The Last September: A Novel

“Brett,” someone called, from up above. I took another step backward, toward Eli. I didn’t want anyone to find us, not out here. I needed to be able to intervene, and explain. My hand reached backward, hanging there unanswered for a moment before Eli’s fingers closed around mine.

Once, across many years and miles, Eli told me that if you lay very still in the grass, on a day when the sun shone bright, you could feel the earth spin on its axis. We had walked together to the stretch of lawn behind the library, by Boulder Creek, and lain down under the heat of the day. I remember the sound of water, and every molecule of my back reaching toward the ground, trying to capture the sense of motion. The way it always works when you’re not trying you succeed; as Eli and I stood together on the beach in Saturday Cove, I could feel it, the tilt of the world, so sudden that for a moment I thought I might fall off, plunging out into the universe like a thirteenth-century sailor.

Instead my feet clung fast to the ground. I could see Ladd, standing at the top of the steps, at first his silhouette as the light gathered and then further lit by swirling red-and-yellow lights.

“Ladd,” I called out. “Don’t let them come down. Okay?”

Car doors slamming, I couldn’t count how many. I stepped backward, into Eli. It would look like he was holding me hostage, but at least then they wouldn’t shoot, with my body in front of his. Standing there, I imagined a drama, guns drawn and people running, shouting, bullets and explosions. What happened itself was only Ladd, walking down the steps toward Eli and me, until a police officer called out to him. Ladd stopped, obediently, as officers sidled past, each with a gun in its holster, but none of them drawing. There was no need. Eli just stood there, behind me.

The police officers walked up to us. “Are you Eli Moss?” one of them asked.

When Eli didn’t answer, I nodded, then cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said. “Yes he is.”

Two of them stayed in front of me. Two of them moved behind me. I could feel Eli’s hand wrested from my own, and when I turned, his hands were behind his back, cuffed, as the police—with impressive gentleness—pushed him forward, marching him back toward the house. Eli went without struggling, accustomed to being handcuffed and led away to the hospitals that to him felt just like prison.

I followed. Ladd met me at the bottom of the stairs. He put his hands on my shoulders and stared into my face urgently, examining me, making sure I was all right, and for the first time in weeks I looked back at him. And then we walked up to the grass as the officers helped Eli into the police car, guarding his head with the same care you’d show toward an invalid, as if they already understood—as I prepared to spend the day telling them—that he’d not been caught, but found.





16


I had crafted a murder mystery where there seemed to be none. The information I’d discovered was not something to be delivered to the police, breaking the case wide open. My role was widow. Not investigator. So I wasn’t aware that the police already knew Eli hadn’t killed Charlie. His fingerprints were all over the scene, along with mine, and a strand or two of our hair. But the blood they found mingled with Charlie’s belonged to a woman, a different blood type than mine. On Charlie’s voice mail and in his deleted email, hundreds of messages from Deirdre, unanswered, anguished, angry. I imagined the emails I might have written him, years ago, if he’d had an account. Or if he’d chosen Deirdre instead of Sarah and me. Maybe they would have been incriminating, too.