I laughed out loud, my sense of relief was so great. If those photographs and videos had ever existed outside Darryl Bob Allen’s imagination, they were gone for ever. A moment later, I felt an equally overwhelming sense of despair. Now I would never know what Lucy had looked like before she met me. Finally, I homed in on another of Mason’s terms.
‘“Almost”?’
‘Well, just about everything. It was quite a mess in there, apparently. But a few things did survive.’
‘Like what?’ I snapped.
Mason smiled.
‘The most unlikely, I guess, was the film.’
‘Film? What film?’
‘There’s no call to shout, sir.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah, it seems Allen was something of an amateur photographer. He had a nice old camera, a Leica from back in the sixties. Somehow when the mast fell it was knocked into a corner, and then a bunch of shelving fell on top of it, which protected it from the fire. It was some kind of compacted pressboard which doesn’t burn easily. It just kind of smoulders, and with the lack of oxygen in there . . .’
‘What about the film?’
‘You’re shouting again. Why are you so worried about the film?’
‘I’m sorry. Allen told me that he had some footage of my late wife which he’d taken back when they were married. I just wondered if it had anything to do with that. What happened to Allen, anyway? Was he there when this occurred?’
‘Yeah, he was there.’
Mason scribbled another few lines, then reached into his pocket and brought out a brown envelope.
‘As for the pictures, it wasn’t anything like what you were talking about. This was an undeveloped roll, still in the camera. The sheriff’s people got it printed up. There were a bunch of landscape shots, weird-looking rocks and erosion slopes. And then these.’
He passed me the envelope. Inside were two black-and-white photographs showing a man pointing a gun at the camera. I looked at Mason, who held out his hand. I passed the photographs back.
‘That’s how I knew you when you walked into the lobby,’ he went on. ‘And it seems I wasn’t the only one. The weapon survived too, of course. A revolver, thirty-eight special. The model was . . .’
He consulted an earlier page in his notebook.
‘A Taurus M85. Well the first thing the sheriff did was to run a trace on the serial number, which led to a local gun enthusiast and part-time dealer named Wayne Jefferson. He was shown the photographs you’ve just seen, and identified you as the person he had sold the gun to at a show held in a convention centre in Reno, right by the airport, on the previous Saturday afternoon.’
He looked at me calmly.
‘Do you have anything to say about that?’
I envied him his calm.
‘Not without a lawyer present,’ I eventually replied.
Mason nodded.
‘Okay, that’s your right.’
‘So what am I being charged with? Threatening behaviour? Possession of an unregistered firearm?’
Mason stood up.
‘Like I said before, no charges have been preferred at this point. I’m simply doing a little background research on behalf of the Nye County authorities. Their budget doesn’t run to sending someone up here on a wild-goose chase, so they asked us to do a credit check, so to speak.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘Well, I have to say that your responses to my questions have been most instructive, sir. Thank you most sincerely. We appreciate it. Tomorrow I’ll pass this information along to the sheriff’s office. They’ll have to decide what steps to take, but I imagine they’ll certainly want to speak with you. Do you have any plans to leave town in the next few days?’
‘No.’
He nodded.
‘Okay. Well, let us know if you change your mind. Here’s my card. I guess I’ll go home, see how badly the Seahawks lost this time, maybe warm up a couple of slices of pizza if there’s any left. Thanks again for your help, sir.’
The mention of pizza made me realize that I’d had nothing to eat all day apart from the hot dog on the ferry. I ordered up a club sandwich from room service, but couldn’t finish it. The mini-bar offered a selection of overpriced miniature bottles of whiskey. The Macallan was not one. I undressed and lay down but couldn’t sleep. As at the motel that Mercy had taken me to, I had an odd feeling that there was someone else in the room. This time it even seemed that I was not alone in bed. Finally I turned the lights back on and watched crapware TV until I passed out on the sofa.
I woke around dawn, dressed hurriedly and drove to the house I still thought of as home. A spiritless rain fell steadily and the sky was as dim as during a partial solar eclipse. Jim, one of our pleasantly impersonal neighbours, had grown up in a town housing a Federal Penitentiary and his mother had trained him to be terrified of prowlers. The rectangular, tan-coloured industrial security light he had installed under his eaves was operating at full efficiency, its photocell undeceived by the notional time of day.
I parked outside the house, breathing hard. The windows peered down at me incuriously. This was what Lucy used to do, she’d told me, when she got home from work in the last months of her marriage to Darryl Bob. Her dread of entering the house was so great she would circle the block again and again, and then sit outside in the car for another fifteen minutes, getting up enough courage to walk up the steps and open the door.
The steps were dark, the porch light off. Rain dripped off the eaves into the shrubbery. The mail was stuffed into the bin. I hauled it out, pausing only over a package with a British stamp and airmail sticker, which I stuck in my coat pocket. I fumbled around with my key, a bad copy which was always reluctant to engage with the lock. Then the door swung open and the smell hit me. These old houses hoard odours like memories, packing every crack and crevice of their wooden structure. Claire had tried to tidy up a bit for the visitors who had come around after the memorial service, but the place was still a mess. It had always seemed to have a mysterious ability to disarrange any imposed order without human intervention, although neither I nor Lucy paid any attention to such matters. At the time, on the rebound from a wife for whom those were the household gods, that had seemed charming.
Now, though, I just felt despair at the familiar clutter, the lingering scent of microwaved popcorn and fried chicken, the pile of unopened mail and the winking red light of the Caller ID machine. What could anyone have to say to me that would not seem an impertinent irrelevance? The place was freezing, too. I wandered into the living area and switched on the heating I had thriftily placed on hold during my absence, something which now seemed ridiculous. Who cared about heating bills now? I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking. I must have gone crazy. Perhaps it had seemed a sort of sacrilege for our home to be kept warm and cosy now that Lucy was where she was.
I’d been wearing the same clothes for days, so the first thing to do seemed to be to take a shower and get changed as a way of trying to get settled back in. I couldn’t go on living in hotels for ever. The stairs creaked beneath me in their familiar way as I walked up to the first floor. I stripped off in the spare bedroom, the one Claire had slept in before she moved out. I couldn’t face ours just yet.
The bathroom seemed a relatively safe and neutral space. One of my dressing gowns was hanging on the hook behind the door, but apart from a toothbrush and a used towel there was nothing of Lucy’s visible. I was about to turn on the shower when I heard another creak from outside. I opened the door and called ‘Hullo?’, but there was no answer. Then I remembered that I’d just put the heating on, and that these old wooden houses, rectangular arks really, always shifted and settled as they cooled down and warmed up. I went back into the bathroom, locking the door behind me, and turned on the shower.
I was giving my hair a second lathering when the spray from the nozzle on the ceiling abruptly turned into a heavy dribble of scalding water. I leapt back, so that only my toes were still
exposed, then grabbed the tap and turned it off. My entire body was covered in a rash of rigid goose-bumps, and not just from the cold air. I knew exactly what that sudden change in water temperature meant, having complained about it to Lucy and her children endless times before. It meant that somewhere else in the house a toilet had been flushed or the washing machine or dishwasher turned on.
I towelled myself down hurriedly and stood there listening. There was a distinct whisper of activity in the plumbing. I wasn’t imagining this. I put on my dressing gown and opened the door cautiously. I don’t know what I expected. This was not a burglar, that much I knew. I padded downstairs, leaving wet footmarks on the bare boards, every sense on high alert. Now I could hear the rush of escaping water more clearly, but where was it coming from? I searched the living room, the kitchen, then the office and third bedroom in the basement. Down there, the noise from the pipes was unmistakable. No, I was definitely not imagining this. This was a consolation of sorts, but one at which my flesh crawled, expressing its ancient wisdom and terror.
A pack of Marlboro Lights lay open on the kitchen counter. Claire had presumably left it there. Like her mother, she was always vague about the whereabouts of her keys, handbag, purse, credit cards and other personal possessions. As if touched by this frailty, the world seemed to indulge her, as Chuck had me in that bar the night before. What went around came around, everything you thought you had lost turned up sooner or later.
I grabbed one of the cigarettes and went out on the back porch to smoke it greedily. It was then that I saw Allie.
‘Oh my,’ she said in her flat, bright tone. ‘I didn’t know you were back.’
She held up our hosepipe, which she was using to clean off some garden equipment stacked against the wall of the adjoining house. There was no fence between our properties. Allie thought that no fences made good neighbours.
‘I hope you don’t mind me borrowing this,’ she went on. ‘Our garden tap rusted out and flooded the basement – the water line I mean – and Jack had to seal it off. He’s planning on rejigging the system come spring, but for now it’s down and I just wanted to clean this stuff up before I store it away for the winter.’
I nodded vaguely. Allie was always up at five, come sun or snow. It was a relief to have a rational explanation for the variation in the water pressure, but I hadn’t counted on company.
‘I’m so sorry that Jack and I were away when that terrible business with Lucy happened,’ she went on, turning off my exterior tap and rewinding the hose. ‘We hardly ever go away, but with Tracy just turning twenty-one we kind of thought we had to drive over.’
She stood below me, looking up with a sorrowful expression. I’d always thought of Allie as a mildly boring old bat, but I suddenly realized that she must once have been beautiful. Then a frown appeared on her features, which seemed to have aged from five to fifty without a hint that anything had happened to the person inside.
‘But that must have been before,’ she said wonderingly. ‘I read about it in the paper, and I thought it was while we were in Spokane, but that can’t be. I’m getting kind of confused, I guess.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, just to sound politely interested.
‘Well Jack and I got back on Wednesday, right? I thought that awful thing happened on Monday, but that can’t be right, because after we got back I saw Lucy right here.’
‘Right where?’ I demanded, with no attempt at mitigation. If Allie was going to retail the clichés of spectator grief, she might at least trouble to get her facts right.
‘On Wednesday? Or was it Thursday? No, it must have been Wednesday, because that’s recycling day and I’d just got back from taking my bins to the kerb. Then I looked over at your house, and there she was, standing there with her back to the kitchen window. I waved to her and called out, but she didn’t notice me, or maybe she didn’t want to talk. I guess she had something else on her mind. But you know the strange thing? She looked about twenty years younger, the way she did when she and Darryl Bob bought that place.’
I said nothing, but my look must have spoken because Allie turned away.
‘I know it’s hard to accept, but it must be God’s will,’ she concluded, heading back to her own porch.
Allie was a fundamentalist Christian of some variety who frequently mentioned God in a casual, slightly resigned way, as though He were CEO of the company in which she was an underpaid, put-upon secretary.
‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ve got some tuna casserole you could have tonight if you want.’
I walked back inside the house and closed the door. On Wednesday of the previous week, Lucy had been dead for two days.
Then I remembered that the memorial service had been held that day, and that Claire had been here. That’s who Allie must have seen standing at the kitchen window, not Lucy but Claire.
In the hallway, the Caller ID box was still winking. The display read ‘UNAVAILABLE’. I picked up the phone and dialled our voicemail service. There were twenty-three new messages. I listened to the most recent. It was from Claire, asking me to call her. She sounded distraught. Just what I need, I thought, another wacky female. But I called anyway, and immediately regretted it.
‘First Jeff walking out on me, then Mom dying, and now this. It’s like we’re cursed.’
‘Claire?’
‘I’m sorry, I guess I have grievance issues or whatever the fuck they’re saying this week. It’s all bullshit. And it’s so dumb, because it wasn’t like I was that close to him, even when he still lived with us. He was a big drunk, to be honest. Plus depressive. Mom tried to get him on meds, but he preferred to self-medicate with booze. He had violent mood swings. You never knew what to expect.’
‘What’s the matter, Claire?’
‘One moment he’d be all lovey-dovey, the next he’d be screaming at you. Plus he was a total slob, didn’t shower for days on end, wore the same clothes for weeks. His idea of dinner was eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon, standing up in the kitchen and washing it down with beer.’
She paused to blow her nose loudly.
‘I hated him. And her. You know that? I never told you, because I didn’t want to be hurtful, but now . . .’
‘Claire, what . . .’
‘They used to fuck, in that room right across from mine. The one you guys have now. I mean had. And she’d be screaming and he’d be yelling and it’d go on all night. And I was like thirteen, for Christ’s sake, never been kissed, and I had to listen to them going at it for hours, and then Mom showing up all dewy-eyed at the breakfast table and him with that kind of “Well-I-guess-I-did-my-day’s-work-last-night-so-I-can-slack-off-now” look.’
‘Hello?’
‘Fuck them both. I hate them. I used to wish they were dead, and now they are I’m scared. It’s like I caused it. Am I nuts too? Have I inherited this? I’m so scared, so fucking scared. Hello? Are you there?’
I could hear her weeping.
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes, unfortunately.’
‘Claire, what’s happened? What’s all this about?’
‘What do you mean what’s happened? You know what’s happened.’
‘I do not.’
A silence.
‘You mean they didn’t tell you?’
By now I was starting to get irritated.
‘Who didn’t tell me what?’ I snapped.
‘The police. They said they’d spoken with you. I’ve been calling you at the hotel and at home and you’re never there. You could at least have got in touch. He was my father, for fuck’s sake. What planet are you living on?’
‘Claire, listen. I was out last night. I came here early this morning. A policeman came to the hotel with some story about your father’s trailer having burned down. He asked me a bunch of questions. That’s all I know.’
Another, longer, silence.
‘Oh my God. They didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Who’s dead?’
‘My father.’
‘Dead? How?’
‘He was shot. The trailer burned down, but they found the gun and . . . and enough of the body. The skull survived. He’d been shot in the head at close range.’
I found nothing to say.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t hate him, I didn’t mean that. I felt sorry for him, just like Mom. He was a flawed human being, but Jesus, which of us isn’t? And of course I never hated Mom. I’m so sorry I said that. I’m going slightly crazy here.’
‘Of course. Look, do you want to . . .’
‘I don’t want anything. I’ll be fine. But I have a question.’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you kill my dad?’
Once again, I could find nothing to say.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Did you hear what I asked?’
‘Yes, of course. The answer is no.’
‘But you were down there, right? The police told me when they called.’
‘I went down to see him, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to talk things over with him, about who gets what from Lucy’s estate. I was doing it for you. For you and Frank, I mean.’
‘You saw him on Saturday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they found the body on Monday.’
‘I was back here by then.’
‘But they can’t tell when he died, because of . . .’
She broke off.
‘Because of the fire?’
‘Yes.’
‘I understand now. They didn’t tell me any of this. I’m so sorry, Claire. You poor thing. I wish there was something I could do.’
She sniffed her way back into speech.
‘There is.’
‘What?’
‘I need to know if you killed him.’
‘No!’
‘Only they say they have photographs he took of you threatening him with a gun. The same gun they found at the scene. And they say you bought it earlier that day, and it was the gun which fired the shot which killed him. That’s what they told me.’
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