The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Andrew Klavan Lou Monahan, County Prosecutor from Guilty as Charged

The things you remember; the things you regret. Funny, Monahan thought — they were such little things. That last week of summer vacation. Rick Ellerbee’s bash. It was more than twenty years ago now. It was the last week before they all went off to college. The evening had grown cool by the water after the leaden heat of the day, and he had smelled the edge of September, and he had smelled the sea. The Sound was a silver ridge out beyond the white mansion, and the lawn, beryl in the dusk, swept down from under the house’s foundations and swelled beneath his feet and swept away again. Liveried waiters angled among the clusters of teenagers. A jazz quartet in white tuxedos neutered the latest hits beneath the yellow-striped tent. “Jive Talkin’.” “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Whatever — it was just a white pudding of noise in there. All the same, the couples danced to it. And the girls were so pretty, their necks and arms so fresh in their sleeveless dresses.

For Monahan, to whom Ellerbee had always been kind, the setting was the element, the music the heartbeat, the girls the very soul of sophistication, wealth, and grace. Ellerbee himself seemed their presiding genius: his smooth, animated features gracious and manly and without arrogance; the figure he cut both slender and solid — and casual, too, in tan chinos and an open-necked shirt; the way he gestured to the circle of smiles around him as if he were conjuring the whole occasion out of thin air only to enhance the comfort and sweetness of their lives. To Monahan, he sparkled, it all sparkled, and he stood watching them — Ellerbee, all his classmates — a little apart, drink in hand, knowing full well that, after today, they would become strangers to him. In a week. Ellerbee would be starting at Princeton and after that, almost surely, would go on to Harvard Law. Monahan would cram and labor his way through the state school in Westchester and get his law degree at NYU, if he was lucky, if he was very lucky and worked very hard. They would meet during vacations. They would chat on the street and part. There would never be this friendship again, this intimacy, not for him. Not that Monahan was bitter about it — he had never expected more, not even this much — but he couldn’t help feeling wistful that last evening. They were charming — his high school friends — and they were charmed; and he knew he was there to say good-bye.

His drink finished, the glass spirited away. Monahan moved across the lawn to the tent, his hands in the pockets of his green suit, his tie stirring in the first breeze off the Sound. He reached the edge of the tent and stepped within the shade of the canvas, stepped up onto the wooden floor. He surveyed the dancers absently, casually tapping his foot to the quartet’s thumpingly bland “Behind Closed Doors.”

And he saw a girl. Leaning against the far tent pole. Resting her cheek against it dreamily.

She could not possibly have been as beautiful as he remembered her twenty years on. Her skin could not have been so white beneath such thoroughly raven hair. Her figure, lightly pressed against the support, outlined, in her floral dress, against the beryl lawn and the azure sky, so graceful and enchanting — women looked like that in memory, in movies, not in real life. All the same even then. Monahan was made breathless by the sight of her.

And then she raised her eyes to him, saw him watching her. And she smiled at him across the dance floor.

The smile lanced his rib cage; it made his head swim. Only half aware, he began to approach her. He wove slowly through the couples dancing around him. The music, in his woozy state, seemed to shatter into glistering bursts and dabs in the summer air. There was nothing but that music as he moved, and the pulse in his head, and her heartbreaking beauty. Monahan was amazed. He could not believe the sudden possibilities. Everything, he knew, was about to become wonderful.

She straightened from the pole to await him. He neared the edge of the floor. A couple moved between them, cutting her from his view for a moment — just for a moment. Then they passed.

The girl was gone.

Monahan blinked. The pole stood alone. He moved out of the tent and looked over the lawn. There was no sign of her, no sign at all. Monahan was too prosy a fellow to believe that she had vanished — but he didn’t go hunting for her, either; he was too unassuming for that. No, he figured he had simply made a mistake. She had not been smiling at him. She’d been smiling at someone else, someone behind him probably. That made more sense; the whole world made a lot more sense that way. He would have made a fool of himself it he’d reached her, if he’d spoken. She would have looked at him blankly. “Excuse me,” she would have said, and walked away. He’d been spared that, at least. He should have felt grateful.

Instead, for twenty years, he remembered her, he regretted losing her. There were days — there were nights — when he imagined entire lifetimes with her. Which was funny. Well, it was pretty stupid, really. It wasn’t like down-to-earth Lou Monahan at all.

Yet there it was. That memory, that moment. From time to time, out of nowhere after years, it turned up again and melted him, wrung him. The things you remember, the things you regret.

They were there to haunt him in force the night the rock star got his throat cut.

Monahan had never even heard of the guy. What did he know about rock stars nowadays? They were just monstrous images on T-shirts to him — those shirts on the sad little punks he sent to juvenile hall. But this one, Thrust — yes, that was his name — he must’ve had a fairly sizable following. Because when Monahan pulled the department Chevy into the dead man’s driveway, reporters converged on him like black flies.

The prosecutor had never seen so many of them. Not on any case he’d ever caught. As he shut off the car, he had a glimpse through the window of their straining faces. He saw Rorke from the local weekly, and Helen Martin from the county’s lone ten-thousand-watt sundowner. But these two, usually the only two to show up anywhere, were quickly jostled out of sight by the swarming others. Flashes went off, spotlights; camera lenses jutted at him; outstretched hands held microphones that chittered against the pane. And the mikes had big-time logos on them, city call letters, and the networks’, too. Monahan even noticed a few glamorous news-women out there, women he recognized but couldn’t name. How the hell had they gotten up here so fast?

As he pushed the door open, he tried to look bored and beleaguered because — well, because that’s the way prosecutors always looked on TV shows. Bui as the cameras started flashing and the shouted questions deafened him and the microphones and minicams were pushed into his face, Monahan felt himself going sweaty and muslin-headed. He had never been through anything remotely like this before. He had no idea, finally, what he said to them. He spoke thickly, his tongue swollen, his brain stuporous. All he could think about was how wrinkled his brown jacket was — and how brown it was! — and how he had to hold it closed to cover the coffee stain on his shirt pocket. Then it was over. Investigator Corvo drew him out of the throng — like being hauled out of quicksand — and the deputies pushed the reporters back. And then Monahan, still trying to button his jacket, was climbing beside Corvo up the front path through a spotlit rock garden dolled with bonsai trees.

“Wow, huh?” said Corvo.

“Jesus,” said Monahan. “Who was this guy?”

They approached the long, low front of the ranch house. Corvo was a small man, short, thin, with a round, squinched face and a dogged gait. Monahan had to take long strides to keep up with him.

“It’s not the guy,” Corvo said, “it’s the young lady that did him. Old Thrust was sticking Ginny Reingold. Only it looks like she stuck him, right?”

Corvo spoke the woman’s name with such weight that Monahan thought he must know it, but there was nothing there. “Who the hell is Ginny Reingold?”

Corvo snorted. “Who the hell is Ginny Reingold? You know your wife?”

“Yeah,” said Monahan. “I know my wife.”

“You know the magazines she reads? You know the face on the cover? That’s Ginny Reingold.”

Monahan slowed down, trying to form an image. Corvo kept walking. “Which magazine?” said Monahan.

“All of them,” said Corvo. He reached the door and looked back at him, gestured at the press in the driveway below. “You better get used to that shit down there,” he said to the prosecutor. “You’re about to become a star.”

The body lay half off the bed, and the head lay half off the body. The blood had spilled over the singer’s face and drenched his long black hair and stained the tan shag under him red. A sheet, also stained, still covered him to his thighs, and the man’s pale, hairy nakedness, and his gaping mouth and his staring eyes and his blood and the metallic smell of his blood and the sour smell of his urine made the murder scene — for all the cameras and glamorous news babes outside — as dingy and miserable and sordid as every other Monahan had seen.

“Is everyone done with him?”

“Yeah,” said Corvo, “but we thought you’d want a look.”

“Thrust? That was his name? Thrust?”

“That’s what he called himself. He was lead singer for Fatwa. Fatwa.” Corvo shook his head.

Monahan snorted. “Fatwa and Thrust.”

“Born Jerry Finkelstein,” said Corvo, and laughed.

Monahan looked around the bedroom casually. “So what about her?”

Corvo told him what they had while Monahan studied the place. It was a large room, all shag below, a wall of mirrors facing a wall of windows open on the September night, a wall of shelves and stereo equipment connecting them. A crime scene man was dusting the CD player for prints. Monahan took it all in, and Corvo went on detailing the evidence against the suspect: the bloodstains, the possible skin traces, the maid who’d sometimes heard them fighting. Monahan look this in, too. He was the most successful prosecutor in three counties, and he was known for his unspectacular, sturdy, determined mastery of every case.

So he took it all in. But a part of his mind was elsewhere. Still thinking about those reporters outside. Excited about them now. His first astonishment had passed, and he could feel the chill of excitement in his chest, the wind of it across his nerve endings. Assistant District Attorney Lou Monahan told reporters at the scene that he would act quickly to secure an indictment... he thought.

Strangely enough, it was just then — not later — that the memory came to him. Rick Ellerbee’s end-of-summer bash. The dancers under the lent. The girl, against the tent pole, smiling at him. Standing beside the shabby corpse, he felt a ridiculous surge of yearning and love.

“Why the hell would she do it?” he said sharply, snapping out of it. “The legendary Ginny Reingold.”

“Old Thrust,” said Corvo, showing a fist. “Boom-boom — tsk-tsk — you know? Hell hath no fury like a woman punched.”

Monahan raised his eyebrows. “She said that?”

“Not her. She’s not talking till her lawyer gets up from the city. You’re gonna be in some very fancy company on this one, my friend.”

Monahan lifted his chin, ready for it.

“She’s bringing in Richard Ellerbee,” said Corvo. “Run for your life.”

Wendy Monahan kept saying the same thing. “You were on the eleven o’clock news!”

Monahan kept eating. Wendy kept putting food in front of him. Cold roast beef, string beans, rolls. A dish of coleslaw now. “The eleven o’clock news!” She kept saying the same thing. “I tell you, the phone would not stop ringing. I thought Sandy was just going to fall over dead.” Usually, if he came home at this hour, Monahan had to forage for himself, scour the back reaches of the refrigerator. Now Wendy fetched him another beer, poured it into his glass for him. He wondered if Rick Ellerbee’s wife treated him like this all the time.

“So?” She plunked down in the seat next to him. Peered at him, her chin on her fists, as if he had tales to tell of a Polar expedition. “Did you see her? What does she look like?”

“‘What does she look like?’” Monahan sat like Old King Cole, his fists on the table before him, his fork in one, his beer in the other. “She’s on every magazine in the house — I can’t go to the bathroom without seeing her...”

“I mean in real life.”

“In real life? In real life, she has a black eye.”

Wendy reeled back with a full-volume gasp. “You mean he hit her?” Monahan nodded. “The creep! Well, then he deserved it.”

“On television, he deserved it,” said Monahan, digging into the slaw “In court, they tend to consider it an overreaction.”

Wendy’s blue eyes grew bright, and she leaned in toward him again, making him feel strange: warm; good. “But the court’s going to be on television,” she said. “They have cameras now.”

He hadn’t actually thought of that. Uncertainly, he said, “Nah. Up here?”

“For this?” said Wendy. “Are you kidding? The trial’ll be on every day. You’ll be like a show.”

He tried to laugh it off. “Lou Monahan, County Prosecutor,” he said. But it bounced around inside him. Cameras at the trial every day, like a show.

“I’d watch it,” said Wendy. And she stood up, slipped around the edge of the table, and sat on her husband’s lap.

Monahan remembered now about Ellerbee’s wife. She was some muck-a-muck’s daughter — some rich guy’s. Monahan had seen a picture of the two of them at some kind of charity function. The wife was very beautiful and posh with wavy black hair.

Wendy nestled against him. She moved her hands gently over the back of his neck, and he put his hands on her bottom. She was a little pudgy now — she hadn’t lost all the weight she’d gained before their second son was born — but she still had a cute round girlish face under the short hair she kept blond. She’d look okay standing beside him, he thought. A good wife for a man-of-the-people type. Viewers would see he had a solid family life...

She leaned forward and put her lips to his ear. “I married a star,” she whispered.

Monahan had a stray thought: maybe the girl at Rick Ellerbee’s party would see him on television... “You’re a goof,” he said aloud, and he nuzzled his wife’s neck and kissed her.

Prosecutor Lou Monahan today came face to face with the man who was once his friend but has now become his ruthless opponent in the trial of the century, Monahan thought as he ambled down the courthouse hallway to meet with Ginny Reingold and her lawyer. He was careful to amble, casual, his hands in his pockets, his expression thoughtful, distant. In truth, he hadn’t been this nervous since the Sunday school Nativity play when his trembling lips had turned “myrrh” into a six-syllable word.

So far, though, things were going pretty well this morning. His performance before the press on the courthouse steps, for instance, had been a big improvement over yesterday’s. This time he’d been prepared for them. Wendy had chosen his clothes, so he felt confident and well dressed. He’d rehearsed his statement as he drove to work, and practiced pointing his finger as he spoke and narrowing his eyes forcefully. He’d talked briefly and clearly as the mob of them congealed around him like pork fat. Then he’d turned and marched away from their shouted questions as if he had more important things to do. He hadn’t had time to review the film clips yet, but some of the deputies who’d seen them on the ten o’clock report had teased him — “Looking good, Lou!” — so he guessed it had gone okay.

Now, though... Now came the meeting he dreaded. His first confrontation with Ellerbee. And even though they would meet in the interview room with no one to see the moment but Corvo and the deputy and the defendant, those cameras, those reporters — they stayed in Monahan’s head; he could see the film of himself in his head, he could hear the newsman’s narration there. Prosecutor Lou Monahan strode to the interview room door and nodded grimly to the deputy...

Monahan strode to the interview room door and nodded grimly to the deputy. He had to get this just right, he thought. From the very first, the first greeting. Friendly but not eager; poised; a handshake; a manly nod of recognition. Nothing that suggested how he had revered Ellerbee in youth, how Ellerbee had gone on to become everything Monahan knew he could never be. Film of his inferiority at eleven.

“Jesus,” Monahan whispered under his breath as the deputy pushed open the door.

Corvo was already in the room, standing before the table. The deputy. Ellen Brown, was against the wall. Ginny Reingold, the skin over her high cheekbone purple and broken, sat with her hands clasped on the table and stared forward blankly. She was long-haired, long-, silky-, chestnut-haired, wide-eyed, shapely but frail. The “neo-waif look,” his wife had told him. Whatever it was, every time Monahan set eyes on her, he felt himself stirred as by some primitive instinct to rise to her defense.

Which was pretty unhelpful under the circumstances. Because there, seated beside her, was her defender in fact.

Jesus, he looks great! Monahan thought. What a great suit!

Ellerbee had thickened over these twenty years; he was not the winsome Boy King of the Suburbs he had been. But he was still trim, clearly muscular. His width only gave his figure power and maturity. There was none of Monahan’s paunch, nor his widow’s peak. And where Monahan felt his own features had spread and blurred with time, Ellerbee’s dauntless profile seemed to have solidified, sharpened, the soft lines straighter, the boy’s face a man’s.

On top of which, it really was a great suit. Sleek and black. Pinstripes so faint, so suggestive, they almost disdained to be there at all.

“Mr. Ellerbee,” said Corvo. “Louis Monahan, the ADA on the case.”

Monahan shot his hand out a little too quickly. But he hit the correct expression perfectly: a tight half-smile, a narrowed eye, knowing, amused. So we meet again, old friend.

Ellerbee stood. He pumped Monahan’s hand. His brilliant eyes seemed to drink the prosecutor down in one smooth swallow. “Mr. Monahan,” he said. Then he sat again. Then he said, “My client would like to make a statement.”

Everyone started moving around Monahan. Ellerbee turned to his client. Ginny Reingold straightened, drew breath. Corvo nodded to Deputy Brown, who stepped to the door and spoke to the deputy outside. Only Monahan himself remained motionless. Frozen. Staring. Gaping at Ellerbee.

He... didn’t recognize me, he thought. It was his only thought for the moment, the only thought of which he was aware, a neon billboard of a thought, all other thoughts fading in its blaze. Didn’t. Recognize. Me? Me? Monahan kept standing, kept staring. But... we were in school together. We ran... we ran track together. Track. At school. Together. I beat him — I beat him in the fifty-yard dash. And he doesn’t recognize...

“Uh... Lou?” said Corvo.

“Miss Reingold, this session is now being videotaped,” said Monahan smoothly, pulling out the chair across from her, sitting, facing her. “So I’ll inform you of your rights again for the record, and then you can begin.” Didn’t...? Me? Lou? he thought. The fifty-yard dash? I hit the line a yard ahead of you. A yard at least, Freddy Markham was there, he saw it...

“Last night,” said Ginny Reingold. She cleared her throat. “Last night, before Jerry died, before he was killed...”

That’s why you only ran the three hundred after that, thought Monahan sullenly, shaking his head at the Formica tabletop. He was suddenly very depressed.

“We had a fight,” Ginny Reingold went on softly. She had the voice of a boy’s fantasy, half flute, half whisper. Monahan, drawing his gut up with a breath, forced himself to listen to her. “It wasn’t anything big. I just made some joke, you know, about his hair, he needed a haircut, teasing him, you know, but... well, his last album didn’t do so well, and he’s been kind of down about it, you know. And, anyway, he started yelling, and it got out of hand, and he — he hit me. In the face. And see, he never — I told him he could never hit me in the face. I told him, you know. I said I’d leave him. But he was just wild. He was crazy. And I got scared, you know. So I ran out. Outside. I got in the car, the tail one, the Mercedes. And I locked all the doors, you know, but... I didn’t have the key, see. It was in my purse. And Jerry came out, and he was pounding on the windows, screaming. I kept hoping someone would hear, you know, call the police, I even leaned on the horn, but... well, there’s really only woods around us, and, anyway, I guess people are kind of used to it. Anyway, after a while, he said, you know, that he was going in to get the key. And then he said he was going to come back out and teach me a lesson. And then he — he laughed this kind of maniacal laughter, you know, and... he went back inside.” Ginny Reingold gulped back tears, glanced at her attorney, her big eyes appealing. Ellerbee reached out and put his strong hand over her thin, white fingers. Monahan watched them touch. I beat him, you know, he told Ginny Reingold in his mind. A solid yard. Freddy Markham saw it. He had to be all noble and sportsmanlike about it. It killed him. Ginny Reingold swallowed again and went on. “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to try and run. I just stayed there. But Jerry didn’t come back. I was out there over an hour, you know, and then... well, it started to get really cold. I didn’t have my jacket or anything. So, finally, you know, I got out. And I went around the back. I wanted to... peek in at the window, the bedroom window, I was hoping maybe Jerry had gone to sleep. Like, passed out. He’d had a lot of vodka and, and some dope, too, so I thought...” She touched the corner of her eye with a fingernail, as if to keep a tear there neatly contained. “So, like, anyway, I kind of crept around to the back, and... there was a man. A big... I don’t know... a big fat guy, white guy with, like, real short hair. He was climbing out of the window...”

Monahan’s month opened, but he didn’t speak. Suddenly, the heaviness in his belly began to lighten. Hey, he thought.

“He was wearing... kind of one of those checkered hunting jackets, you know,” Ginny Reingold said. “He didn’t even see me, he didn’t look at me, he just climbed out of the window and... started running. He just ran off into the woods in back. And I ran to the window and looked in, and... and there was Jerry...”

Now she shuddered, covered her mouth with her hands, and her tears spilled over. They coursed over her bruised cheek and her silken hair covered the other side of her face as she leaned toward her attorney. Ellerbee squeezed her shoulder, and she pressed her forehead against his lapel. Investigator Corvo clenched his fist at his side. Ginny Reingold looked like a beaten child.

But Monahan wasn’t looking at Ginny Reingold now. By now, his mood had transformed entirely, and he was looking at Richard Ellerbee. Running his gaze over the bold, thin nose, the forthright brow, the whole expert etching of his countenance. Looking at him as one lawyer to another, one savvy courtroom practitioner to another. Excitement, like cold water boiling, was rising up through his chest, into his throat. And he was thinking: Hey. Hey, what do you know? What do you know, counselor? Her story is crap. Craparoni. And you know it’s crap, Mr. Counselor Ellerbee. And the jury will sure as hell know it, too. He almost let himself laugh out loud. And I’m going to beat you, he thought in surprise. I’m going to beat you blind. On TV. On TV every ding-dong day. For everyone to see every day. For her to see. At your lousy party. I beat you once. At the fifty-yard dash. You arrogant son of a bitch. And I’m going to beat you now. Again. For everyone to see.

Monahan shoved into his office, riding his confidence. This time, Corvo had to hurry to keep up with him.

“You better find an all-girl jury, boy,” Corvo was saying, “’cause there’s not a man in the world who’d vote to convict her. Even I wouldn’t vote to convict her, and I know she’s guilty.”

Monahan’s desk was covered with pink message slips. Newspapers and TV stations and radio stations had been calling him. People from the Sonny Charleston talk show were calling him. Sonny wanted to have him on.

“They’ll convict her,” he said. “She’s lying. They’ll convict her.”

He cleared a space at the corner of the desk. He had brought one of the portable JVCs in from the squad room. He hoisted it onto the desk and switched it on. It was almost time for the twelve o’clock report.

“That Ellerbee, he’s something, huh,” said Corvo. “Nice suit.”

“Yeah,” said Monahan. “It’s a great suit.” The picture on the set came up fast. A woman was holding up a box of detergent. She looked a little like Monahan’s wife — round-faced, blond — only thinner, prettier, in a crisp, pretty yellow blouse. If Wendy could make herself look a little bit more like that, she’d be perfect, Monahan thought.

“He’s actually a really nice guy,” Corvo went on, as if he’d met a movie star who’d given him the time of day. “I was talking to him on the way out. He was asking me about the fishing up here. You know, he says he thinks he went to school with you.”

“Oh yeah?” said Monahan. “I didn’t recognize him.”

“What do you think he makes? Like a million a year or something?”

The news came on then. Music like Morse code played on violins. An exciting swoop toward the anchorwoman’s desk, the keen beam of her gaze at the camera. And behind her, a glamour shot of Ginny Reingold over the image of a broken guitar.

The anchorwoman’s lead was quick, sharp. Revelations today that Thrust had repeatedly battered his supermodel lover. Then they were into the tape, and there was Monahan, pushing up the courthouse steps as the reporters closed around him like the sea.

“Hey — looking good,” said Corvo.

But Monahan briefly shook his head. He knew he did not look good. He did not even look like he looked. In real life, he had a candid, intelligent face, more handsome than not. On TV, his features seemed thick and coarse, his hair thin and unkempt. His attempts to speak forcefully, jabbing the air with his finger, seemed ludicrous, stagey and stiff. From a competent, honest, small-county prosecutor, the cameras had somehow transformed him into a bullying, beady-eyed thug of a bureaucrat.

But his new energy, his new confidence, did not falter. He was not experienced in this, that’s all. The cameras, the press. It had caught him off-guard. Now, though, now that he knew he could win, he had a plan.

Ellerbee came on. “This case has been mishandled from the start,” he said. He spoke quietly but precisely, addressing the reporter, and thus the audience, as a colleague, an equal. “The town police were on the scene before the county sheriff’s department, and they wandered all over the property. Contaminated the evidence completely. Obliterated any trace of an intruder. No attempt to find another suspect has been made. And there’s been no attempt to trace the ownership of the murder weapon.”

“Yeah, those townies,” Corvo said.

Monahan didn’t hear him. He’s slick, he was thinking. Ellerbee’s approach to the camera was practiced, slick. He included the audience in his thoughts as if they were all lawyers trying the case together. Monahan nodded, thinking. But this is my county, counselor, my truck. And the jury will come from here.

This was his plan. Monahan was going to change. Now, right away, before the reporters had time to notice. He was going to become a local boy. He’d lived here long enough; he knew just how to do it. Well, that Mr. Ellerbee, he sure is one fine city lawyer he was going to tell the reporters. I guess a small-county prosecutor doesn’t have much chance against him in court, he would say, so I’ll just have to tell folks the truth and hope they’ll listen. Monahan, staring at the TV, smiled without knowing it. It would work. He knew it would work. Even the fact that they had gone to school together would play right into it, sharpen the clash of personalities. Every day, the people would see it. Small-county David against big-city Goliath. The cameras would be on them. In the courtroom, every day. Just like a show. And he would amble back and forth before the witness stand, one hand in his pants pocket, the other scratching at his head, his shirt rumpled, his tie undone. The Honest Bumpkin. Shrewder than He Looked. Justice on His Side — that would be him — Alone Against All the Power of the Rich and Famous. The jury would love it. And he would win. On TV. The whole country — maybe even the whole world — would be watching it. Lou Monahan. County Prosecutor.

“What’re you thinking?” said Corvo with a laugh. “With that look on your face — what’re you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking about a blouse I’m gonna buy for my wife,” said Monahan. “Yellow.” And he picked up the phone to call the Sonny Charleston show.

Lou Monahan, County Prosecutor, looked at the murder scene in the fading light, Monahan thought. He looked at the murder scene in the fading light. He was standing in back of the ranch house, out of sight of the deputy guarding the front. He was standing in the grass with his hands in his pockets. A cool breeze full of dusk and autumn traveled up the gentle slope of the hill from the woods below.

He had wanted to come and inspect the place again, get a sense of it. Supply himself with ammunition against Ellerbee’s charges that the scene had been contaminated. Well, now, he would tell Sonny Charleston, that Mr. Ellerbee has some real fancy ideas, but I had a look-see at the place myself, and, well, if there was any sign of an intruder... He smiled as he turned to look down at the trees below him. He was going on the TV program tomorrow. The Lou Monahan show would begin its run tomorrow. Everything, he knew, was about to become wonderful.

The leaves in the forest rustled faintly. He could smell them beginning to die. And suddenly his soul was in the past, and he was full of yearning. Walking across the dance floor to where she stood. The girl so achingly near and youth so achingly near again that he nearly groaned aloud in his desire to touch them both.

He had been wrong, he thought. Wrong all this time. She had been smiling at him. Beckoning him. He should have searched for her, found her, spoken to her. Everything would have been different. He would have been... something. Something else. He didn’t know what. Some gleaming thing he could now only hanker for blindly.

Monahan began to walk toward the woods, down the slope of the lawn. He thought he was still examining the scene, but really he was just walking, feeling himself walk, as he had walked twenty years ago beneath the tent. He was wandering toward the woods and the source of the wind, and toward that smell of summer’s end that he remembered. He was approaching the forest shadows and their sense of mystery as if he hoped to wander there right through the veil and into the un-happened thing.

But he slowed, stopped, right at the tree line. Gazed into the deeper darkness wryly, because he knew it was only the darkness after all. There was no going back, of course not. There were no alternative histories. Everything had to be as it was. His time had not been then. But his time was coming now.

He drew his gaze back to the front rank of trees and was about to turn away. But then he noticed something.

Lou Monahan, County Prosecutor, stepped forward, his eyes narrowing. He looked down at a young maple growing at the forest’s edge, its lower branches. On one of them there was a small puff of color trembling in the air. Red and black among the leaves that were still green. He leaned closer to it, and he knew exactly what it was. It was a trace of fabric, a few threads. Pulled from one of those checkered hunting jackets. Like the jacket Ginny Reingold said had been worn by the murderous intruder.

Something in Monahan greeted the sight without surprise, as if he had known all along it would be there. Just as he had known, somehow, that the girl at the edge of the dance floor would be gone by the time he reached her. This made sense to him, too. That Ginny Reingold was innocent. That she would not go to trial. That there would be no trial. Some drug-crazed drifter would be busted for the murder and would confess. The model would leave the county, and Ellerbee would leave, and the cameras would leave. Lou Monahan, County Prosecutor would be canceled before it even premiered. It did not surprise him at all. The world made much more sense to him that way. It always had.

And yet... thought Monahan dreamily. And yet...

He reached out and pinched the little scrap of cloth between his thumb and finger. He tugged it, and it came free from the snag of the branch on which it hung. He held it up, a little above his eyes, as if to examine it in the darkling. The breeze blew up to him from its mysterious source in the woods. And he opened his fingers.

And the little scrap of cloth blew away.