THE POLICY by Bentley Little

Author:Bentley Little [Little, Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signet / New American Library
Published: 2003-09-15T21:00:00+00:00

2

Joel stood on the back patio, looking over the roofs of his neighbors’ houses at the rough pyramid shapes of the Rincon Mountains, their tan facades a hellish orange in the light of the setting sun. The temperature was dropping fast with the disappearance of daylight, but he made no move to go inside. Lilly was in there, and if he went back into the house he would be forced to have a conversation he did not want to have with his daughter. Better to stay out here until Stacy called him.

Cowardly, he knew, but he couldn’t help it.

Joel looked up into the sky. Night had not yet overtaken day, but both the moon and Venus were out, shining brightly despite the dwindling presence of the sun. He remembered vividly when he’d first learned that that bright star was Venus. He’d been ten, and they’d gone on a family camping trip to Mt. Lemmon, bringing Hunt along. After dinner, after the sun went down, his parents had retired to their tent, but he and Hunt had remained outside, sitting on adjacent rocks. Hunt broke out a map of the night sky he’d brought along. He turned on his flashlight, trained it on the circular piece of thin plastic, then flipped off the switch. The map glowed in the dark, and Hunt rotated the map until he recognized the positions of the celestial bodies. He pointed to a bright star rising in the west. “That’s Venus,” he declared.

“That’s the North Star,” Joel said. It was what his father had told him.

“It’s not north,” Hunt pointed out. “And look at this map. See? Right here, it shows Venus.”

Joel looked. “You’re right,” he admitted. He was shocked by the fact that his friend knew something his father didn’t.

“Venus is usually the first star out,” Hunt said matter-of-factly. “Although it’s not really a star, it’s a planet.”

The location of Venus was still the extent of Joel’s astronomical knowledge, and he still recalled perfectly the night he had learned it. Now he found himself wondering if Hunt had a window in his jail cell, if he could see the night sky.

Joel closed his eyes against a tension headache that had been pressuring his brain all day. There was no way in hell that Hunt was a child molester. He knew that as certainly as he knew his own phone number. Hell, since meeting Beth, even Hunt’s ordinary casual interest in looking at other beautiful women seemed to have disappeared.

And he would testify in court that in all the times he’d been over to the house, Hunt had never once been alone together with either Kate or Lilly. Not even for a second.

Behind him, there was a click and a swish as the sliding glass door opened. He turned. “She’s out of her room,” Stacy said. “I think we should talk to her.”

Joel nodded and followed his wife inside. Lilly had plopped down on the couch and was using the remote control to turn on the television.

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