Killer's Cousin

by Nancy Werlin

  CHAPTER 10

  “It’s all settled for Thanksgiving,” my mother said the following Sunday. But she gave no details of her conversation with Vic, instead concentrating on how big a turkey she planned to buy and how she would transport it from Baltimore in a cooler. “Uh-huh,” I said, and found myself hoping the humming shadow would keep herself quiet while my parents were there. If I were to hear and see her in their presence—and they didn’t … I couldn’t bear the thought.

  I spent the rest of the morning running my daily loop around North Cambridge. Afterward, I bought a newspaper, and ate two donuts and drank three coffees at Verna’s Coffee Shop.

  I was finishing up a satisfying mental list of the peculiarities of Frank Delgado when I came to and found myself staring, pen in hand, at the Sunday crossword. I got up from my table and left Verna’s, heading to the Shaughnessy house.

  Lily was raking leaves in the tiny front yard. Her head was down, and I watched her plod to the sidewalk, place her rattan rake on the edge of the grass and then turn away, grasping the rake handle with both hands behind her. She paused for a moment as if gathering her strength, and then walked the twelve-foot width of the yard with the rake bouncing along behind, dropping as many leaves as it gathered.

  I didn’t like Lily. I couldn’t like Lily. For reasons I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pinpoint, she made me uneasy. But right then she reminded me of myself at her age, doing chores as slowly and inefficiently as possible and hoping for early release. It made me smile. The smile felt strange on my face. “Do you get time off for good behavior?” I asked.

  Her head shot up. I glimpsed her glare for an instant before she began another trek across the lawn. Behind her, the rake barely skimmed the ground. I went over to the front stoop and sat down to watch.

  “Lily, have you ever seen the movie Conan the Barbarian?” I asked, after a few minutes. “There’s a scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger is enslaved at the mill. He walks around and around, year after year, pulling a two-ton grindstone and building his muscles.”

  Lily dropped the rake. She turned to face me, hands on her hips. “So?”

  “So you remind me of Arnold,” I said. “Hard at work.”

  Lily turned her back again and bent to get the rake.

  I sighed. “Hey, would you like some help? We could make a pile for you to jump in.”

  “No. My father asked me to rake. He didn’t ask you.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.” I waited. “Come on, Lily. It’s always more fun with someone else.”

  Her look said she doubted it. I shrugged, and went off to the toolshed in the back, where I found another rake; old, metal, and heavy. I began cleaning up after Lily. A few minutes later, I tried once more: “Do you want to make a pile? We can borrow some leaves from next door.”

  “It would just make more leaves to bag.”

  I gave up. We finished the raking. Lily held open a large garbage bag for the leaves while I stuffed them in. Up and down the street, neighbors had packed their leaves into orange and black jack-o’-lantern bags to make Halloween displays, but the Shaughnessy bags were the regular kind, plain brown paper, destined for immediate disposal.

  “I guess that’s it.” I brushed my hands off on my jeans and reached over to pick up the rakes. “I’ll just put these away.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “No, really, it’s—”

  “I said I would do it,” Lily burst out. Her face was reddening. “I’m going to do it!”

  I held out my hands. “Hey—”

  She grabbed the rakes, nearly staggering under the unexpected weight of the metal one before managing to steady herself, propping the ends of both rakes against the ground and keeping them upright with her hands, leaning her weight into them. “You’re always interfering! Why don’t you mind your own business? Why did you come here, anyway? We didn’t want you!”

  “Lily—”

  “I wish you’d leave!” She was panting. Involuntarily, I took a step back from her. She was clearly on the edge of hysteria.

  “Lily,” I began, “I just want—”

  She cut me off again. “I don’t care what you want! Why should I? What I want, that’s what matters!” She was shaking with rage, and a sound—almost a growl—emerged from her throat. Her hands tightened around the rakes, and she tried to throw them at me. But while she might have been able to hurl the rattan rake, the other one was too heavy for her. It slipped from her hand as she raised it and fell with a thunk to the ground between us, the rattan rake falling feebly next to it.

  We both looked at the rakes on the ground. Then Lily turned away. I heard her gasping for breath, saw her shoulders rise and fall. But I was afraid to try to comfort her. I had no idea what this was about, or what I had done to set her off. I couldn’t tell if she was already crying or was struggling to hold tears back.

  I prayed neither Vic nor Julia would come outside and find us like this.

  Finally Lily managed to calm down. Even though a big part of me thought it would be better to say nothing, I couldn’t stop myself. “Lily, what have I done to make you so angry?”

  Lily mumbled.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t hear you,” I said.

  This time she flung the words over her shoulder. “Why were you talking to my father about me?”

  What did she mean? Then I remembered.

  Lily had turned to face me. Her fists were clenched. She had not been crying. She was not near tears.

  She said fiercely, “Aren’t you going to answer me?”

  I tried to fumble my way. “Lily, I’m sorry. Your father and I were just discussing Thanksgiving. You came up …” For some reason I felt like I was getting myself in deeper. I switched my approach. “What did your father tell you we’d said?”

  “He was talking to my mother,” Lily said. Her voice was filled with … disbelief? Astonishment? Pain? All of them. “Not to me.” She flashed me a look of hatred. “About Thanksgiving. About your parents coming.” Her tone made it plain they were about as welcome as I was. “I heard it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “My parents will be staying upstairs with me, but we’ll all have Thanksgiving dinner together.” I weighed whether to tell her I didn’t particularly want my parents to come either, but decided against it. “They’re looking forward to seeing you.”

  The expression on Lily’s face made me stop talking. “You interrupted me,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to apologize, and then closed it. When had control slipped from me to Lily? She was standing there, facing me, perfectly self-possessed despite her rage.

  She waited until she was sure I wouldn’t interrupt her again. Then she said, “You told my father to talk to my mother instead of me.” She leaned forward suddenly. “Didn’t you?”

  The answer popped from my mouth. “Yes,” I said.

  Lily caught her breath. “I knew it was your fault.”

  My fault. I was very, very tired of everything being my fault. “Lily,” I said. I leaned over and took her firmly by the shoulders. “Listen to me.”

  Lily tried to twist away. She kicked out, hard, just missing my crotch. Then she clawed for my eyes. I had to grab her hands, her arms, try to hold her away. “Hey,” I said, “calm down. Calm down! Will you just calm—”

  She spat in my face.

  I caught myself a split second before slapping her.

  I was holding Lily with my left hand, and actually had my right hand upraised to strike. My stomach roiled. Reflex. It’s the body’s betrayal of the mind. It’s only a reflex.

  As if that mattered. As if I were someone who could dismiss a reflex as “only.”

  I lowered my hand. I gave Lily’s shoulder a very awkward pat. It was stiff. I stepped back, away from her, away from myself. “Lily, I’m sorry,” I said. “I would never hit you.”

  She froze at my words, almost seeming to need a moment to translate them. Then the rancor disappeared from her face as if it had been wiped off wi
th a clean wet rag. She looked at my lowered hand; at my face.

  She leaned forward with the intensity of a drill sergeant. Her eyes filled with … something. She said, softly, so softly, “Are you sure?” And in my head I heard her other question, from before: Did you feel powerful?

  For a moment I had the insane conviction that Lily had intimate knowledge of all my worst nightmares.

  Then I recovered. I glared at her. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  She stared gravely back at me. Then, incongruously, the corner of her mouth twitched. She put her hand over her mouth and laughed outright, once, in a short bark. And then the laughter seemed to seize her body and take possession; it rocked her frame and escaped from her mouth in great peals that somehow did not sound amused. She laughed as if it hurt; as if she would never stop.

  Then, abruptly, she did stop. And looked at me, her eyes still filled with that … something.

  I couldn’t bear it. I turned. I left. I walked.

  I did not run.

  CHAPTER 11

  That evening, I turned on my computer and went online for hours, reading alt.tv.x-files, downloading software, surfing the Web. But in the end I could no longer avoid thinking. Lily’s frightening laughter—my hand—her question—the look in her eyes—my hand.

  My upraised hand.

  Did you feel powerful?

  Sometimes in my head I can still hear the snap of Emily’s neck.

  One day toward the end of the trial my father grabbed me by both shoulders. In a distant way I was astonished. I had never seen him other than contained, measured. But that afternoon in the bleak private waiting room, he was all at once out of control. Using a voice I’d never heard before.

  “You’re killing yourself! Don’t you see, we’ve got to give the jury something! You have to take the stand—don’t you understand how it looks if you don’t?”

  “Yes,” I said steadily enough. “It looks like I killed her.”

  For an instant I thought he might kill me, and I wished he would. But my father mauls only with words.

  “Aren’t you scared?” he said. “You should be.” And he described prison to me; described in detail; described for a very, very long time.

  Oh, yes, I was scared. I was being tried as an adult. Anyone would have been scared.

  Especially after listening to Greg.

  “Emily didn’t dare tell anyone,” Greg had explained rapidly on the stand to the prosecutor. To the jury. To his parents, who had published a vicious open letter to me in the newspaper. To everyone. “She was scared of Davey. But Emily couldn’t keep her secret from me.” His face was fevered. “Emily and I were very close,” he said.

  “It’s my fault,” Greg sobbed. “I thought if I were with her when she broke up with him, she’d be safe. I thought I could protect her. I should have listened to her when she told me he was out of control.”

  One woman on the jury reached out involuntarily, as if to pat Greg. But the others looked at me. Eleven pairs of eyes. Curious eyes. Judging eyes.

  I had intended to stay silent. To keep off the stand. To let whatever happened to me happen. I had thought it all out very carefully, you see. I put all Greg’s lies on one side of a scale, and I put the one truth on the other. And it seemed to me that it didn’t matter that Greg had lied. Emily was dead.

  By my hand.

  But then I looked back at the jury. Even though Emily was dead, I looked back. I don’t know why I had to, but I did. I met every pair of eyes.

  Defend yourself, screamed my father. And in the end, out of fear, out of some blind need for survival, out of the vestiges of rage against Greg—for it was him I’d meant to hit, and both Greg and I knew it—I did.

  I defended myself. I did it well, because Davey did everything well. And the facts, those the court considered important, were with me. There were no old bruises on Emily. The judge declared that Greg’s history of drug abuse was admissible, and the jury looked at him differently after that. Then there were the bank statements for Greg and Emily’s joint account, now empty. And the bank clerk who remembered Greg. “Oh, every week, he came,” she said in her soft voice. “Then twice a week …”

  The faces of the jurors changed. The shrieks of the tabloids softened, then died, then turned, snarling, on Greg. By the time the verdict came down, no one even seemed surprised.

  No one but me.

  Again I pictured Lily. I wondered what the jury would have thought if they had seen me with my eleven-year-old cousin that afternoon. If they had seen my upraised hand.

  But I had not hit Lily. I had not. I held on to that as I lay in bed with my forearm over my open eyes. I had not done it. Not this time. And yet …

  I recalled the strange expression on Lily’s face. Suddenly I recognized it. I had seen it on Greg’s face, when Emily fell. Before he buried it in the basement of his house of lies. It was …

  Complicity.

  CHAPTER 12

  The next day exhaustion pressed on me like concrete. Only part of that day felt real: last period, in Dr. Walpole’s class. There, I got a second wind and was able to sit up and pay attention of a kind.

  Despite myself, I had become interested in the class. Up to then, we had been occupied by a rapid overview of the thousand-year period. Dr. Walpole was a good teacher: knowledgeable, and even, in her own dry way, dramatic. I would never forget her slides of the Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg, with its elaborate instruments of torture. Who had ever heard of a punishment flute for bad musicians? Or a heavy metal mask with a tongue guard for gossips? Not to mention the more elaborate and horrible devices: racks, eye gougers, the inner-spiked case of an iron maiden. “Forget about criminals, witches, and heretics for a minute, people,” said Dr. Walpole, “and notice how many of these instruments were used for day-to-day social control.”

  I wondered, with a kind of sick fascination, what they would have used on me. Or on Greg.

  That day we were to announce our medieval identities: the point of view from which, said Dr. Walpole, we would individually grapple with the entire period. “And about which,” she’d added, “you will write a major paper in the spring. So be careful. The character you pick—who can be real or imaginary—will be with you all year. Remember that if you choose to invent someone, you will still be responsible for collecting the background to form a realistic environment and opinions for your character.”

  In other words, it would be tougher to make someone up than to choose someone about whom you could just do specific research. I took the hint and chose a real person: Maimonides, a twelfth-century rabbinical scholar, philosopher, and physician. There was lots of material available about him, much of which was easily accessible via the Net.

  I was the first person in the class to declare my choice. Dr. Walpole considered me over her half glasses and then nodded. “A fine choice.” She wrote it down, and then said, “Stoph?”

  While Christoph Khouri explained his choice (an elaborate imaginary identity for an eleventh-century fighting knight), I heard Frank Delgado whisper at me: “Hey.”

  This was unusual. Though we still sat side by side in Dr. Walpole’s class, we had comprehensively ignored each other since he’d matter-of-factly identified the depth of my daily fear. I glanced over at him. “What?”

  Frank replied, “I like Maimonides. I can see that his rationalism would appeal to you.”

  I blinked. I didn’t quite know how to react. But it didn’t matter; Frank had already half turned away to look toward Dr. Walpole, who was in the process of rejecting Justine Sinclair’s choice. “I don’t believe you’ve really considered the wide range of possibilities, Justine,” she was saying.

  “But I have, Dr. Walpole,” said Justine earnestly. “Joan of Arc is a major figure. Don’t you think she’s fascinating?”

  “I think everyone at this school already knows Joan’s story,” said Dr. Walpole. “Including you. Her presence will not add new information to our discussions; nor will you be challenged
in the research phase.” She paused. “How about Margery Kempe? She saw visions too.” At that, I saw Frank smile to himself; clearly, he knew who this Margery Kempe was. I wanted to kick him.

  Frank Delgado was last. I was curious about what identity he’d choose. It was almost certain to be someone we hadn’t encountered in the background reading.

  It was. “Abulafia,” Frank said. His voice was very soft, close to inaudible. Oddly, he glanced over at me.

  “I don’t quite recall this Abulafia,” said Dr. Walpole. It did not appear to disturb her. “Why don’t you tell us a bit about this … it is a man, isn’t it? A real person?”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “He was a kabbalist.”

  “Well, that helps,” muttered Stoph Khouri.

  “Kabbalism,” Dr. Walpole said. “We didn’t cover that material. Jewish medieval mysticism, yes?”

  Frank nodded. “Kabbalists were mystics, yeah. They believed in all kinds of weird stuff. Magic. Astrology. Witches and demons. All the unexplainable stuff that medieval Christians believed in, but that most Jews, rational Jews like Maimonides”—again I got a glance—“didn’t. The other Jews thought the kabbalists were crazy. And Abulafia—they thought he was the craziest one of all.”

  There was a little silence. Then, unexpectedly, Justine Sinclair said, “Oh, I see. Kind of like a medieval Fox Mulder.” She added helpfully to Dr. Walpole, “The X-Files. On TV. Mulder and Scully investigate psychic phenomena. Mulder believes. Scully doesn’t. She’s the rational one.”

  Without thinking, I corrected her: “No, it’s more complicated than that. Mulder needs to believe. His whole identity depends on it; it’s what keeps him sane. It’s a little twisted, but very logical.”

  Frank turned to look at me intently. Justine scowled. “Well, when you compare him to Scully, Mulder is not rational—”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Yes, he is! You just don’t understand where he’s coming from—” I stopped. Everyone was looking at me. Dr. Walpole opened her mouth.

  Frank cut her off. “Yes?” he said to me.