December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  I stared at Issie’s face, amazed that I hadn’t seen my mother’s eyes there before that moment. Instead of the burning terror that I might have expected, and that Issie had clearly anticipated, I felt nothing but sadness and a yearning compassion—for my mother, my poor, lost mother—and for this woman whose life had been capsized by sexual shame and a particularly vicious brand of family confusion.

  I could see Ceri smiling; I didn’t know why. I could tell that Issie was waiting, but for what, exactly, I had no idea. Melissa slowly put away her gun. Everything seemed suspended in time for a while.

  Then I reached out my hand toward Issie. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’ll be all right now.”

  Issie stared at my hand for an instant and then burst into tears, great gasping sobs and hysterical muttering. She collapsed toward Ceri, and Ceri responded by taking her in her arms and holding Issie, rocking her, slowly petting her hair.

  27

  Melissa Mathews snapped her firearm into its holster and rubbed her face. “I don’t understand.”

  I nodded. “Well. It is a lot to take in, all at one sitting.”

  “She went insane because she was in love with Tristan and you,” Melissa said slowly, trying to piece it all together in her mind, “and so she pretended to be somebody from a story?”

  “She’s not insane, I hate that word,” Ceri said, still rocking Issie. “She might be all right after a while. Now.”

  “Now?” Melissa’s face wrinkled up. “She killed her cousin. She’s either going to jail or to the insane asylum.”

  “She’s not insane, Melissa,” Ceri insisted. “Please stop saying that, all right?”

  “But what did she think she was doing,” Melissa asked, “coming here, pretending to be Dr. Devilin’s wife? And then trying to kill Skidmore? Why did she do all this? It is crazy, you have to say that.”

  “Well,” I said to Ceri, still a little light-headed, “this does have to be, at the very least, the worst case of sibling rivalry on record.”

  “That may be part of it,” Ceri said. “It’ll take awhile to unravel. But, have you ever had an unpleasant experience, say, an argument with someone, and then wished, later, that you had said or done something that would have made it turn out better—better for you? Like, you think of what you should have said, or something you should have done? You play it over and over in your mind, hoping it might come out different, trying, in fact, to make it come out different? And try as you might, you can’t let go of it? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  I let out a long breath. “I only have, maybe, ten thousand moments like that in my life.”

  Melissa nodded. “I had a couple of tough arrests—I think about it all the time.”

  “So, while part of Issie’s problem is that she experienced some serious sexual trauma,” Ceri went on, “and part of it is that after the trauma had a chance to sink in, she also began to envy her half brother—I mean it’s a very complex series of events and emotions she’s been dealing with. But the odd behaviors, the inability, sometimes, to distinguish fiction from life, and the little play that she’s been putting us all through for a few days? That’s actually a product of her brain trying to work it all out. She’s trying to make everything turn out better. It’s the opposite of insane. She’s been trying to fix herself in the only way her miswired consciousness could figure out to do. These events of the past couple of days or months, however misguided, were an act of healing.”

  Issie had grown quiet.

  I realized then that I was hearing men’s voices, the patrolmen and the ambulance people coming back up the slope with David’s dead body.

  “And as to the killing of David Newcomb,” I said to Melissa, “Issie did that in self-defense, and to protect Dr. Nelson and me from David. I mean, you saw what he did to Skidmore. We were in fear of our lives, and Issie saved us.”

  Ceri avoided eye contact with anyone, but Melissa stared me down like a lie detector.

  “Skidmore told me that David Newcomb was in the mental hospital,” I continued, “because he was, quite possibly, responsible for seven murders. And if you’ll recall, you couldn’t identify Issie’s fingerprints. Why would that be?”

  Melissa nodded, her eyes still locked on mine. “Because she’s not in the criminal database.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Issie sat up, still leaning a little on Dr. Nelson’s shoulder. “David was a voluntary commitment at the Milledgeville,” she said. “He came to get me.”

  “Why?” Melissa asked.

  Issie smiled heartbreakingly. “Family,” she said, sighing. “Somebody or other in the family told him to come get me out. I don’t know why that happened now, after all this time.”

  “How long had you been in the hospital?” I asked.

  “Near five years,” she said.

  “Why?” Ceri wanted to know.

  “What?” Issie said, sniffing.

  “Why were you put in the hospital? You were committed?”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “Momma put me there.”

  Melissa turned to me. “Your mother was alive five years ago?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. Don’t know when she died—or even if she’s dead now. I’ve seen her grave. It’s in Fit’s Mill. But it wouldn’t be the first time she’d lied about something important, would it?”

  “You saw her grave?” Issie whispered.

  I nodded. “There’s a wild native azalea growing beside it. Smells like honeysuckle.”

  “Okay.” Issie leaned back a little, her eyes still rimmed in red. “Reckon that’s why she never come and got me.”

  “She committed you?” Ceri asked.

  “Me and her,” Issie answered, “we spent long years in that piece of crap house over there in Fit’s Mill. I spent lots of time alone there, too, even as a little tiny young’un. She’d come back and never tell me where she’d been. Days. Weeks sometimes, she was gone. Had to fend for myself. Got used to it. But when I came back from over there in England? I lit into her like a house afire. We tussled many a time. She hit me. I hit her. It went on for some years that way. ’Til one day I tried to kill her with a carving knife. She smacked me good then. Real good. I woke up in the trunk of a car. Next thing I know, there I am in the Milledgeville.”

  I felt a stinging sensation in my sinuses and realized after a second or two that I might be about to cry. I didn’t. I could count on one hand the times I’d cried in my life. But the fact that the impulse was there at all, that was significant. I could only think, then, that biology had won out over every other option. My empathy for my sister seemed to be expanding.

  “I mean,” Issie went on, “I realized after I came back from England that she’d been coming here when she left me alone. To this house. To her real family. A husband. A son. You can’t know how many times I stood out there in those woods, after I came back from England, staring in at this house. Walked all the way from Fit’s Mill, and it’s a good piece from there to here, just to watch you in the kitchen, Fever. And every time I’d come back to Fit’s Mill, from here, Momma and me would bicker—or worse.”

  “You’re not finished with what happened in England,” Ceri said awkwardly. “There are a few moments missing.”

  “Missing?” She turned toward Ceri.

  “Maybe we’ve had enough for one day,” I interrupted.

  “You stopped by the side of the road, you said,” Ceri explained to Issie, ignoring me, “and stayed there for a long while with your father. Then what happened?”

  “After that?” Issie let out a long, slow breath that seemed to exorcise minor demons. “We drove on, and I went to Fever. I was set to tell him everything. I was burning up to tell him. But he was all caught up in his work, and couldn’t nobody get next to him.”

  I tried to think. “That’s probably true. I was obsessed with the work there. I concentrated for hours every day on the stones, the stories about them, and even the incantations I’d heard or read. I
don’t remember much else about being in Wales.”

  “But you left at a key moment,” Ceri said pointedly. “Why?”

  “Why? I think I’ve already told you why. I wanted— I wanted … wait.”

  In a very sudden slap of light, I saw with impossible clarity a single moment in Wales. I saw myself winding around and around the stones in Cornwall, mumbling words and phrases. I was about to crawl through the stones, on my hands and knees, when I had a shooting pain in my head and a violent sense of panic. I instantly thought of my great grandfather, Conner Briarwood, in Ireland, and had a nearly overwhelming desire to leave, that second, from Cornwall, cross to Ireland, and see the place where he had killed a man in a fit of jealous rage, the act that produced our American family. I realized, as I was sitting there in my home in Blue Mountain, that the sensation then was a duplicate of the sensation I’d had coming up the mountain only a short while earlier: the faint, timeless, visionary rapture that had tried to warn me about Issie’s impending revelation.

  “I don’t want this to sound completely insane,” I announced, before I thought better of such a phrase, “but I think I knew Issie was coming, Issie and Tristan. I think I left at the so-called key moment because I knew she was coming and I wanted to avoid her. Does that sound crazy?”

  Melissa looked away.

  Issie shook her head.

  Ceri told me, “Not to me it doesn’t.”

  The voices outside told us that the men were packing David’s body into the ambulance, and several people were headed toward my front door.

  I stood. “I’m saying now, officially, for the record, that Isolde Newcomb killed David in self-defense, and in defense of Dr. Nelson and me. Except for her action in that regard, we’d all be dead now, and David, a known murderer, would be on the loose.”

  “The best thing for this woman,” Ceri chimed in, “would be to get her back to the state hospital in Milledgeville and then let me come down there and take over her case.”

  I stared at Ceri Nelson, then, with a nearly overwhelming sense of gratitude.

  Melissa hoisted herself out of her chair just as an insistent pounding came to my front door.

  “Okay,” she said, making certain to display her complete reluctance to believe us.

  I went to the door. Two state patrolmen stood silently, staring into the house.

  “This one goes with me,” Melissa said to the patrolmen, inclining her head toward Issie. “I need to get her paperwork for Milledgeville. That’s where she escaped from while ago.”

  The two men stared.

  “Take the dead body over to the mortuary,” she went on. “I’ll take Ms. Newcomb to the lockup with me until we can get it all sorted out. Okay?”

  “Will the sheriff be—will Skidmore be all right with that?” one of the men asked.

  “He will if I tell him he will,” she said, her voice made of steel.

  Both men looked down. One said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Melissa Mathews was a deputy sheriff, and these two men were state patrol, but it was clear who was in charge.

  “I’d like to go with Issie,” Ceri began.

  “Nope,” Melissa said with complete finality. “You can come visit later. But right now, me and her’s about to have a talk. Step over here, please, Ms. Newcomb.”

  Issie closed her eyes for a second, and then stood. I was hoping she’d glance my way, but she didn’t.

  Melissa put Issie in handcuffs before I knew what was going on.

  “You’ll sit quiet in the back of the squad car,” Melissa said, as if she were explaining the rules of some game to a child, “and I’ll sit in front. And when I ask you a question, you answer it like a straight shot. We clear?”

  Issie nodded, not looking at the officer.

  “When can we come to your office?” I asked Melissa.

  “I want to question this person,” she said, “then process the paperwork, and then talk to the sheriff. So it won’t be until later this morning. You’uns ain’t tired?”

  I suddenly felt every muscle in my body. “God, yes,” I said. “I am.”

  “All right then,” Melissa said.

  “Issie?” I said suddenly.

  She did not look at me.

  “What keepsakes?” I asked. “What is it you got out of this house that was important to you?”

  “The wedding ring I showed you, for one,” she mumbled. “It belonged to Momma. She took it off when she left your father for good. That was in her room, along with some poems I wrote for her when I was little. I used to like to write poems. They’re still down in the cave. And a sweater you used to wear when you were teaching. Smells like you.”

  I started to respond, but Melissa took Issie by the elbow and began to ease her out the front door. I watched them leave, still hoping Issie would look back my way, a quick flash of kinship. She did not.

  The door was closed. Suddenly my house was silent, and seemed empty.

  28

  Eventually Ceri stood, groaning and rubbing her neck.

  “If there’s any of that apple brandy left,” she said, “I could certainly have some.”

  “Me too,” I agreed, shuffling toward the kitchen.

  The sun was past the horizon, and gold mixed with red, shot through bare black tree limbs. That light made the woods outside my house look like a set from a lavish play, not remotely real at all.

  “Should you cover the windows in your living room?” Ceri asked, still standing at the sofa.

  “You could pull the curtains to,” I suggested, not looking back.

  She did. The room was significantly darkened.

  I continued on my important mission, the immediate acquisition of alcohol.

  In no time, Drs. Ceridwen Nelson and Fever Devilin, doubtless charter members of the Oddest Names in the World Club, sat at my kitchen table drinking locally made calvados from short plain glasses.

  After the second glass was finished, and the third was poured, I began to ask the questions I wanted to ask.

  “So, by way of discovering why, exactly, Isolde Newcomb came to my house five nights before Christmas,” I said, staring at my glass, “we think that she was trying to heal herself of sexual trauma and bad mothering?”

  Ceri smiled. “Not exactly. I think foremost in her mind was revenge.”

  “Revenge? For what?”

  “For the fact that you had the happy family and childhood that she didn’t.”

  I laughed until I coughed and felt light-headed.

  “I know,” Ceri said, “but that’s what she assumed. You got a father and a mother, a nice house, a college career. She got slapped around by her mother, never knew her father, didn’t know she had siblings, lived in Fit’s Mill, for God’s sake. Blue Mountain is Mayberry. Fit’s Mill is— I don’t know, Kudzu Hell.”

  “How do you know Fit’s Mill?” I asked.

  “I know the area,” she said, somewhat evasively, I thought.

  “So my sister, my half sister, wanted revenge.” I reached for my glass.

  “And she wanted to make you suffer as she had suffered, for years, with shame and remorse, and head-splitting pain. I mean, if her chronology is correct, her own mother slapped her in Milledgeville and then died, leaving her in a state hospital forever.”

  “But why did David come to break her out?” I wondered out loud. “I mean, if that part of her story is true.”

  “Someone in the Newcomb family must have known that your mother died, and wondered what had happened to little Isolde. I mean, from what I know about the Newcomb family, odd as they are, they do watch out for their own. Witness the vengeance wreaked on some poor idiot who grabbed Issie once. He got the Orvid Wire Treatment from her mother. Your mother.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “There were plenty of things wrong with my mother, and she was prone to hysterical exaggeration. I can see her calling up Tristan and telling him that his daughter had been menaced by some toothless, backwoods ape. But dispatching Orvid to take
care of it? That would have been Tristan’s doing. Not mother’s.”

  “Oh.” Ceri took a sip of her brandy.

  “Still, there are plenty of unanswered questions here,” I said. “Why was David— why did David do that to Skidmore?”

  “Remember how we said that sometimes things get stuck on a sort of loop in your brain, and you keep playing those events over and over again, hoping to make them right, or to exorcise them?”

  “Yes, God.”

  “David was deeply affected, as a young person—who knows how old—by watching a hero of his destroy a man in that manner. My bet is that David has done that before, reenacted that event with other people as the victims, in an effort to fix himself, to stop nightmares, or to quell overwhelming fears. Something like that.”

  “So, your take on every bit of insane behavior is that it’s an attempt, on the part of the lunatic, to correct himself, or herself?”

  “Yes.” She drank back the rest of her brandy. “Yes it is.”

  At that exact moment, my front door burst open and Lucinda came charging in, still dressed in her nurse’s uniform, hat and all.

  “Fever!” she shouted, before she saw us in the kitchen.

  I stood and turned, only a little unsteadily. “Hey.”

  “Lord.” Lucinda closed her eyes and exhaled. “I saw the ambulance and the state patrol on the road coming from here, and they didn’t stop when I waved, and—Lord.”

  “I’m all right.” I went to her.

  She threw her arms around my neck. I could feel how frantically her heart was beating. I put my arms around her, too.

  “I’m all right,” I repeated.

  We stood there for a moment. Then she seemed to realize that Ceri was in the kitchen, and let go of me.

  “Come on in,” Ceri said, still seated. “We’re having a nightcap after a very, very long night.”

  “You’re finished with your shift?” I asked Lucinda.

  “Just got off. I called you, but you didn’t answer.” She noticed my bandage. “What happened to your arm?”