“So you’d see him then.”
The soldier shrugged again. “Well, sure, if I was on duty.”
“They told me he liked to drive around.”
“Yeah, in that Buick of his.” So he noticed.
“Did he ever have anyone with him?”
The soldier looked at him, puzzled, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Did he?” Connolly asked, pressing.
“Sometimes. You’re asking an awful lot of questions,” he said, cautious again.
“Just one. Who used to go with him?”
The soldier looked away. “Is this some kind of investigation or something? What do you want to know for?”
Connolly stared at him.
“I mean, he’s dead. I don’t want to go making trouble for nobody. That was his business. Now it’s just hers, I guess.”
“Hers?”
“Well, sure. I figured they was just-scootin’ off, you know? None of my business.”
“You’d better make it your business. I mean it. You know who she was? What she looked like? I need to know this.”
The soldier looked flustered. “Well, hell, I thought you did know. I didn’t mean to start nothing.”
“How would I know?”
“Well, I thought she was a friend of yours too.”
Connolly stood still. When he finally spoke, his voice had the low steadiness of a threat. “Are you trying to tell me it was Mrs. Pawlowski?”
The soldier retreated a step. “Well, God Almighty, you kept askin’. Now don’t go and blame me.”
“How many times?” Connolly said, his voice still unnaturally steady.
“A few.”
“Where were they going?”
“Where?” And now his face, no longer frightened, filled with a sly grin, as if the question were irrelevant. “I guess you’ll have to ask her.”
He didn’t see her until the end of the week. He sat listlessly at his desk or lying on Karl’s bed, absorbed in his own mystery. The days were hot and dry, a steady wind scratching at everyone’s nerves. The talk was of drought and an outbreak of chicken pox in the school and the frequent caravans to Trinity. The scientists seemed never to appear, locked full-time in the labs. There were no parties. A fight broke out in one of the enlisted men’s barracks, something to do with an insult taken, but really about the new tension of the work and the constant dry wind that made everything feel as suspended as dust.
Connolly didn’t notice any of it. Something had detonated in him, like one of Kisty’s tests, and he sat shuffling through the pieces, repeating her conversations in his head, wondering what had been meant, what she wanted him to believe. Mills avoided him, sensing the black mood that was smothering him, and when Connolly noticed him at all, it was only as a figure of a more cheerful betrayal. He read through Emma’s file, and Daniel’s, as if they were new characters on the Hill, people he’d never met. Why had she married him? He’d never asked. How many others? The mood festered in him, silently, until the surprise and hurt became pure anger, and when that happened he stopped thinking about anything else.
One day he saw her walking past Ashley Pond and he wanted to run over and take her by the shoulders. Why did you lie to me? But he couldn’t bring himself to ask her, and he realized with a sick feeling in his stomach that it was because he still wanted her. The wind blew her clothes against her and there was that rider’s stride, quick and straightforward, utterly without deceit. But why lie? What had she to do with Karl, with any of it? He drew his imaginary blackboard map, but she didn’t fit anywhere. Instead, she was in another map, an X at Theater-2 and the punch bowl, lines to Santa Fe, to Chaco, to-and he saw that she was everywhere on this personal map, it was about her, everything that had happened to him. Was any of it true? Where had they gone? Maybe just a lift into town. But the soldier hadn’t thought so, with his stupid, sly grin. The MP at Trinity hadn’t thought so either. In this hot, lazy afternoon with nothing to do but brood, no one was innocent. Not even him. He’d just been the next in line.
