T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Alma, heart pounding, smiles up at her. “You can say that again.”

The article isn’t everything she could have hoped for, but clearly, for the first time since all this began, the newspaper of record in Santa Barbara is attempting to distance itself from LaJoy and his gang of crazies. He’s still seen as a crusader and TNC and the Park Service as the enemy, but Toni Walsh — muddied, bloodied and thoroughly provoked — cuts him loose, sounding more like an editorialist than a reporter:

Activist and local businessman David Francis LaJoy, 47, of Montecito, founder and president of the animal rights organization For the Protection of Animals, was arrested late Saturday evening after a bizarre and tragic incident on Santa Cruz Island. Mr. LaJoy led a group of his followers in an alleged attempt to sabotage the Park Service’s campaign to exterminate the island’s feral hogs after the failure of a last-minute injunction to stop the hunt. Members of the party claim that he proceeded recklessly despite the severe weather conditions that struck over the weekend. In attempting a dangerous climb at the direction of Mr. LaJoy in an area of extensive flooding, Kelly Ann Johansson, 19, of Goleta, fell to her death.

Mr. LaJoy was charged with criminal trespass, vandalism and conspiracy. The parents of the deceased, Ronald and Eva Johansson, also of Goleta, contacted by phone, had no comment, but a family friend, who asked to remain anonymous, states that they are planning to file a wrongful death suit against Mr. LaJoy.

She reads the article twice through, feeling better now, much better. When the food comes, she leaves the newspaper spread out before her so she can run her eyes over the headline and the murky file photo of the pier at Prisoners’ Harbor they’ve dug out to accompany it. The chowder is delicious, rich with clams, potatoes, butter, the crab Louis the best she’s ever had. She finds herself wiping the plate clean with chunks of the hot sourdough bread the management prides itself on and she winds up eating too much, or it feels that way anyway. When finally she looks up, it’s well past three, and despite the lift the iced tea gave her, she can barely push herself up from the chair. She’s sleepy, exhausted, but even as the idea of taking off early comes into her head, she dismisses it.

Once she’s outside, she forces herself to pick up the pace, snapping her knees in a martial stride and taking in great lungfuls of sea air, the marina tranquil, the parking lot just a parking lot once again. The breeze is soft and fragrant, wafting up out of the south in a hint of the season to come, and she takes a moment to stand there on the patch of lawn out back and turn her face to it while the custodian emerges from the rear door to shake out his mop and a half a dozen starlings squabble over a spill of French fries on the walk. Then it’s back to work, her mood darkening again when she sees Alicia’s empty chair, and she settles in at her desk thinking that when Alicia comes up for evaluation, she’s going to have to act on her conscience. That’s all there is to it. And she’s sorry if she’s going to hurt anybody’s feelings.

She winds up working till six, trying to make up for wasting the morning in court, though of course she would have been out on the island still if it weren’t for what happened at Willows, so she can’t be too hard on herself. She’s thinking about that, about the scene on the island, about the dead girl, as she locks the door behind her, makes her way down the steps and crosses the deserted lot to her car. Coming up the beach with the men and the dogs, she’d felt powerful, in charge, and at first, seeing the humped and useless form flung down there in the sand beneath the wet poncho, she’d thought it was a pig, one of the dead pigs they’d pulled out of a ravine and were planning to spirit back to the coast and put on display. Her blood sang in her ears. Removing anything from the island, animal, vegetable or mineral, was a crime, and here they were, caught out at it, and it wasn’t enough that they were trespassing and trying to interfere with a project that had already cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but they were trying to possess wildlife as well, steal it, own it, use it, when as anybody knows all wildlife throughout the country, on public or private land, is the property of the government. She was savage, worked up, thrilling with the joy of nailing them, finally nailing them, when a knot flared in the fire and the form beneath the poncho became something else altogether.

Traffic is heavy along the darkened freeway, an undulating river of soft rubicund taillights carrying her along in its flow. She flicks on the radio, listening first to the news, then switching to music, trying not to think of the dead girl, of Tim, of the child growing inside her and what she’s going to tell people when she can hide it no longer. A song she loves comes on, one they hardly ever play on the radio—“I Came So Far for Beauty,” a Leonard Cohen song in the Jennifer Warnes version — and she tries to sing along, but the words tumble past her and after the second chorus she falls silent.

Her first stop is at the grocery in the lower village — after that big lunch she doesn’t need much: a piece of salmon (farmed, color added) and a bag of spinach to pop in the microwave — and then the video rental. It takes her a long while to pick something out, working her way through the current releases, most of which she and Tim saw in the theater when they came out, and then the comedies, which are uniformly puerile and funny by definition only, before finally drifting into the classics section and settling on an Ernst Lubitsch movie she’s seen at least twice or maybe three times but not recently. The idea — the theme of the evening — is to keep it light, a little distraction, that’s all, and then crawl up to bed and let the oblivion wash over her like a dark tide of nothing.

Fine. Super. But when she gets to the front door and inserts her key in the lock, she finds that it’s already open. Which is strange, because she’s not the sort of person who forgets to lock up. Not ever. For a moment, mentally retracing her steps from the time the alarm clock went off and she’d lurched out of bed in a panic till she left the house with a stale bagel smeared haphazardly with cream cheese, she tries to visualize herself at the door and turning the key in the lock, but the image won’t come. All at once, she’s afraid. There’s been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood recently, in one of which a woman on Olive Mill Road — not three blocks from here — was attacked on surprising the thieves while they were rearranging the furniture so as to get at her oriental carpets. Very slowly, silently, like a thief herself, she turns the knob and reaches in a hand to flick on the hallway light.

She’s poised on the doorstep, ready to bolt if need be, but when she gradually pushes the door open — all the way to the wall to be sure there’s no one flattened behind it — she sees nothing but the familiar entry hall, the table there piled with outerwear, umbrellas, unread magazines and the three purses she’s most tired of. “Hello?” she calls. “Anyone here?” And then, heart leaping, she thinks of Tim. He’s the one who can never remember to lock the door behind him — half the time he doesn’t even know where his keys are. “Tim?” she calls, already foreseeing a reunion, Tim come back to surprise her, and wouldn’t it be just like him to pop out of a dark corner and scare the wits out of her? “Tim, is that you?”

It isn’t until she’s inside, until she’s made her way through the kitchen and living room and into the bedroom, that she begins to understand. Tim has been here, but he’s here no longer. His things — everything, his bicycle, his books and video games, even his underwear and his T-shirt collection — are gone. Empty drawers, that’s what he’s left behind. Dust bunnies. An old pair of high-tops with broken laces and soles worn through at the heels.