Despite his intention to play it cool, Tom blurted it out just as soon as Sarah slid next to him in the passenger seat of his car: “Why didn’t you tell me you’re having an affair?”
She was stung. “Because I’m not,” she said.
“Come on, Sarah!” His voice rose quickly. “Stop lying to me. I know that you are. I saw you with him.”
“Who did you see me with?”
“With Albert DeRichter.” It pained him to say his rival’s name, so he repeated himself sorrowfully and with deep disgust, for double the effect. “I saw you with Albert DeRichter.”
“I am not having an affair with Albert DeRichter.”
Her indignation ramped up the emotion, further justifying his anger: “You were too tired to see me last night but not too tired to spend over an hour with him up here,” he said with too much anger in his voice. “You were fucking him, weren’t you? Didn’t you tell me this is the fucking field?”
“Who the hell are you to be talking to me this way, to be asking me questions like this? My relationship with Albert DeRichter is none of your fucking business. And what were you doing spying on me?”
“Maybe Sheriff Martin would like to hear about this. He thought it was Ray who was having an affair so he figured that maybe Ray just left you and that’s that. No crime and nothing to investigate. But if it was you having the affair, he might just draw a different conclusion. Maybe there is a crime to investigate after all.”
“You’re threatening me? After you killed Mark Brubaker? I don’t think so.”
She reached for the door handle but he grabbed her arm.
“I have a good defense,” he said coldly. “What’s yours?”
“Keep your hands off of me!”
“I’m sorry.”
But he didn’t relax his grip.
“You’re hurting me.”
He let go and she rubbed her arm.
“What has gotten into you?” she said. “I thought you had feelings for me?”
“I did. I do. But you lied to me.”
“I did not. I just didn’t tell you everything… yet.”
“Goddamn it, Sarah! It’s the same thing.”
“Albert is not my lover. Albert was…”
“Albert was what?”
“Albert was my husband. A long time ago. Before I met Ray. Before Angie was born. Albert is Angie’s father.”
“I thought Ray…”
“Ray adopted her and took care of us. I told you that Ray was very kind and that’s the truth. He took care of me the same way he helped Anya.”
“He was kind, but maybe you didn’t love him.”
“Stop,” she said, and she started to cry. “You aren’t this cruel.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, but this time he meant it.
They sat quietly for a moment.
“Maybe it’s time for you to come clean and tell me everything,” Tom said. “And start at the beginning.”
“I was born in the church and was engaged to Albert when I was just 14,” she said.
“The DeRichters are Utopianists?”
“Just Albert. He converted because he liked the idea of having multiple wives. And Victor Redd, who was head of the church at that time, was happy to have him because he was prominent and rich. Albert gave a lot of money to the church, which was just like giving it to the Redds. Redd paid him back by making me Albert’s first wife.”
“Your parents allowed this?”
“They were honored. There’s a room in the temple where new marriages are consummated. The whole thing is very ceremonial, the deflowering. I was only 15 and I didn’t like it. I got pregnant right away, but before I started showing, and before Albert knew about it, I decided to run away. It was the middle of the night. I was hitchhiking and Ray picked me up. He hid me until the baby, until Angie, was born. Then he went and told Victor Redd and Albert that he had me and the baby and told them that I didn’t want to go back to them and that he was going to protect me.”
“They let him get away with this?”
“He was smart about it. And he was tough. We had gone to a lawyer in Denver where we made up these sworn statements and he gave copies of the statements to Victor and Albert and told them that the lawyer had instructions to share the information with the authorities if anything happened to either one of us. That was enough to keep them quiet. And I guess it worked for almost twenty years.”
“You think they did something to Ray?”
“Victor Redd died a few years ago. But Albert is capable of anything.”
“Why didn’t you and Ray just leave and get away from here?”
“Ray didn’t want to go. Sometimes we talked about leaving, but then we just never figured out how we could pay for it, or where we would go if we did go, we had a place to live, and he had his business, and the years went by, Angie grew up, Ray Jr. came along, and somehow the memory of how we started out just faded away into the background. It didn’t seem all that strange around here. It actually seemed kind of normal. Just how things happen. Albert moved away so he wasn’t a problem and Victor died and life went on. But then Albert came back.”
Sarah stopped talking and Tom sat back to absorb all she’d told him. Without looking over at her, he grabbed her hand, and he squeezed it to reassure her that he was there for her and to ask her forgiveness, a lot to communicate, he realized, from a hand squeeze. She squeezed his hand back.
“After Albert came back, supposedly to take care of the old man and run the family business, he looked for Angie and he told her that he was her real father. She confronted us about it. I’ve never see Ray so pissed off. Angie said we lied to her for her whole life and that we were keeping her from her inheritance. Ray was so hurt when she turned on him like that, after they were so close….”
“What did he do?”
“He wanted to go have it out with Albert, but I begged him not to and I made him promise me that he wouldn’t.”
“And then?”
“And then Angie and Ray started fighting all the time and Angie got pregnant and engaged to Craig, and we planned a big wedding for them, and it seemed like maybe we’d weathered the crisis. Then Ray disappeared.”
“But none of this explains what you were doing with Albert yesterday.”
“It’s because of you. When you told me Angie is an addict, the reason that was so hard for me to hear is because Ray tried to tell me the same thing and I wouldn’t listen to him, either. I kept making excuses for her and that was wrong. It was like I was reliving the same argument I had with Ray all over again with you. Then you got mad and walked out of the house and I realized that I was doing the exact same thing when I told you that I didn’t know what happened to Ray. I wasn’t telling you the truth, and I was putting you in danger, just like I put Ray in danger.
“That first time we met here, at the drive-in, I called you because Albert warned me. He said it was my fault that you were nosing around, my fault that you went to meet Elizabeth at the nursing home and that you went to North Mountain to ask him about Ray. He was positive I put you up to it or why else would you bother, and why would you suspect him, and he said if I knew what was good for myself I’d make you stop. I asked you to stop but you wouldn’t listen so I got the smart idea to tell you about Anya. I didn’t think you could ever find her. You would just think that she was the reason for Ray’s disappearance, that it was obvious that he’d run off with her, and you’d stop looking. But you did find Anya and then you almost got yourself killed when you went out to Brubaker’s place. I didn’t think anyone could be that, I don’t know, that stupid, to tell you the truth, to go out there to try to talk to him.
“And then the other day we went to bed and made love and afterwards I thought to myself, ‘Sarah Walker, it’s time you found your backbone. You can’t keep running from Albert DeRichter your whole life.’ So I called Albert and told him that I had something to tell him, in person. I needed to look him in the eye and tell it to him to his face. I wanted him to know that he can’t hurt me anymore. I wanted him to know that I’m ready to fight back. I don’t have Ray anymore to fight for Angie so it’s up to me. I told him to leave Angie alone because he’s already hurt her enough. And…”
“And what?”
“And I told him that he might get away with whatever it is he did to Ray because even though I know damn well that he’s responsible for whatever happened to him I can’t prove it and he’s got the sheriff in his back pocket, but I told him that if anything happens to you, then he’d better be prepared to deal with me, too. I told him that he’ll have to kill you and me both because if he doesn’t I’ll come after him.”
“You told him that?”
“I did,” she said grimly.
“What did he say?”
“He looked at me and said I was always about half crazy and now I’ve gone all the way insane, and I laughed and said, ‘Maybe so, but I’m also dead serious about this.’ And that was it. So now who knows what he’s going to do.”
Finally, she lost control of her emotions and allowed a full sob to escape. She leaned into him and he put his arm around her.
“You are giving me way too much credit,” Tom said. “You didn’t get the courage to confront Albert like that from me. You found it by yourself.”
“You know what’s really weird about it is that I don’t know for sure that Albert did anything to Ray,” she said. “I suppose Ray could have run off to Vegas. But if Albert did do something, then you know he’s going to come after you next. So that’s why I had to tell him: He’d better not dare. So now I guess he’ll come after both of us.”
Sarah sounded resigned and Tom should have felt threatened. But what he felt was the opposite of vulnerability. Sarah’s desire to protect him was far more impressive than the fact that the only weapon she had at her disposal was bluster. The toxic entanglement of depression, pain, anger, and jealousy that had been consuming him had suddenly unknotted itself to be replaced by something lucid and pure.
Tom knew then, finally and with absolute certainty, just as Sarah had always known, that Ray Walker had not abandoned his family, he had not run off to Vegas. An accident having been ruled out by the exhaustive search, only foul play could have kept Ray from returning home to Sarah and Angie and Ray Jr.
And Tom knew that he would never abandon Sarah, either. Somehow, he had come to occupy the void left by Ray; he had become Ray.