Read Online The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly - Free Book Online Page B

of quiet confidence. It sometimes felt like the decision to have a child had been made for us by some higher power, and all we could do now was hang on and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe Rachel wouldn’t have used the word “enjoy”: after all, it was she who had felt a strange heaviness to all her actions from the moment the test had proved positive; she who stared at her figure in alarm as she began to put on weight in strange places; she whom I found crying at the kitchen table in the dead of one August night, overcome by feelings of dread and sadness and exhaustion; she who threw up every morning with all the certainty of sunrise; and she who would sit, her hand upon her belly, listening to the spaces between her heartbeats with both fear and wonder, as if she could hear the little bundle of cells slowly growing within her. The first trimester had been especially difficult for her. Now, in her second, she had found new reserves of energy initiated for her by the child’s first kicks, by the confirmation that what lay inside her was no longer potential but had become actual. While I watched her quietly, Rachel tore into a piece of beef so rare she had to hold it down with her fork to keep it from making a break for the door. Beside it, potatoes and carrots and zucchini lay heaped in little mountains.
    “Why aren’t you eating?” she asked, when she came up briefly for air. I curled my arm protectively around my plate. “Back,” I said. “Bad dog.”
    To my left, Walt’s head spun toward me, a brief flash of confusion visible in his eyes. “Not you,”
    I reassured him, and his tail wagged.
    Rachel finished chewing, then jabbed her momentarily empty fork at me. “It was that call today. Am I right?”
    I nodded and toyed with my food, then told her Elliot’s story. “He’s in trouble,” I concluded.
    “And anyone who sides with him against Earl Larousse is going to be in trouble too.”
    “Have you ever met Larousse?”
    “No. The only reason I know about him is because Elliot has told me things in the past.”
    “Bad things?”
    “Nothing worse than you’d expect from a man with more money than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people in the state: intimidation, bribery, crooked land deals, brushes with the EPA over polluted rivers and poisoned fields, the usual stuff. Throw a stone in Washington when Congress is in session and you’ll hit apologists for any one of a hundred people like him. But that doesn’t make the loss of his daughter any less painful for him.”
    An image of Irv Blythe flashed briefly in my mind. I swatted the thought away like a fly.
    “And Norton is certain that his client didn’t kill her?”
    “Seems that way. After all, he took over the case from the original lawyer and then stood bail for the guy, and Elliot isn’t the kind of man who risks his money or his reputation on a losing prospect. Then again, a black man accused of the murder of a rich white girl could be at risk among the general population, assuming somebody got it into his head to make a name for himself with the grieving family. According to Elliot, he either bailed his client or he buried him. Those were the options.”
    “When is the trial?”
    “Soon.” I had gone through the newspaper reports of the murder on the Internet, and it was clear that the case had been fast-tracked from the beginning. Marianne Larousse had been dead for only a few months, but the case would be tried early in the new year. The law didn’t like to keep people like Earl Larousse waiting.
    We stared at each other across the table.
    “We don’t need the money,” said Rachel. “Not that badly.”
    “I know.”
    “And you don’t want to go down there.”
    “No, I sure don’t.”
    “Well, then.”
    “Well, then.”
    “Eat your dinner, before I do.”
    I did as I was told. I even tasted some of it.
    It tasted like ash.
    After dinner, we drove out to Len Libby’s on Route 1 and sat on a bench outside to eat our ice