Greg Iles - The Quiet Game

“I’ve got a wife and kids. And I’m not out to trash the Bureau.”

“I’ll shut up, then. I really called to apologize anyway.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

The phone goes dead in my hand.

Caitlin puts the phone back between the beds for me. “He wouldn’t try it?”

“No.”

“Let’s just forget it all for tonight, then.”

She picks up the remote control and flips through the channels, finally settling on a showing of To Catch a Thief. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant zoom across the screen in a vintage sports car.

“Okay with you?”

Staring at Grace Kelly, the coolly luminous Princess Grace, I recall my earlier thought that she and Livy Marston look more than a little alike. The similarities go deeper than looks too, for despite her cool exterior, Grace Kelly had a dark and promiscuous sexual history.

“It’s fine,” I say absently.

Caitlin turns up the sound, and we watch from our chairs while Annie snores away on the bed. My mind is so full I cannot think clearly, but one image is predominant: Livy Marston in the Baton Rouge airport, seemingly as beautiful and untouched as she looked at seventeen. But when is anything ever what it seems? As beautiful as Livy was, she was not untouched. No girl that radiant survives adolescence without attracting the attention of every male in the three grades above her. And nature being what it is (and the seventies what they were), sex usually follows. I didn’t understand this so clearly then, of course. At sixteen, though I was as perpetually and mindlessly horny as the rest of my compatriots, I was also ready to place some lucky (or unlucky) girl on a pedestal of mythic proportions. When, after a showing of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Livy tearfully confessed to me how she’d lost her virginity-a date rape by a senior with whom I played football-she installed herself on that pedestal with the permanence of a pieta.

Once she occupied this place of reverence in my psyche, it became impossible for me to see her clearly. Her public image was flawless. Queen of the elite private school in a city with five high schools, she was wanted by every male student in the city-not merely lusted after, but actually worshiped-and thus floated above the usual tortured angst of high school life. What I didn’t understand then was that, to a girl like that, the most exciting company would be guys who didn’t care what she said or thought, and who treated her accordingly.

Everyone knew Livy Marston occasionally went out with boys from the public schools-rough, handsome guys who straddled the line between “hoods” and outright criminals-some of whom were so dumb as to boggle the mind. It was hard to imagine what Livy could find to talk about with these guys. What I didn’t understand then-or was too afraid to admit-was that she was not interested in talking to them.

It was something of a tradition for St. Stephens boys to sleep with girls from the public schools, who we thought to be “looser” than the ones we saw in class every day. Whether this was true or not, I’m still not sure. Some public school girls defended their virtue like Roman vestals, while many St. Stephens girls led active romantic lives, to say the least. In any case, it was understood, according to a time-honored double standard, that boys slept around as a rite of passage into adulthood. When girls did it, they entered that unjustified but unforgiving territory known as sluthood. When Livy Marston did it, she confused everybody. To the point that no one really believed she was doing it. Everyone thought she was putting on a show. Acting wild. Driving her uptight father crazy. Now, of course, I understand it perfectly. In the time-honored tradition of Southern women of a certain class, Livy was taking her pleasures downward.

When she opened to me like a flower in the spring of our senior year, I accepted her attentions like a divine gift. For girls that age, having sex is usually so tied up in the desire to be accepted by peers that true motives are impossible to fathom. But for Livy Marston acceptance was not an issue. When she gave herself, it was because she wanted to, and that knowledge immeasurably dilated the experience. That her skills did not seem virginal I wrote off to her being as gifted sexually as she was in so many other ways. I submerged my self into hers, basked in the glow of being seen with her, of being known to be loved by her. I cared as little for what lay ahead of me as for what lay behind, and so set myself up for the fall of my life.

“Penn? Are you awake?”

I blink and look over at Caitlin. She’s watching me from her chair, her face flickering in the television light.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

An enigmatic smile. “Livy Marston?”

“God, no,” I lie, thinking that Caitlin was absolutely right when she told me she had lethal instincts.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, rising from her chair. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”

I get up to walk her to her room, amazed by how tired I feel. Witnessing death up close saps you like a day under the sun. It also stokes the sexual fires, urging toward procreation. As we stand outside her door, Caitlin looks up at me, her face tilted perfectly for a kiss, and I realize again how beautiful she is. But I no longer see her as I did last night in the restaurant. I’m looking through the distorting memory of Livy Marston. Caitlin lowers her chin, and the moment passes.

“What do you think Dwight Stone knows?” she asks.

“More than we do. Maybe he knows everything.”

She opens the door and slips through without looking back, leaving me alone with my ghosts.

Crested Butte, Colorado, is a tiny village nestled nine thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains, twenty-five miles from Aspen as the crow flies, three hours by car. The easiest way to get there is to fly into Gunnison and drive north up the valley for half an hour. But to get to former special agent Dwight Stone’s cabin, you must leave the pastel storefronts of Crested Butte’s old town behind and drive northwest into the mountains on a forest service road, past the summer homes of the rich, until the road turns into a jeep trail that follows the Slate River upstream between Anthracite Mesa and Schuylkill Mountain. A few hundred yards north of an eight-foot vertical drop in the river, situated in the thick fir and spruce between the jeep track and the narrow blue-black span of the Slate, stands a small but well-built cabin, facing southwest to catch the sun.

Dwight Stone likes his solitude.

When I called Stone from the Gunnison airport and asked if I could speak to him about the Payton case, he politely declined. I did not tell him where I was calling from.

That was an hour ago.

Now Caitlin and Annie and I approach his front porch like a lost family asking for directions. I’m glad we brought coats. When we left Natchez it was ninety degrees. Here it’s less than fifty, and there are dark clouds glowering over the summit of Gothic Mountain to the east.

Before I can knock, a tall, fit-looking man in his late sixties clumps around the side of the cabin wearing hip waders, a Black Watch flannel shirt, and carrying a fly rod.

“You folks lost?” he asks in a deep, resonant voice.

“That depends on where we are.” I’ve already recognized the voice, but I say, “Are you former special agent Dwight Stone?”

Stone has the eyes of a combat veteran, and they narrow instantly, assessing threat. A man with a woman and a little girl can’t seem like much danger, but I don’t know what his anxieties are.

“You’re on my property,” he points out, quite reasonably. “Why don’t you introduce yourself first?”