked at him with an uncomfortable level of poignancy, as if she knew she might not see him again and wanted to preserve the moment, a woman watching her lover board a troopship and head off to war. Or ordering him aboard the ship. True to form with Jacqueline Mathis, he was never quite sure of her role.
“You’ve been there,” she said.
“The lighthouse? Yeah.”
“What about the rest of the area? The ridge, the woods, the trestle. Have you walked around there at all?”
“Just yesterday. Looking for a cat.”
“A cat?”
“Not the kind in the Friskies commercials, Jacqueline. A black panther. But yes, I’ve seen the place.”
She nodded. “You can picture the base of the trestle. It would be on the… eastern shore, I think. Closest to the road.”
“I can picture it.”
“There’s a fire down there,” she told him calmly.
He raised his eyebrows. “There was a fire?”
“There is a fire. I haven’t seen it in a while—I’ve been otherwise engaged for a few years, you know—but I can’t imagine that it’s gone, either. It had been burning for a long time when I saw it, and I think it will burn for a long time to come.”