Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  I started toward that wing with Consuelo hanging on to me. She should have been yelling at me now, calling me unpronounceable names in her native Spanish, calling for help, but her voice was strangely quiet as she begged me, with an almost fearful tone, to please please stop and not disturb Mr. Shaw.

  “I’m going to speak to him today, Consuelo,” I said. “If you want you can go and call the police and they, I’m sure, would be up here in no time at all to kick me out, their sirens blasting, their lights flashing, just, I’m sure, what Mr. Shaw would like to see today. Or, on the other hand, I’m willing to wait here while you go tell him that I’m here to speak to him about the deaths of his son and his daughter and about Caroline.”

  She stared at me, her dark features darkening even further, and then she told me to wait right there. She turned and went to the door at the very end of the hallway, glanced at me again, knocked, waited for a moment, slowly opened the door, and disappeared inside.

  The next time the door opened it opened for me. Consuelo, without lifting her gaze from the floor, said, “Mr. Shaw will see you now.” I offered her a smile as I passed her, a smile she didn’t accept as she maintained her stare at the floor, and then I stepped through the doorway into the room of Kingsley Shaw, the door closing quietly but firmly behind me.

  42

  I FOUND MYSELF ALONE in a massive, high-ceilinged room that spanned the entire width of the house. Luxuriously carpeted, luxuriously outfitted, smelling richly of smoke and seeming to have been set down in this spot from another time, the room shouted the strength of a single overwhelming personality. I spun around to see all of its strange dark grandeur.

  Two chandeliers of wrought iron, hanging from an ornately patterned ceiling, sprinkled a dim light on the furnishings, complemented by the uneven glow of savage iron fixtures intermittently cleaving to the walls. There were windows on three sides of the room but they were either shuttered or draped with thick maroon velvet so the daylight that did seep through, thick with spinning motes of dust, appeared uninvited and invasive, like slashing claws. A huge telescope stood forlornly by one of the draped windows and across the room, by another draped and darkened window, was a second, and beside each telescope were astronomical charts held open on wooden racks and star globes suspended in intricate wooden stands with clawed feet. The wall behind me held the head of an antlered deer, of a buffalo, of a large, pale brown cat, and weapons were studded between the taxidermy, swords, battle-axes, a thick and ornate shotgun. Massive bookshelves were filled with leather-bound volumes, one series after another in gold and green and blue and maroon, huge epic tomes, intimidating in their size and mass. One half of the room was furnished with red leather club chairs and a long leather couch, a gentleman’s club for old shipping magnates to hide from their wives and smoke cigars and peruse the papers for that day’s ship arrivals. A huge bed with a wrought-iron canopy stood alone in the other half, seemingly marooned on an oriental carpet of blue. Before the wall directly in front of me was a great stone fireplace, its fire crackling but low, the flame’s heat not reaching across the cold to me, and above the fireplace, dominating the whole of the room, lit by its own overhead brass lamp, was a grand portrait, ten feet high, six feet wide, a portrait of a lady.

  The woman in the portrait seemed strangely familiar and I stepped toward her, almost against my will. She stood in a black dress, her hands held delicately before her, a bonnet tied tightly to her head, her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face pretty and composed and absolutely self-contained. Her eyes, of course, followed my movements as I walked toward her but she stared down at me without even the pretense of concern for my presence in that room with her, as if I were no more significant than an insect crawling about the ground beneath her feet. The closer I stepped, the larger and more ominous she became and then I stopped and felt a slight shiver. I recognized her all right, I had seen her picture in the box we had dug up from Charity Reddman’s grave, a picture where she was younger, gayer, oblivious still to all her future devastation. Faith Reddman Shaw. I took one more step forward and for a moment it was as if the self-containment in her face cracked and something ugly and serpentine revealed itself. But that was just the reflection of the overhead light on the painting’s varnish and when I stepped back again her face regained its composure.

  I heard a rasp of breath from behind me and turned quickly. In the midst of all that baroque grandeur it took me a moment to spot the source. I had been so overwhelmed by the decor I hadn’t noticed anyone in the room with me but now, focused by the sound, I saw him there in the corner. Hunched, gray, his skin pasty and smoothly pale, seated in a wooden wheelchair, a tartan rug across his legs, he all but disappeared under the power of the interior design. His face was turned away from me.

  “Mr. Shaw?” I said, starting to walk toward him.

  He cringed, lowering his large chin into his shoulder, preparing himself as if I were wielding a weapon in my advance. I stopped.

  “Mr. Shaw?” I repeated, more loudly.

  Still cringing, he nodded.

  I stepped forward again. “Mr. Shaw.” I raised my voice to near shouting and there was a slight echo in the enormity of the room. “I’m very sorry about your son Edward. I wouldn’t disturb you on a day like this, but I believe it vital that we talk right away. My name is Victor Carl. I’m a friend of Caroline’s. She asked me to look into the death of Jacqueline and now, I believe, somehow, that her death and your son’s death are related. I have just a few questions to ask you. Mr. Shaw?”

  He just stared at the floor, his chin remaining in his shoulder.

  “Mr. Shaw? Do you understand what I just said, Mr. Shaw?”

  Still cringing, he nodded.

  “Can we talk?”

  He stared at the floor for a moment longer before placing his hands on the wheels of his chair and, his head still tilted, rolling himself slowly across the room until his chair was fronting the fire. He leaned forward, as if to warm his face by it.

  One of the leather club chairs was facing the hearth and I sat in it so that I could see his profile. He had been a handsome man once, and large too, I could see, enormous really, with broad shoulders and a huge head, but it was as if he had been crushed into the space he now occupied. There was something weak and slack about his face, a statue weathered to a bland smoothness by time, and his eyes were dull and weary beneath his overgrown eyebrows. I leaned forward and crossed my hands like a schoolmarm and explained to him what I had discovered, how Jacqueline had not killed herself but had been murdered by a professional assassin who had been well paid for his services, how Edward might have been killed by the same man, how it looked as if someone was trying to destroy the heirs to the Reddman fortune toward some, as yet unknown, purpose. As I spoke I noticed that he didn’t seem surprised by what I was saying. It was hard to tell if he was getting it all but I spoke slowly and loudly and he nodded as if in comprehension throughout my little talk.

  “I don’t know if whoever is hiring the killers is going for money or just plain blood revenge,” I said, “but I think you might have some of the answers.”

  When I was finished I waited for a response. He stared into the fire, remaining silent.

  “Mr. Shaw?” I said.

  “Sometimes it speaks to me,” he said. His voice was a listless monotone, as gray and pale as his coloring.

  “Who?” I asked.

  He pointed at the fire. “It speaks single words directly to my thoughts. Sometimes I listen to it for hours.”

  All right, I thought, I’ll hitch a ride on his downtown train. “What does it say?”

  For the first time he turned his head and looked at me. His eyes were watery and weary. It was tiring just to look at him. “It says ‘cut’ or ‘hammer’ or ‘blood’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘fly’ or ‘escape,’ just single words over and over.”

  “What’s it saying now?” I asked, realizing he had been nodding not at my explanation but at the voice of the f
ire.

  “It’s saying, ‘Alive,’ ” he said. “ ‘Alive. Alive. Alive.’ ”

  “Who’s alive, Mr. Shaw?”

  “She is. Alive. Again.”

  “Who, Mr. Shaw?”

  “My mother. Alive.”

  I suddenly leaned back in my chair. I couldn’t help but look up at the portrait staring down at me. From this angle it almost seemed as if she were smiling.

  “I thought she died just over a year ago,” I said.

  “No, no, she’s alive,” he said, his voice growing suddenly more agitated. He reached out from his chair and grabbed my sleeve. “She’s alive, I know it. I’ve seen her.”

  “You’ve seen her? When?”

  He tugged at my sleeve harder. “A week ago. Outside. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He let go of me and spun his wheelchair away from the fire, rolling it toward one of the windows with a telescope beside it. I followed behind him. When he reached the curtain he opened it with a strong pull. An invasion of light streamed in, so bright and unhindered I had to turn my face away until my eyes adjusted. When I turned back I could see through the window’s bars to the rear yard of the house, straight down the hill to the pond.

  “Less than a week ago I saw her in her garden,” he said.

  From the window there was a clear view to the overgrown hedges and wild flowers of Faith Reddman’s garden. From here the mazelike pattern was much clearer and in the center clearing I could see the shape of the bench that had been devoured by the orange flowering vines.

  “I saw the light,” he said. “She was there. She was digging in her garden in the middle of the night. I saw the light, I heard the clang of her shovel. I swear it.”

  “I believe you saw the light, Mr. Shaw.”

  “She’s come back.”

  “Why has she come back, Mr. Shaw?”

  “She’s come back to take me away, to save me. That’s why she’s waiting in the house, waiting for me.”

  “What house is she waiting in, Mr. Shaw?”

  “The old house, the old Poole house. I’ve seen her there, at night. I’ve seen the lights through the trees.”

  “In the house by the pond?”

  “Yes, she’s there, waiting.” He suddenly looked away from the window and stared at me with his watery eyes. “Will you take me there? Will you? I can’t go myself because of my legs. But I’m light now. You can carry me.”

  He reached out and gripped again at my sleeve. It was frightening to see the yearning work its way beneath his slack face. This is a man worth half a billion dollars, I thought. What happiness has it bought him? I turned my face away and looked at the garden once more and then altered my focus.

  “Why are there bars on your windows, Mr. Shaw?”

  He dropped his head and let go of my arm. Slowly he spun his wheelchair around and rolled back to the fire. He leaned toward the glowing heat, listening. I stared at him, his color washed completely away by the sunlight now flooding through the window.

  I looked around once more. This room reeked of a single personality, yes, but if the personality that had created and maintained it once belonged to this man it had clearly fled. Nothing was left but a shell. I had intended to ask him about Caroline’s paternity, about the Wergeld Trust, about the Pooles, but I would get no answers from what remained of this man. I walked over to the bookshelves and their heavy tomes. Leather-bound volumes of the great works of literature, Dickens and Hugo and Balzac and Cervantes, each spine perfectly smooth. I took out volume one of Don Quixote. It was a beautifully made book, the boards thick, the leather hand-tooled and leafed in gold. The binding cracked when I opened it. I remembered that Selma Shaw had told me she had been brought to Veritas because her future husband had difficulty reading. I remembered the disappointment in Faith Shaw’s diary over young Kingsley’s failures in his studies.

  “Do you read much?” I asked.

  He responded as if I were merely an inconvenient distraction pulling him away from the voice of the fire. “No.”

  “Don’t you like books?”

  “The letters mix themselves up on the page.”

  Dyslexia? Is that why he had so much trouble learning to read as a boy? Then why are there so many books in his room? I wondered. Why would a problem reader surround himself with such potent reminders of his failings? Was it pretension? Was it merely a facade, like Gatsby’s library with its uncut pages, or was it something else? I closed the book and put it away and then looked around the room with newly opened eyes and a growing sense of horror.

  “Do you hunt, Mr. Shaw?” I asked while I looked at the wall full of dead animal heads.

  “Once I did,” he said.

  “Are these your trophies?”

  “No. They were my father’s.”

  “Even the cat?”

  “It’s a cougar,” he said in his distracted monotone.

  “Is that your father’s too?”

  “No,” he said. “Everything but the cougar.”

  I stepped slowly toward the cougar head, its eyes dazed, its yellow teeth bared. There was a brass plate beneath the ruffed fur of its neck. It said something I couldn’t read for the tarnish, but I could make out the date: 1923. I felt colder than before. This wasn’t just any cougar, I was certain, this was the cougar that had slipped down from the mountains to terrorize the farms around Veritas in 1923. The same cougar Kingsley Shaw was aiming for in that dark rain-swept night when, with his mother by his side, he fired into his father’s chest. How could he live with that cat staring at him every day of his life, taunting him with that grin? And the ornate shotgun beside it, that gun, I realized, must be the gun.

  I took a photograph out of my suit pocket and walked it to the fireplace to show to the man in the wheelchair. It was a photograph, removed from the metal box, of the unattractive young woman with the long face, the beady eyes, the unruly hair. “Do you know her?” I asked.

  He took the photograph into his shaking hands and examined it closely. I wondered if he recognized her at all and then realized, when I saw a tear, that he did.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Why are you here?” he said, still staring at the photograph.

  “I am trying to find out who is killing your children.”

  “This is Miss Poole,” he said. “She was my friend from long ago. She read to me.”

  “Do you know where she is or where her child is?”

  “Why? Do you know her?” He smiled up at me with a hope that was at odds with everything he had shown me before. “Is she alive too?”

  “I don’t know. Her father believed that your grandfather stole his company from him. Do you believe she could be responsible for hiring the man who killed your children?”

  “She was my friend,” he said. “She was lovely. She could never have hurt a soul.”

  “Then who do you think is killing your children?” I asked.

  “I told you,” he said, staring up at me. “She’s alive. Didn’t I tell you? She’s alive.” He turned his face back to the photograph. “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Shaw, and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  With a wan smile he waved the photograph. “She used to read to me about a pond. Such a beautiful pond it was. I forget the name of it now.”

  “Walden Pond,” I said.

  “No, that’s not it, but it was so beautiful.”

  On my way out I stopped for a moment and stared at the cougar head mounted above the door. I turned around.

  “Mr. Shaw, why are there bars on your windows?”

  From across the room, still staring at the photograph, he said, “Because of the first time I heard the fire speak.”

  “When was that?”

  “Years and years ago. When I could still walk.”

  “What was the word it repeated the first time?”

  “ ‘Jump,’ ” he said. “ ‘Jump. Jump. Jump.’ ”

  I thin
k all of us in this world carry our own individual hells, like a turtle shell on our backs, hauling it about from place to place, the burden so constant we often forget how its weight is twisting our bodies and spirits into grotesquery. This hell is the cost, I believe, of being human and humane, and better that, I figure, than the oblivious, spaced-out bliss promised by places like the Church of the New Life. But never have I seen an individual’s personal hell so objectively and oppressively rendered in his surroundings as I saw in the room of Kingsley Reddman Shaw. Wherever he was jumping to when he ruined his legs, he was jumping to a better place than this.

  I blinked into the sunlight outside Veritas. Nat had progressed in his work to the hedges on the other side of the doorway. He saw me standing on the steps and without climbing from his ladder he shouted out, “Had a pleasant meeting, Mr. Carl?”

  “How long has he been like that, Nat?”

  “For as long as I’ve been here. But it’s gotten worse over the years.”

  “How old was he when he jumped from the window?”

  “Twenty-five or thereabouts, but by then he had not been out of the room for six or seven years.”

  “I’ve never seen such a horrible place in my life.”

  “N’aren’t too many like it. That was his grandfather’s room until the elder Mrs. Shaw moved her son into it. Much of the furnishings were left over from Mr. Reddman’s time.”

  “Even the cougar.”

  “Mr. Reddman bought it from the farmer who killed it. We’ve tried to remove it but Mr. Shaw won’t allow us.”

  “And the painting of Faith Reddman Shaw?”

  “Mr. Reddman commissioned it, a portrait of his only surviving daughter.”

  “What was he like, this Claudius Reddman?”

  “A hard man, Mr. Carl. Even in his last years, when he dedicated himself fully to philanthropy, he was hard. Do you know what his last words were?”