about the lake, Mr. Tripp?’ Those two! ‘Tell us about the lake.’ I had a choice about it at first. And then after a while it didn’t matter.”
His voice isn’t a whisper, doesn’t travel as whispers do, but is so soft I strain for every word.
“There are some things you can’t fight, Mr. Crane.”
“By ‘things’ I take it you mean ‘urges’?”
“I mean the will of others.”
“Are you telling me—are you trying to tell me that there’s another party involved here? If so, I need you to tell me now. Give me a name.”
The tears have been stemmed once more, but Tripp’s head now hangs down to meet his chest and his arms have fallen inward so that he takes up as little space as he can, as though he would pull his entire body up into himself and disappear if he could.
“Whoever it is, you can’t help them now,” I continue, keeping my voice even. “It’s time tothink of yourself, Thomas. And I can help you—we can help each other—if you just give me a name.”
He wriggles his shoulders as though invisibly bound. His blinking irregular, accelerated. An audible smacking of eyelids sounding out an unreadable code.
“Can you hear them?” he whispers.
“I can hear you and me and an inmate barking for a smoke down the hall. What else are you referring to?”
“They change.”
“Change?”
“From one to another.”
“Well, that’s the basic structure of conversation, isn’t it? An exchange between more than—”
“They talk to each other .”
“Mr. Tripp. Are you trying to suggest to me your suitability for the defense of insanity? If this is your plan, you need not pretend with me. I’m your lawyer. It’s essential that you realize we have shared interests. Now, if you prefer the idea of lifelong hospitalization to the possibility of lifelong incarceration, you just tell me how you’d like me to go about it, and we’ll—”
“I can hear her!”
Tripp pulls himself up, leans across the table and hisses this at me, his face a mask of goggle-eyed desperation. Hands gripping the edges of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles an instant white, shoulders braced as though in anticipation of a physical blow from behind. And now bigger than I thought, as though another, larger man was swelling within his skin. Pushing out bands of vein across his forehead, slithering pulses down his neck.
There’s something about this new turn to his performance that gives me serious pause. An urgency I didn’t recognize at first, a sharp edge that could cut through whatever lay before him. Fear. But a fear that could be translated into other extremes. And just as these possibilities begin to cloud together around him he retreats back into the depths of his chair, his eyes returning to their usual appearance as two undercooked eggs. The room turns cool again. He’s my man Tripp once more, an equal mixture of timid schoolteacher and confused child.
“Her?” I ask. “And what ‘her’ would we be speaking of?”
“I don’t care if you believe me.”
“Nor do I, Mr. Tripp.”
I stick my bare notepad back into my briefcase and rise to knock for the guard.
“I urge you to consider the seriousness of your situation,” I say to his back from the safe distance of the door. “Perhaps the next time we speak you’ll have come to appreciate the fact that I’m on your side. That I’m the only one on your side.”
The guard’s rubber soles squeaking down the hall to let me out.
“A strange one, I told ya,” the leprechaun guard says as he walks me to the front doors, but seeing as I have to agree I end up not saying a word.
S IX
A s I walk through the two hundred yards of downtown Murdoch to The Empire I’m thinking that Tripp should count himself lucky to have the law on his side. Unless something nasty bobs to the surface of Lake St. Christopher over the next few weeks there’s still no evidence that anyone is dead. No bodies, no actus reus , no murder. And although I’d
His voice isn’t a whisper, doesn’t travel as whispers do, but is so soft I strain for every word.
“There are some things you can’t fight, Mr. Crane.”
“By ‘things’ I take it you mean ‘urges’?”
“I mean the will of others.”
“Are you telling me—are you trying to tell me that there’s another party involved here? If so, I need you to tell me now. Give me a name.”
The tears have been stemmed once more, but Tripp’s head now hangs down to meet his chest and his arms have fallen inward so that he takes up as little space as he can, as though he would pull his entire body up into himself and disappear if he could.
“Whoever it is, you can’t help them now,” I continue, keeping my voice even. “It’s time tothink of yourself, Thomas. And I can help you—we can help each other—if you just give me a name.”
He wriggles his shoulders as though invisibly bound. His blinking irregular, accelerated. An audible smacking of eyelids sounding out an unreadable code.
“Can you hear them?” he whispers.
“I can hear you and me and an inmate barking for a smoke down the hall. What else are you referring to?”
“They change.”
“Change?”
“From one to another.”
“Well, that’s the basic structure of conversation, isn’t it? An exchange between more than—”
“They talk to each other .”
“Mr. Tripp. Are you trying to suggest to me your suitability for the defense of insanity? If this is your plan, you need not pretend with me. I’m your lawyer. It’s essential that you realize we have shared interests. Now, if you prefer the idea of lifelong hospitalization to the possibility of lifelong incarceration, you just tell me how you’d like me to go about it, and we’ll—”
“I can hear her!”
Tripp pulls himself up, leans across the table and hisses this at me, his face a mask of goggle-eyed desperation. Hands gripping the edges of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles an instant white, shoulders braced as though in anticipation of a physical blow from behind. And now bigger than I thought, as though another, larger man was swelling within his skin. Pushing out bands of vein across his forehead, slithering pulses down his neck.
There’s something about this new turn to his performance that gives me serious pause. An urgency I didn’t recognize at first, a sharp edge that could cut through whatever lay before him. Fear. But a fear that could be translated into other extremes. And just as these possibilities begin to cloud together around him he retreats back into the depths of his chair, his eyes returning to their usual appearance as two undercooked eggs. The room turns cool again. He’s my man Tripp once more, an equal mixture of timid schoolteacher and confused child.
“Her?” I ask. “And what ‘her’ would we be speaking of?”
“I don’t care if you believe me.”
“Nor do I, Mr. Tripp.”
I stick my bare notepad back into my briefcase and rise to knock for the guard.
“I urge you to consider the seriousness of your situation,” I say to his back from the safe distance of the door. “Perhaps the next time we speak you’ll have come to appreciate the fact that I’m on your side. That I’m the only one on your side.”
The guard’s rubber soles squeaking down the hall to let me out.
“A strange one, I told ya,” the leprechaun guard says as he walks me to the front doors, but seeing as I have to agree I end up not saying a word.
S IX
A s I walk through the two hundred yards of downtown Murdoch to The Empire I’m thinking that Tripp should count himself lucky to have the law on his side. Unless something nasty bobs to the surface of Lake St. Christopher over the next few weeks there’s still no evidence that anyone is dead. No bodies, no actus reus , no murder. And although I’d
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