The Best Revenge Read online

  “Like walking too close to a cliff?”

  “Exactly. Like getting too close to a cliff. I would have been the one who would have said, ‘People who aren’t afraid of heights wouldn’t get any closer than this, Jones. It’s not safe—this is as close as you need to get to the edge.’ She wouldn’t have a natural sense of that. She would think that she needed to get right to the edge and curl her toes over the rocks—that that was the only way to confront her fear, that that’s what other people would do. Normal people.

  “I have an image in my head of the last few seconds of her life. Of her approaching that cliff edge and that big strong wind blowing off the Pacific into her face. What I think Jones would have been doing is she would have been leaning into the wind. She would have had her arms out like the wings of a bird, letting the wind hold her up as she tried to look down over the rocks and the water. Her heart would have been pounding and the fear would have almost paralyzed her but she would have forced herself to do it, to get all the way to the edge. The picture in my head is that the wind . . .” Kelda exhaled in a little burst. “What happened is that the wind paused, just for a second, the way it does sometimes, and in that instant it stopped holding her up and she lost her balance and she toppled over and she fell.”

  I asked, “But if you were there, you would have warned her that she was close enough, and she would have backed off from the edge of the cliff? That’s what you think?”

  “I should have been the one to tell her she was too close to the edge or that the wind wouldn’t really hold her up. It was one of the things that I did. It was my job as her friend.”

  “And you think it would have made a difference?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Do you think it’s reasonable for you to feel responsible for her falling off that cliff?”

  “Reasonable? God, no. But you wanted to talk about my pain, right? Well, the pain in my legs started right around the time that Jones moved to Maui. Maybe even the exact same week that she moved to Maui. I didn’t even know that she’d moved, of course, but . . .”

  “Are you suggesting a relationship between Jones’s decision and the onset of your pain?”

  Kelda’s voice turned slightly mocking. “Are you going to allow me to get away without taking a look at that possibility, Doctor?”

  I smiled.

  Kelda said, “Are you wondering if she got help for her anxieties? Professional help?”

  I nodded, although what I had actually been considering was the likelihood that Kelda really didn’t understand the magnitude of her friend’s anxiety. Kelda was describing a level of fearfulness that left me wondering about a significant underlying paranoia, and not just a strange pattern of multiple phobias. If Jones had been my patient, I would have tuned my antennae to the frequencies that were most sensitive to a complex presentation of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “Your friend had some serious problems,” I said.

  Kelda’s eyes were unblinking as she responded, “The fears were definitely a problem.”

  “Not just the fears, Kelda. The way she reacted to you going to Australia. I suspect that other things might have been going on with Jones, too. Was she ever worried about things that weren’t inherently dangerous?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The things you describe—her fears of fire, electricity, lightning, airplanes—are all exaggerated responses to everyday things that have the potential to be dangerous but usually aren’t. I’m wondering whether she was ever fearful of things that aren’t usually considered potentially dangerous.”

  “You’re talking about paranoia? People after her? Like that?”

  “Sure,” I said, grateful that Kelda had made the last hop on her own.

  “Sometimes she would worry that people didn’t understand her. That they were . . . trying to undermine her. There were some people she didn’t trust, wouldn’t want to be around. Like that.”

  I waited.Go on, I thought,go on.

  “But that wasn’t often. Mostly, it was the fears that we dealt with. Just the fears,” she insisted.

  “Phobias don’t usually come in bunches like hers did. It’s an atypical presentation.”

  “Funny. That’s what my neurologist says about my pain. It’s atypical. I don’t care. It’s still real.”

  I debated proceeding with my psychopathology lesson. Before I was even aware I’d reached a decision, I said, “Even if the phobias were all that Jones was dealing with, there are some medications that might have helped her, and there are a few therapeutic approaches—desensitization and even traditional psychotherapy, for example—that work for a lot of people. But yes, to get back to your original question, I was thinking that maybe she didn’t have to suffer so much. That someone could have eased her pain.”

  “She sought help. She went to see different therapists at least twice while I knew her. In my opinion, she saw a couple of flakes, unfortunately. One guy she saw hit on her during their second session—asked her to go skiing with him for a weekend at his condo in Winter Park. And a woman therapist she went to see took her fire walking with a bunch of her friends out on some ranch near Parker.”

  I would have liked to say I was surprised. I wasn’t. Anybody with an inclination could hang out a shingle as a psychotherapist in Colorado. Most consumers didn’t seem to understand the distinction between a licensed and an unlicensed therapist, between a psychologist and a psychiatrist and a clinical social worker, between a competent professional and an unskilled quack. My impulse with Kelda was to apologize for the behavior of people I sometimes abhorred having to consider colleagues. Instead, I said, “Fire walking?”

  Kelda said, “Yes. Fire walking. She aced it. It turned out Jones didn’t have any phobias about prancing down a bed of hot coals.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Kelda called Rosa Alija“hermanita”—little sister. The girl, a shy child, called Kelda “hermana.”

  Since Kelda had rescued Rosa, the two had never gone more than eight weeks without visiting, and they talked frequently by phone in between encounters. Kelda could rely on receiving an e-mail message from the girl at least a couple of times a week.

  Rosa enjoyed all the visits. Kelda had taken the girl to Broncos and Rockies games, to the ballet, had even endured a trip to the Pepsi Center to see some boy band. But the visits that Rosa seemed to enjoy most were the weekend afternoons at Kelda’s little piece of property in Lafayette. Rosa’s mother or father would drop her by sometime during the late morning on a Saturday or after church on Sunday, always bringing something special along for Kelda. José would pull a shrub from the back of his pickup to plant in the long bed near the highway, or he’d spend twenty minutes lining the walkway with a tantalizing border of annuals, or he’d dig a hole for a sapling that would someday grow to replace one of the aging elms on the property.

  When it was Maria who drove Rosa to Lafayette, she would offer a covered dish full of tamales or, Kelda’s favorite, a basket of homemadechurros . Once she took over Kelda’s kitchen to make a huge platter ofchilaquiles, which she said was her daughter’s favorite meal.

  Kelda ate more than Rosa did.

  Rosa would spend the long afternoons in Lafayette exploring the fallow fields and repeatedly acting out some homesteading fantasy that Kelda never really understood. The girl was a natural athlete who was fearless in the trees. She would climb to limbs high in the elms. The dangerous heights made Kelda crazy. Rosa could spend hours on the swing that Kelda had hung from the big branch on the elm that was closest to the lane. The swing faced the mountains, and Rosa would swing higher and higher, kicking hard at the top of the arc as though she was certain she could reach out and tickle the glaciers on the northern slopes of Mount Evans.

  Rosa was on the swing and Kelda was watching her from the kitchen window when Kelda spotted the microwave truck lumbering down the street near her home. Involuntarily the muscles in her jaw tightened. The familiar logo on the side of the rig identif
ied it as being from Denver’s Fox News affiliate.

  A few summers before, all of Denver’s television stations had done anniversary pieces on Kelda’s rescue of Rosa. Two of the stations had sent crews to Lafayette during one of Rosa’s visits to Kelda’s home and had ultimately agreed to Kelda’s restriction that they film the little girl only from the rear. Kelda, after consultation with the Denver SAC and with the Alijas, had agreed in return to brief interviews. But she set firm ground rules: She would answer questions about her current relationship with Rosa, but wouldn’t discuss anything about the rescue.

  She would say nothing about the shooting.

  Nothing.

  What she would talk about on camera was the man who had kidnapped Rosa. After years of delving into his background on her own time, Kelda knew more about the kidnapper than Boswell knew about Johnson. “Why is it so important to know him so well?” the reporters would ask her.

  “Because it is,” she would reply. “We have to know our enemy.”

  Each summer since, Kelda had been forced to deal with at least one TV station eager to reminisce about the dramatic rescue as the anniversary date approached. The truck on 111th Street meant to Kelda that this summer would be no different than the others.

  “Hermanita,”Kelda called from the side door of her house. “Inside for a few minutes, please.”

  “Why?”

  Kelda nodded at the microwave truck and the little girl immediately understood what was happening. Kelda said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go talk to them. I just made fresh lemonade. It’s in the fridge. You help yourself, okay?”

  “Can I pick some fresh mint to put in it first?”

  Rosa was already running to the thick patch of mint on the south side of the house. “You bet,” Kelda yelled after her.

  It took Kelda almost ten minutes to negotiate to a stalemate with the reporter who got out of the truck. The reporter ultimately used her cell phone to reach her producer, who asked to speak with Kelda.

  Kelda took the phone and walked away from the reporter before she said anything to the producer. Once she was fifty feet or so down the lane, she said, “We’re okay, right? No changes from what we agreed?”

  The producer was a young man whom Kelda had dealt with twice before on Rosa Alija stories. He wore his ambition on his sleeve and because he was so brash about it Kelda found that she trusted him as much as she trusted anybody in the media.

  He said, “We’re okay on this, Kelda. Just tape, no audio. We’ll only show the kid from behind. But . . .”

  He let the word hang between them. “But what?” she asked.

  “But . . . I’m running down a story that you might have had something to do with Clone’s release from death row. Is that true? Were you really the one who found the knife that got him sprung from the pen?”

  “Rafe, you know I can’t comment on reports like that. Rosa Alija is human interest. Tom Clone is law enforcement business. If you have questions about that old case, take them up with Park County or with the FBI information officer.”

  “So the FBI is involved?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not going there with you.”

  “I’m doing you a favor here, with this shoot. I want you to remember me if this Tom Clone thing breaks open. Is that a deal?”

  She said, “I know you’re doing me a favor.”

  “Is that a deal?” he pressed.

  “I said I know you’re doing me a favor.” She started retracing her steps back down the lane.

  The producer said, “I’m going to take that as a yes.”

  “No comment. Hold on. I want to say all this out loud in front of your talent.” Kelda approached the reporter, a pretty woman whose skirt was too short for a Sunday afternoon in Lafayette. Almost too short for a Sunday afternoon in Denver. Kelda held the cell phone out between them.

  “Your producer and I have reached an understanding. Here it is: You can tape me outside the house, and you can tape Rosa from behind, but no audio and no interview. Not with me. Not with Rosa. No interview. And no copy and no shots that would identify the location of my house.”

  The reporter took the phone from Kelda. She had trouble finding a comfortable way to get it close to her ear over her big earring. Finally, she said, “That’s the deal, Rafe?”

  She listened for a moment to her producer, then folded up the cell phone and reluctantly gave instructions to the woman who was handling the camera. When Kelda asked, the reporter said that the piece should be ready to air by the following night at nine.

  The news truck pulled away from her house about forty-five minutes later. Kelda sat on a lawn chair and watched the dust settle in the lane. Rosa crawled onto her lap and pressed her face into Kelda’s breast.“Hermana?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You killed him? The bad man? My father said you killed him.”

  In all the years that had passed, Rosa had never asked about that day. Kelda hoped she would have forgotten.

  She hoped for peace in the Middle East, too.

  “Yes,hermanita, I did. You don’t have to worry about him ever again. I killed him.”

  The little girl pressed harder against her chest. “I’m glad he’s dead,hermana. ”

  Kelda said, “I’m glad, too.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The fentanyl patches were designed to provide relief for Kelda’s pain for seventy-two hours. After she’d kissed Rosa good-bye and tucked her into José’s truck and yanked on her seat belt at least a couple of times, she walked inside and checked the calendar by the phone and read the notation she’d penciled in the previous Thursday at bedtime. It read “F—11:30p.” The clock on the microwave told her it was only 3:31. That meant that the patch she’d put on Thursday night had been on her skin for only sixty-four hours. Yet she could already feel it failing. A fresh patch, even if she put it on right then, wouldn’t provide relief until almost morning.

  She popped a Percocet and washed it down with the rest of the lemonade from the refrigerator. There was enough mint floating in the pitcher to flavor the contents of a bathtub. Rosa’s excess made her smile.

  Kelda left a message on Ira’s voicemail, suggesting he stop and pick up some Thai takeout for dinner before he came over. She set up her bath towels and her frozen peas, and spread out on the bed to take a nap.

  When the rumble of thunder woke her, she glanced at the clock by the bed; it was a little after four-thirty. The light that was filtering into her room was grayer than usual. She listened for the melody of raindrops on the roof but wasn’t sure if she heard a faint pattering or not.Had the monsoons finally arrived? Hopeful, she eased herself from the bed and walked to the western window. Between the trees, she could see a curtain of virga silhouetted against the sky between Lafayette and Boulder. But virga was to weather watchers what fool’s gold was to a miner: Kelda could tell at a glance that the mirage of moisture would all evaporate before it reached the soil of Boulder County.

  She picked up the phone and tried Ira again. When he didn’t answer, she hung up without leaving another message and collected the bags of peas from the bed to return them to the freezer.

  She was still cravingpad Thai .

  She took another Percocet instead.

  Twenty minutes later she reached for the phone to try Ira one more time. But the phone rang before she got the receiver out of the cradle.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The line was silent. With her free hand she depressed the button on the phone that would kill the call, and then hit *69. Once again, the phone company failed to identify the location of the caller. She noted the date and time of the call in the log she kept beside the phone.

  After saying “What the hell,” she picked up the local phone book and checked for a number. Finding it, she dialed. After two rings, a man answered. She thought she recognized his voice. “Have dinner with me,” she said.

  “Is this Kelda?”

  “How many women do you have calling you out of the blue as
king you out for dinner?”

  “Not enough.”

  “How many would be enough?”

  Tom Clone said, “If you’re the woman doing the calling, one is enough. The answer is absolutely, you bet—yes! But I can’t come to wherever you are; I don’t have a car, Kelda.”

  “I’ll come by and get you. We’ll walk over to the Mall or something. I’ll be there around six-thirty.”

  Days in Boulder are a little more compressed than they are in the nearby towns on the eastern plains of Colorado. Boulder’s elevation above sea level is a tad more than a mile, while the nearby sun-shielding peaks of the highest reaches of the Continental Divide rise to over fourteen thousand feet. The difference in altitude between Boulder and the highest mountaintops, which are less than twenty miles away, is a fraction under two miles. As the summer sun sets in clear skies behind that two-mile-high wall of mountains, it casts quite a shadow. That’s why day disappears early in Boulder and night seems to be in a hurry to impose its presence.

  But on hot summer days spent waiting for the monsoons, the early nightfall and cooling shadows are a blessing to almost everyone. Even if the dry air holds no prayer of rain, as the evening sky above the Front Range glows in grays and pastels, in the high desert of Colorado there is always the promise of an overnight chill.

  It was a few minutes before seven when Tom and Kelda walked down the hill from Tom’s grandfather’s house on High Street toward the nightlife of the Downtown Boulder Mall.

  Boulder’s Downtown Mall is a mall in the manner Americans thought of malls before the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Downtown Mall is a brick-paved, tree-lined promenade that traverses four blocks of lovely public spaces, with shops and restaurants in century-old buildings. Motor vehicles are prohibited—along with bicycles, dogs, skateboards, scooters, in-line skates, and anything else that the City Council’s current whims determine are impediments to public enjoyment. On a warm evening in early summer the Mall and its adjacent streets are packed with people. The sounds of street musicians or buskers and their audiences overlap on the short blocks, and the outdoor seats at the Mall’s cafés and restaurants are temporarily the hottest real estate in town.