THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE

by Jason Whitlock

  Maggie did not respond.

  “That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” he ventured.

  Maggie surveyed the room, oblivious to the bottles on the countertop, the food on the floor, and the pots bubbling on the stove. “Hungry?” she asked, turning to face him. “It’s not much, but I’m sure I could throw something together.”

  Throughout the course of their marriage, Eugene had either adored his wife or, alternately, he had despised her. More often than once, he had experienced these conflicting emotions concurrently. When Evelyn arrived, their firstborn—Maggie’s firstborn—Eugene had wept, at first with joy then with rage upon realizing the child could not possibly be his. He’d been sick to his stomach in the men’s room, returning later to Maggie’s bedside, compelled both to caress her and to smash her face with his fist, unsure of how he would react until finally at the last moment, he moved to embrace her. He was, after all, a mere boy and in too deep to do otherwise.

  Eugene loved Evelyn as if she was his own, but was unable to compensate adequately for Maggie’s contempt toward the child. Life was difficult, becoming intolerable for Evelyn after the arrival first of Mandy, and following her, Missy. Eugene both sympathized and resented Maggie’s attitude toward her daughter, even if it was beyond his capacity to understand. Even now, Eugene was unsure if he should feel pity for his wife or cast blame. Eugene believed instinctively that in the manner of their daughter’s passing, it could happen only to a child of hers.

  Unable to face her any longer, he said, “I’m going to bed.” Eugene turned from the kitchen, taking the steps to his bedroom two at a time.

  Later, after Maggie had straightened the kitchen and long after Eugene had fallen into a deep sleep, she herself was ready for bed. She did not take the stairs two at a time like her husband. Maggie attacked them slowly, methodically, as if each were a burden.

  In the bedroom, she spoke to the sleeping Eugene as if he were awake.

  “I know you blame me,” she said. “I understand. I should have done more, for your sake if not hers.” Eugene turned from his stomach to his back, but did not wake. Satisfied that he was listening, Maggie continued. “I’m a terrible mother, Eugene, God knows, I’m unfit. It’s not as if I had someone to take after, is it? Instead, I suppose, I defined myself by him, against him, like a mirror.”

  Slowly, Maggie undressed, discarding her blouse and her slacks in a heap on the floor. She hadn’t bathed in over a week and her underclothes were soiled. “Don’t you see? Without Daddy, who was I? As his reflection, if I shut him out, wouldn’t I myself simply disappear, cease to exist?”

  She looked to Eugene as if for an answer. When he didn’t respond, she said, “I’m really no better than who I was, Eugene, like one of Daddy’s horses. I wish I could, but I can’t rise above my bloodlines. Please understand; please understand and please forgive me. I know I shouldn’t ask; I have no right, but you’re a good man, Eugene, you’re a good, good man. I don’t care anymore if God forgives me; he abandoned me long ago. Still, I’ll pray to him anyway, that you will, forgive me.”

  Maggie pulled back the cover on her side of the bed, slipped between the sheets, pecked Eugene on the cheek, and made herself comfortable in the outstretched arm of her husband.

  That night, Maggie Bitson, nee McMaster, slept peacefully, the first time she had done so since the night before the day she turned eight years of age, a birthday on which her father had promised to do what he must to make it a happy day.

  …

  Christopher Burke could see the river from his back porch. In winter—after the leaves fell completely from the trees—it was just visible from here as a thin, blue-green thread. In summer, it was obscured completely, which was fine with Chris as he was neither able to hear it or to see it; Burke preferred to partake of the Hudson from a distance.

  Twice in the time they had worked together, Ed Dojcsak had invited Burke on a trip to Lake George, to accompany him on the water in his sixteen-foot aluminum powerboat. Ostensibly to fish, but more likely, the younger man assumed, to bond. Both times, Burke had declined. (Too Deliverance for him.) Dojcsak had never asked again, preferring, Burke imagined, his own company instead: to Burke, Dojcsak’s heart hadn’t seemed much into the invitation anyway.

  It was after midnight. At the insistence of his wife, Burke agreed to remain home this evening, to entertain his mother-in-law. In truth, Burke would not miss the damp second floor of the fire-come-police station bunkhouse. He’d been sleeping there with greater frequency lately, on the pullout sofa. The springs punched through the cushions, digging into the muscle of his back like small metal fists, leaving welts the following morning. Burke had told this to Sheila, though he wasn’t at all convinced she had ever accepted his explanation.

  The Pasta Pomodoro he had brought home for dinner had been a hit with both Sheila and her mother. After dinner, they sat in the small living room, the women together on the couch, Sheila with her legs elevated while Tina Marinos massaged her daughter’s swollen feet. It was something Burke had never done, or even thought to do.

  “Are you ready for this?” she had asked him after dinner, her hand flat on her daughter’s belly. “It isn’t a pet you know.”

  Burke suspected Sheila complained to her mother about his behavior. He hoped it was not too much.

  “I know,” Burke replied. “Not like a dog or a cat. It needs more attention, maybe like a tropical fish.”

  Tina smiled; Sheila did not. To Tina, Christopher had looks, charm and career prospects. Her daughter could do worse, much worse, and privately Sheila’s mother hoped her daughter wasn’t giving her husband too hard a time, as expectant mothers were wont to do.

  “It’s okay to raise a child here,” his mother-in-law said, her eyes surveying the room. “But if you want to raise a family, it’s too small.”

  “Church Falls is nice ma’,” Sheila said. “It’s clean, it’s safe.”

  Tina Marinos scoffed. “Safe?” she said. “Safer than what? This place has an aura, Sheila. I don’t like it.”

  Burke laughed. “Bangor Maine,” he said.

  His mother-in-law smiled. “Stephen King.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Sheila said, “You’re both being ridiculous.”

  “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, and maybe it’s time for a change, for you to move back to Syracuse, to be closer to me and your Dad,” she said to her daughter, fixing Burke with a sidelong glance. “The baby will mean more work you know, for both of you. If you return to work even part-time,” she said to Sheila, “it will be more work for Chris. Besides, no offense Chris, but I don’t see you playing Barney Fife to Dojcsak’s Andy Taylor. There must be openings with the State Police.”

  Chris said, “Your mother has a point, Sheila.”

  Shortly afterward, the ladies went to bed, leaving him alone to smoke outside on the back porch.

  The wind had risen and though the sky was clear, the weather forecast was predicting snow. Today the temperature had reached into the mid-fifties but this far north, Burke knew, if the conditions were right by tomorrow they might wake up to six inches. This early in the spring it was not unheard of for a cranky Nor’easter to wander in off the Atlantic and collide with a temperamental Canadian cold front, dropping enough of the white stuff to extend the ski season until early May. If the warm weather held, the small lakes would quickly thaw, keeping the more adventurous off the water; if not, authorities would be pulling the bodies of careless snowmobilers from the water until June.

  Burke flicked his cigarette butt from between his thumb and forefinger onto the lawn. He pulled a small, flattened square of aluminum tin foil from a rear pocket of his jeans. He unwrapped, extracting a joint. Inserting it between his lips, he ignited, drawing heavily on the musky fume, filling his lungs. Enjoy, he said to himself, not knowing how long the small quantity he had remaining would last. No more Jordy, no more dope.

  “Jordy, Jordy, Jordy,” Burke said quietly, smiling. “You little scumbag.
Even I can’t save you now.”

  Inside the house, he retrieved a manila envelope. Earlier, he had concealed it beneath the dining room hutch. He pulled on a heavy jacket, one that was too warm for the temperature but not for the wind, he decided. He locked the front door behind him, leaving the house for the short walk to the river. It would do neither for his marriage nor his career to be found in possession of the photographs of Missy Bitson impaled on the shaft of her adoring cousin. Best consign them to the deep, where for him they could do no harm.

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE said,” Sara Pridmore complained, more hurt than angry.

  “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “Necessary?” Sara said, propping herself on an elbow so the bed sheet fell from her shoulder to her breast. “Necessary? Is that how you feel? That we share with each other from need, not from want?” Sara looked away, returning to her back to stare at the ceiling. She had pulled her hair from her forehead and off her face in a way that made her look much younger than she was. “I’m sorry you consider me such an obligation.”

  “You’re blowing this out of proportion, Sara, twisting it the wrong way,” said Cassie McMaster. She, too, had been lying naked on her back, bare breasts exposed above the linen bed sheet, staring idly at her own blank spot on the ceiling. She now turned to face Sara. “It’s not something you talk about. It’s not something you admit to friends.” Sensing Sara bristle, she added, “Or lovers.” She was close enough to smell the sweetness of Sara’s breath. As if to prove her point, Cassie looked away before saying, “It’s not something you brag on, like winning the lottery, that your half-sister also happens to be your niece.”

  Sara had arrived home shortly before midnight, after driving straight through to Church Falls from New York City, stopping only for coffee and to pee. What she had considered the single most significant lead in the investigation into the killing of Missy Bitson—namely, the discovery of Jordy Bitson’s DNA in the alley where the victim’s body was discovered and Missy’s DNA on the bed sheets where Jordy slept—had been swept from her practical mind by the matter-of-fact disclosure of Evelyn Bitson that her grandfather, Leland McMaster Senior, was actually her biological dad.

  Sara had struggled to remain standing, even as she had asked Evelyn dumbly, “So, who is your mother?” Owing to the resemblance between the two, at first, Sara feared it might be Cassie. When Evelyn said Maggie, Sara was somehow relieved, and at the same time appalled.

  Immediately on her return, Sara showered, standing under the steaming water until her skin glowed pink, in the hope she might scrape the road grit from her body and the spiritual grime from her soul. Afterward, though her skin was clean, Sara felt her thoughts were still dirty. She telephoned Cassie McMaster, who arrived shortly after.

  Sara wished she could, but knew she wouldn’t be able to let the issue go. Clearly, in Church Falls, the bloodlines did run deep.

  “After Missy was killed, you didn’t think it might be relevant?” asked Sara.

  “How? How could it be? My father is seventy-six-years-old, Sara: old, old, old—an old man. He rarely leaves the property except to work. Even to buy groceries. They have what they need delivered; he has his horses, he has his cars. My mother? She has”—Cassie paused, wondering what exactly it was her mother might have—“her memories, I suppose.”

  Sara said, “Such memories they must be.”

  “At first, my parents weren’t allowed by Maggie to be alone with Missy,” Cassie continued. “By the time she turned nine, Maggie wouldn’t let them see Missy at all, as if it were some arbitrary age beyond which my father couldn’t be trusted. My mother begged me to speak with her, to ask Maggie to change her mind. For your father’s sake, she said. When I told this to Maggie, she laughed, as if the notion was absurd.”

  “Even if he hadn’t seen her for years,” said Sara, referring to Leland McMaster, “he would know her. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to pick Missy out in a crowd, to follow her to and from school. He could have stalked her,” she ventured.

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Cassie said, running her fingers through her dark hair. “He wouldn’t.”

  Outside, the wind howled against the windowpane, rattling the glass and shaking the frame. They each had consumed half the bottle of red wine Cassie brought with her when she arrived, even though it was late and in the morning Sara, if not both, would suffer a hangover. Sara didn’t drink alcohol, only in the company of Cassie, though in fairness when they were together, they didn’t always drink. Sara wondered, “Is this the courage she requires to be with me?” But she did not ask. Not that she was frightened of the question, only the reply.

  The relationship began nine months ago, by accident. Sara was never certain who had seduced whom.

  She had been on routine patrol and noticed a disturbance beneath a lighted window at the rectory of the Episcopal Church, a faint shadow passing through the hedge. If it had been anything at all, it was nothing by the time Sara arrived. She conducted a cursory check of the surroundings, walking the full perimeter of the property until she again was standing by the lighted window. Without meaning to, Sara looked up. There, through the window, she observed Cassie McMaster stepping from her vestments and throwing a heavy, terry towel bathrobe over her naked shoulders. At that point, Sara willed that her feet should return her to her car. Unfortunately, her feet disobeyed. Before Sara could reissue the command, Cassie turned, becoming aware of her presence.

  Sara could not depart without an explanation. She knocked on the heavy wood door of the rectory. Cassie answered and they talked in the narrow hallway leading to Cassie’s rooms. After her shift that evening, Sara returned. They had been sleeping together ever since, though the relationship hadn’t prompted a return by Sara, to the bosom of the Church.

  “Did he ever touch you?” she asked now.

  “Never,” said Cassie. “Never. But I think—without my knowing it at the time—Maggie willingly ran interference.”

  “What about afterward, after Maggie was gone? She was only fifteen when she became pregnant with Evelyn. Sixteen when she left. That much I already know. How did you avoid him? You couldn’t have been more than fourteen yourself.”

  “I don’t know,” said Cassie. “I was tall, well developed for my age,” she said, caressing a breast. “I suppose I wasn’t his type. He preferred them young.”

  She smiled as if it didn’t matter. It had for her at the time, growing up, though if Cassie had known then of her father’s unique way of showing affection for her sister, it wouldn’t have. But as a young girl Cassie had been jealous of the fact her father considered Maggie special. She shivered now, pulling the bed sheet close to her chin.

  “When did you know?”

  “Maggie confessed. The day she was married. We were upstairs, in her bedroom at home,” Cassie recalled. “She was dressing, pulling on her slip when I saw her tummy and said, you’re getting fat. I didn’t know, but she was pregnant and already beginning to show.”

  “How did she tell you?” asked Sara.

  “She said: I’m pregnant. It belongs to Dad. Just like that, as if she were discussing the weather. At first, I had no idea what she was saying, then, seeing her expression, it began to make sense, like something I’d known all along. The separate rooms for my parents from the time we were very young. Late at night, the back and forth between rooms, as if both my father and Maggie were restless, and the nudge-nudge, wink-wink relationship they seemed to enjoy, excluding my mother, my brothers and me. And the bleeding.”

  Cassie shuddered. For a moment, Sara thought she might weep. “I was eight years old, maybe, so Maggie couldn’t have been more than ten. Already she was menstruating. She couldn’t confide in my mother could she? For almost a year she suffered, having to make do with toilet paper, Kleenex and rags. It was awful.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Me? I did nothing, what could I do? A teacher at school noticed, gave Ma
ggie pads. Told her what to buy, how to use them and not to come back to school until she figured out how to do both.”

  “What happened then?” asked Sara. “The teacher, she didn’t report it to anyone?”

  “Not a word. Remember, Sara, it was more than thirty years ago. Even then my father was a big shot, a respected man in this town.”

  “And your mother? She didn’t tell your mother?”

  Cassie considered her reply. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. My mother was—is—a drunk. What came first, the alcohol or the abuse?” Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know, Sara. And frankly my dear,” she mimicked, “I don’t give a damn.” Sara studied Cassie as if she wasn’t entirely convinced. “It isn’t that I don’t care,” Cassie relented. “Too much damage has been done not to.” Cassie said it as if it were eating at her now. “It’s just that I’ve come to terms with it. You move on. Perhaps it’s the reason I joined the Church. I wasn’t going to make it on my own. I just knew it. Eventually, my future would be consumed by my past. The Church was my back-up plan.”