No Mercy--A Mystery

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  In the dark, with no traffic, Boston felt like the small city it really was. All those old neighborhoods, rich and poor, crammed on top of one another inside forty-eight jagged square miles. She reached the Gallaghers’ house in less than ten minutes. Her footsteps resounded on the hushed street. Bright twinkling lights in all colors blazed away in the row houses, Christmas trees visible through the windows as the sleeping occupants waited to see if Santa would come down the chimney. Ellery herself used the front door. She pressed the bell hard and repeatedly until Patrick Gallagher appeared, dressed in a flannel robe and slippers, his hair matted on one side and his scowl firmly in place. “What in the hell is going on? Do you know what time it is?”

  “I need to speak to Myra.”

  “The hell you say! It’s Christmas. Leave my family alone.” He moved as if to shut the door on her, and Ellery blocked him with her body.

  “I can talk to her now, or I can come back in a few hours with the police. Your call.”

  He opened his mouth, possibly to curse her out again, but a soft voice stopped him. “Pat, let her in.”

  “We don’t have to,” he said, turning around to his wife. “She’s not a cop and we don’t have to do anything she says.”

  “Let her in,” Myra repeated, her tone scolding. “It’s freezing out there.” She rolled back her wheelchair so that he could widen the door to admit Ellery.

  Ellery blew on her hands as she entered the cramped hall. It barely held the three of them and Myra’s chair. Though the light was dim, Ellery could see the wheel tracks on the wooden floor, worn by two and a half decades of use. “What’s so awful important it can’t wait until morning?” Patrick asked as he drew the robe more tightly around his body.

  “I’d like to speak to Myra about that.”

  Patrick frowned, the wrinkles deepening on his grizzled chin. “Whatever you want to say to Myra, you can say to me. We have no secrets.”

  Myra’s blue eyes met Ellery’s, and she did not look afraid. “No, dear. You go back to bed and rest. I’ll just go make some tea and we can have a chat.” She said this as though it were totally normal to have an unexpected visitor drop in at three in the morning on Christmas.

  Patrick took some convincing. “I don’t like this,” he said, glaring at Ellery. “I don’t like the way she keeps coming around here, poking her nose in where it don’t belong.”

  “I know you don’t, dear.” Myra patted his arm in loving fashion. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, and this will be the last time she comes here, I promise you.”

  Ellery and Patrick exchanged a curious look, both of them apparently surprised by this certain pronouncement from Myra. Eventually, he harrumphed his way back to the bedroom, closing its door with an emphatic slam. Myra wheeled herself into the kitchen, and Ellery followed. “Please, sit,” Myra said as she pulled the kettle off the stove and began to fill it with water. Ellery couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s discolored, waxy skin. How terrified she must have been when the flames started up around her, and the child was gone.

  “Do you like herbal tea?” Myra asked pleasantly. “I find chamomile helps me sleep at night.”

  “Anything is fine.” Ellery still hovered near the door, not taking the offer of a chair. She’d come here on a mission and she was prepared to fulfill it, but it was harder than she’d imagined, here in this simple kitchen with Myra.

  “There,” Myra said as she turned the gas on under the kettle. “It’ll just be a moment.” She turned and regarded Ellery. “I’ve been expecting you, you know.”

  Ellery raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t known until an hour ago that she was coming, so this news came as a surprise to her. “Oh?”

  Myra nodded. “Ever since a couple of days ago, when I saw what happened with you and Wendy. How you tracked down the man who—who hurt her. I knew eventually you’d turn up here.” She hesitated, and her voice grew soft. “For me.”

  At the admission, Ellery groped blindly for a chair, because now she needed it. She lowered herself in, her eyes still trained on Myra. “You set the fire that night.”

  Myra’s left hand started a tremor, and she stilled it with her right. A painful silence passed between them, but eventually, Myra answered with a single, short nod.

  Ellery let out a shaky breath. There it was after all these years: the truth. It gave her no pleasure. “The Blaze—he saw you and Bobby at the store,” she continued. “He didn’t see anyone else before the fire. The prosecution thought he was a useless witness because they were looking for a third party, someone other than you who came into the store that night. But there wasn’t anyone, was there? The Blaze got it right all along.”

  “Yes.” The air seemed to leave her body with the word, exhausting her, leaving her limp in the chair.

  “But why?”

  Myra forced herself upright, her mouth a grim line. “For the money, of course. The store was going under, there was nothing that could be done to save it. We could only save ourselves. Jacob needed a lawyer. David wanted out so badly, and he was getting desperate. He and Patrick fought constantly, when they talked at all. He was angry, he was threatening—” She shut her mouth with a snap, as if to hold back the last, awful part, but Reed had already deduced it.

  “He was threatening to reveal your affair,” Ellery finished.

  Myra clawed at her throat with one gnarled hand. “Yes,” she said finally. “He was going to tell Patrick the truth unless I could convince Pat somehow to buy him out of the business. But there was no money for it! David just wouldn’t hear reason on the subject.”

  Ellery bit her lip, wondering how far to push. Myra didn’t seem to be holding anything back. Maybe she had just been waiting all these years for someone to come and ask her for the truth. “Did he know that Bobby was his son?”

  Myra drew a sharp breath and held it in. She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. “No,” she said after a long moment, releasing the breath in a rush. “I didn’t want him to know. Patrick and I had patched things up, at least mostly, and he adored Bobby. David didn’t ever want kids. What good would come from the truth?”

  The teakettle’s whistle pierced the room, and Myra rolled over to remove it from the stove. She dutifully doled out two cups of tea and carefully brought them to the table.

  “The fire,” she said, “was going to solve all our problems at once. The store would be gone, that terrible weight from around our necks. David would take his share and go away once and for all. We would have money to pay Jake’s bills, to keep him out of the worst of the trouble and give him a second chance. And that’s what happened, you know. That part worked just like I dreamed.” She shot Ellery a pleading look.

  Ellery shook her head. “Bobby died,” she reminded her.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Myra’s cry exploded with anguish. “Don’t you think I live with that every day, every waking hour? Of course I would take it back in an instant if I could. But … but…” Her chin started to tremble and she paused to gather herself. “An instant was all it took. I was naïve, stupid. I thought all you had to do was scatter some gasoline around the place and set a match. I didn’t realize how far in I’d gotten. I didn’t realize Bobby was no longer between me and the door. The curtains went up immediately and I couldn’t see or hear anything. ‘Bobby, Bobby—where are you?’ I yelled and the fire seemed to leap into my mouth. It was like he’d vanished literally in a cloud of smoke. I couldn’t find him. Later, they told me he got caught up in a backdraft. He’d never had a chance.” She shook her head sadly.

  “Why the hell did you bring him in there in the first place?”

  Myra’s mouth twisted into an ironic grimace. “I told the truth about that part. Pat was sick, his head in the toilet. Bobby woke up at night, like he often did, and he would climb out of his bed. Jake was off God knows where. It didn’t seem safe leaving the baby at home on his own.” She covered her face with both hands. “I should have just left him at home.”


  Her sorrow seemed to sink down to her very bones, and Ellery felt the stirrings of pity for her. Then she remembered the aftermath. “Luis Carnevale went to prison,” she said, her tone hardening again. “You never said a thing.”

  Myra nodded, accepting the weight of this on her slim shoulders. “I was in the hospital for several months,” she said. “Multiple skin grafts. No one liked to talk to me about the fire, and I sure wasn’t about to bring it up. I didn’t watch television. I didn’t do much of anything except lie in bed and think about Bobby. I prayed hard to God to take me then, to let me be with my baby. I didn’t deserve to live.”

  Ellery looked away. She saw the picture of the Virgin Mary that presided over the kitchen table. Twenty-six years Myra had sat here eating her meals under that painting, all the while swallowing back the truth.

  “Finally, I realized I had it backward,” Myra continued. “I didn’t deserve to die. This was my punishment: to outlive my baby. To spend the rest of my days knowing that it was me who caused his death. By the time I even heard Luis Carnevale’s name, he was already on trial. We’d had so many fires that year. Everyone said it had to be him.” She gave a tiny shrug. “I guess I let myself believe it, too. Turning myself in wouldn’t have helped anything. It wouldn’t bring Bobby back. Jake, he was so fragile back then, so torn up by his dad and me fighting, by the store having problems—and then the loss of his brother. He needed me. I’d already lost one boy, and that was my fault. I wasn’t about to unburden myself only to heap more trouble on my other son. Or on Pat. They had suffered enough for my sins.”

  Ellery sat back in her chair, the one carved with such care by Patrick Gallagher. She pictured him gently helping his wife to and from the car. He’d had a small life, maybe not a bad one, but was it the one he would have chosen if he knew the truth? “Your version of the story is tragic,” she told Myra, “but it’s also incredibly self-serving. You say you kept your mouth shut to help your family, but it also kept you out of prison.”

  Myra’s gaze turned dull and distant. “Prison,” she said finally. “I’m ready, if that’s what you want. Lock me up and throw away the key.”

  Ellery tried to imagine a DA who would take this case on, twenty-six years after the fact, and with another man sitting in jail for the crime. The state wouldn’t care to admit its guilt, either, and Luis Carnevale would forever be reasonable doubt. “No,” she said at length, her voice hard. “I think you’ve gotten away with it.”

  Myra looked up sharply. “Gotten away with it? Not in this lifetime.” She glanced at the painting of the Virgin Mary, the one Ellery had admired earlier. “There’ll be no rest for me in this life,” she repeated, her voice hollow. “Nor, I would expect, in any life to come.”

  * * *

  Christmas morning at the Markham manse inevitably featured a breakfast big enough for the family and several generations of their ancestors. Reed and his sisters had helped their mother prepare a buffet that included baked shells, seven-cheese ham-and-eggs, crispy bacon, chicken and biscuits, winter fruit compote, roasted vegetables, cranberry-orange tea bread, and six kinds of cookies. Tula and her cousins inhaled their food and went back into the family room to take turns shaking the presents and chasing each other around the tree.

  Reed eyed the tower of food on his plate and remarked to his sister Kimmy, “I think Mama may have to let out my pants after this.”

  She shoved him playfully. “Hush. You’re as trim as you ever were. Try birthing three kids and then we’ll talk about middle-age spread.”

  The talk about her kids reminded him of his broken promise. He glanced at their father holding court at one end of the long table. Angus waved his fork in the air to make some dramatic point, and the people around him all laughed. Reed leaned closer to his sister. “Kim, I’m sorry I didn’t help you out with your present for Dad.”

  She reached for her Bloody Mary with one hand and patted him with the other. “Don’t worry about it. Lynette made me feel like an ass for even asking you. I think I forget sometimes that you’re not blood. I can’t imagine our family without you in it, and I certainly didn’t want to make you feel singled out or different. I was thoughtless and I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me for making you uncomfortable with this whole DNA nonsense.”

  Touched, Reed reached around and squeezed his sister’s shoulders. “No offense taken, I swear. Maybe I should go poking around in my genetic background, huh? Might be good for Tula.”

  “Uh, about that.” It was Kimmy’s turn to look down the table at their father.

  “What?” Reed asked when he followed her gaze. “Didn’t he like your ancestry present?”

  “I didn’t give it to him. For one thing, Daddy would be incensed if you weren’t part of it. He’d probably disinherit me on the spot if he thought I left you out. But also, Mama let slip the other day what his big announcement is.” She paused for effect. “Daddy’s running for governor.”

  “Really!”

  As if on cue, Angus finished up his dramatic tale with a flourish. “Conscience doesn’t prevent sin. It only prevents you from enjoying it! Am I right, or am I right?” His wife and assorted relatives laughed and clapped.

  Kimmy smiled and raised her glass in her father’s direction. “Somehow I don’t think he’d like his DNA floating around on the internet right now. What if it turns out he has some predisposition to a terrible disease? A reporter could get wind of it or something.”

  “I thought these records were confidential.”

  “Well, sure. It always is until it’s not. Daddy’s going to have a bigger target on his back now, and you know how nosy the press can be.”

  Reed wondered if this was some backhanded slap at Sarit, but he held his tongue. The children’s noisy laughter rose to the level of shrieking from the other room, and Kimmy grimaced as she set aside her drink. “I suppose I should go tend to that before they shatter the glass doors.”

  Angus clapped his hands when he saw her get up from the table. “Quite right, Kimmy,” he said, rising as well. “We should all get in there soon, eh? What kind of monsters keep the children waiting on Christmas?”

  The rest of the day passed in a blur of torn paper, delighted yelps, and never-ending food. By evening, Reed was happy to find a quiet end of the burnished leather sofa in his father’s den. Tula lay asleep with her head on his lap, and Reed took out his phone. He had one last present to send. For himself, he’d purchased a piano—nothing fancy, just a nice upright that fit within the smaller confines of his condo. It was an admission, once and for all, that he would never be going home again. He’d run through some old favorites until the rust fell away, and then he’d recorded a slow, bluesy version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” He sent it now to Ellery, with a short, albeit practiced, note:

  To a friend, who is dear to me indeed. May we be together when the fates allow. Merry Christmas, and happy New Year. —Reed

  His heart skipped a beat when he sent it because he didn’t know how she would interpret it, or even how he wanted her to interpret it. He knew only that he couldn’t stop thinking about her and the way her skin had tasted under his mouth. The woman clearly wasn’t encouraging any sort of relationship. In fact, she’d shut him down entirely. Somehow, though, Reed knew he would see her again. It felt like fate.

  His phone still in his hand, he browsed idly through the day’s news: Santa had completed his mission, and children rejoiced the world over. On his lap, Tula sighed and clutched her plush yellow pony against her body. Reed stroked her hair and smiled. Maybe it wasn’t Disney World, but his daughter seemed to have had a wonderful Christmas. Moments like this, when they were quiet, just the two of them, he considered saying to heck with everything and taking her to live on some remote island where the biggest problem was which beach to lie on. Knowing Tula, though, she’d miss the TV.

  He clicked back over to his email program, where the link to his DNA results sat, still untouched. Now that he knew Kimmy wasn’t goi
ng to go announcing all the results in some big family video presentation, he decided to look. He was a bit curious, and he figured he owed it to Tula. Steeling himself, Reed opened the link and verified his password. He held his breath as the information came up.

  The page loaded slowly, and when it finished, the results showed the composition of his background as determined by his DNA sample. Reed was 63% European, with Scandinavia and Great Britain most strongly represented; 19% Central Asian and 11% Native American; 2% African and 5% unknown/undetermined. “So I’m your basic mutt,” he murmured to himself, intrigued.

  The phone rang in his hands, and he fumbled it, wincing as it nearly hit Tula in the head. “Hello?” he whispered.

  “Reed? It’s Ellery.” She paused. “I got your song. Thank you.”

  He smiled, warming at the sound of her voice. “You’re quite welcome. I hope you’ve had a nice Christmas.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence on the other end, and he kicked himself for not remembering this time of year was one of tension for her. “It’s been okay, I guess,” she said finally. “Bump and I went for a long walk. I called my mom and we didn’t end up yelling at each other. I did a lot of thinking.”

  “Oh? Any thoughts in particular?” He tried not to sound too hopeful.

  “About prison, actually,” she said, and his hope evaporated. “The kind with cement walls, and the kind we make for ourselves. You can get paroled from the first kind. I’m not sure how you ever get out of the second.”

  His heart squeezed inside his chest. “I don’t know, either,” he said softly. “But we could talk about it, if you like.”

  She seemed like she was considering it, but then replied, “No. I mean, not today. It’s Christmas, right? Did you have a nice day with your family?”

  “I did, thank you.” He gave her some quick highlights. “I finally just clicked through on those DNA results I told you about, the test Kimmy had us all take. My ancestors apparently come from all over the globe.”