All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 235

235

Saint took a deep breath because she knew what would come. But she was in no way ready for it. “Tell me about Callie Montrose.”

Marty Tooms cried then. He did not stop to breathe, to explain. He just cried in a way that was difficult to witness, an unraveling of a story he had held inside so tightly and for so long.

When he calmed he drank a little. “The hemorrhage. It’s always a risk, but there was just…I just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

Saint had not realized she was crying, too.

“I didn’t know he’d come back with you, and he’d see it on my face, because I could never lie to him—” he cried again. A wrenching sound.

“Who?” Saint said, but knew. She thought of the photographs. Saint knew love, she knew it was sewn into the smallest gestures, the kindnesses barely perceived. And she knew it was responsible for the largest and darkest acts, the sacrifices and the rawest pain.

And when Tooms spoke his name, she heard it in his voice. “Nix.”

“That first night I showed at your house—” she began.

“Was the night Callie died. You led Nix to my house, and he saw what I had done. I told him to call it in, but he wouldn’t.”

“So he made it go away,” Saint said.

Tooms nodded, like he could no longer find the energy to speak.

“You met him at school,” she said, and for a moment found a smile.

“I loved him the first time we spoke. Of course, it was different back then, with the church and all. The judgment.”

“Maybe not so different still,” she said.

“We never hid it. Just didn’t advertise it. We had our place at the farm,

and we shut out the world and just—”

“Lived,” she said.

He smiled. “Loved.”

Saint took a moment. “He didn’t know what you were doing? Helping these pregnant girls?”

“I would never have told him. It would have put him in an impossible position. I just, I saw what was happening. Hell, what is still happening out there.”

She took his hand, and it was a moment that stunned him. Maybe it was because he had not felt the warmth for so long, or because he didn’t feel he deserved it. But when Saint looked at him she saw nothing but heart.

“Nix didn’t want you to tell the truth?”

“Oh, he did. He came to visit me each week. Over a thousand times he threatened and blustered and damn near broke. He told me to tell the judge I was helping the girls. That’s why the blood was there.”

“But you wouldn’t save yourself.”

Tooms wiped his eyes. “I wouldn’t betray Callie. She deserved my protection in death as she had done in life. I wouldn’t betray Nix. And I know how that sounds.”

“Noble, Dr. Tooms. It sounds nothing but noble.”

“Callie was pregnant. You know that. But when she lay there, when she started bleeding, when she started to fade, she told me who the father was.”

Saint took a breath, and she thought of Nix and Richie Montrose. And she thought of Patch and Eli Aaron. She thought of the best people and the worst, and how the two so often collided.

“I couldn’t tell anyone without betraying Callie,” Tooms said.

“So how did Nix—”

“He always suspected something was wrong. Callie went to see him a little while before she disappeared. Got four buses just to find a cop who

wasn’t linked to her father.”

“Nix sent her back,” Saint said.

“The girl went a little off the rails, and so he thought it was best handled by her father.”

“The father that raped her,” Saint said, empty.

“I wrote to Richie. I needed him to know that someone knew. That he wouldn’t live out his days in peace. I wrote to Richie, and I gave the letter to Patch. I thought maybe he’d give it to Sammy to post.”

“What did it say?” Saint asked, though knew.

“Something that needed to be said. Something I couldn’t post out of here because it would have been seen as a threat when they checked

my mail.”

He took a breath, calmed a little.

“Callie Montrose. Where is she now?” Saint said.

“I didn’t ever ask. I just told Nix she deserved to rest somewhere beautiful. Somewhere she wouldn’t ever be troubled or disturbed again.”

Saint exhaled till her shoulders dropped.

She hugged him for a long time, and when she turned to leave she wondered at the price of trust, and the toll it took to offer it, and to betray it.

OceanofPDF.com