Well Bred and Dead

by Catherine O'Connell

  “What in hell happened here?”

  “Ethan, I want this cretin removed from my presence this very instant,” I demanded. “If you refuse there will be no transactions in the morning, do with me what you will, the money be damned.”

  Ethan knew better than to cross me when my temper was like this. “Maybe it’s better if I keep an eye on her the rest of the night,” he said.

  “Suit yourself. It’s your own life you’re taking into your hands.” Coolly unaffected by my rage, Terrance got up and picked up a few of the larger pieces of crystal from the floor. He started out the door before stopping to deliver a final crushing blow. “Pauline, I gotta tell ya, you are one of the most shallow broads I’ve ever met in my life. Which makes it so easy to screw you like this.”

  Ethan took up Terrance’s post on my chaise while I fumed over Terrance’s last words, so angry my vision blurred. Who was he to call me shallow? I tried to minimize the insult by bringing to mind one of my mother’s pet expressions, “consider the source,” but it did little to soften the blow. No matter how much I told myself that the slur had been issued from the two-sided mouth of a con man, somehow his epithet still had teeth.

  “Don’t look so unhappy,” Ethan chirped in an effort to placate me. “He’s far too common to recognize class when he sees it.” I looked at him and Mother’s words came back to mind. Consider the source. Was he validating or invalidating my mother’s expression?

  “Don’t look so unhappy!” I snapped. “Surely you jest. It’s nearly midnight and I am handcuffed to my bed wearing the same clothes I’ve had on all day. I am scheduled to leave for Paris tomorrow afternoon and I haven’t finished packing. I haven’t had a proper meal, I haven’t been permitted to do so much as apply my face cream, and my net worth is going to go down by ninety percent tomorrow. As if that isn’t enough, now I am forced to take insults in my own house from a common vulgarian who I once fantasized as my ideal mate. How dare you have the gall to say ‘don’t look so unhappy!’”

  Having finished my speech, unable to contain myself any longer, my fury gave way to tears, scalding rivers of them spewing forth from my exhausted eyes. Being handcuffed made it impossible to flip over and bury my face in my pillow, so I buried it instead in the crook of my arm, crying great heaving sobs of frustration and anger. A moment later I could feel Ethan’s weight settling beside on the bed. I looked up to see him holding out a box of tissues. I took several and blew my nose messily into them.

  “Dear lady, dear friend, I know this wasn’t exactly the best way to go about this, but it was the only way. After tomorrow we will be out of your hair and you can get on with your life.”

  “Don’t call me your friend. I’m not your friend,” I sobbed.

  He sounded genuinely hurt. “Please don’t say that.”

  “It’s the truth. I despise you and I shall never forgive you for this, Ethan. Never.”

  “Oh, Pauline, I can’t bear for you to hate me this way. Is there something I can say to change your mind?” he whined. Some of the Ethan I used to know, the one who desperately sought acceptance, was coming to the surface.

  My tears slowed to a mere spring, and for a capricious moment I toyed with the idea of asking for more money. There could be no better salve for my wounds. But I knew the request would be futile. So instead I took the opportunity to seek satisfaction of another kind, non-monetary, but desirable nonetheless.

  “Well, you could give me some answers.”

  A wry smile passed across his thin lips, reminding me of a teenager whose mother has just caught him self-pleasuring with his father’s men’s magazine sprawled across his knees. Nodding a series of short quirky jerks, he got up from the bed and resumed his place opposite me on the chaise, pulling my cashmere throw over his narrow shoulders as if preparing to settle in for a while. The open look on his face reminded me of my lost friend, the one whose shoulder I could always cry upon, the one whose engaging voice had so intrigued me years ago.

  “What would you like to know, Pauline?”

  “For starters who are they and how did they find you?” I gestured down the hall in the direction of the other two chameleons.

  “They didn’t find me. They found my twin. He found me.”

  In a burst of clarity, I realized whose ashes were in my entry closet, the son Joseph Baincock never knew he had sired and Moira McMahon Kehoe never knew she had delivered into this world. When Mr. Holstein told me about the twin’s existence, he suggested that people had a way of coming out of the woodwork where money was involved. He hadn’t known known how on target he was. And just as he had in Morristown, South Carolina, in 1965, Ethan had recreated himself again, this time metamorphosing into his twin. But according to Hal Holstein the twin lived in Miami. How did he and Ethan come together?

  “Ethan,” I begged him. “In consideration of what I’ve been through, you do owe me one thing.”

  He looked at me glassy-eyed. “What’s that, Pauline?”

  “You owe me your story.”

  “My story? What do you mean?”

  “I mean your story. The true one. From the moment you left your family home until this very minute.”

  I gave him my most obstinate look. He smiled his first smile since invading my home. Still the same yellow teeth. “All right, Pauline. I suppose you do deserve it.”

  And he started telling me everything. I became so absorbed in his story, I forgot about being held captive in my own house and the specter of poverty once again looming large before me. All that existed was Ethan and his tale, and he enraptured his audience of one much the same way I am sure that storytellers in ancient days enthralled battle weary warriors around the fire.

  It was a story that would have made him the bestselling author he so longed to be—had he only been able to bring it to print.

  34

  A Tale of Two Ethans

  “You know, Pauline, I always knew I was different. It was an overwhelming feeling. The environment I lived in was contrary to my nature, surrounded by blue collar people with lack of aspirations. Though my mother was loving, my father was a pig, and my sister…well, she was young. Anyhow, I don’t think there was a day in my life I didn’t tell myself, ‘I don’t belong here with these people.’

  “My so-called father was terribly abusive, though I don’t think we called it that when I was young. He had a pugilist’s fists and never hesitated to use them on me. By the time I turned twelve, I don’t think there was an inch on my body that hadn’t been bruised at one time or another. But worse than the physical cruelty was the mental cruelty he dished out. He rode me night and day about my worthlessness, and for a long time I fulfilled his prophesy. I felt I was incapable of doing anything, which kept me from leaving home. For survival, I’d hide in my room and read about exotic places and fancy people and think ‘I belong there, not here.’

  “Finally, or I should say, fortuitously, one day shortly after my twenty-first birthday, he came after me with a garden hoe. If I hadn’t had quick reflexes I’m sure he would have killed me. My mother was afraid for my life and told me now that I was a grown man, it was time for me to go off on my own. She gave me some money and an envelope with my birth certificate, and oddly enough, hers too. She said, ‘I just want you to remember who you came from.’

  “So I left home and went to New York City. I only lasted there a couple of weeks. It ate me up alive. Things were too fast for a naive young man like me. I meandered for a few years after that, moving from town to town, working odd jobs, until I somehow ended up in Charleston. I fell in love with that city almost immediately, even though I realized it was yet another place I wouldn’t be accepted. Then one afternoon while I was watching the shrimp boats pull into the harbor on Sullivan’s Island, I struck up a conversation with an Englishman named Ethan Campbell. He told me he was going to Morristown for a few days’ holiday before heading down to Puerto Rico to start a writing job he’d just secured. He invited me to come to Morristown with him. I fi
gured, why not? I tagged along and we checked into the St. Alder Arms, separate rooms, of course, so that no one would suspect our sexual orientation.”

  He fell silent, and I could tell he was contemplating what to say next. Then suddenly he began speaking rapid fire, the words churning to his lips and bubbling over as if he had been waiting forever to share them. “It was an accident. We were two consenting adults. He told me what to do, showed me how to do it. I never could have thought up anything like that myself. One minute he was in the throes of ecstasy, the next he was dead at my feet—with me standing over him holding a nylon stocking.”

  So that was how the British Ethan Campbell had died—of erotic strangulation. I only knew of it because it had been in the paper recently, explaining away a rash of suicides among young men that most probably hadn’t been suicides at all. The deadly dangerous sexual act involved cutting off oxygen at the point of orgasm to increase its intensity. That explained how one so small as Ethan had been able to cause the Englishman’s death, and why the skeleton found in the swamp had shown no indication of how he died or of any clothes.

  “Pauline, I was terrified beyond belief. I didn’t know what to do. I stayed in the room with Ethan’s body until the middle of the night when everyone in the inn was asleep. Then I wrapped it in a blanket and dragged it down the stairs, praying that no one would wake up. Every creak of the steps echoed like a scream, it was so quiet in there. Luckily, he was a small man like me, but it still pushed me to my limits to move him. Somehow, though, when it means your survival you find superhuman strength.

  “Ethan’s rental car was parked on the street, so I dragged the body to it and loaded it into the trunk. Then I got into the car and started driving. I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing, I just got on the interstate and drove. That’s when I spotted an exit sign for Little Scapoose Swamp.

  “It was as if Providence was looking out for me,” he said, his eyes turned inwardly as he relived that night. “I turned off the highway and drove into the swamp until the road ended. Then I pulled the body out of the car and dragged it through the marsh until I thought my arms were going to pull out of their sockets. Mosquitoes were eating me alive, and I didn’t dare think about the snakes and reptiles I knew lived in swamps. I just kept dragging him and dragging him, thinking that if I could get that body far enough away they wouldn’t find it until I was long gone.”

  Finally, so exhausted he couldn’t drag the dead man another inch, Ethan left him in the water and returned to the car to decide his next course of action. He could go back to the St. Alder Arms, check out in the morning and catch the first bus out of town, or he could keep the dead man’s rented car and just continue driving. If he didn’t go back to the inn, he worried about what would happen when the innkeeper went into their rooms the next day and found all their belongings but neither of them. He would most likely call the police, and there would be an investigation that might lead to the swamp. And they would most certainly connect Daniel Kehoe to the body since the two men had been inseparable since their arrival.

  Then a solution came to him. If Ethan Campbell continued to exist, there would be no reason for the authorities to search for him.

  Daniel sped back to the inn, arriving just before dawn. He went into the dead man’s room and packed up his belongings, taking his wallet with all his documentation as well as a substantial amount of cash. Then he went back to his own room, cleaned himself up and packed his things. An hour later, while the innkeeper and his wife were busy setting up for breakfast, he asked to check out for both of them. He settled their bills in cash from Ethan’s wallet, climbed into the rented car and headed south.

  “It may sound strange, Pauline, but for the first time in my life I felt liberated. I had all of Ethan’s papers, his birth certificate, his driver’s license, his passport, his work visas and, most important, a writing job in Puerto Rico. Our physical descriptions were nearly identical, height, weight, hair color, eyes, and so on and since this was before pictures on driver’s licenses, it was perfect. I kept all his identification except his passport which did have a picture on it, so I burned it. When I got to Miami, I turned in the rental car and caught the boat to Puerto Rico.”

  “But didn’t Juan Cardoza know you weren’t Ethan Campbell?”

  “Juan had never met Ethan, they had only corresponded by mail. He did know that Ethan was a British citizen, so I told him I was born in England but grew up in New York to explain why I didn’t have an accent. He never questioned it. So Ethan Campbell flourished and Daniel Kehoe ceased to exist. Which was good. No one would miss Danny Kehoe.”

  “Except your mother and sister.”

  For the first time a look of regret came over his face, but it lifted quickly. “I felt slight remorse over that, but I knew my sister would be okay. As for my mother, I did love her and I know she loved me, but when I think back on the way she let that son of a bitch treat me…” His voice trailed off as he relived a part of his life ugly enough to turn him into the creature who now sat beside me.

  So Daniel Kehoe as Ethan Campbell spent twenty-five years in Puerto Rico, writing for Juan Cardoza’s paper and living his life with ever increasing self-confidence. It was as if becoming Ethan Campbell negated his sad history. He would read the loving letters Ethan’s mother had written him and pretend that his own mother had been so adoring. And after the years he spent hiding in his bedroom and reading of exotic things, he found out he was engaging. Though his writing job didn’t pay a great deal, he built a fairly happy life for himself in Puerto Rico.

  “But then I started getting wanderlust. I really wanted to be in a metropolitan area where there was more culture to draw from. I figured enough time had passed since the death of the original Ethan that it would be safe for me to move somewhere else, but I worried about New York City since I might see someone from Rochester there. So I looked at all the cities in the United States, and I settled on Chicago. I wanted to write, and was fascinated with Berthe Palmer, so I thought what better place than the city where she had lived? Of course, no one had ever clued me in about the weather in this godforsaken place. It was worse than Rochester, with one exception. When my book was published I received a warm reception. That’s when I decided Chicago would be home for me. And it was a good choice. I made so many friends. I’ve never seen so many women starved for companionship, so happy to be on the coattails of an author no matter how small.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to fill in the blanks for you in the intervening years, Pauline, except that I always had this feeling of being more—that I was deserving of more. But I pushed it back and contented myself with my life here.

  “Then one day last March my whole world started to implode. I received a phone call from a man named Norbert claiming to be my brother. I knew the original Ethan Campbell had no siblings, so I told the caller he’d made a mistake. Then he said something that sent shock waves through me. He said he was Daniel Kehoe’s brother.

  “Can you imagine, Pauline, what was going through my mind? No one had seen or heard from Daniel Kehoe since 1965 and here was a complete stranger on the phone, not only claiming to know I was Daniel Kehoe, but claiming to be my brother as well. I kept my cool and asked him what made him think he was my brother. He said I would know when I saw him. I tried putting him off and then he said something that caught my attention. He said that Daniel Kehoe had inherited a lot of money. He wouldn’t tell me anything more unless I agreed to meet with him.

  “He came to my apartment that Tuesday night, the day before you found the body. Can you imagine my shock when I opened the door and saw myself standing in the hall? I invited him in and in the course of our conversation I learned that his parents had died many years before and he was on his own. They had left him a modest sum which was almost gone. He told me he dabbled in writing himself, had started his own autobiography but hadn’t gotten very far. He worked in a bookstore because, like me, he loved the written word.

  “Then N
orbert told me that the week before, two men had come into the bookstore and told him that he had a twin named Daniel Kehoe who had come into a lot of money. In their search for Daniel they had learned of his existence, and they hoped by some fluke of fate he might have connected with his brother. At the very least they would know what Daniel looked like.”

  The two men, of course, turned out to be none other than Terrance and Mr. Matthews. So they were “estate” bounty hunters just like Mr. Holstein. Which meant in their quest to find the rightful heir of Joseph Baincock, they too had visited the hospital where Daniel was born, and had dug deep enough to find the nurse who kept track of the black market babies. Only they had found her well before Mr. Holstein had, and unlike Mr. Holstein, they had looked Ethan’s twin up. It must have been a lucrative year for the former baby trader. I hoped her grandson had gotten his operation.

  “But how would Norbert know where to find you?” I asked, lost in the labyrinth of Ethan’s tale.

  “He had read my book on Gloria. He was fascinated with her too. He said when he saw the picture of the author inside the book’s dust jacket it was like looking in a mirror. So when Terrance and Matt told him he had a twin, he knew right away who his twin was. He assumed that Ethan Campbell was just a pen name.”

  Of course his twin would have read his book. What is it that sociologists say? That identical twins separated at birth tend to have the same interests in life, from their favorite colors to the work they do to the type of people they choose to marry. And so it was only natural Norbert would have taken an interest in books about society women. Since Ethan’s bio stated that he lived in Chicago, he was easy to find from there. His phone number was even listed. He claimed he listed it so that people could find him during his research, but I personally thought it was because he didn’t want to risk missing out on any invitations.