Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

gut in Bridgehampton. Do you know what those chips look like on your insides?”

You forget pain. You really do.

Bonnie opened the screen door to her kitchen. “Congratulations,” she said softly.

“I don’t want congratulations. Believe me, I’m sorry.”

“No. You did what you set out to do. You got me. That’s it. My life is over. What you did isn’t homicide, but the effect is pretty much the same: a dead person.”

There was so much grief in her voice, as if she was mourning someone she had loved very much.

“It has to be,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you killed someone.” She walked inside and closed the screen door. I looked at her, blurred, distant, through the mesh. “Don’t try and leave. There’ll be a twenty-four-hour watch—”

“Where could I go that you wouldn’t find me?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s so sad.”

“It is,” I agreed.

“No. It’s sad because I didn’t do it. You know I didn’t.” It was about sixty-five degrees. I began to shake. I knew: This would be pain I would never forget. “Don’t worry,” Bonnie said, just before she closed the kitchen door. “You’ll get over it.”

C H A P T E R E L E V E N

We got to Bonnie’s house before eight the next morning.

Less than thirty seconds later, she looked up from the fine print on the search warrant, swallowed and said: “I’ll have to call my lawyer.”

“Feel free,” Robby said magnanimously, a second before he and the other detective, a short bodybuilder type in his late twenties, tried to push past her, into the house. The kid’s thighs were so overdeveloped that he couldn’t get his legs together. He walked like a chimpanzee.

“You can’t do this!” Bonnie shouted, trying to block us. I was the one who finally shoved her aside.

“Reasonable force,” I said. “Call your Civil Liberties Union.”

At first I’d expected hysteria. Then—especially when I noticed she was wearing those tight turquoise bicycle shorts and a T-shirt—I did a fast fantasy number. She’d faint. I’d grab her, lead her over to her couch and mumble something calming, like “Easy, Bonnie,” as, slowly, I let her out of my arms. Easy, Bonnie: I liked the idea of saying her name out loud.

But she’d just stood near the staircase, completely 209

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still. She was there, but she wasn’t there. The world she was living in was so awful that she withdrew and entered some other, kinder universe. At last, she drifted past me, into the kitchen to call Gideon. I could have been a ghost, just air and vapor. Moose picked up Bonnie’s mood, staying right beside her, concerned, not giving me so much as a wag of the tail.

I followed them into the kitchen and started going through her cabinets as if assuming I’d find a cupful of .22 bullets behind the Down Home Gourmet barbecue sauce. For someone who was close to broke, Bonnie was spending too much money on mustard: honey mustard, tarragon mustard, green peppercorn mustard. I looked over at her. Maybe I’d try a little mustard humor, clear the air. But her back was toward me, and she was speaking quietly into the phone.

I shook a jar of popcorn hard and loud, like some maracas-playing fool in a Latin American band. I wanted attention.

Maybe if she acknowledged I was alive I would be able to feel alive. I was so goddamn down.

Fuck this sadness shit, I told myself. Your obsession’s dead. Be glad. But I couldn’t let it rest in peace. And I couldn’t stop trying to get a rise out of Bonnie.

I made a big production out of going through her pocketbook. Obnoxious. Intrusive. A deliberate invasion of privacy.

I examined each key, flattened out a couple of linty tissues, studied a supermarket cash register tape. In slow motion, I took apart her wallet, laying out her seventeen bucks in bills, her forty-four cents in change, her driver’s license, her Visa card, her library card, her video store membership card. And the pictures: father in a plaid shirt holding up a prizewinner of a trout. Father and mother—tall and broad-shouldered like Bonnie—all dressed up, like for MAGIC HOUR / 211

a wedding, smiling, but starched, stiff. You just knew they’d rather be in their plaid shirts. Brothers and sisters-in-law on skis. Nieces with horses. Nephews with dogs. All the Bernstein pictures had mountains in the background.

I waited for her to show some spirit: run, try and punch me, scream out something like “I hate you!” Nothing. So I made a big deal of opening a purple plastic case that held a couple of Tampax. I held each one—Super—up to the light, as if anticipating a fuse instead of a string. Zero response.

Should I taunt her? Say, No shit. You still have a period?

and then deny it if her lawyer bitched about my being insult-ing? But I kept quiet. Thighs, the kid detective, was around; I didn’t want him to think I was anything other than neutral.

Bonnie hung up the phone. I went back to the pocketbook.

There was some powder on the bottom of her purse, red, obviously the blushing stuff women put on with those big fluff brushes. But I did a major number, sifting it into a plastic envelope, like it was a new, killer form of cocaine that made crack look like aspirin. She made no snide remarks. Clutching the warrant in her hand, she simply walked out on me. I stood there, a complete jerk, helpless, yearning, watching her turquoise ass until it disappeared into the hall.

I was like a husband whose wife has just walked out on him. I sank into the same chair where I’d sat that first day, having coffee. I was still holding her pocketbook.

About ten minutes later, when I finished the kitchen and found absolute squat, I went looking for her. She was sitting on the brick ledge in front of her fireplace, the search warrant beside her. She was hugging herself, as if waiting for logs to blaze up and

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