Jan Burke - Remember Me, Irene

The elevator opened and I stepped out into the sunlight.

I tried to look at things differently. Nadine’s brother was sad but relieved. I learned he had filed a missing person’s report on her, but in the six months that had passed since her death, Hill made certain loose ends had been tidied up, and she was thought to have left the area. The coordinates Jeff McCutchen guessed at from his quarter’s worth of viewing turned out to be in the water near an oil island. Lots of diving and some underwater metal detectors finally turned up the chain. It was still around the canvas bag. The bag, which had been firmly anchored by the chain and sheltered to some degree by the island, was carefully raised and opened. A largely intact adult female skeleton was found within. The teeth, a bracelet, and an old fracture on the crooked left little finger were enough to identify the remains as those of Nadine Preston. No one had expected to find so much of her, the coroner had confided.

Stop it, I told myself.

Keene Dage, who probably would have been able to completely avoid the risk of criminal prosecution, instead had come forward. He was being offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony in several investigations, as was Corbin Tyler. The last time I had seen him, he was tired but happy. “My kids are behind me one hundred percent,” he said. “That’s all that matters to me.”

“You’ll have to recarve the faces of the angels on the Angelus,” I told him, and he laughed.

Roland Hill and Allan Moffett were probably going to prison. Booter Hodges was looking for another job. And although I didn’t know it that day when I stood in the solarium, Andre Selman would cheat the hangman. He never left the hospital. Heart failure. Perhaps there was some justice in that after all.

Some of Roland Hill’s investors wanted to lynch him. Some wanted to lynch me.

Claire had thanked me. If I hadn’t come to know her, to see how courageous she was, I might have been surprised at her gratitude. She was more at peace for understanding what had been on Ben’s mind in those last days, she said. She thought no less of Ben. She had loved him. That’s all there was to it as far as she was concerned. A pity his demons hadn’t let him see that.

Word was, the college was awarding a posthumous master’s degree to Lucas. Too little, too late.

Barton Sawyer had earned my respect by not distancing himself from Lisa or joining the hoopla around the newly popular memory of Lucas Monroe. Instead, he privately sent letters of sympathy to June and Charles Monroe, to Marcy and Jerry. The only time he spoke of Lisa publicly was to say that he felt the same sadness he would feel if his own daughter was imprisoned, regardless of her guilt.

I had visited Lisa before her arraignment. Her face was black and blue and there were marks on her wrists from where I had tied the straps too tight. She saw me looking at them and said, “Remember the time you were teaching me how to ice skate? I fell and knocked you down with me, and you got a fat lip. I was crying, both because I had hurt you and because I was afraid you’d never take me skating again. You said, ‘Lisa, ice is slippery. People fall down on it. Get used to it.’ Remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

She started talking of other things we had done together. They were good memories. Maybe we wanted to convince ourselves that things had been different then. I’ve come to believe they were, though I doubted it for a time. Before I left, I thanked her for keeping her promise to talk to the police. She asked me to come back. I told her I would.

I LOOKED OUT ACROSS the view from the solarium. In the distance, I could just make out the tallest buildings downtown. Keene Dage’s Las Piernas. Corbin Tyler’s. The sun glinted off the glass crown of the Haimler Building.

We all have to do something we can be proud of.

I heard the elevator doors open. My husband stepped out.

“Ready to go get your car?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I know you. There wasn’t an ocean in the hospital, so I had to look for sunlight.”

“They call him Detective Harriman.”

He had reached me by then, lifted the hair on the back of my neck, put his mouth on it and blew, sort of a contact raspberry.

“Hey, that tickles,” I said, laughing and feeling shivers down my spine.

“It’s a neck fizz. It’s supposed to tickle. You’re supposed to laugh once in a while.”

“Sorry. I’ve been a sort of morose creature, haven’t I?”

He shook his head. “That’s okay, too. But once you’ve talked to June Monroe, we’re going to get your car, put down the top, and enjoy a beautiful spring day. Got it?”

“June Monroe’s looking for me?”

He fizzed my neck again. “You’re supposed to answer, ‘Yes, I’ve got it.’ As for June, you know she is. I told her I’d find you. And no Detective Harriman jokes, Ms. Kelly. You want to talk to her here?”

“Yes. We might have some privacy here, anyway.”

He gave me a quick kiss and went over to the elevator. Every few seconds he’d look over at me and make a completely clownish face. I couldn’t keep my own straight.

“Yes, doctor, her condition is improving,” he said when the bell for the elevator rang. I was gratified by the clown act, knowing only his closest friends-including his wife-ever saw this side of him.

When he left, I felt his absence so strongly I almost slipped back down into my funk. Almost.

He must have told June to wait on the next floor down, because she arrived just a moment later. I smiled at the thought of how sure of himself he had been.

“I said something you took the wrong way down there,” she said without preamble.

“No, you were right. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Too much, you ask me. Let’s sit down over here-just for a minute. You got that man waiting for you, and I don’t need a lot of time to say what I am going to say.”

Well, just try to argue against a will like that. We sat down.

“Do you know what Edmund Burke said about evil?” she asked.

This I was not expecting. But fortunately, my old friend O’Connor had been a walking quotation book, so I knew the answer. “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

“Exactly right,” she said. “Not ‘everything.’ Nothing. You did something. You should feel good. But no, you’re too busy wishing that you were better than the rest of us.”

“What?”

“Oh yes. You’re up here wishing that you could be perfect. That your courage never failed you. That when some old drunk came up off a bench shouting crazy stuff at you, that you had been a perfectly charitable Christian soul and said, ‘How may I help you, brother?’”

“Well-”

“Well, nothing! Do you think no one forgives you for that? Do you think Lucas himself held that against you?”

“No.”

“So, then, quit wasting time with all this feeling bad about what you could have done, and just get out there and keep doing something. You don’t have to do everything. Just what you can.”

For some damned reason, I started crying. She put an arm around me.

“Oh, now Frank is really going to be after me,” she said. “Listen to me, Irene. I know my son lives. I don’t mean with Jesus, though I believe that with all my heart. I mean here. He lives, because he changed something. He made things a little better before he passed. And you helped him do that. You have done him a great kindness.”

“I would have preferred to have been kinder to him for five more minutes while he was alive,” I said.

“Of course you would have. But then, my son was a teacher, and you’ve learned something from him, haven’t you? We all only have five minutes to be kind to each other. So go on down there and be good to that husband of yours.”