So all day and much of the nights of Thursday and Friday, Tara was busy organizing and tending to last-minute crises among her students and, often, their families. She had no time to contact Evan to find out what, if anything, had happened after he'd stormed out on her on Wednesday night. And, truth to tell, she wasn't too inclined to call him anyway. She thought she would let him take a few days to sober up and get over his embarrassment about how he'd acted. Then, after he'd called her and apologized, they'd see where they were. But in the meanwhile, she had her job and her kids. She thought that a couple of days' respite from the emotional turmoil and upheaval surrounding Ron and Evan might do everybody involved a world of good.
Saturday, she slept in until nearly ten o'clock, then went down to the pool and swam a hundred laps. Coming back upstairs to her apartment, she showered and threw on some shorts and a T-shirt, made a salad for lunch, and after that dozed off watching a tennis match on TV. When she woke up, she graded the last of the written reports for another hour or so. At a little after four, she was just finishing up the last one when her doorbell rang. Checking the peephole, she saw Eileen Scholler, her face blotched from crying.
LIMPING, SCABBED, AND BRUISED in his orange jail jumpsuit, Evan entered his side of the visiting room chained to twenty other men. Watching the line enter, Tara stood among a loose knot of mostly women in a kind of bullpen waiting area on their side of the Plexiglas screen that separated the visitors from the inmates. A row of facing pairs of talking stations bisected the room from one end to the other.
Tara had to fight to hold back her tears as they unfastened Evan from the chain of men to whom he'd been attached. He saw her and started to raise a welcoming hand, but his wrists were still attached to the chain around his waist. The guard directed him to one of the desks and Tara excused herself through the now-pressing crowd of visitors and sat herself at last facing him. There was a hole in the Plexiglas through which they were supposed to talk.
It was Wednesday, his fourth day in custody, and the first day that his injuries had healed enough to allow him to walk unaided and to see visitors. In the first moment, neither could find anything to say. They looked at each other, then away, and back again.
How could either of them be here? How could it have come to this?
Finally, Evan leaned forward, shrugged, manufactured some kind of brave face. "I guess I should have gone home with you after all."
Tara didn't trust herself to say anything.
"I am so sorry," he said.
Tara opened her mouth, but again no words came. Now, unexpectedly, tears began to overflow onto her cheeks. She didn't try to stop them.
"Oh, babe," he said. Then, "I don't think…" He shook his head and looked at her. His shoulders rose and fell. "I don't believe I killed him."
Tara was still reeling from the bare fact that Ron Nolan was dead. Putting Evan together with that on any level wasn't yet possible for her; the idea couldn't bear any scrutiny. Instead, she found herself fighting a sense of unreality that permeated her waking hours as though she were living within a bad dream from which she couldn't will herself awake.
"I wouldn't have killed him," he said, then waited for her until he couldn't take it any longer. "Can you say something, please?"
"What am I supposed to say? What do you want me to say? I'm here. That says something, doesn't it?"
"I hope it does."
"I hope so too. But I'm not sure. Are you hurt?"
"I'll be all right."
"Will you? When will that be? What does that mean?"
He just looked at her.
TEN WEEKS PASSED before they saw each other again.
In that time, Evan was charged with the murder of Ron Nolan, but no charges were brought against him for the Khalil slayings-the district attorney, Doug Falbrock, decided that the evidence tying Evan to those murders wasn't strong enough to convict. As almost always in a murder case, bail was denied.
Tara had cleaned up her classroom and then hung around her apartment for the first couple of weeks of summer. On the Fourth of July, she went up to her parents' condominium to spend the holiday near Homewood on Lake Tahoe and decided on more or less the spur of the moment that she wasn't going to go back home. She couldn't bear reading about Evan every day in the newspapers down there. She needed to be away from the whole thing-the requests for interviews with reporters, her proximity to the jail, the expectations and/or accusations of people who didn't know her. She wound up staying alone at Homewood until late August-reading, running at altitude, dead sober, swimming in the cold lake.
