Finally, Dylan grunted and said, “Have a seat, officer.”
Jones dragged a plastic chair away from the wall under the TV to sit on, and opened a notebook he’d pulled from his coat pocket. “I want you to know, the man who did this to you is in custody.”
“Let him go.”
Jones sighed. “You won’t press charges?”
“He didn’t do it.”
“We have witnesses who say he did.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“Are you saying it was an accident?”
Dylan’s voice rose. “He dinnae do it. Let him go. The man never touched me.”
“Then how did you get stabbed by a broadsword?”
“It wasnae a broadsword. It was a cavalry saber with a mortuary hilt, called so because of the carved face on the guard, resembling the beheaded King Charles I. The blade was nae more than two inches wide, which, if I’d died, you could have told by an autopsy. But, since I dinnae die, you’ll just have to take my word on it. That monstrous big Italian storta Bedford fought with would have made a much larger hole than what the surgeon found. You can ask him. Bedford did not come near me.”
“Then how do you explain—”
“To the best of my knowledge, officer, I’m not charged with a crime and need not explain anything at all to you. What you do need to know is that Bedford did not stab me, and I will swear to it if you try to convict him.”
“I don’t know who you’re protecting, but I would advise you to—”
“I’ve not solicited your advice, nor am I likely to. I’ll thank you to leave me in peace. Get the hell out of here and don’t let the door hit your Sassunach backside on the way out.”
“Mr. Math—”
“Good day, sir.”
There was a very long silence, then Jones closed his notebook, rose, and left. Dylan lay back on his pillows, satisfied he’d put enough suspicion on himself to keep the police off Bedford’s back. They could hassle him all they wanted, but they couldn’t convict him of stabbing himself. As much as he despised the Sassunach Major, his descendant had done nothing. Dylan wouldn’t let the Yankee be imprisoned for something he hadn’t done.
Dylan wished he could get out of the hospital. The room was stifling hot.
It took five days for him to finally escape the antiseptic stench and hospital food, but even then he couldn’t go back to the dojo. His mother deemed it too risky for him to be by himself, so she talked him into staying in her guest room, which had once been his own bedroom. When she brought him home, she suggested he go upstairs to lie down. He obeyed and, sitting on the guest bed, he looked around at the strange room that had once been the center of his world.
Mom had redecorated in the years since he’d moved out for good after college. He’d been twenty-two then, and it almost didn’t seem like the same room now. Unless he looked out the window at the view he’d grown up with, it was like any other generic guest room with a single bed, brass lamps from the eighties, and an oaken chest of drawers that had never been used except as a suitcase stand. The closet was full of large boxes of Christmas decorations that made the room smell of musty cardboard and decaying pine cones. Dylan pressed his hand to his side to still the lingering feeling his guts would spill if he let go.
He was home, sort of. For five days he’d avoided thinking about Cait and the others he’d known in the distant past. It almost felt like a dream, except for the knotted scars on his back, the thin white line on his left forearm, the nick out of his right ear, the thick white mark at the back of his left calf. . . .
He slipped Brigid under his pillow, screwed his eyes shut and lay back on the bed to clear his mind and make the world go away for a while.
His eyes half-closed, he drifted. His body relaxed for the first time since his return. As he lay there he took inventory of himself: the broken parts, missing parts, the weakened ones, as well as the parts of him that were still strong and perhaps tougher than before. Gradually the various pains diminished, and the world faded into silence and darkness. But he wasn’t asleep. His eyelids were not closed, but he couldn’t see. Alarm surged and he leapt from the bed. All around him was grayness, like fog at night. He tried to see his hand before him, but there was nothing. He tried to feel his hand. Nothing.
He turned and peered into the mist. “Where am I?” he asked the air, but got no answer. “Sinann?” No answer.
Then there was whispering. Many voices spoke around him, but softly and in a strange language. All around him. “Who are you?” There was no response, just more unintelligible whispering.
Above the voices there rose a Gaelic one that cut to his heart. Cait. She was praying, asking God for the safety of her beloved. “Cait!” Dylan called, but she didn’t hear and only continued until her voice faded into the others.
In the next instant Dylan again felt his body around him—the aches and injuries—and found he was still lying on the bed. He sat up, and had to press his hand to his side as his dozens of stitches tugged at him. He whispered Cait’s name, but knew nobody was there to answer. He sagged back onto the bed and lay still.
After a while he was called to lunch.
When he was finished eating, his mother parked him in front of the television to while away the hours watching movies on cable. He slept some, mostly out of boredom, and picked a book from the shelves in the living room. Toward the end of the day, though, he found himself tensing the way he always had this time of day when he was a kid. It was almost time for his father to come home.
Then it was past time for him to come, which was familiar, too. He’d most likely stopped for a drink on the way, and in a sense that was something of a relief. It meant Dylan might escape dealing with the old man for the evening.
Kenneth Matheson finally walked through the door after Dylan had eaten his supper. His mother was most likely sick from not eating while waiting until her husband would be home. Dylan heard him downstairs, his voice angry and growing louder. He was probably still throwing back the whiskey, and Dylan hoped the ogre would pass out soon. Again, that was as it had been all his life. He closed the bedroom door and lay on the bed with his book open in front of him. He read the same page over and over until he fell asleep.
For the next week Dylan avoided his father. His wounds healed, muscle knitted, the ache lessened, and he began walking on the property. It felt good to move freely again, and walking long distances had become second nature to him over the past couple of years. He was almost ready to return to the dojo, which would be a relief.
After a long walk one day he returned for supper to find his father’s car in the driveway. He sighed. Eating with Dad was never good for the digestion or the blood pressure. He went inside.
His father sat in his leather club chair, watching television. “Hi,” said Dylan.
The elder Matheson looked up. “Hello.” He spoke in a normal tone, which meant he wasn’t too far into the bag yet. But there was a glass on the end table at his elbow, containing only ice, and not much of it melted. It wouldn’t be long before more whiskey followed. A bottle, in fact, stood on the coffee table, waiting to refill that glass.
Dylan sat in the Lesser Chair, the one meant for guests. It was the one he preferred because it was on the opposite side of the room from Dad’s chair. Mom always sat at one end of the couch, if she sat at all. Right now she was bustling around in the kitchen.
Dad returned his attention to the movie on TV. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance were fleeing the Pinkerton agents, taking their horses over rocky terrain to thwart the trackers. Dylan sighed. Been there, done that. He looked at his father and realized he knew as much about a couple of nineteenth-century American bandits as he did about his most immediate ancestor. As he stared, he wondered why he had to be that way.
He’d never noticed before, but he now saw his father had the blue Matheson eyes that had been so common among the family and tenants of Iain Mór, the same eyes Malcolm had said saved Dylan from i
mprisonment as an English spy. When he was a boy, nobody had ever told him he looked like his father, nor any other Matheson, mostly because his coloring came from his mother’s side. Dad and his brothers all had medium-brown hair and light skin. It was a small shock to realize that having his father’s eyes probably had saved his life.
Dad refilled his glass from the bottle on the table, and when he set it down Dylan’s attention was caught by the name on the label. He leaned forward for a closer look, but he hadn’t imagined it. The name on the bottle, in old English style type, was Glenciorram. He moved to the sofa to pick up the bottle and read the small print, but learned only that the single-malt whiskey had been distilled in Ciorram, Scotland. Duh. He set it back onto the table and shook his head to rid himself of the willies. He told himself not to think too much, and let it slide to the back of his mind.
They sat in silence while Mom put supper on the table, then went to eat at one end of the long dining room table. Mom sat at the kitchen end, and Dylan and his father took seats on either side. Then Dylan saw the swelling in her lip.
She’d covered it with dark lipstick, but there was no hiding that her upper lip was swollen to twice its size and had been split since he’d seen her that morning. Dylan glared at his father, who was oblivious. He wanted to reach across the table and haul the old man out of his chair, but his mother laid a hand on his. Her eyes entreated him to keep still. He sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, wondering if his father would catch on, or if he was too drunk to see the anger.
Mom did her best to crank-start the conversation, though Dylan and his father both did their best to kill it. Finally she gave up on the safe subjects of church and television and said, “Dylan, how did your Games go? Except, of course, for how they ended.”
Dad chuckled, his mean laugh. Another glass of whiskey sat at his place, half gone. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
It would have been funny, if the joke hadn’t been delivered with an ugly snarl. Dylan ignored it, though, and said, “It was terrific. There was this sword there—a real claymore. It had . . . quite a history.” If only he could tell it.
Mom surely didn’t have the first idea what a claymore was, except that if it interested him it must be Scottish. She gave a smooth social smile and said, “You certainly know an awful lot about Scottish history.”
He coughed and nodded. “More than most, I guess.”
“I think that’s so wonderful.” She probably did. There wasn’t much he did she didn’t think was wonderful. Even at his age he loved that about her. “I heard on the news this morning there’s talk about Scotland becoming independent of the United Kingdom.”
He smiled. “There’s been talk of Scottish independence for about a thousand years. At this point it’s probably too complicated to ever sort out. I don’t think there will ever be complete independence, any more than the South will ever rise again.”
Mom sighed. “Yes, all those wars they had. It’s a shame, I think. Perhaps there was another way. Perhaps they could have changed the system from the inside.”
Dylan shook his head. “They were too often not part of the system. England wasn’t a democracy back then.”
“But did they need to go to war?”
He shrugged. “Do you think Americans shouldn’t have had the Revolution?”
“Well, that’s different. The Americans weren’t English.”
“They were. They just didn’t live in England. Neither do the Scottish. And Highland Scots were even more culturally disparate from the English than the Americans were at the time. They should not only have fought like the Americans, but they should have won like them.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Dad. “Who gives a damn about Scotland anyway? Pansy men in dresses, is what they are.”
Dylan sat back and crossed his arms, his eyes narrowed and irritation rising. “Just so you’ll know, Dad, Highlanders in kilts are considered among the most formidable soldiers on earth.” He could feel his acquired Scottish accent slipping in, and let it come. “And they’ve been known to throw fear into an enemy before firing a shot just for their courage in attack. They’ve been called Ladies from Hell, and by people who have faced them. If ye’d ever fought with yer pants off, ye’d never call such a soldier pansy. But then, I’ve come to expect that sort of ignorance from you.”
Dad sputtered, then half rose from his seat. “You little prick . . .”
“Knock it off, Dad.”
“Stop it, both of you!” Mom’s voice was panicky and she stared at her plate. Dylan glared at his father while the man sat back down and drained his glass again. There was a long silence, then Mom attempted a wobbly laugh and said, “Eat up, you men. I’ve made chess pie for dessert.”
The glass was slammed to the table and ice went flying. “Dammit, is that all you could think of to make? Chess pie. It’s always chess pie.”
“Dylan likes it.” She should have known better than to even try to talk to him when he was like this, but Dylan figured if she stopped talking to him when he was a drunken asshole, she would never utter a word to him.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what Dylan likes. What about what I like?”
“I thought you liked chess pie.”
He took a swing at her, backhand, and missed as she made an expert dodge. “I don’t!”
“Hey!” Dylan half-rose from his seat.
“Dylan, I’m all right.” Mom was frightened now, and her eyes began to swim with tears.
Dad sneered at Dylan. “Shut up and eat your supper, boy. We’ve got your favorite for dessert.”
Dylan sat back down. He had to struggle to keep his temper in check. He stared at his plate and picked at the food there. His appetite had fled. Now all he wanted was out of there.
Dad got up to refresh his drink, and slowly weaved his way down to the sideboard at the far end of the table where there was a decanter. Dylan reached for his water glass and accidentally-on-purpose knocked it over.
“Oh!” Mom leapt to her feet. “Let me get a paper towel!”
“How about some more water, too, Mom.” He needed her to be gone long enough. As she hurried into the kitchen, he slipped his hand over his steak knife and rose from his seat. As quickly and silently as he’d learned in the woods and moors fleeing English soldiers and Montrose’s men, he moved to meet his father at the end of the table, where he grabbed the old man by his shirt front, twisted the fabric in his hand, and shoved him backward over the end of the table.
Dad’s eyes bugged out, and he sputtered. “What the hell?” He tried to rise, but Dylan shoved him back onto the table. The centerpiece jumped, and the candle in it flickered. “Get your fucking hands . . .” But Dad went silent when the point of the knife was pressed just below his solar plexus, pointed up toward his heart.
Dylan leaned on his father’s chest, securing him with a thigh between his legs. “Listen to me,” he said quickly, in a low voice thick with murderous intent, “I’m only going to say this once. You are a disgrace as a man and as a Matheson. One who cannae lead without unnecessary violence is not a man at all, but a coward.” Through his teeth he said it in Gaelic, “Tha thu gealtach! ” He twisted harder the shirt fabric in his fist.
His voice was still low. He hurried to finish before his mother came back. “You will be civil to my mother. God knows why she loves you, but she does, and that is the only thing that keeps me from slipping this knife into your black heart and ending this right here. Now, I am telling you, if you are not as sweet as pie to her from now until you die, I will make sure you die very soon.” He pressed the point of the knife again to emphasize his meaning. “Do not ever do violence to her again, under any circumstances. Are you understanding me?”
His father nodded, and Dylan hauled him off his back just in time to be caught at it by Mom. He began brushing his father’s shirt to smooth the wrinkles, and said, “Dad tripped. You should watch where your feet are going, Dad.”
His fathe
r was far too shaken to speak. He left his glass on the sideboard and returned to his chair. Mom mopped up the spilled water and provided Dylan with a fresh glass. Dad made an excuse to leave the table.
Mom stared after him, puzzled. “Usually, he drinks until he can’t stand and I have to make him comfortable where he passes out.”
Dylan said, “Perhaps it’s time he changed his ways. Aye?” His stomach was in knots. He’d just threatened his own father’s life, and knew he would carry through if he saw his mother hurt again. He watched Mom eat, and wondered what sort of man he’d become.
CHAPTER 24
The next day he returned to his apartment. His Jeep had been taken there from Moss Wright Park by Ronnie the day of the Games, so his mother dropped him off. But first she made him promise to come to supper the following night. He kissed her cheek, then let himself in through the front glass door. He stopped dead just inside and let the door close automatically behind him.
He’d forgotten what the place looked like. For two years he’d thought of going home, and the memory had changed until details went missing: the stack of folded floor mats against the mirrored wall, the bulletin board sporting fliers about events that were still weeks away, the broken office window. Damn, he’d forgotten about that. Ronnie had covered the hole with plywood while Dylan was in the hospital. The past few weeks his assistant had covered all of Dylan’s classes, and it seemed he was doing a fine job of running things. Good old Ronnie.
Out of curiosity he stepped on the scale by the mirrored wall. Even with clothing and the weight he’d gained since his return, he was still ten pounds lighter than the day he’d left two years ago. The reflection before him was of an angular, tough-muscled man with edges he’d never seen before. He’d never realized how much extra weight he’d once carried. But now all of it was gone, leaving taut skin over a strong but economical build. Once again he was shocked at how much he’d changed.
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