Fidelity

26

Ted Forrest reached Route 3 3 and passed west of Mendota just as the night was showing signs of giving way to the dim gray light before the sunrise. As he drove through the Central Valley, now and then his car would dip into a low, shallow pocket of fog. It was what the old people used to call the bean fog. In the days before heavy, efficient irrigation, the fog was a big source of free water for the vegetable crops.

He knew this highway so well that he descended into the basins of fog without slowing. He believed he would detect any obstacle blocking his lane in plenty of time, and if he couldn’t, he could veer off the road and let the car exhaust its momentum in the level rows of artichokes and radishes he had been passing for the last couple of miles.

When he reached a rise and recognized the long flat road ahead, he took his cell phone out of the glove compartment and turned it on. As it awoke, he heard the familiar musical tone, and then almost instantly, the one that said he had a message. He glanced at the screen: thirteen messages, twenty-one missed calls.

Forrest had already felt tired and anxious from his night’s work, and listening to the messages seemed like an insurmountable task. He decided not to listen to them. He would be home in a little while anyway. Then he changed his mind. He had to know if Kylie had called, and it wasn’t safe to leave her calls in his voice mail. He dialed the message number and the code, then listened.

“Ted.” It was Caroline’s voice, not Kylie’s. “I think you should come home right now. You know that we need to talk, and putting it off isn’t helping.”

He pressed the three key to erase it, and left his finger on the key while he listened to the next message. “It’s now seven o’clock. I’m going out for dinner with some friends. I assume that you heard my earlier message and decided to ignore it. Or maybe you left your phone off all day, which amounts to the same thing. I won’t be home before ten, but you can call my cell number.”

He listened to the next call. At first there was near silence, but he could hear a woman breathing, and sounds that could be traffic. Then she said, “Sorry I missed your call during business hours, Mr. Forrest.” It was Kylie. “I was still at violin practice and then I went to work, and didn’t get a chance to check messages. I’ll be available and waiting for your call from now until tomorrow.” She didn’t seem to know how to end her message. “This is Kylie Miller. My number is-” He hit the three and erased it.

Next there were eight more calls from Caroline, each one just a second or two. “Call me,” or “It’s Caroline,” “Me again,” and once, “Shit!” Her final call was at three in the morning-he looked at his watch-about fortyfive minutes ago. That was good. She had probably given up and gone to sleep. He could go in, take another of the spare bedrooms, and get some sleep, too.

He remembered that when he had left he had resolved to check Kylie’s voice mail to be sure she had erased his call from yesterday. He took his eyes off the road long enough to dial her mailbox number, then her phone number. On the first call, a young girl’s voice said, “Hey, Kyl. This is Tina. Get back to me on the party tonight.” The time on the call was six fifteen. Why had Kylie’s phone not been on at six fifteen? Oh, yes. He remembered. Violin lesson. His own message had been left in the morning, so if she had neglected to erase it, he would already have heard it.

He still didn’t hang up.

The next message was the same voice: “Kylie? Do you still want a ride tonight? Call me.” Ted Forrest felt his breathing become shallow, and noticed a hollow feeling in his stomach. He told himself it was all right. He had called her early and left his message that he would be gone. She had erased it, tried to call him back, and then decided to go to a party with her girlfriend Tina. He had heard of Tina, he thought. Kylie talked constantly, but it was like a cat purring, just a steady sound that come out because she was comfortable and contented. He had not listened to her anecdotes closely enough to know all the names with confidence.

He knew that he should be delighted. It wasn’t good for a young girl to be isolated from friends her own age. It might even make her feel restless and tired of him, her young mind reacting to get what it needed, the way a growing body did when it was missing some nutrient. Going to a party was good in a dozen ways. Kylie was gregarious and had lots of friends. If a few of them started to notice that she was hardly ever available in the evening, they might begin to talk. That was probably the danger he had to worry about most because it was out of his control. If they talked, the gossip would eventually reach one of her friends’ mothers.

But he couldn’t keep from feeling a blind, galloping sort of jealousy. He knew that there was no realistic hope of keeping Kylie away from boys her age, and absolutely no chance that any of them wouldn’t be interested in her.

He kept listening. “Kylie, this is Mark. I was wondering if you were doing anything on Friday. My number is-” Forrest erased the call.

Forrest erased two more calls from boys, and one from a girl who sounded too giggly to be a safe, sensible companion, and who invited Kylie to “hang out” because Hunter and Shane were going to be there.

When he had heard all of the messages he put his phone in his pocket and began to feel a manic energy. He knew it was only the shallow, nervous agitation that came from too many hours at the wheel. He had driven all the way to Los Angeles, spent a night awake there, and driven all the way back, all in changing states of worry or fear or excitement.

But he had done it. He had managed to burn both the Kramer house and the office in one night. He had destroyed the evidence that Phil Kramer had wanted to use to blackmail him, and probably any secret copies that Kramer had never intended to hand over. If Philip Kramer had been devious enough to hide the evidence in a third place, then Kramer had defeated himself. If it hadn’t turned up by now, then he had not left word where it was hidden. It would stay hidden forever.

This was a masterstroke, the sort of big thinking and bold, decisive action that won wars. The realization that he actually had accomplished the coup and made it home without discovery began to make him giddy. He was free, he was safe, he was invulnerable. He still had Jerry Hobart out preparing to kill Emily Kramer, and that was good, but now that he had burned the evidence, it wasn’t essential. As soon as he paid Hobart, he would forget all of this unpleasantness.

As he drove along the ever-more-familiar stretch of highway toward his house, he knew he was going to beat the sun by a long mar gin. As soon as it was light enough to work, there were always workers in the fields who might see a car out at dawn and maybe remember it. But by then Forrest would be asleep. In a few more minutes, Forrest saw his home ahead, standing on its rise at the end of its long drive.

The gate was closed. He reached for the remote control in the door’s well, pressed the first button, and watched the gate slide aside to admit him, then pressed the button again to close it behind him. It felt good to be inside that iron gate again.

Forrest kept his car slow all the way up the long driveway and around the big house to the old carriage-house garage. He felt a moment of suspense as he reached for the remote control again to open the garage door. What if the garage was empty except for the pickup truck and the riding lawn mower the gardeners used? What if Caroline had gotten into her Jaguar and simply driven off toward whatever vision of a future her self-absorbed mind had been constructing since he had left? The fact that his thought had come from nowhere seemed to give it divine provenance and make it prophetic. The current of the universe had been running his way for the past twentyfour hours. Would there be a last gift?

He pressed the second button.

As soon as the door began to rise, he recognized the tires of the Jaguar in its parking space, then the gleaming metal. His premonition was only a fantasy. He moved his car into its space beside the Jaguar, pressed the second button on the remote control again to close the door, then turned off the car’s engine.

He sat still for a moment, staring at the back wall of the garage. There was the door to the old tack room, and it reminded him of the things he had taken when he had left. He pushed the button to pop his trunk, then got out, picked up his small suitcase, and looked into the space behind it. His car was clean. He closed the trunk, then walked out the side door of the garage onto the stone walkway to the house. It was still dark, but he could hear a few chirps from birds beginning to move around in anticipation of the sun.

He was careful to grip his keys in his palm so they wouldn’t jingle when he unlocked the front door. He prepared to punch in the code to turn off the alarm before it sounded, then pushed the door inward. The alarm was off, and he let out a breath in relief. Caroline had undoubtedly decided she didn’t want to be awakened.

He stepped into the broad foyer of his house and felt the hard, slippery surface of the marble tiles, the black-and-white pattern just visible in the dim star-glow from the skylight. The substantial, weighty presence of the architecture made him feel even more protected and invulnerable than before. The house was not just big interior spaces and thick walls. Hardinfield was several generations of importance and unassailable position. He was aware that there were mobs of people living on the coast to the south and the north of him-movie-studio people and computer billionaires-who each had the money to build several houses like his. But it would not have been appropriate, and even they seemed to sense it. When they opened their windows they didn’t see vistas of open land running all the way to barely visible foothills. They saw the houses of the rest of the rich rabble, all shouldered up to each other along streets in Beverly Hills or San Francisco, and actually touching each other in Malibu.

“I see you’re back.”

His head spun toward Caroline’s voice. A love seat that belonged beyond the vaulted arch in the living room had been pushed across the marble floor into the foyer. As his eyes adjusted to the deeper shadows along the far wall, he could see that she was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and there was a quilt pushed into a lump beside her. “What are you doing here? Did you sleep here?”

“I didn’t want to miss you.”

“Very interesting. You can tell me about it another time. I’m going up to bed.” He started toward the staircase.

“I want to talk now, Ted. There are no servants in the house. I told Maria to give them the rest of the week off, so we can settle this. We’re going to start right now.”

He had almost made it to the stairway, but he heard something in her voice that made him stop. “Oh? Something’s urgent?”

“You bet. It’s very urgent. I would like you to put your suitcase down and come with me to the library where we can see each other and talk.”

“And what will happen if we wait until I’ve had some sleep and a shower and maybe even some breakfast?”

“Are you trying to goad me into saying something that will give you an excuse to stomp off? I don’t want to threaten you.”

“That’s good. I don’t think there’s much you could threaten me with at this point, is there? That there will be less than no sex? That you’ll be more extravagant and demanding? When would you find time?”

“You just wanted to hurt me, and it always works, I guess, because your wanting to do it is what hurts. In spite of that, in spite of everything that’s gone on in the past few years, I find that you’re still more important to me than anyone else. Whenever I do something, or even think something, part of me is already looking around for you, to be sure you noticed. I know it’s just a reflex now because you haven’t been there watching or listening in years. What hurts most is the unfairness.”

“What’s unfair?”

“We don’t have a better relationship because you haven’t wanted one. When I went off to find ways of keeping busy, I wasn’t choosing them instead of you. I was filling a vacancy.” She looked down and shook her head, as though to push away a distraction. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to fight, I want to save you.”

His jaw was tight, but he spoke quietly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I listened to your phone messages.”

“You what?”

“You heard me. You’re having a-I don’t even know what to call it-Is it called an affair if it’s with a child?”

His heart seemed to him to have stopped, but then he felt it begin to pound. He could barely breathe. “What on earth would make you say that?”

“Jesus, Ted! I heard her message. I asked Maria’s daughter if she knew her from school, and she did. The girl is barely fourteen, Teda child. You’ve been sleeping with a child.” She couldn’t say it without having her mouth contort so her face became a mask of horror and despair. “There’s a doctor, a psychiatrist, who specializes in this kind of thing. Diane Bidwell’s cousin Burt was seeing him, and she thinks he saved his life. It was completely confidential.”

“Until Diane found out.”

“I remember the doctor’s name, so we don’t have to ask some other doctor for a referral or something. It can be completely-“

“Stop right there,” he said. “Don’t even finish. The answer is no.”

“It’s not that simple. This problem isn’t going away. You can’t have sex with children. If anyone finds out, you’ll go to prison. And if this Kylie Miller is leaving messages like that on your voice mail, how long will it take? Her parents, her teachers, her friends, somebody, will find out.”

Ted Forrest snorted. “This is actually pretty funny. You’re completely wrong. She’s just a kid who wants a summer job in the Forrest Enterprises office. She went in and talked to Denise, and Denise has been trying to set up an interview. That’s all.” He was aware that his voice was too flat, but he hoped she hadn’t noticed.

“Denise gives out your personal phone number to job applicants?”

“Sometimes. Why not? This is a high school girl, not a stalker.”

“Ted, this isn’t a game. It isn’t just the usual infidelity. I’m used to that. When you first stopped wanting me, I knew you had to be having sex with someone, and for a few years I tried to always know who. I found out about your friends’ wives because I confronted one of them and she told me. I knew about the ones in your office because of the way they treated me. I knew there must be others because I saw receipts for hotel rooms in San Francisco and Sacramento that you had to have used in the daytime. I always blamed myself for not being attractive enough or fun enough or something, and kept quiet. Not this time. We’ve got to get you into therapy now.”

“I know, inpatient therapy. Then, while I’m in some hospital so doped up I can’t walk out the door, you can be out here spending my money, right?”

“I’m trying to save you.”

“From what?”

“She’s a child.”

“She’s a couple of years younger than you were when I met you.”

“That whole period seems a lot different to me now than it did when I was seventeen and you were thirty. People talked, and now I know they were right to. You’ve got a problem, and you’ve got to admit it to yourself and see a doctor.”

“You’re a jealous woman who wants to lock me up. What sort of therapy do you recommend-chemical castration? This is the perfect revenge fantasy.”

“My fantasies aren’t that way, Ted. I dream about having a decent, normal life.”

“Great! Have one. Go behave the way you would have if you had never met me. Have a decent, normal life. I’ll pay you a salary. Find a nice guy. I’ll pay him a salary, too.”

“Are you so deluded you don’t see? You’re in trouble. If you’re already in voluntary therapy before anyone knows, we might be able to keep you out of jail. We might even be able to settle the lawsuit her parents file when they find out. And make no mistake, they will. She has no sense of propriety.”

He paced the foyer for a moment, then stopped in front of Caroline. “Listen carefully. You’re wrong about Kylie, and you’re wrong about me. You listened to a phone message in which a young local girl I don’t even know called for an interview appointment. Your imagination and your bitterness toward me magnified it into a big story. It isn’t.”

“I didn’t hear anything like that.” Caroline looked amazed, then confused. “You don’t seem to-” She stopped. “Didn’t you hear it? Oh, my God. I guess you didn’t. She called on the line in your office. I saved it after I heard it so I could hear the others.” She stepped across the foyer to the small door beside the library, went inside, and returned with the wireless telephone from his desk, punching the buttons for the messages. She stopped a few feet from him and handed it to him.

He took the telephone and turned away from her. “You have no new messages, and four saved messages. To hear your-” He pressed the one key and heard “Hi, Ted.” It was Kylie’s voice. “I called your cell phone, but it must have been off, so I figured I’d try your private line. I missed you tonight. I was hoping that I would be in bed right now. Not alone. With you, silly. Instead, I ended up at a stupid party with Tina. I couldn’t stand it, so I came home early and now I’m just lying here thinking about you.” He had heard enough. He pressed the three key and heard, “Message erased.”

He could think of nothing to say. Caroline knew who Kylie was and had found out how old she was. He was suddenly exhausted, his body stiff from sitting in the car, and his mind seemed to be racing, but nothing came to him. He walked to the staircase, set the phone on the step, picked up his suitcase, and prepared to climb.

“Ted?” She said it quietly at first, then, “Ted!”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“You have no choice.”

“I have nothing to say to you.” He took the first step, and from the silence he knew she was following.

Her voice came from behind him. “You have one chance, Ted. One, and then it’s over. You can help me try to fix this-break it off with the girl, pay her off if necessary, get into therapy-or I’ll have to call the police.”

He spun around to look down at her. He felt his neck and temples pulsing. Caroline looked as though she were wreathed in a red haze. He saw her step backward, and her expression of alarm seemed to tell him what to do. She pivoted and leaned forward as though she was going to run.

In a second, he was on her. His arm shot out and hooked around her waist and swung her off her feet, and then he was half-carrying, half-dragging her across the foyer.

She shrieked, “You’re hurting me!”

He kept his arm around her waist and pulled her into the corridor that led toward the kitchen. He opened the door beside the pantry, held her at the top of the stairs to the basement, and turned on the light. She began to scream and struggle as though she thought he was going to throw her down the stairs, but he closed the door behind him, tightened his grip, and carried her down. She stopped screaming. Now she was just breathing hard from struggling against a bigger, stronger opponent.

Ted Forrest pulled her into the wine-tasting room with the theatrical-looking stone walls and false ceiling Caroline’s decorators had added, past the long table surrounded by leather chairs and the glass-fronted cabinets of glassware to the end of the room. He opened the heavy oak door to the wine cellar and turned on the light. As he pulled her inside the long, narrow room lined with wine racks that reached the edge of the arched ceiling and shut the door behind them, she began to scream again. “Shut up!” he said. “Nobody can hear you.”

She was wide-eyed and disheveled. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

“We’ve already had this conversation. No, I’m not crazy. I’m just giving you a chance to sit quietly for a while and think before you do something stupid that you can’t undo when you cool off. I want you to step back and consider the fact that you’re angry now because I’ve been seeing a younger woman.”

“Not a woman. She’s a child.”

He ignored the comment. “Your jealousy is making you lose your sense of proportion. You’re making terrible threats and wild demands, one after another. Isn’t this really about `who is the fairest one of all’? It’s not as though you were still interested in me, and were fighting for my affection. You just don’t want to lose, even if you don’t want the prize.”

“It’s about a crime, Ted. A felony.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of? You could hardly be implicated. You know that in all the time you’ve lived in my house, we’ve been able to tolerate each other and you’ve been treated well. I’m willing to go on that way, if it suits you. If it doesn’t, we can arrange a divorce with a fair settlement, and you can do something you like better.” He paused. “However…”

“However?”

“Yes. You must know that I’m never going to let you get me committed into a mental institution or arrested. It just isn’t going to happen.”

“You’re going to prevent it by imprisoning me?”

“Oh, please! You’re in the wine cellar of our own house.”

She glared at him but kept her distance, retreating a step until she backed into one of the floor-to-ceiling racks full of wine bottles. He could see that she was already beginning to feel the chill of the wine cellar. The two-ton temperature-control unit her decorators had insisted on kept the room at a constant fifty-five to fifty-seven degrees.

Forrest stepped out of the room, closed the door, and turned the key, but left it in the lock as usual. He heard her pounding on the door as he went to the long wooden table in the center of the tasting room and picked up the silver bucket Caroline had provided for people to spit their wine into at the ridiculous tasting she’d held down here last month. When she heard him turn the key to unlock the door, she stopped pounding.

He opened the door and saw her standing her customary six feet away, a smug expression on her face. He set the bucket inside. “I thought you might need this at some point.”

“You son of a bitch.”

He closed the door and locked her in. He walked upstairs and then along the hall to the suite where Maria, the chief housekeeper, lived. He knocked on her door, then knocked again. “Maria? It’s Mr. Forrest.” There was no answer, so he opened the door and looked inside. He walked through the small sitting room where she had her television set and the coffee table that held her sewing and a few magazines in Spanish. He went into her bedroom and looked at the perfectly made bed, the dresser with its top bereft of the usual cosmetics and hairbrushes, then stepped to the closet and opened the sliding door. The suitcase she always used when she took time off to visit her family in Ventura was gone. He looked at the clothes hanging along the pole, and saw that some of the outfits he was used to seeing on her were gone, too.

Caroline had told the truth.