The houses east of Warner Fork looked like they'd been cut from crystal. Spray from the river added extra layers of ice to the eucalyptus and pine. I slowed and parked up close to the house. The river raged, chops louder than earlier in the week, wind playing eerie pipes of Pan all along the length of the woods. Flickering lights of a television and receding smoke from the fireplace proved somebody was home. I got out and quickly crossed the yard. The motorcycle leaned up against the side of the house. I checked the engine. It was warm. I thought the recent snowfall would have kept everybody to cars, but I suppose bikers don't mind being out in any kind of weather.
I knocked on the door and had a long wait. Drapes rustled at the window. Deena finally appeared. At her side, Fred and Barney stuck their noses out, black shale eyes fixed.
Deena had expression this time; red and toxic hatred swarmed her face, those mismatched lips immediately tugging and crawling as if the dogs' command to kill kept passing half-formed over her tongue. Her eyes remained uncannily calm. We were close. I couldn't quite be sure if I was smiling. The sexual charge had become even more powerful.
"Hello," I said.
The breeze tugged her scarlet hair across her face, obscuring that weird mouth. She breathed softly, "What?" She didn't sound like she was asking me what I wanted but rather what was going to happen next. I wondered.
"I need to speak with Tons for a minute."
"No." The word fell like a stone.
My voice grew almost as tight as hers. "It's extremely important."
"He's asleep."
"He does a lot of that."
Her bottom lip curled, really curling, twisting and rearing ugly the way the Wicked Witch of the East's feet curled under the house Dorothy dropped on her. "What?"
"Please," I said, trying to keep it together and feeling my tolerance slipping off me like dead skin. "I know I've been something of a bother the past couple of days, but I need to speak with him."
"No."
She went to shut the door and I jammed my foot inside, got a position on the jamb and shoved. Dogs, I thought, be careful of the dogs. The front door flew open and blasted back against the wall. The Dobermans had been ready to get into me for days; they darted forward, keyed-up yet silent. If dogs really could smell fear then they weren't getting much of a noseful off me. Instead they looked surprised, catching the lingering scents of crew cut's blood. Fred came low and Barney hit high, one tearing at my ankle and the other standing on his hind legs and going for my throat. If I hadn't seen Anubis in action I wouldn't have known what to do. What irony if I died the same way. Deena vanished. I caught Barney's collar as he snapped at my neck and tugged him up and over my shoulder and hurled him out the storm door, which smashed and went flying on impact. Fred had already started chomping at my leg. His snout was dabbed with two thin streaks of my blood. I brought both fists down heavily on top of his skull. The dog let out a yelp and slumped to the ground, and I grabbed him by the collar and flung him on top of his brother. I slammed the door shut.
A baby cried in the far room. I stepped cautiously into the kitchen, checking, then walked into the living room. Tons was sprawled out and sleeping on the couch, undisturbed by the commotion. One arm was flung over his face and the other rested on the floor near another empty bottle of JD. I moved into Richie's room, where Deena was loading the Winchester.
She spun and pointed the rifle at me, but she hadn't locked the barrel. I said, "You shouldn't have wasted time loading so many bullets," and took the Winchester from her and laid it on the bed behind me.
"You," she said. "What do you think you're doing?"
"Saving my life, probably."
The baby still cried. Deena slung that emotionless gaze as she slid past and went into the baby's room across the hall and picked up her daughter. The room was filled with the usual amount of stuffed animals, toys, and clothes she wouldn't be able to appreciate for another year or two. Deena rocked and shushed her daughter. The infant sat wrapped in a large, black and red wool blanket, and Deena buried her face in the cloth as she hummed to the baby. The scene would have done Norman Rockwell proud, if only there wasn't such a hideous underside to it.
"You keep ol’ Maurice on a shorter leash than you do your dogs," I said. "Whenever you want to go out alone or keep him home, you hand him a bottle and a handful of downers and he puts himself to sleep."
"You were stupid to come alone," she said.
I tried imagining her with that fun scarlet mane buzzed off. "Not only do you act like him but you sound like him, too." She wasn't going to attempt lying her way out of anything; she didn't have the temperament for theatrics. "That is who the guy with the crew cut was, wasn't it? Your brother?"
"You murdered him."
"Not exactly."
Her hair jounced like crashing waves and turned me on even more. How that kind of sexual quality had led her to Tons Harraday I'd never know, but it blasted out at me in a torrent of rage and sorrow. "I'll kill you for that."
"He was staying here in the back trailer."
"For that." Deena repeated herself, stuck in the moment as she pressed her face to the infant again. "For that."
"You were doing it to her as well, weren't you? Harassing Margaret Gallagher, the way your father had twenty-five years ago. Why?" It had taken time to decipher Crummler's monologue. He'd said the ghost of a ghost, the chance of a ghost, the father of ghosts. "How long had it been going on? How long did you hound that woman before she finally died of a heart attack?"
"Not enough. Not at all. It wasn't like that," Deena said. "I just wanted to talk to her. You don't understand. I tried talking to her on the phone, I wanted to see her, to know what my father felt, and why. I just wanted to look at her, I wanted to know why she"—gain the curling lip, and the tide of hatred rushing up, making speech difficult—"broke my father's heart. I never knew him, but he loved her; I think he loved her. The letters he wrote, they were beautiful. He deserved a proper burial. They should have done that for him. I wanted to talk but she kept hanging up on me."
Here I'd been wallowing in my own past, believing myself haunted in some way: just look into those eyes, deader than her dogs'—what had driven her and her brother to Felicity Grove after twenty-five years to complete a madman's insane agenda? Displaced, I thought, all that fury. I should've been listening more closely to my grandmother. Anna had called it venom. Deena's face, body language, every nuance was angled wrong as if she'd been crushed and tied up again with chicken wire.
"Why did you wait so long? You were living in town for almost a year."
"Because, you damn fool . . ." Her breath came in gasps; there'd be no logic to this. Insanity might've been learned or genetic, but whatever its cause, she'd caught it good. Stray tears of fury dripped and clung halfway down her cheeks. "Because I didn't know that this was the damn town. I'm from Gallows, about a hundred miles west of here. I met Tons and I loved him, and I didn't know. My mother died two months ago and my brother Carl found a carton filled with our father's belongings: some of the letters he never sent, and newspaper articles. Mother clipped and pasted them on black cardboard just like school pictures. She knew what he was, and how he'd been killed, but never told anyone, and let them bury him without a name. It didn't matter that we didn't know where he was really buried; they all could have been him. We simply picked a site. Where that filthy, idiot grave keeper let the weeds cover my daddy—that retard's lucky Carl didn't break his neck. That's how I learned about why my father left when we were only three and four years old. Who he was, what he did, and how he died."
"And Carl came here and you both started making calls to Margaret?"
"Only me. Carl couldn't do anything but think about the day when Daddy left and never came back. Carl found out the cop who killed our daddy was the sheriff now and started calling him too, and sending presents the way the papers said our daddy had done. Carl thought it was poetic justice. I did, too. Tons didn't know."
"What do the wil
low swatches mean?"
She actually smiled and I wished she hadn't. "It was Carl's idea. He left them because our house in Gallows had a large willow tree out back and our daddy built us a tree house in it. Nothing big, just a few planks nailed together, but the three of us always played there. It fell apart but Daddy rebuilt it, until he didn't come home anymore."
My mouth was dry; there wasn't enough satisfaction in this, not the way I'd hoped. "And Richie?"
Deena cocked an ear and I heard the sound, too: Tons snoring, muttering, smacking his lips, and one of the dogs growling at the door. It shook her as she repeated what she'd said the other day, with the same empty tone. "He was a good kid." The baby had hushed and Deena whispered. "But he was silly and stupid. He thought we were doing it for fun, like a game. I still just wanted to see her, but she wouldn't even open the door. We were scared she'd call the police. Richie broke in through the back and let me and Carl in. She started to scream and Carl shoved her and then shoved her again, yelling about our father, and Richie started getting scared. I grabbed her and shook her and she slid to the floor and turned over on her back. I needed to know what my father had seen in her. I needed to know about my father, don't you understand that?" I did. "And then she was dead, just like that. Didn't take a minute." Deena's eyes glazed. "Richie thought he could make it look like a robbery and stole some jewelry, and he said he wiped his fingerprints off the glass, but he must have left some. After a few weeks he got careless and tried to pawn the bracelets and get a little cash, except he sunk himself. And. . ." She let it fade, staring at nothing.
"And your brother decided Richie was too dumb to get away clean, and when the kid got caught he'd tell the cops everything. So Carl killed Richie."
"I didn't know he would," she said, a subtle hint of pleading in her voice. It was the only time she'd shown any regret at how the circumstances had played out. More tears streaked her face down to her chin, but no sniffling, no sobbing. "They were supposed to just go driving through the park, Richie's favorite place to hang out, trying to think things through a little, and Carl said they started to argue and Richie started telling him stuff until my brother couldn't take Richie anymore; the kid could be like that sometimes."
Her reasoning made my hair stand on end. "So it really was a fluke that he left Richie in my yard."
"You live near the far end of the park. It must've happened right there."
"You said as much when you told me, 'How could it mean anything?' It just happened to be a nice spot for his impromptu act of leaving one of your father's old letters for Broghin. And tonight you watched his house. You found my grandmother there and saw Broghin leave and then you set up your little Wizard of Oz skit." All a game, so very fun. "Why didn't you cut the phone wires, too?"
"I thought I did," she said. "There were a bunch of them. They were a lot thinner than I expected. I just stuck a branch behind them and pulled hard. There weren't even any sparks or anything."
"Why did you kill Karen?"
"I didn't," she said.
"Your brother, then."
"He didn't, either. There was no reason for that."
My stomach knotted. Deena walked by me and we went into the living room where Tons was still snoring in the exact same position. I kept an eye out for her trying to let the dogs back in. I picked up the phone and started to call Lowell.
Deena pulled Tons's hair until he opened his eyes and said, "What?"
She had been resigned before, but now one final chance to get out of this was still open and she gave it a shot. "He's crazy! He broke in here!" The baby began crying again. "I think he killed Richie!"
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"He killed your brother, Tons! Get him!"
He sat up and came at me, staggering, arms raised. I ducked his one wild punch, swung, and tapped him lightly on the chin. Tons went down like his namesake's amount of bricks.
He crawled forward for a moment, pointed at my leg and said, "You're bleeding on my floor, man." I wasn't quite chastened enough to apologize for the fact. Tons tried to get up and fell asleep halfway to his knees.
Richie started telling him stuff.
The child wailed and Deena's eyes met mine. "Is she Richie's?" I asked.
She cooed into her daughter's face, infant gripping a strand of her scarlet hair like a lifeline out of a world with such a beginning as this.
"I don't know," she said.
FOURTEEN
I waited until Lowell showed; he came with Roy and another deputy, both of whom had their guns drawn low for the dogs. Seeing Anubis' work earlier in the day prepared them for another encounter with savagely protective canines. But being thrown through a glass door was enough to take some of the resolve out of the Dobermans. One was semi-conscious on the porch, and the other barked insanely but wouldn't leave his brother's side.
I had told Lowell most of it over the phone and filled in the gaps when he got here. He listened without comment. The child's crying didn't distract him, and neither did Deena's humming or Tons' snoring. Roy grabbed the rifle off Richie's bed, and he and the other deputy searched the house and the trailer out back for the .22. They discovered Carl's belongings, but didn't find the gun.
At one point Lowell said, "That son of a bitch," and I knew he was talking about Broghin, who might have avoided all the trouble if only he'd leveled with his own men.
"Why do you think he didn't come clean from the beginning?" I asked.
Lowell said, "Because he was scared. Seeing that letter brought up a lot from his past. I know that story about the stalker and how Broghin tripped over him skulking around Margaret's house and killed him in a tussle, but they never found out who he was. Broghin shot the perp in the face back when he was just starting out, still the only man he ever killed. For twenty-five years he's been living with that. It does something inside."
The ghost of a ghost. The chance of a ghost.
"His own private ghost," I said. "He couldn't share it with anybody." Twenty-five years of replaying his moment up on the stage giving his speech and taking his bows.
"Yeah, I guess." Lowell looked quite ready to fold the sheriff into an origami swan. "When men like him get scared they take it on their shoulders, make it personal and muck it up. They want control, only they don't have any so they walk around with their heads half screwed off."
"I sort of told you that a few days ago."
"Yeah," he said. He'd been wrong to completely trust Broghin, and it would never be the same in town again.
"He should have given you a holler."
Deena asked if it would be all right if she changed the baby, and Roy nodded and escorted her into the other room. Tons drooled on the rug, and I didn't want to be around when they woke him up and explained what had happened. He'd lost his brother, wife, and brother-in-law, and if the police wanted to pursue the drug charges based on what they'd found in the house, he might very well not see his infant daughter for a couple of years.
Roy found the tape recorder and played it. An eerie, ghoulish keening filled the house, like a bubbling, choking victim: "We have waited for this moment to . . ." He shut it off quickly and muttered, "Freaky goddamn people."
Lowell motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen. I did and he turned and stared at me, granite features unreadable.
"What?" I asked.
He wet his lips and told me what Wallace had found out about Karen Bolan.
~ * ~
Broghin got there a few minutes later; we looked at each for a long time while he went through the motions of taking charge of the scene. His demons had been dealt with and you could tell he felt like getting back into his old shoes. Lowell had respected him, Anna had trusted him, and his wife had loved him, and still he put them all into danger because he didn't have the strength to give up the limelit glory day of his career. He'd tampered with evidence, knew much more than he was willing to relate. He reminded me that we all had our fantasies and did our best, and occasional
ly acted our worst, in order to live up to them. For twenty-five years he kept a sacred memory of speeches and parades: killing Deena's father might have been the day he looked back on as the happiest of his life. He didn't want to give it up.
"Kendrick," he said. "Let me…"
I drew my arm back ready to haul off and break his jaw, started forward with it with all the frustration working at me like scalpels, a sudden migraine fragmenting my skull, but somewhere between me and him I lost the urge and nearly fell forward into his arms, and the room started to whirl as I looked up into his sweaty face and I had to go outside to throw up.
~ * ~
The worst part, perhaps, was that I meant to take time and sort the remainder through, drive around wishing for stray lightning bolts of inspiration, but instead I went immediately across town to where I understood I had to go. The subconscious mind is a perverse associate of ourselves which takes credit for our meanest assumptions; good, I thought, maybe that will help me get to sleep tonight. I didn't want to believe I had consciously thought what I was thinking. The same idea had occurred to Lowell, I was certain, but whether he held back because he was a cop and needed a warrant to do anything or because he was giving me the opportunity to end it myself, I didn't know. I hoped it was because he was a cop. This type of responsibility I could live without.
It was after eleven, but the front porch remained on. I parked at the curb and fumbled in the back of the Jeep until I found a bent screwdriver. It would do.
I got out and started up the driveway. A cat wandered over and brushed against my leg, tail looping around my ankle. I picked her up and held her close, no longer smelling the faint antiseptic odor in her fur. She meowed loudly and nibbled at my finger. I put her down.
The door of the El Dorado was unlocked. I opened it and the hospital stink dropped on me. In the dim illumination of the dome light I could see that the weather stripping around the window was cracked and discolored in spots; I used the screwdriver to pry loose the Dezus clamps and took the door panel off. The seat, rug, and window had been cleaned, but blood and minute traces of skin tissue had run down the window seal and dried inside the car door.
The Dead Past Page 16