"Both?" Kate said, raising her eyebrows.
Ida Belle chuckled a little. "Yours were not the only eyebrows raised by the situation, my dear. No one in town could surmise how the three of them would work it out. Clearly she could not marry them both, but everyone knew she would most certainly choose one of them. I think the boys simply put that thought aside in their joint courting of her. She was a beautiful girl and so sweet, a talented musician. She dreamed of attending Julliard.”
"What happened?"
"The three of them were on their way to the Christmas dance. Your father was driving. No one ever really understood what happened. He likely hit a patch of icy road before the bridge coming into town and he had been drinking. The car rolled several times. The impact broke Alice's neck. She died on the spot."
"That's horrible," Kate said. "And Daddy and George?"
"Not a scratch on either one of them, but they didn't speak for years after that night. Your father assumed complete responsibility for the accident, but did not face charges. He retreated to the ranch. Your grandfather died within the year, and Langston took over the whole operation. He lived as a complete recluse, only coming to town when ranch business demanded. Grew an awful long beard, had a wild, angry look in his eyes."
"And George?"
"He went to college, graduated at the top of his class, attended law school back east, and after several years came home with his fiancé to start a law practice here."
"Pauline," Kate said.
"No," Ida Belle said. "Irene. Your mother."
Kate felt as if all the air had gone out of the room. "My mother?" she asked incredulously.
"Yes."
"Then how . . ."
"Langston took her away from George."
"How?"
"It was like watching a man reborn. He shaved his beard, began to dress like a cowboy out of the movies, wearing those gorgeous Stetsons. He made every church social, every bake sale, and every dance. At the end of the summer, Irene ran away with him. They married in Mexico."
"Miss Ida Belle," Kate said, "if there is one thing I can tell you for certain, it's that my father did not love my mother."
"True, my dear," the old woman said. "The whole county had no doubt of that. He did it to break George Fisk's heart, and it worked. Why Fisk went on to work as Langston's lawyer all these years is completely beyond me, especially after the business with Pauline."
"What business with Pauline?" Kate asked, absolutely horrified. "There's more?"
"Shortly after your birth, your father had an affair with Pauline Fisk."
Kate sat back heavily against the sofa cushions. "Why have I never heard anything about this?" she asked, in total shock.
"The town hated your father, Katherine, but everyone adored your mother. Irene was the soul of kindness and compassion. You don't understand how much good she did in this community, fighting Langston every step of the way until it killed her. No one held your father's behavior against her or against you girls."
"But I don't understand," Kate protested. "If Daddy was driving the car the night Alice died, shouldn't George have been the one with the vendetta?"
"One would think so, my dear," Ida Belle said mildly. "One would think so."
"Do you think John Fisk knows about all this?"
"George Fisk is also a highly respected man in this town," Ida Belle said. "Like your mother, he has been the agent of good and charitable acts. Many a man in this town owes his life's success to George. He was a most forgiving county judge when it came to the escapades of the young. People repaid him by not gossiping about him and his family, and they forgave Pauline because Langston used her ruthlessly and then abandoned her to the mercies of her husband. True to his nature, George took her back without reproach."
"So my father just went about his whole life taking out his pain on innocent people?" Kate said, outraged. "Ruining other people's lives because he could?"
"That is the common belief, Katherine," Ida Belle said, "but the truth of the matter is that no one really has the information about what happened that night except Langston and George. I can only tell you that George never made one move to counteract Langston in any way. I witnessed them cursing one another, but George Fisk took what your father dished out. He must have had a reason for doing so."
21
"Poor Daddy," Mandy said, wiping tears from her eyes.
Kate and Jenny both stared at her. "You did not just say that," Jenny finally spluttered.
"But he must have loved Alice so much for her death to change him so completely," Mandy said. "He must have been in such terrible pain. It's so sad. "
"And what about Mama?" Jenny demanded. "And Pauline Fisk and George? What about their pain? What about our pain?"
"I meant all of it is sad, Jenny," Mandy said in a small voice. "The whole terrible story."
Jenny softened at the hurt expression in Mandy's eyes, "I'm sorry, baby," she said. "I'm not mad at you."
"I know, Jenny," Mandy said, but her lower lip still trembled. "It's just . . . now we understand Daddy wasn't always like, like . . . how he was with us."
They all sat silently for several minutes, each lost in their individual thoughts, until Jenny couldn't stand the reverie any longer, "Kate, you're being awful quiet. What are you thinking?"
"That there's probably no man in the county who hated Daddy more than George Fisk," she said.
"A man in his seventies who walks with a cane did not get out of the barn swinging hand over hand on the rafters," Jenny said.
"John Fisk is strong enough," Kate said evenly, "and he certainly doesn't want to talk about any of this."
"Would you?" Jenny asked.
"That might explain why Daddy was on his knees," Mandy said suddenly.
"What do you mean?" Kate asked.
"What if John Fisk came out here and confronted Daddy about all the awful things he'd done to the Fisk family and Daddy was asking for forgiveness before he killed himself?" Mandy said, hope shining in her eyes. "That would mean Daddy felt bad about all the things he'd done. That would be something, don't you think?"
"Sweetheart," Jenny said, taking Mandy's hand. "Does any of what you just said really sound like Daddy?"
"Well . . . ," Mandy faltered, "no, I guess not . . . but, well people can change . . . can't they?"
"Some people," Kate agreed. "Some people can change. But usually because they want to. Daddy didn't."
"Are you going to talk to John about all of this?" Jenny asked.
Kate shook her head. "No. He'd lie or dodge the question. If he was the person in the barn, he'll never tell us what happened."
"The only other person who could tell us what happened in the barn is dead," Jenny pointed out.
"Yes," Kate said, "but we might still be able to find some information in Daddy's study. We've been putting off doing anything about that room. Tonight is the night."
"Didn't you tell me John Fisk still practices law on the east coast?" Jenny asked.
"Yes, why?”
"One of my friends in New York conducts background checks on corporate hires," she said. "Gretchen will be able to find even the tiniest speck of dirt on John Fisk's business dealings."
"Good. Call her and then let's go through Daddy's study," Kate said.
"He'd tan our hides if he knew we were touching one thing in that room," Mandy warned. "We weren't even allowed to walk into his study."
"Fine," Kate said, her jaw set in a hard line. "If the old bastard's ghost shows up, we might get some answers."
Four hours later, sitting on the floor amid a litter of old issues of Texas Sheep & Goat Raiser Magazine, Kate let loose with a string of profanity worthy of Langston Lockwood himself.
"Feel better?" Jenny asked. She was sitting on the sofa leafing through yet another of the identical leather ledgers that filled one complete shelf in the antique lawyer's case beside their father's massive roll top desk.
"No," Kate said darkly. "And how the hel
l many pictures have been taken in this state of kids in oversized hats holding snot-nosed sheep at stock shows?"
"Millions," Jenny said, pointing to framed photos on the walls of each of them in oversized hats holding sheep at the San Antonio Stock Show.
"How can a man, even one as ill-tempered as Daddy, not leave one shred of personal information behind?" Kate said.
Mandy was curled up on the sofa thumbing through piles of file folders. "Well," she said, "we can track every dime he ever spent on feed over the last 40 years."
"We must be going about this the wrong way," Jenny said, closing the ledger. "Daddy was like a locked bank vault. Nobody ever knew what he was really thinking. So if he did keep personal things, they wouldn't be where anyone could find them. He would use a hiding place. Did he put a safe in this room?"
"Not that I ever knew about," Kate said, standing up.
After several fruitless minutes that included taking pictures off the walls and testing for loose floorboards, they came up empty again, but Mandy had an odd look on her face.
"What?" Jenny asked.
"Well, we think Daddy didn't go to the barn that day of his own free will, right?"
"Yeah," Kate said. "So what?"
"Well, that might mean whoever was here that day was with him in the house, watching him, possibly even holding a gun on him. Daddy would be forced to find a way to send a message without being obvious," she said.
"Okay," Kate said. "Go on."
"What if something he did was a clue," she said.
"You mean like putting a thousand dollar Stetson on to walk to the barn?" Jenny asked.
"The hat box," Kate said. "Where's the box the hat was in?"
In the deep cedar closet in the hall they found stacks of hat boxes. Kate stood on the step ladder and opened each one until she found the empty box and grinned. "What is it?" Jenny asked, looking up at her.
"It's empty, but it's too heavy," Kate said, handing the box down to her sister. "There's something in there. Let's go to the kitchen where the light's better."
They walked single file down the hall, Kate flipping on the kitchen light as Jenny set the box in the middle of the table, removing the lid. She ran her hand around the satin lining and felt at the bottom of the box. "Here," she said. "There's something at the bottom. Mandy, hand me one of those knives."
Jenny used the blade to gently pry the lining away from the top of the box, which came loose with almost no resistance. "It's been glued back in place," she said. "Just enough to hold it. I think he used school paste."
When she worked all the silk away, she lifted the lining out whole, revealing a small black notebook and a pile of faded letters tied with a yellow hair ribbon. She lifted both out and offered the notebook to Kate. "You do it," she said.
Kate slipped off the elastic cord holding the cover closed and flipped to the first page, instantly recognizing her father's precise and oddly elegant handwriting.
"'I don't know why I'm bothering to write this all down,'" she read. "'Likely because I'll never tell another living soul, but I wasn't drunk and I wasn't driving the night Alice was killed. George was driving. He begged me not to tell. It would cost him his scholarship, and going to school meant everything to him because his family was so poor. So he's there now and I'm here, hated in my own town and so lonely without my Alice I can hardly breathe. Life has no purpose. If I believed in it, I'd go to the barn and end it all, but suicide is for cowards and I'm no coward.'"
For the next hour, through their father's increasingly bitter words, they listened as his personality disintegrated under the weight of the secret he carried. The pages of the notebook were interleaved with newspaper clippings chronicling George Fisk's increasing roster of accomplishments.
"Listen to this one," Kate said, holding a yellowed scrap between her fingers. "'This paper is happy to announce that George Hampton Fisk, Esq. will be returning to our town to open a practice of law. We have it from a reliable source Mr. Fisk, who will be accompanied by his fiancé, Irene Northrup, may be contemplating a run for the state legislature. Could this young barrister be headed for the governor's mansion in Austin? This editor believes our town's most successful native son is destined for political greatness.'"
"What did Daddy write about that?" Mandy asked.
Kate flipped the page. "He wrote, 'Not while I have breath in my body.'"
In the entries that followed, Langston detailed his campaign to ruin George Fisk's political aspirations. He described how he courted Irene, winning her away from George and running off with her to Mexico. Then Kate's voice broke.
"What is it?" Jenny asked, laying her hand on Kate's arm.
Kate shook her head and handed the notebook to Jenny who scanned the page until her eyes stopped on a single sentence. "'Irene is a good woman and she doesn't deserve what I'm doing to her, but God help me, I can't stop now.'"
Jenny glanced away, cleared her throat, and then said, "Do you want me to go on from here?"
When Kate nodded, Jenny continued the narrative. It was all there. The planned affair with Pauline Fisk, forcing George to work as his attorney, and the increasingly outright blackmail. But there were also quick, hasty entries.
When Kate was born Langston wrote, "We have a daughter. She resembles my mother and she's strong to be so tiny. She's a Lockwood alright." For Jenny he said, "Another girl. God knows I don't deserve sons. She's pretty. Hair like Irene's and the eyes of a little dreamer."
But it was the entry for Mandy's birth that made them all cry. "Is Almighty God merciful or a vengeful tyrant? I swear she is the image of my Alice. Is it even possible she might come back to me this way? That her soul is in my tiny baby's body?"
"That's why he treated you differently," Kate said. "He thought you looked like her. He thought you were her."
"But that's not even possible," Mandy protested.
"It doesn't matter, Baby Sister," Kate said. "He believed it. Is there anything else, Jenny?"
She turned the page. "One entry, dated about two weeks before he died, 'I'll just be goddamned if I'll let George Fisk off the hook now. Not after all we've been through.'" She looked up. "That's it. The rest of the book is blank."
Kate stood up and walked out of the room, coming back with a bottle of whiskey and three glasses. She poured them each a drink. "I think we could use it," she said, in answer to Mandy's raised eyebrow.
"So Daddy put a bullet through a thousand dollar hat to make us hunt for the box and find this?" Jenny asked, taking the glass her sister offered to her.
"It would seem so."
"But what does that tell us about the day he died?" she said.
Mandy swirled the liquor around in the bottom of her own glass and said, "What if it happened like this. Maybe somebody came here to talk to Daddy and it all went so bad they pulled a gun on him and told him to go to the barn. Daddy never walked out of the door without his hat on. He probably said he wanted to get his hat and picked that one to send us a message. I mean even if we hadn't figured out the rest, we'd have found the empty box sooner or later."
"But what was he trying to tell us?" Kate said.
"Maybe he just wanted us to hear his side of the old story," Mandy said. "It was all bound to come out after he died. Someone would have told us."
"In this town, you'd think so," Kate agreed, "but I had to go looking for the story."
"Then that just leaves one interpretation," Jenny said, knocking back her drink. "Somebody in the Fisk family, most likely John, had some involvement in our father's death. Now, the question is, what are we going to do about it?"
22
Two days later while Jenny was working in her studio, her iMac rang with a FaceTime call. The screen filled with the smiling face of her friend, Gretchen Larsen.
"Hey you!" Gretchen greeted her cheerfully. "How's the wild west treating you?"
Jenny watched as a small blond streak rocketed by in the background of the picture. "The kids are home while you're wor
king?" she asked, surprised.
Gretchen rolled her eyes. "A pipe broke at the school and flooded their building. The Fire Marshall wouldn't let them stay, so my 'investigative woman of mystery' image is shot to shit for the time being."
They both laughed. "The pitfalls of working from home," Jenny said. "I had a goat try to come in my door this morning."
"A goat?" Gretchen asked. "They just walk around down there?"
"No. Its mother wouldn't let it nurse, so we all stepped in taking turns with the bottle feeding. The little beast decided to fall most in love with me," Jenny said, trying not to smile.
"I saw that!" Gretchen said triumphantly. "You do have a maternal streak."
"For goats," Jenny corrected her archly. "A maternal streak for goats and other four-legged creatures only."
"Whatever," Gretchen said. "So, Mr. Jonathan Hampton Fisk, Esq."
"Did you find anything?"
"As far as credentials go, everything about his checks out. Top 10% of his class at Harvard, started out in a small boutique firm here, tried high-dollar low-profile cases."
"What kind of 'boutique' practice?" Jenny asked.
"From what I can tell, very wealthy people who may or may not have achieved their money by legitimate means, but who do not like answering questions."
"Mob?" Jenny asked.
"No, doesn't smell like that to me," Gretchen said. "But lots and lots of power, no doubt about that."
"Anything else?"
"Yes. Your boy likes the ponies . . . and the dogs . . . and sports . . ."
"Gambling," Jenny said. "How much is he in for?"
"No idea, but his recent move out of Dallas in support of his beloved and aged father was prefaced by a significant 'downsizing' if you get my drift."
"He told my sister he still works with clients on the east coast," Jenny said. "Do you know who they are?"
"No," Gretchen said, "but Fisk is a pilot, and oddly enough, he was able to pay off what he owed on the plane and keep it at the last minute. He's been in and out of JFK several times a month since he moved back to your hometown.”
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 10