Inhabited. Charlie Quimby

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СКАЧАТЬ pulled over near the last remnant of the old uranium mill across from the park and peered through the streetlamp flare. No one about. No lights coming from the camps. It was as if night had already absorbed the day’s horror into the bleak history of the place. There was nothing specific about such darkness. It could contain any dreadfulness, including the worst mistake of her life. The memory came back like a poorly fixed Polaroid, a bright white blank with smudges and shadows creeping to the foreground.

       Right over there. About this time of night.

      There was no Botanical Gardens building then. The junkyard had been off to the right and some shacks straight ahead where the hardpan was glazed in ghostly alkali blotched with crankcase oil. They had abandoned the Jeep there with the keys in the ignition, counting on some derelict to cover the vehicle with fingerprints. Their impulse turned out better than they had imagined. The Jeep ended up trashed near the Amtrak station in Salt Lake City, where everyone assumed Neulan Kornhauer had left it, after eluding the authorities closing in on him. Back in Grand Junction, security camera footage had showed the Choirmaster Killer fueling his vehicle and filling a reserve gas can on the day he disappeared. Then no more charge card transactions. No sightings. A decade later, investigators still combed coroner’s reports on young women who had fallen from high places, keen to pick up Neulan’s trail. Only Meg and Brian could tell them they should be searching instead for his bones.

      The lights of a police cruiser illuminated her car’s interior with the sad blue cast of a failing nightspot. Although she was driving barefoot, she hadn’t done anything obviously illegal. He’d see she was respectable. She watched in the mirror as he got out of the squad car and hitched himself in three places before beginning the slow walk to her side.

      “Everything all right, ma’am?”

      She’d had only two glasses of wine but wasn’t eager to pronounce the fact, and she was careful not to fumble the retrieval of her registration. He looked at her license, looked at her, then back to the picture, then to her, each time pausing a trifle longer.

      “You heading home now, Ms. Mogrin?”

      She nodded, thankful he hadn’t asked her to step out for a roadside exam.

      “Just because there’s no traffic doesn’t make it okay to stop here. It’s posted.”

      “I’m sorry. I was here this morning when Officer Hostetter got hurt. I came back to… offer a prayer.”

      “I’m sure she’d appreciate your concern.” He tapped the license on the window rim. “So you know this’s not a good area to be stopping this time of night.”

      “It’s on the way up, though, don’t you think? Someday, the city will come back to the river.” She couldn’t help it. Maybe that’s all her prayer was intended to be: something hopeful spoken over this bloodied soil.

      “I care about what happens tonight,” he said, returning her papers. “You drive home safe and leave the riverside to us.”

      She pulled away carefully and watched to be sure the officer didn’t follow. She couldn’t go home yet. That wasn’t a good place for forgetting, either.

      She headed for the Interstate, dropped her windows so the crosswinds buffeted the interior and pushed to a practically legal eighty. At the Palisade exit she circled back, desert scrub to her right, orchards and vineyards on the left, the city ahead glowing like a radium dial.

      It was Neulan’s fault. He had phoned her on his way out of town, for reasons she could only guess. It was her fault. Instead of hanging up, she agreed to meet him and chose the place. It was Brian’s fault. Playing the protector, his adrenaline-washed reflexes. It was their fault. The two of them each half-thinking and relying on the other. They should have simply walked away. Or called the police, admitted they were idiots and told an approximation of the truth before their mistakes became compounded by cover-up. But in their moment of panic, they could not arrange their acts into a plausible narrative of how Neulan had died.

      In truth, she was gratified to have trapped a dazed Neulan at the cliff edge and to prod his faith, question his rectitude and accuse him of murders he refused to neither admit nor deny. Neulan pitching off Cold Shivers Point meant there would be no similar, self-justifying public forum. His anonymous end seemed just retribution for having reduced young women like Helen to a few lines in a memorial scholarship.

      Brian, though, spiraled down into an anguish he could not quell. While she slumbered, he jolted up out of sleep, gasping, clawing back time. He was so keen to repair the world’s wounds and assume its burdens. That had always been the difference between them—and the attraction. She observed wrongs and he went forth to right them. It was as if she wielded his healing power.

      One manic night, tossed by visions of flash floods and floating corpses, Brian riveted her with a question: What if it’s found?

      It—the body, Neulan kept nameless. Their encounter had become the incident; Neulan’s fall, the mishap; their cover-up was resolution. Abstraction was best to deal with such worries. But bones were most stubborn things.

      A click and a rustling told her Brian had returned. He was undressing in the dark by their apartment’s front door. So as not to wake her? He should have known her blood would be thundering, her senses alert to the faintest sound. Floorboards muttered his approach. His weight pressed a sigh from the mattress. She rolled to face him and was shocked to meet a foul marinade of sweat, gasoline and smoke.

      Both of them stared at the four-o’clock ceiling.

      “Is everything okay?” she whispered.

      After a deep breath and long exhale to stop his voice from quaking, he said, “No, of course it’s not.” A moment later, he corrected himself. “I’ve never done this before, so how would I know?”

      He was shivering. She sought his hand and found it over his sternum, cradling a fist. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” she said.

      “Let’s not keep going over it,” he said. “It’s done.”

      It was. But they could not resolve what it meant. Brian wanted to confess without implicating her. She refused to allow his sacrifice for what she believed was a proper outcome. They finally agreed they would come forth together or not at all. Their trust, which had always offset their differences, now cemented their conspiracy, and they continued to live in this suspended state of disagreement until the impasse devolved into a numbness that made them inaccessible to each other.

      To atone, Brian chose to live according to his convictions; he jumped back into teaching. Meg fled the classroom, no longer willing to present herself as a moral figure; her solution was to reinvent herself. The effects of their split passed for its cause. Brian’s new job on a Hopi Indian reservation was incompatible with Meg’s new career in real estate. Her friends, who had weathered their own family decisions, thought they understood.

       You’ve been a busy girl.

      I wondered when you’d show up tonight.

       I wouldn’t miss it. The scholarship’s in my honor, after all. But despite that, it’s been hard to get a thought in edgewise.

      Is that what our conversations are—thoughts?

       I think it’s best if we don’t get too analytical here. I thought I detected a whiff of him tonight. You know he’s not СКАЧАТЬ