“You don’t listen, do you?”
“Tell me about the sister.”
“Who? Roylynn?”
“Where is she now?”
“West Virginia.”
“Does she look like Hailey?”
“The spitting image.”
“What was it like, seeing her?”
“Strange. Affecting. Sad. False.”
“Maybe I should meet her, talk to her.”
“Why?”
“Just to be considerate. I mean, she lost something, too. I think I should pay my respects. I think I ought to. What do you think?”
“I think you’re pathetic.”
“Maybe. But still, I don’t know. Just to see her. Just to talk. I think I should.”
“She’s in another world, Guy. That bastard damaged them both, and I don’t know who was damaged more, Roylynn in her asylum or Hailey. You have to move forward, you have to find a new life.”
“I want what I had.”
“You forget quickly, don’t you? What you had was dead already.”
“You don’t know that. I’ve been thinking about it. We had problems, yes, but I think we could have worked them through.”
“Your love was a con from the start.”
“Shut up.”
“She seduced you for the money. She seduced you because she knew all along that Juan Gonzalez had a preexisting condition that would have destroyed her case.”
“Shut up, you bastard.”
“Don’t you understand what Cutlip did to her? He hurt her so badly, took something so precious from her, that she never recovered. He put a flaw in her heart. She couldn’t love, not the way you thought she could. It was never there for her, only for you. It was all in your emotions, not hers.”
“You don’t know a damn thing. It was real, and it would have lasted. I wouldn’t have allowed it to disappear. We would have worked it out.”
“Let it go.”
“I don’t want to let it go.”
“Move on.”
“I don’t know how.”
He was right, he didn’t know how. But I knew how for him.
I don’t know if I would have done it without Roylynn. I remembered her, so heartbreakingly beautiful, sitting in the golden glow at her asylum, and I remembered how I felt when I saw her. He would feel it, too, I was certain. If he found her, which wouldn’t be so difficult and which he seemed inclined to do, he would feel it, too. She’s in me, she had said about her sister, she always has been. I can feel her breath in my breath, her touch in my touch. When I look into a mirror, I see two faces. When I speak, I hear two voices. What would happen if he went to Roylynn? What would it draw out of him? Whatever he felt would have nothing to do with the lovely woman with her slim black physics book, but it would be real to Guy, and the damage it could cause was hard to predict. Reverend Henson had told me to leave her be, and though I had ignored him, he was right. She didn’t need to be further haunted by the ghosts of her sister’s past. And neither did Guy.
“Remember our theory, the other-lover theory?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Remember how neatly it worked? The other lover had been given a key for assignations. The other lover had been shown your gun so he knew where it was. It explained all the facts in evidence, how the killer could do what he did.”
“I remember. It was my theory. I almost had to throttle you to get you to argue it. So?”
“So, since we know that Bobo was trying to kill you and instead killed Hailey, how do we explain those facts now?”
“Who cares?”
“There was no break-in, so how did Bobo get a key? There was no evidence of a mad search of the closets, so how did Bobo know where to find the gun? How did Bobo know to climb the stairs in the dark and turn to the left in the dark and find the mattress right there, on the floor, in the dark, the mattress where you would have been sleeping if you had been sleeping? How did Bobo even know where you lived?”
“Cutlip must have known.”
“How? He’d never been to Philly.”
“What are you trying to tell me here, Victor?”
“I’m trying to tell you to think it through.”
“I don’t want to think it through.”
“You want to live your life turned around, wallowing in the past. Fine. Wallow. Think it through.”
“Stop it.”
“Think it through, Guy, and then tell me how true and perfect was the love you had with Hailey Prouix.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a word.”
“Don’t take my word on it,” I said. “Just think it through.”
The questions I had just asked him were the same questions I had climbed the stairs of the SeaBright Motel to put to Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, and why I had wanted to go in there alone. At first I intended to trick him into a confession. That was why I had brought the tape recorder. But the sight of his gentle circling and self-flayed flesh had changed my plans. It wasn’t a confession anymore I was seeking when I entered that room, but still I had questions that needed answers. I was hoping for some explanation other than the one I had developed, desperate for some innocuous answer that had been eluding me. Instead he showed me a scene different from what I imagined, more painful, more pathetic, more heartbreaking. It chokes me now to even conjure it.
Henderson, Nevada. A private room at the Desert Winds. Cutlip sits in his chair, sitting as tall as his withered frame will allow, staring down. Dwayne stands beside him. And curled on the floor, like a little girl lost, in tears, like a girl facing punishment, curled on the floor is Hailey Prouix. I remember her always so strong, in control, always the master of the situation, so I find this tableau incomprehensible. I had expected to find Hailey the manipulator, the plotter, the Hailey that I knew, but I believed Bobo, every word, and so she is on the floor, in tears, begging. Begging? Begging that he not demand this of her. Begging him to leave her finally alone. But Cutlip isn’t listening, like he’s never listened. You been a bad girl, he tells her, like he’s told her before, hundreds of times before. You done let it climb out of control. And now there’s trouble, and someone need clean up the mess. He’ll take ever thing we have, ever damn thing. But I know how to handle peckerheads like that. You’ve been a bad girl, and once again I need clean up your mess. Like before. For twenty-five years that’s all I done. But this is it, no more after this, I’m too tired, too sick. My love can only stretch so far. No, don’t be going on like that. I always know’d what you needed before, and I know this time, too. Now, you tell Bobo here where he hides that gun you told me about. You tell Bobo what we need know and your daddy’ll take care of it, just like I always done before.
Hailey Prouix.
Even before Bobo confirmed it, I knew in my heart that Hailey was part of the plot to kill Guy. A final sacrifice, a final offering to the destructive love, the Shiva of her emotions, that incomprehensible thing between her and her uncle that warped her and defined her at the same time, one final unspeakable act to end it once and for all.
She was so happy that last day of her life, so relieved. The night before, I was to be her alibi. She had expected to return home and find Guy dead on the mattress. Guy had said she was startled to see him at home, and I’m sure she was, having braced herself for the sight of her bloodied and dead fiancé. And then, assuming that Bobo had backed out of the killing, relief fell upon her like a prayer. Then and there she decided to leave Guy, to do the right way what she was letting Cutlip do the worst way—the troubles, the money, the scandal be damned. That was why she was so happy that last day, why our lovemaking was so joyful and expectant, why the possibilities seemed suddenly so verdant.
And so she had ended it with Guy, that very night, and was lying in bed with a fresh bruise and a fresher future, when she heard the front door of the house open, and she knew, immediately, who it was. Bobo. He hadn’t given up, he had simply gotten the day wrong or, scared off by the traffic ticket, had delay
ed a day, not thinking it mattered. And now here he was searching for the gun. And now here he was coming toward her step by step. And now the past that she had thought she had shucked forever just the night before was climbing up the stairs.
It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind at that very moment. Sadness, fear, disgust, despair, relief? Was she thinking of her father and the way he deserted her those many years ago by his death? Was she thinking of the dark nights when her uncle crept into her room? Was she thinking of Jesse Sterrett and the way he was murdered and how she protected her uncle while she used her lover’s death to get herself out of Pierce? Was she thinking of me? It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind, but we do know what she did as Bobo approached. She didn’t shout, she didn’t rise and send him away, she didn’t pull Guy from the bathtub to protect her, she didn’t call for the police. What she did instead was lift the comforter high over her head so that Bobo wouldn’t know for sure who was beneath, so that Bobo would think it was the original target, so that Bobo would take the gun and fire into the mattress and end it all.
She wasn’t the first Prouix sister to try to kill herself, but she was the one who succeeded.
There were moments when I had imagined I understood Hailey Prouix, and, to be fair, not all of those moments were in the depths of sex when understanding flows like cheap champagne through the overheated synapses of the brain. There were moments when I felt a deep connection with her, moments when I believed I caught a glimpse of the interiors beneath her lovely shell. There were moments, God help me, when I thought the solution to Hailey’s sadness might just be me.
And now, sitting in the dark on the steps of the house in which she died, sitting beside another of her lovers, all I knew with certainty was how little of her I understood. What is love when it is based on myth, on a false image, on the lies we tell ourselves? What is love when the imagined object of the emotion bears no relation to actuality? Can that even be love at all?
I didn’t have any answers, but by believing I loved her I had convinced myself I understood her, and in so doing I had failed her. If I had the least inkling of what she’d been through, maybe I could have done something, said something, forced something, maybe I could have changed everything. But of course I did not. I had deluded myself that I understood, when in reality I understood nothing.
Nothing.
“Oh, my God,” said Guy in a moan of recognition. He was thinking it through, we were thinking it through, and it would take us both a very long time.
About the Author
William Lashner is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was a criminal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice. His novels—Fatal Flaw; Bitter Truth; Hostile Witness—have been published worldwide in ten languages. He lives with his family outside of Philadelphia.
Also by William Lashner
Veritas
Hostile Witness
Credits
Jacket design by High Design, NYC
Jacket photograph by Jan Cobb
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted materials:
Brief excerpts from “Totem,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Ariel,” and “Daddy” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes, copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
FATAL FLAW. Copyright © 2003 by William Lashner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition August 2003 eISBN 9780061742866
FIRST EDITION
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