“This is ridiculous,” I said.
“You still think that was an accident, what happened to Victor that night? Aw, come on, Charlie. It was the plan, a damn well perfect plan—not original, I guess, a little out of my league. It was Caro had the idea. I called her as soon as I got out of the slammer, she told me to meet her in New York, she set up places we could see each other … y’know, she felt pretty bad about me goin’ to prison, she could of helped me but, hell, I didn’t want her to get tied up in it … I mean, hell, I felt like one prize asshole myself. There was Caro, I’d gotten her pregnant and what was I doin’? Trying to screw her sister! My future was never farther away than the length of my dick … Anyway, she said we’d have all the money and she’d be rid of Saberdene.” He lit another cheroot. “Whattaya think so far, Charlie?”
“I think you’re going to a lot of trouble to cook up this story. I’m trying to figure out why.” In my mind I was back in Judge Edel’s study looking at the photos Maguire had taken of them together. But I heard Caro explaining all that. I remembered the happiness we’d known, the love in her eyes and the pain.
“The trick was to get Saberdene up to that country house in the middle of the night. You were a complication, Charlie, but she said she could handle you. Turned out she was right. I called the poor bastard, got him up there on schedule, and she blew him away as planned. The way I figured it a whole lot of things could of gone wrong but none of ’em did. Bang, bang, she gets him with both barrels and I just went to ground.
“I knew everything that was going on all the time. I was always Johnny-on-the-spot. How the hell else do you think I could of found you up in Maine? You think I’m psychic? She told me, she told me! Think, Charlie, think! She cut the phone wire … She figured it out! How else?
“And now Victor’s out of the way. Caro’s got the money. And you and I are all alone in the middle of the night. Tomorrow, one way or the other, it’ll just be me and Caro.” He laughed quietly from behind the smoke. “Y’know how it is, Charlie. She’ll get tired of me someday and try to kill me … but what the hell? Maybe I’ll kill her first.” That struck him as fairly amusing. “The way I see it, it don’t really make no difference.”
“I simply don’t believe you,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”
“Well, old buddy, I really don’t give a shit. I just want you to get lost and leave us to get to hell in our own way.”
“I say you’ve already murdered her—”
“Damn it, Charlie!” he shouted. “You are the most contrary bastard I ever did see! How ’bout I take you down there and you can see for yourself. Honest to God, she’ll kill you herself if she has to. Listen … you’re everything she knows she should want … but me, I’m what she really wants. Down in her guts she wants me, Charlie. She says it’s a sickness, she can’t help herself. She didn’t know there for a while, all that lovey-dovey crap going on up in Maine there … She fell in love with you, I guess, as much in love as a woman like that can be, anyway. And I was gettin’ pretty antsy. Wasn’t the way the plan was supposed to work. I got to thinkin’, what if she married you and left me holdin’ the fuckin’ bag again? Where the hell would I of been? Sure, I could kill both of you … but I’d sure as hell never get my hands on all that money. Get it? Was she double-crossing me or what? How was I to know?
“So I went on up there to Maine. Fourth of July, I went to the house. She didn’t know I was comin’—she just thought I was waitin’ to get word from her, see. She came back to the house by herself, piece of luck, and I told her I was a little, y’know, disgruntled, pissed off, you might say. I think she was a little scared of me so she did what she always does when she’s scared … she said she wanted me, she said I should kill you when you came looking for her … she said a funny thing, Charlie, she said you were closing in on her and she’d tried but she figured you’d realize the truth about her sooner or later so I might as well finish you off … she was screwing me and she looked up and said you’d eventually realize she was crazy, she said she’d already seen it in your eyes … but then you came in and I guess she couldn’t take it, watching me work you over, and she ran … well, I was about to crack you in two, and I got to thinking … You were just a dumb bastard who wandered into the whole mess innocent as a fresh-laid egg, you fell in love with the wrong dame. That ain’t a crime in my book. I done it a thousand times myself. Why kill you? I kill guys who are after me, dangerous guys, people I need to kill. But you? You were harmless, why squash you? Like steppin’ on a bug. No offense, Charlie. Listen, our plan was to kill Victor, then meet six months later in Rio, that was what she’d always talked about, the beach in Rio, Ipanema and Copacabana … Rio, like it was the other side of the moon, like she always thought she’d be safe there and could start all over. I’d tell her, you can never hide from yourself, your fate catches up with you wherever you go. My dad told me that when he was dyin’ and I never forgot it … ah, Charlie, Caro and me, we were really crazy for each other that summer … then her sister, that Anna, started digging around, found out about all the screwing we were doing … she tried to scare me off and like a damn fool I took a fancy to her … that night we walked down the lane there and I grabbed her and kissed her and tried to screw her and she scratched my face, she was so scared … I probably should have screwed her, she’d be alive still, I’d have stayed a free man, a whole lot of people would still be alive … Aw shit, Charlie, it’s a fuckin’ mess, ain’t it? Somewhere along the line I got all turned inside out. ’Cause right now there’s no doubt that I’m the psychopath they said I was at my trial … then she lost the baby while she was having her breakdown. She tells me she did it on purpose and maybe she did. She said two people who were mad shouldn’t produce offspring—a monster, she said it would be …” He laughed bitterly at the idea. “Tell you the truth, Charlie, I never thought her testimony could have saved me and my ass, anyway. If the truth about us had come out, hell, nobody would have believed I was with her when Anna got herself killed.” He looked up at me, sucked on his cheroot. “That’s the thing about Caro. People are always gettin’ killed around her. But I ask myself, Charlie, why should you be one of them?” He smiled at me. The gun was drooping across his knees. He ground the cigar out under his boot heel.
He wasn’t watching me. I think he actually liked me at that moment.
That was when I hit him with the stone I’d gripped by my thigh while he was telling me his story. I don’t suppose I had to hit him so many times. But I was new at this game and I wanted to make sure.
Then I set off down the hill to the lodge.
I was soaked with his blood.
Chapter Twenty-five
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE SIDE door again, catching my breath, wiping my blood-spattered face on my sleeve, grabbing at the twinges of pain in a freshly twisted ankle.
Then I went inside. I wasn’t thinking. I was operating solely on shock and fear. Just then I was afraid of what I’d find in the house. I was afraid that he’d already killed Caro.
The downstairs was as empty as before. The house was still as a grave.
I climbed the stairs slowly; my ankle felt like a cracked china plate. I couldn’t keep my nose from bleeding. The stair creaked in the stillness and the dark.
The light from her bedroom spilled out into the hallway.
“Caro?”
I thought I heard a sound. A whimper or a sob.
She was crouched on the bed. One eye was puffy and discolored, yellow and purple. Her hair was sweaty, clung wetly to her forehead. The pink and black pearls hung motionless from her ears. She wore nothing but panties. On her left breast there were teeth marks.
She stared at me as if she’d never seen me before. Her arms were twisted back. She was handcuffed to the headboard. There was nothing at all in her eyes.
“Caro, my God, you’re alive!” I went to the bed. Her eyes tracked me. She shrank away when I bent toward her. I kissed her hair. She turned her head away. “I know, I
know,” I whispered, “I’m not such a pretty sight myself.”
She said something so softly I couldn’t understand.
I saw that the handcuffs were locked, her wrists rubbed raw. “The key, the key …” I was thinking aloud. But she was all right, she was scared and hurt but she was all right.
I found the key on the chest of drawers.
I bent over her wrists and fit the key to the lock, turned it.
“No, no,” she whispered.
Then her hands were free. She still knelt rigidly, hugging one of the pillows to her chest.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
The door to the room banged back, slammed off the chest of drawers. Caro’s eyes flicked toward the noise. She didn’t make a sound.
“I don’t think it’s going to be all right, Charlie.”
Varada stood in the doorway. He looked like what he was. Back from the dead. His hair was matted with blood and dirt and pine needles. His ear was smashed to a pink lump. Blood had run down his face and soaked into his shirt and the front of his safari jacket. He leaned in the doorway, dark blood running from his mouth. He held a gun that was pointing toward the floor.
“Tell him, Caro,” he said, “tell him the truth. Tell him about us …” He spit a bloody tooth from his mouth. “Tell him it’s the way you want it to be …”
He brought the gun up and staggered across the room. I’d left Victor’s forty-five back on the hillside. He was going to kill us. Lost in his madness, he was going to kill us.
He stood over her, then slapped her hard with a full swing of the back of his hand. Her head slammed into the wall and when she turned back to me her eyes had cleared, were focusing on me. He grabbed her shoulder and shook her. “Tell him the truth about us! Tell him about our baby you killed! Tell him how we planned to kill Victor for the money! Tell him!” He threw her back against the wall. She clung to the headboard. “God damn it! Tell him … then let him go! Or let me kill him … I don’t much care …” He spit some pulp and it stuck in her hair like a rotten blossom. “Tell him the truth, bitch!”
He was shrieking at her, spitting blood, his eyes bulging at her, oblivious to me.
I made a dive across the blood-spattered bed. The gun came out of his hand so easily, as if he had no strength left. He turned toward me slowly, a look of surprise on what the stone I’d used had left of his face.
I shot him twice in the chest.
The slugs seemed to blow him open, or apart, all in a split second, lifting him back off the bed where he’d been kneeling and dropping him on the floor.
I crawled across the bed, threw the gun down as if it might somehow turn on me, looked down at him. He was clutching at his chest, the fingers sinking into the wounds as blood oozed between them.
“You … gonna be real sorry … about this …”
He was trying to laugh but died in the middle of it.
I sank down on the floor beside him. We were leaning against the wall, side by side. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even feel anymore. Once I began to think and feel again, I knew I’d want to die, too.
She made a sound of some kind deep in her throat, not a word, something else.
I looked up at her.
She was kneeling on the bed. She’d turned to look at me. Her nipples were dark and erect, like tiny weapons. She was crying.
She was pointing the gun at my head.
“So, he was right. It’s been you all along. Saberdene’s goddamn variations.” I licked my lips but it didn’t do any good. Too dry. All I could taste was salty blood. “Living the same damn story over and over again … three of us loved you, Varada and Victor and then me, the latecomer … and now you’ve killed all three of us …”
Caro couldn’t stop sobbing. “I did love you, Charlie, all of you … each one of you differently … but I loved me more, can’t you understand that? I loved and hated me, everything you saw in me … I have to be free of all of you because each one of you knows me, sees inside me … I told you to forget me, Charlie, I told you to go away and never give me another thought … I wanted to save you, Charlie … why didn’t you do it, why did you have to come after me? My God, how I warned you, how I begged you to forget me … why didn’t you listen to me?”
I said: “I love you, it’s that simple. It’s my fate.”
I leaned forward, tried to stand up. I reached out for her. I wanted to touch her for the last time.
Then I think I heard the roar, saw the flash of light, felt the fire enveloping me …
Epilogue
ONE
AT THE BEGINNING OF ALL this I told you I had a story to tell. Well, you’ve heard most of it by now, but not quite all. No, not quite all. You haven’t heard the story of what someone who was about to die called the Nichols Variation. A last little joke before sleeping.
I also mentioned that it took me a while to recover from what happened up there at the lake. It was a very long process, a lonely, scary trip through uncharted territory. My memory of the events was agonizingly slow coming around, much slower than my physical recovery, which was pretty well completed within six months or so.
I was blinded for a while and that was a bitch. You want claustrophobia and panic in a very small place, like inside your head? Try being blind for a while.
One eye finally came back, functioning almost as well as ever. The explosion, the flash I thought I saw, the burn—they all played their own kinds of havoc with me but the one eye came back. I lost the other eye, on the side where the slug hit me. I’ve got a little thing like a marble in there now. Nobody can tell there’s anything wrong and I’ve grown used to it. I lost my hearing in that ear, too. The side of my head needed a lot of reconstructive surgery. The brain—that is, my brain—was exposed. A good deal of bone was blown away but the surgeons knew what they were doing. Part of my head is now something a lot like fiberglass or some damn thing. I’m squeamish about all that. I used to tune out when they started explaining. They’ve assured me my head won’t rust or anything and what more can a fellow ask for? There’s some metal in there, too, because like the guy in the old joke I occasionally pick up the news-on-the-hour inside my head.
I don’t look much different, or should I say much worse? I do look different. I have a bit more hair now due to some artful and incredibly expensive reweaving which covers the worst of the cranial scarring. And I’ve grown a beard, maybe a little ritualistically, beginning a new life since I had sure as hell used up my previous one.
From time to time I get a dull, throbbing headache but a handful of Advil fixes that. Science marches on.
Memory was a mess. My recollections ended with the beating Varada had given me in Maine. When I came out of surgery for the gunshot wound I figured I was up there in Hackett, glad to be alive. Over the months of my convalescence bits and pieces of what happened came back to me. Once the new year had passed, Andy Thorne insisted that I come to stay with him. That was where I went through the period of nightmares, reliving events right on up through the moment I was shot. Together, piecing through it from beginning to end, Andy and I reconstructed the whole story. It was quite a story and, of course, very different from the one that came out during the official inquiry into the shootings at Half Moon Lake.
Officially, the tale of Varada’s stalking Victor Saberdene’s widow and the friend of the family, Charlie Nichols, seemed shocking and horrible, but not altogether unreasonable or unlikely. In the end Caro had shot Carl Varada to save our lives and I had had the misfortune to get caught between them.
Well, that’s the way it could have been. And I was in no condition to set the record straight. Whether or not I would have, I suppose I’ll never know. But when I’d recovered and my memory of the truth had returned I certainly wasn’t inclined to drag it all out again.
By the time I arrived in Earl’s Bridge, Caro was gone. She spent the holidays that year with friends of hers and Victor’s in the south of France, at a villa above Nice. I had no inclin
ation to see her then. I was living in those days in a kind of bubble, stretched to the bursting point. I remembered loving her, all of that seemed like yesterday, but I didn’t understand what had happened out there in California.
Andy Thorne helped me like no one had ever helped me before. He saved me in the most fundamental sense. He said that at bottom what he really wanted was what was best for Caro. I came to feel the same way. And for some inexplicable reason I didn’t want to see her again. Perhaps my subconscious was protecting me, remembering beneath the surface what I had not yet been willing to face. Who the devil knows what really goes on in your head?
But as summer came and slowly turned to fall, Andy and I watched the Red Sox on television and went for walks and had dinners out at the inn and read and talked. As my memory of the events of a year ago returned to me, Andy was there to talk about Caro and Varada and Anna and Victor and me. He helped me to see the wellsprings of human folly and violence which had colored all of our lives. He led me by the hand, carefully, through the terrible agonies of his life and mine. He showed me the true face of love. We all had loved Caro. The survivors still loved her.
Caro.
She was recovering from what had happened to her life. No one seemed to know when or, indeed, if she would ever return to New York. In one segment of the press she was considered something of a tragic heroine. My publisher let me know that there was a big book in the works on “the curse of the Saberdenes.” As I write this I understand that it will be published next year. But I’ve refused to cooperate at any level and, believe me, I’m now the only person who knows the whole story.
Andy Thorne’s heart went bad for the last time in November. He knew he wasn’t going to make it this time. He insisted on staying at home, surrounded by nurses and paraphernalia but by all the familiar things as well.
The Saberdene Variations Page 23