by Greg Iles
“Well?” he roars. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
Remarkably, my mother interposes herself between Grandpapa and me. This may be a first. “Don’t shout at her, Daddy,” she pleads. “Cat’s not herself right now.”
“What do you mean?” he bellows.
“She’s dealing with some problems.”
He grits his teeth and nods angrily. “Oh, I know she’s got problems. She’s had problems her whole life, just like Ann. I’ve spent half my life cleaning up their problems, but today it stops. Today, I’m done. Today, I’m doing some bud-nipping, before this girl causes this whole town a problem it can’t afford.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“The casino, goddamn it! I’m talking about the salvation of this city. We are one hairsbreadth from federal certification of the Natchez Indian Nation. And there’s not a damn thing the state gaming commission can do to stop it. But you”—he jabs a thick forefinger in my direction—“you could blow the whole thing right out of the water with your questions and theories and getting tied up in the middle of mass murder. And now you want to dig up Luke Ferry’s decomposed body for the whole town to read about in the newspaper? Well, I’m telling you right now, that’s not going to happen. Unless it’s part of an official criminal investigation, you need your mother’s approval to dig that body up.”
Mom almost cowers when he glances in her direction, and I know that she’s not about to give me what I need. But I will not cower. I’m done with that. I take a step toward my grandfather. “Then I guess I’m going to have to make this a criminal investigation. I didn’t want to, but you’re not leaving me any choice. I’ll get the Natchez police out here, and I’ll drag the FBI into it, too, before I’m done. I’ll turn Malmaison into a three-ring circus, if that’s what it takes to find out the truth.”
“The truth?” Grandpapa echoes. “You think it’s the truth you’re after?”
“That’s all I’ve ever been after! But all you’ve given me is lies. Every new story was just another lie to keep me from digging any deeper. What are you afraid of, Grandpapa? What can’t you bear to have anyone find out about you?”
He glances at my mother again, then looks at the ground. When he finally raises his head, his eyes burn into mine. “It’s not myself I’ve been trying to protect. It’s you. The bottom of this damn mystery you’re so keen to solve is something I prayed you’d never have to know, and I’ve done everything in my power to keep it from you. But you won’t let this go. You’ll tear down this house, this family, everything I’ve built to get what you want. You’ve proved that. So…you want the truth?”
A strange thrumming has started in the back of my head. But there’s no turning back now. “I do.”
“You want to know who killed your father?”
“Yes.”
“You did.”
The sound of rain is so vivid that I put up my hands to shield my face. My mother and grandfather suddenly waver in my vision, as though we’re all standing underwater. I want to speak, but there’s nothing left to say. With two simple words all my questions have been answered. Every piece in the chaotic puzzle of my life has finally fallen into place. The long black train that plowed silently over me in the gleaming kitchen of Arthur LeGendre has circled around again. The great black face of its engine roars out of nowhere, blotting out the scene before me: people, grass, trees, and sky. In the last instant before impact, searing images pass behind my eyes: the New Orleans murder victims, naked and mutilated; Nathan Malik lying dead in a motel bathtub, a human skull in his lap; Ann sprawled on the floor of the clinic with two skull-and-crossbones symbols drawn on her abdomen, her stuffed turtle beside her. But nowhere do I see my father’s face. I try to summon it, but all that appears is a necklace of ears, a sculpture of a hanged man, photographs of naked children, and two black shadows fighting above me in the dark.
And then I see nothing at all.
Chapter
53
I’m running.
Harder and faster than I’ve ever run in my life. Tree trunks flash past the way they used to when I rode horses on the island, but it’s only my legs hurling me forward, my feet flying from something too terrible to face.
You want to know who killed your father?
No! I want to turn back time. Push back the days to the point before I began asking questions—questions to which I thought I wanted answers.
Now I know better.
Some things it’s better not know. Pearlie’s voice.
Michael Wells’s house appears between the distant trees. The sight of it brings a strange feeling of hope, the way a thief might feel sighting a church, his sole chance at sanctuary. I sprint harder, and soon the shining blue rectangle of the Hemmeters’ swimming pool appears. But the Hemmeters’ are gone now. The pool, like the house, belongs to Michael. Too many changes…
I stumble down to the concrete patio that surrounds the pool, my eyes plumbing its blue depths. Part of me wants only to slip beneath the surface, to lie on the bottom and hold my breath while my heartbeats get further and further apart, stretching into ever increasing increments of time, eventually reaching infinity. But that’s not the way it happens. Deprived of oxygen, the heart will eventually beat harder and faster, struggling to feed the starving tissues until at last it squirms frantically and uselessly in the chest. I would kick to the surface then. Not even a death wish can suppress instinct honed over millions of years. That takes coercion. Or a suicide method from which there is no turning back. Like intravenous morphine. That probably plunged Ann into blissful sleep so fast that any second thoughts quickly faded into oblivion. But I doubt she’d have turned back, even if she could.
In some people, the pain of living minute to minute simply grows so acute that they can finally stand to look into the face of death without blinking—even look at death as a friend—and cross that river Dr. Malik talked about without a backward glance. For me, even though I’ve crawled right up to the black rim of suicide, pain has always been preferable to the void.
Until now…
There’s a light on in Michael’s house. That alone draws me past the pool and up to the French doors at the back of the house. Suddenly I’m banging on the glass, banging hard, and the pain shooting up to my elbow doesn’t stop me, but only reminds me that I’m alive. I see movement inside, and then Michael is hurrying to the door, his face all concern. Before he can speak, I throw my arms around his neck, stand on tiptoe, and hug him as tightly as I can.
“Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” he asks. “What happened? Did you and your mother have an argument?”
I want to answer, but my chest is heaving against him in great racking sobs that make my whole body shudder. I killed my father! I scream, but nothing comes from my throat.
“Calm down,” Michael says, stroking my hair. “Whatever it is, we can deal with it.”
I shake my head violently, staring at him through a screen of tears.
“You’ve got to tell me what happened, Cat.”
This time my mouth forms the words, but again no sound emerges. Then, like a distraught child, I manage to stammer out the truth. Michael’s eyes go wide for an instant, but then he pulls me tight against him. “Your grandfather told you that?”
I nod into his chest.
“Did he give you any proof?”
I shake my head. “But I feel it…the minute he said it, I felt I’d finally heard the truth. Only…”
“What?” asks Michael.
“I was eight years old. Could I really have shot my father?”
Michael sighs with deep sadness. “When I moved back to Natchez, it was autumn. And one of the first things that struck me was all the pictures in the newspaper of seven- and eight-year-olds who’d shot their first deer.”
I close my eyes in desolation.
“I thought about the possibility yesterday,” he says. “I told you that if it was your father who had molested you, it could have b
een Pearlie or your mother who shot him. But, yes…it could have been you. Patricide is certainly the most convincing scenario for your retreat into silence.”
What am I doing here? I wonder. Standing in the house of a man I barely know, shaking like an epileptic?
“If that is what happened,” Michael says, “if you did shoot your father, it was a clear act of self-preservation. If an eight-year-old girl was driven to the point where she had to shoot her father, no one in the world would question the rightness of her actions.”
I hear Michael’s words but they have no effect. Words cannot penetrate the wounded region of my soul. He seems to sense this. Keeping one arm tight around me, he leads me to the master bedroom, pulls back the covers, and sits me on the edge of the bed. He kneels and removes my shoes, then stretches me out on the bed and pulls the covers up to my neck.
“Don’t move from this spot. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He vanishes, leaving me in the cool, dry darkness of his airconditioned bedroom. I feel strangely at home here. Mr. and Mrs. Hemmeter slept in this room for more than thirty years. They loved me like a daughter, and something of their spirits must remain.
Michael reappears beside the bed, a glass of water in his hand.
“This is a Lorcet Plus. It’ll take the edge off.”
I take the white pill from his hand and pop it into my mouth, but as the glass touches my lips, I realize I’m making a terrible mistake. I spit out the pill and put it on the bedside table.
“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.
“I can’t take this.”
“Are you allergic to hydrocodone?”
I look up into his concerned eyes, wishing I didn’t have to tell him the truth. Why has he done all this for me? He’s disrupted his entire life to help me. There’s got to be a reason for that. But I can’t lie to him anymore. Not even by omission.
“I’m pregnant,” I tell him, my eyes never leaving his.
He doesn’t flinch the way my mother did when I mentioned my father’s mistress, but something changes behind his eyes. The warmth slowly dissipates into a cool and wary look.
“Who’s the father? The married detective?”
“Yes.”
He stares silently at me for a few moments. “I’ll make you some tea instead,” he says awkwardly. “Decaf.” He turns and walks quickly to the door.
“Michael, wait!”
He turns and looks back, his face pale, his eyes confused.
“I didn’t want this,” I tell him. “It wasn’t planned or anything. But I’m not going to terminate it. I should have told you before now, I guess, but I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want you to think badly of me. But now…with everything else you know, it’s absurd to hold anything back.” My next words take more courage than swimming into the middle of the Mississippi River. “If you want me to go, I’ll understand.”
He only stares at me, his eyes unreadable.
“I’ll get the tea,” he says finally.
I never got the tea. I never took the Lorcet either, but exhaustion gave me that most precious of gifts—dreamless sleep. When Michael woke me a few minutes ago, the clock beside the bed read 11:30 P.M. I felt neither rested nor tired.
I felt numb.
The room is all shadows now, cast by the spill from the bathroom light. Michael has pulled a chair up beside the bed. He’s watching me as he might a patient in the ICU. At least he hasn’t asked me how I feel.
“What do you want to do?” he says.
“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”
“Go back to sleep. See how you feel in the morning. I’ll stay in one of the guest rooms upstairs. If you need me, you can call my cell phone.”
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even blink.
“I’m not trying to make a pass or anything,” I tell him. “I just don’t think I should be by myself right now. You know?”
He cocks one eyebrow at me. “That’s the first time a woman ever threatened to kill herself if I didn’t sleep with her.”
I’d like to laugh, but I can’t. There’s nothing left in me. I slide across the bed and pull back the comforter. Michael stares at the blank space in the bed, then gets up and walks into his closet. When he returns, he’s wearing a pair of blue gym shorts and an Emory University T-shirt. He sits on the edge of the bed and sets the alarm clock, then slides under the covers and pulls them up to his chest.
It seems a weird parody of married life, both of us lying on our backs, staring at the ceiling as though we’ve been together twenty years and said all there was to say long ago. I expect him to talk, to probe me with questions. But he doesn’t. What does he think of me? Does he regret the moment that he walked into his backyard and picked up the net to rescue me from the bottom of his swimming pool?
Tentatively, I slide my hand over the cool sheet and take his hand in mine. There’s nothing sexual in the touch. I’m holding his hand the way I must have held my father’s long ago—before he twisted our relationship into a perverted shadow of parental love. It takes a while, but Michael squeezes my hand in return. I may be mistaken, but it feels as though he’s shaking. I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to notice, so I say nothing.
After a time, another realization hits me. Michael is hard. I know this without feeling his erection against me. It’s something about the way he’s lying, a tension in his body. This knowledge does something to me. It always has. I feel not only desire, but a sense of compulsion, even obligation. In the same way a match exists to be struck or a loaded gun to be fired, the erect penis is a potential waiting to be released. I’ve seen a loaded rifle instantly transform a roomful of men from ennui to alertness. The moment a bullet enters the chamber, the inanimate weapon takes on an almost living presence, dangerous and impossible to ignore. For me, in this moment, Michael’s penis is the same.
“I can help you with that,” I say softly.
“What?”
I nudge his hip with mine. “That.”
“How did you know?”
“I just do.”
He keeps staring at the ceiling. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. Because you need it. You can kiss me if you want.”
He’s silent for a time. Then he says, “I don’t want to kiss you right now. Not like this. I can’t help the other. I’ve had a thing for you for a really long time, but I don’t want to be what other men have been to you.”
I squeeze his hand. “We don’t have to make love. I can just use my hand. Or…whatever.”
Michael pulls his hand out of mine, and I hear his breathing stop. Then he turns on his side and looks at me. I can barely make out his eyes in the dark. “I don’t want that,” he says. “Okay? That’s not the way this is supposed to happen. You may not know that, but you need to learn. Now, go to sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
I guess I know how he looks at me now. I suppose I should be embarrassed, but I’m not. I should probably feel regret. But I don’t. Here I lie, pregnant by a married man, sleeping next to the first nice guy I’ve come to know in a very long time.
And I feel nothing at all.
When you dream the same dream over and over, you begin to wonder whether, like a Hindu who has lived an immoral life, your punishment is to be reincarnated again and again in the same body, unable to rise up the chain of being until you learn the elusive lesson of your sin.
I’m back inside the rusted pickup truck, my grandfather behind the wheel. We’re rolling up the sloping hill of the old pasture. I hate the stink inside the truck. Sometimes a river breeze blows it out of the cab, but today the air hangs dead and still over the island, as though trapped under the overturned bowl of steel-gray clouds. My grandfather grits his teeth as he drives. He hasn’t spoken since we left the house. I might as well not be here. But I am. And soon we will crest the hill—crest it and sight the pond on the other side.
I don’
t want to see the pond. I don’t want to see my father walk across the water like Jesus and pull open the bullet hole in his chest. I already know what he’s trying to tell me. I already know that I killed him. Why won’t he let me rest? If I could apologize to him, there might be some reason for this dream. But I can’t. I can’t speak at all.
“Goddamn rain,” Grandpapa mutters.
He downshifts and steps on the gas, and we trundle over the hill. The cows are waiting for us as they always are, their eyes glassy with indifference. Beyond them lies the pond, a perfect silver mirror reflecting only sky. To my right, the prize bull mounts the cow and begins lunging forward.
Grandpapa smiles.
Dreading the sight of my father in the water, I cover my eyes with my hands. But sooner or later I will have to look. I peer between my fingers and brace myself against the horror I know is to come.
But it doesn’t come. Today the pond is empty. My father isn’t floating on its surface, his arms splayed out like those of a man on a cross.
The perfect mirror remains undisturbed.
Grandpapa brakes as we roll toward the pond, then stops twenty yards from the water’s edge. I smell decay, rotting plants and fish. Where is my father? What’s happened to my dream? Even something terrible is more comforting than the unknown. I turn to Grandpapa to ask a question, but I don’t know what the question is. I couldn’t ask it anyway. Fear is clawing around in my chest like a trapped animal trying to get out.
A new smell cuts through the decay of the pond. Something man-made. It’s the tonic Grandpapa uses on his hair. Lucky Tiger.
“Goddamn rain,” he says again.
As I stare through the windshield, a curtain of rain sweeps across my field of vision like a great gray shadow, all the leaves trembling under its weight. In seconds the glassy surface of the pond is sizzling like water thrown into a hot skillet. Pearlie told me once that a person is like a raindrop, sent from heaven alone but destined to rejoin all the other drops at journey’s end. I can’t remember heaven, so I must have left it a long time ago…yet I still have such a long way to fall…