by Howard Owen
I was quiet. She continued.
“Let me tell you a story.”
When Lewis was a teenager, Bitsy told me, she was madly in love—or thought she was—with a young man, a member of her group with a rather impressive Roman numeral after his name.
One day, the boy told her it was over. He didn’t want to go steady anymore.
“I knew his family, they lived four houses down from us. My older sister, Elizabeth, was just a year behind Lewis at St. Catherine’s, and she hung out with the boy’s sister. One day, Liz let me tag along with her when she went over there. It was an early summer morning, and we had our bathing suits. We were going down to the Quarry.
“But when we got there, Bobby, that was the boy’s name, and his sister and his mother were all standing there at the edge of the driveway. It was early. I remember the dew was still heavy.
“What they were looking down at, lying half-hidden inside the boxwood hedge, cold and dead, was Dabney.”
Dabney was Bobby’s Labrador retriever. He’d had her since he was in second grade. The dog had gone missing the day before. They’d walked all around the neighborhood, but couldn’t find her anywhere. Bobby’s father hadn’t noticed her body when he went to work that morning, and so it was left to the kids to find her. Her collar was missing, but it was obvious that it was Dabney. When the vet took her away and did a doggie autopsy, he determined she had been poisoned.
“I was ten or eleven. Liz pulled me away, and we went back home. The whole thing with Dabney was a real shock. Nothing like that ever happened in Windsor Farms. There was talk of neighborhood watches or hiring private security. But then it died down.
“A month or so later, though, we were at the Simpsons’ for a party. I wandered away and started exploring. It felt kind of wicked, you know, to be in somebody else’s house like that, just snooping.”
Somehow, she said, she wound up in Lewis’s room.
“I was just going around, opening drawers and stuff. I could hear the adults and the kids off in the distance, mostly out by the pool. Anybody could have walked by.”
She said there was a desk, where Lewis probably did her homework.
“I opened the drawer underneath the desktop, and there, with all the pens and pencils and such, was a collar. A dog collar. And you know whose name was on it?”
Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.
“Dabney.”
“Yeah. You know, I never told anybody about it, not until I went to college. And nobody in Windsor Farms. To this day. It’s about the only secret I’ve ever kept, I guess.
“But I’ve always been afraid of Lewis, since then.”
Well, I told Bitsy, that was a long time ago.
Bitsy’s laugh is as sharp and dry as a good martini.
“People,” she said, “don’t change.”
So here I stand. Lewis Witt leads me into what seems to be an otherwise empty house.
“I understand,” she says when we’re seated in the living room, which is about the size of my whole apartment, “that you have some information.”
I nod. Then, I spell out what I’ve learned, what Alicia wrote, giving her the short version.
She sits quietly as I tell her what I think happened twenty-eight years ago.
She seems less than shocked.
“I thought there might have been something,” she says. “And I just didn’t want to know. The sad truth is, both my brother and sister have had issues.”
Then I tell her what I think might have happened on January 22nd.
“That’s quite a story, Mr. Black,” she says when I finish my spiel. “Complete fiction, because my brother has trouble planning what he’s going to wear, let alone a murder, but quite a story nonetheless. Do you think anyone will believe it?”
I tell her anyone who read the whole manuscript and knew all the facts might.
“Did you bring it with you?”
I assure her that Alicia’s papers are in a safe place.
She sighs, then begins talking.
“Mr. Black, my family has been through a lot. My brother’s, ah, illness probably took years off my parents’ lives. Then, the rape—or whatever you wish to call it—diminished Alicia in ways you cannot imagine. And then, to be killed the way she was. What’s left of my family would like a little peace. We don’t exactly need this embarrassment on top of all the grief. I would like very much for that manuscript to never see the light of day.”
“Well,” I tell her, “I’m not trying to ruin your lives. But there’s this guy who’s about to spend the rest of his days in prison, if he’s allowed to live, and I don’t think he did it. Either time.”
I see Lewis’s lips twitch, almost like she’s going to smile. But she doesn’t.
“And what, Mr. Black, are these other ‘facts’ you mentioned?”
I tell her about Bump Freeman and the phone call.
“OK, so suppose this, this man . . .”
“Richard Slade.”
“Suppose Richard Slade did answer the phone at his mother’s home. What would have kept him from hiring someone else to kill my sister?”
Nothing, I tell her, except there’s not one scrap of evidence to indicate that. A gun with no serial number or fingerprints on it. No witnesses. Could have been anyone.
“Seems like a long haul,” I tell Lewis, “from there to ‘guilty.’ ”
“Well, we’ll let the courts decide that one. But one thing at a time. About that manuscript.”
My head’s been on a swivel since I got here. I wonder if Wesley is lurking somewhere, waiting to pay me back for Wednesday night.
“Where is your brother, by the way?”
She pauses for a moment.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she says. “He’s not here. And he’s not over at Momma and Daddy’s, either. He won’t be staying there anymore.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Black, it’s just you and me here, all alone. It’s Carl’s poker night, and my son’s spending the night with some friends.”
She walks over to a desk, an old, scarred one that stands out like a bottle of Ripple in a wine bar. It looks like it might have belonged to a schoolgirl at one time.
She pulls out a piece of paper. When she gets closer, I see that it’s a certified check. Made out to me, with a very large number on it. Holy shit. What Lewis is offering is about the size of my 401(k) before it turned into a 201(k).
“You’ve worked very hard to get that manuscript, Mr. Black. Some might say you stole it, that you were a snoop who deserves to be arrested for trespassing and assault on a mentally ill man.
“But let’s not quibble. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones and just call this a reward for a job well done.”
“And you get the manuscript.”
“You’re very sharp, Mr. Black.”
It’s tempting. Jackson says everybody’s a whore; we just have different prices.
The trouble is, I’ve pretty much promised the esteemed James H. Grubbs a story that will make me worth the trouble of paying my salary. And I really do like going to work every day. The last week has taught me that if nothing else. The newspaper, which has on occasion beaten and flayed me like Gunga Din on a bad day, might be the only thing between me and a bottomless bottle.
I tell her I can’t do it.
“So what will you do with the information?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”
I really haven’t. There’s still a lot of bullshit to sort out here. Even if it happened all those years ago the way Alicia wrote it, how can you prove that neither Richard Slade nor an agent of his killed her, just for spite. I know what I know, and I know what I can prove, and the two aren’t quite aligned.
Lewis Witt walks over and puts the check back in the drawer. Then she turns toward me.
“Mr. Black,” she says, “if you will come with me, I believe I can show you something that will ease your doubts at last about who killed my sister.”
“Come where?”
“Just a short drive. This won’t take long, I assure you.”
I explain that I have a daughter recuperating back at the Prestwould, and I have to get back to check on her.
“Well, if you want to know what really happened, this is your chance.”
What choice do I have?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Nov. 22, 2010
I never meant to write this, never wanted to write it. Dr. Burstein wanted me to put everything down on paper a long time ago. He finally dropped me as a patient. Maybe he didn’t want to share my guilt. And when I told my father that I felt much better, they just let the whole thing drop. I had had two years of treatment by then, once a week spilling everything to Dr. Burstein. My parents were never very comfortable with psychiatrists. It was against their beliefs—more to the point, their belief that we were perfect.
People are able to tuck things away in the back of the closet, eventually almost forgetting about them. I suppose all those years I had hoped, even convinced myself, that Richard Slade had died in prison, God help me. I’d talked myself into believing that he was just a train wreck waiting to happen, that if it hadn’t been my case, it would have been something else, some other girl.
But then somebody broke the code, came up with DNA, and everything that was tucked away in the darkest corner of that long-forgotten closet came tumbling out.
Everybody assumed that I’d just made a mistake, identified the wrong black boy. It had happened, still does, I suppose.
Only three other people know my shame, two really since Dr. Burstein is now dead. And I don’t believe it is possible for anyone to know the stain I bear. It is not possible now to even look in a mirror any longer than it takes to ensure that I am at least moderately presentable. Last week, I went out with only one earring on. Bitsy had to point it out to me.
I have sinned. I don’t even believe anymore that there is a God, but there is still sin. And I have wallowed in it and I’m covered with its slime.
What I want to do is get clean again, the way I once was. It may not be possible, but I intend to try.
I intend to keep writing, night and day, until it is all told, until I have vomited up all that I have done.
Since it happened, Lewis has tried to “talk some sense” into me. She tells me that, for the sake of the family, I must keep everything hidden. Who will gain, she asks me, if I tell everything now? Who will lose?
I tell her that she is right, but she seems to doubt my sincerity.
Now, when it seems certain that Richard Slade, whose name I blocked out for so long, will be a free man again soon, walking the streets in the same city, perhaps coming face to face with me eventually, those kind eyes I see in the newspaper stories quietly asking me why, I can no longer stay quiet. The lie within me is too large to contain any longer.
As my Sunday school teacher told us when I was six years old, the truth will out. . . .
Nov. 29
It is time to talk about Wesley.
He was my hero, always there to defend me if anyone tried to pick on me, always patiently showing me the way, helping me with my homework, including me in things when his friends might have thought I was a brat. Two years age difference is a lot when you’re ten or twelve.
He was handsome, talented and popular. Yes, I had a crush on my brother.
It seemed innocent enough. He’d show me how to kiss, tell me what to look out for from the older boys, even though, at twelve, I wasn’t turning any heads. We weren’t a particularly prudish family. When you have an older brother and sister around, and the neighborhood’s full of other kids, some of them world-wise beyond their years in their parents’ mistaken belief that knowing how to mix a cocktail before you’ve reached puberty is a proper step toward adulthood, you learn things, you try things.
A little experimenting, I heard my father tell my mother once, after she had found a joint in Wesley’s shirt pocket, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I was thirteen when Wesley lost his mind. He didn’t lose it all at once or forever, at least not at the start. He would have “spells.” He would have days when he couldn’t go to school. That summer, when he was fifteen, it became really apparent to everyone in our world that Wesley was likely broken in a way that he would never “grow out of.”
An infamous incident at the Quarry in which Wesley swam naked in front of a couple of dozen of our neighbors pretty much put it up in the sky in big block letters: WESLEY SIMPSON IS CRAZY.
Psychiatrists and a battery of drugs, much more primitive than the ones they have now, failed to do much more than delay the day when Wesley couldn’t live with us anymore.
The rest of the family, even my mother, seemed to step away from Wesley, trying to separate themselves from the taint of insanity.
“You know,” I heard my mother say once to a friend who was at least feigning sympathy, “I’ve looked back into my family, and so has Harper, and nobody in either of our families ever had anything like this.”
In other words, not our fault. Maybe not Wesley’s, but not ours either.
(I have since learned of a great aunt on my father’s side who spent her latter years in a “hospital” and a great-grandmother on my mother’s side who had to be more or less kept in the cellar.)
Me, I just ached for Wesley. I didn’t love him a whit less for his illness, even if it did make him someone different when it was upon him. I tried to make up for what seemed to be a poorly hidden lack of sympathy on the part of Lewis and our parents. Their belief, as crazy as any of Wesley’s delusions, was that if someone took him by the shoulders, shook him and ordered him to “pull yourself together,” somehow it would all turn out all right.
The summer I turned fourteen, it happened.
We had been fooling around in the basement. I don’t know where my parents and Lewis were. When I say “fooling around,” I mean everything else but what Wesley called The Final Frontier. Yes, we did oral, too. We convinced ourselves, or Wesley convinced me, that it wasn’t really sex, beating Bill Clinton on that one by a few years. We had seen porno flicks that Dad thought were well-hidden. We knew what went where. We knew other kids who were “doing it.”
I knew it was wrong, but we just kind of fell into it. I felt guilty, but I felt guilty about refusing Wesley. He needed someone to make him feel good. And, God help me, it made me feel good.
Lewis had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but she was in college by then, so it was just the two of us.
That day, he made me lie on my bed, naked, and then he talked me into letting him tie me up. He’d done it before, and it shamed me to admit how good helplessness felt. The other two times, though, he just felt me up a little, teased me, made me beg.
This time, though, he broke through The Final Frontier.
It didn’t hurt that much. There was a little blood, which we cleaned up. He was probably inside me all of two minutes.
But, of course, there are some things you can’t take back, some things you can’t do just once. . . .
Dec. 12
So finally we come to The Night In Question.
It was still warm that day, somewhere between Labor Day and the beginning of fall, a time I loved, up to that point.
I was sixteen. Wesley was eighteen. He was in one of his several stays at “homes” of one kind or another. This one was just across town. I knew my mother would soon relent and talk my father into letting him come back. They loved Wesley. I’m convinced of that. They just didn’t know what to do with him.
When he came back, we always did it. I still had not had sex with another boy. Wesley was all I knew.
Our parents didn’t seem to be aware. Lewis would summon me to her room and say things like, “You and Wes must be careful. He’s not responsible for his actions, so you’ve got to be responsible for two.” I think she had trouble finding the words for the enormity of what she knew we were doing.
Wesley and I had always kind of teamed up against
poor Lewis. I say “poor Lewis” because, even though she was four and six years older than we were, we always seemed to be able to get her goat. Lewis didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and I always felt that she didn’t think she was as well-liked by our parents as Wesley and I were when we were young, but that’s just me.
We would play tricks on her, taking advantage of her when she was supposed to be babysitting us. She would report us to our parents (although she never could bring herself, later, to report on what really needed to be brought to their attention), but they likely as not would tell her that we were just children, to just laugh it off.
That night, our parents were having drinks out on the patio, and I was doing my homework.
Wesley must have slipped away from the group home. I don’t think it was too hard. My bedroom had a little side door that opened to the outside, kind of hidden away. I heard a light tapping, and when I looked out, there was Wesley, holding his index finger to his lips.
I let him in. He kissed me and told me that we were going to the Quarry.
I told him that I had homework, but the look of disappointment was enough to make me close my book.
I told my parents I was going up the street to see some friends. They didn’t even ask which ones. When they got beyond the second gin and tonic, they didn’t ask a lot of probing questions.
I met Wesley out on the street and asked him why we were going to the Quarry. He smiled down at me and said, “So we can be alone.”
I didn’t resist. I never did, really. We walked downhill until we got to the entrance. I remember that the night was still and sticky, like there was a storm brewing.
We slipped in through the hole in the fence. The water probably was still plenty warm for swimming, but of course Wesley had other ideas.
I was led, willing as a sheep to the slaughter, to the men’s dressing room. It still smelled of the damp of summer bathing trunks and the chemicals used when they cleaned the toilet.
I let him strip me and lay me down on the hard wooden bench. He produced some kind of lightweight rope, pulled my hands over my head and tied me to a hook hanging on the wall behind me. When he’d tied me up before, it seemed to be less scary, mostly because we were in our own house.