“You are incredible,” he managed to say at last, though he was still hiccupping giggles. “You know damn well that I was the one. I visited Pen regularly, even before the day when you caught me up there.” His smile was horrible.
“I’d sneak out of my room at night and go up and let myself in, after I got the key out of your desk. I knew very early there was something in that room I had to know about, and I got the key copied at a key shop near the school. Nobody ever suspects a little kid sent on an errand for his mother, you know. We had some wild times up there, just the two of us.
“But the lot of you kept catching her and locking her up. You even changed locks on us a couple of times, but I always managed to get another key. And she told me everything. The truth about you and Aunt Lina. About her mother and Miss Edenson.
“Everyone was always against her. They hated her because she was brighter, braver, better than any of them. And then you came, and things got worse for her. You took her twin away from her. She told me that lie you got them to believe about saving my father’s life.” He glared at her and she could see the madness well up in his eyes.
“But you didn’t keep him from dying. I saw that with my own eyes, right here in this house. The lie was just something you used to get into their good graces, and they fell for you, like a bunch of fools.”
Marise made a protesting sound, and he grinned at her savagely.
“I fell for it too, for entirely too long. You were my mother. I loved you until Pen made me see what a lot of shit you were. Always the good little woman, busy as a bee managing the farm and doing things around the house and taking care of people, weren’t you? But you kept turning everybody further and further away from Pen. She saw it, and once I knew how to look I saw it too.”
“So you turned her loose, thereby killing your Uncle Hannibal, your grandfather, your grandmother, and, I suspect, Miss Edenson too. You were too young to know what she was capable of doing,” Marise said. She felt almost disembodied as her worst imaginings came into being.
His laugh sounded genuinely amused. “She told Uncle Hanni that I let her loose and she gave him a bit of what she was teaching me. He died before he could say or do anything about it. She gave Grampa that shot, but I tended to Grandmother. I went in and told her what a nasty, smelly, horrible old monster she was.” He snickered.
“She looked at me—you just can’t imagine how she looked at me. Then she yelled, ‘No! No!’ and then she died. And I liked it. So after that I put the medicine into Miss Edenson’s milk. She watched me too much, and Pen told me how to do it and where to find the medicine. She prowled around the house a lot more than any of you ever suspected.”
Marise took a gulp of coffee, which was cooling and very bitter. But it was better than shouting or screaming.
“And then you killed my father. Pen nearly went wild because you wouldn’t put him in the hospital. You didn’t do a thing to keep him alive, and he just kept getting weaker and thinner, and paler and sicker. I’d go up and cry in her lap, and she’d cry with me. We hated you and hated you and wanted you dead.
“She told me what she planned to do at the funeral. I gave her a map of the woods I drew myself and told her how to get back to the house without being seen using the streets. I took the keys off your desk and opened the gate. I was waiting at the front door when she came.” He took up a cookie and nibbled it absently, as if caught up in the past he was reliving.
“Hildy must have heard us. She called up from her apartment, and we went right down. Pen wouldn’t let me come in, and when she came out she was all bloody. I could see red all over the floor, too. She took my hand and we went up to see Aunt Lina.”
He smiled, his eyes bright and black. “I helped with that, you know. And after she was dead I helped with the...rest of it. I got a little messy too.
“But we couldn’t find you. We looked everywhere, downstairs and upstairs, and you weren’t even in the tower, so she finally went in there and waited for you. I went back to my room to get my sneakers, and then I waited with Aunt Lina.
“When I came out again, you had come down here and Pen was with you. I could hear from upstairs. And you killed her. Killed Pen! If you could do that, I knew I was too little to handle you. So I ran out, up the road. There was a truck parked at the Mobile station over on Gladder Street, and I crawled into the back with a lot of furniture and pulled the tarp down tight. When we stopped for good we were in Albuquerque.”
So that was how he managed to disappear so thoroughly. Even the driver had probably never known he was there.
“I got out without being seen, and there I was. No clothes, no money, no parents, covered with blood. It was easy to convince the police I couldn’t remember anything. They looked for the wreck that had to have happened to me for weeks.
“I grew up in about seven foster homes. They’d get tired of me, after a while, every time.”
Marise could imagine why. She set her cup meticulously in its saucer. “And all those years you were just waiting to get big enough to come back and kill your mother,” she said in her calmest tone.
“Here I am. Here you are. I won’t try to convince you of anything. If you didn’t see the true state of affairs when it was before your eyes, you won’t believe it now. If you believed the ravings of a madwoman instead of the honest, loving lives of your people, you were already tainted with the flaw that ruined her life. But I must admit it didn’t show. You can congratulate yourself on being a very fine actor.”
He glanced up sharply and down again, listening without comment.
“Nobody suspected, once you arrived so healthy and bright, that the Clarrington madness was in you. We thought we’d beaten the odds.” She began to laugh, but there was no amusement in the sound.
The black eyes snapped cold fire. “Don’t try to trick me. I know what I know. We’ve talked for long enough. I have waited a very long time for this. Why don’t I feel excited any more?”
“Because, my poor son, you are quite mad,” she said. The knife caught her under the ribcage, slowing her own movement. But not enough. She pulled her small automatic from the cushion behind her and fired it, point blank, into his face.
His blood and brains spattered the table, the chair, and her jumpsuit with color. Marise gasped. The knife had pulled out of her body at his reflexive jerk. Blood was oozing in a warm flood down her side. With a terrible effort, she pulled herself up and stood swaying over the body of her son.
“God send you peace, Benjie,” she said.
She staggered through the door, across the half landing, onto the stair. The front door loomed near its foot, distant as Everest. With terrible peasant toughness, she set her foot on the step. Clinging to the banister, she struggled downward, kept from falling by her will alone.
The door was nearer. She was almost there, but the light was too dim. She couldn’t make out the hall tree. Nothing except the big door.
Then it, too, grew misty. She fell to her knees on the velvet rug at the bottom of the steps. Her hands moved toward the door, as if with a life of their own.
Then they drooped and went still. Not even the sound of her breathing interrupted the quiet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Evan
Evan had not slept well. The memory of that interview with Marise had haunted his dreams, distorted and filled with nightmarish images. Finally, when dawn touched the east, he gave up trying to sleep and went into his small kitchen to make coffee.
This was Saturday. There was no work today to distract him from his unease, nothing planned except perhaps golf at two o’clock with a couple of the Board members. That left the morning completely unoccupied.
He knew before the sun was well up that he was going to visit Marise. The reason, of course, was his need to replace Gertrude Fisk. He kept telling himself that as he got ready, but he kept seeing the thoughtful tilt of Marise�
��s fair head, the evasive expression on her narrow face.
Something was wrong. Badly wrong, if his instinct was right. He wouldn’t have a moment’s ease until he had made her tell him what that might be. He put on his loafers, got his wallet, and walked quickly away from the house into the freshness of the morning. Already it promised to be hot.
If Marise wasn’t up yet, he would wait. The walk would give her time to wake and drink her coffee, he hoped, and the exercise seemed to calm his nerves.
His impatient feet drove his long legs more quickly than he had intended, and the half mile through the shady streets went faster than he’d planned. Before the sun was much higher he was in front of the granite structure. It was too early, and he knew it, but he shook the gate impatiently anyway.
The ironwork opened to his shove.
Something cold and deadly chilled beneath his breastbone. He moved up the walk and the steps to the front door and tried it. His hand was shaking by now.
It, too, moved without hesitation. Evan felt sick dread rise in him, but he pushed the door wide open and let the pale morning light fall across the hardwood floor and the velvet drugget of the entry hall.
Marise lay between the foot of the stair and the door, her hand stretched forward as if she had been reaching for help or safety. When he touched her arm, she was cold and stiff. Her dark jumpsuit was patterned with splotches of rusty blood, which stained the little rug with bright patches.
Evan stared upward, knowing she must have come down the stair. Those blotches of blood were clearly visible on every step.
Would he never finish making terrible discoveries in this house? He looked back down at the dead woman at his feet. Then he stepped around her, very gently, and climbed toward her tower sitting room.
A man lay there, and for a bit he couldn’t think who this might be. The face had been shattered by the bullet that killed him, but the eyes were open. Black eyes. Like Ben Clarrington’s.
The portrait on the wall told Evan more. Marise had known or suspected something dreadful. The letter—she must have realized, once he told her Benjie’s body had not been found, that it could come only from her son.
It was logical, and he was proud of being able to think rationally when he wanted to scream and weep and beat his fists against the pale paper of the walls. He would never know if his guess was accurate, but it satisfied him. Marise would never have protected any murderer except her son.
He made his way down again, averting his eyes from the pitiful body on the rug. Her strictest rule had been that at once, if she died, he was to look into the safe in the study. Obediently, he went there and dug into his wallet for the combination to the safe.
The two envelopes were impossible to miss. She had known this was likely to happen, and she had spent her last hours safeguarding her heritage. He took the envelopes, as well as the deeds and insurance policies in the folders.
Then he went into the hall again and looked about him. He could see her there in a hundred ways, bringing tea and cookies, welcoming him into the house, peering wistfully after him as he left.
Evan knew he could not leave her here to be handled and measured by police, for reporters to gnaw to the bone and scandal to overcome at last. He took his lighter from his pocket and touched the flame to the hangings that hid the dining room door. The old fabric blazed up hungrily.
He bent and touched one of those cold hands. “Goodbye, my dear. God bless,” he said. Then he turned and went out, closing the door behind him.
He locked the gate as well. The street was empty, which was good. He squared his shoulders and walked away from the Clarrington house for the last time.
Evan didn’t look back. Already he could hear the snap of greedy flames as they ate away at the prison in which Marise had lived and killed and died. Let the heritage end, he thought. The final drop of blood is spilled, and the old Clarrington greed is satisfied at last.
The Clarrington Heritage Page 19