“Connie?”
He didn’t move or speak, and I said nothing else to him.
I walked up the altar steps toward him, pulling the handcuffs from the belt of my jeans.“You have the right to remain silent.”
“I don’t want to remain silent,” he said.“I’m so tired.”
“Okay.It’s over.”
I could hear the sirens coming.
“What was worth it, Connie? Was anything worth it?”
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“Nothing,” he said.“But at the time you don’t believe it.”
“But what? The scholarship? Running this place? Single malt scotch at River Bend? Being smarter than the rest of us?”
Connie sat on the marble step, resting his head on the altar rail as if it were just too heavy to hold up.He smiled with a sorrow I’d seen on Gina’s face as she was dying.“At first, I just didn’t want Mary Beth not to like me.That’s all.If I just could stop Lyall from leaving that night ...
that’s all I was thinking.And my life changed.”
“You changed it.”
“Oh, yes.Free will.I know the doctrine.”
Danny was in the first black and white to get there.
As he shoved Connie’s head down into the backseat, Danny pointed at my car, parked in front of the church.Danny said, “I always knew a girl driving a 1968 Ford Mustang Shelby GT-500 couldn’t be all bad.”
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25
J A M I E
GARTH DIDN’Tcall me until he was waiting at the train station on his way back to New York.I drove over there to tell him good-bye.While we stood on the platform, a woman asked for his autograph.
“Katie’s right,” I said.“You’re a celebrity.” The national media, covering the shocking capture of a young star of the Church as the Killing Club Killer, had turned quickly and often to Garth for inside-source interviews.Every anchor from Peter Jennings to Larry King had asked him to tell them how this horror could have happened in such a little town and to such unlikely people.According to Katie, Garth was getting offers to go national himself.
It was now early January, cold and windy.The station announcer told us that the train to Trenton was approaching the platform and that we should step back.I already knew that.
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Pulling his hands from the pockets of his loose Italian cashmere overcoat, Garth rubbed them together and then glanced at his watch.“So, guess I’ll see you around.Thanks for the story.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.“But to me it wasn’t so much a story, I guess.
More a heartache.”
“You know what I mean.I would have looked like an idiot if I’d gone on the air saying it was Barclay.” He thought a moment. “You know what?
I liked Barclay better when I thought he’d killed himself.Love and loss.”
“I don’t like it either way.”
We talked about Connie’s confession, which he’d made as soon as Rod and I had sat down with him in the Dixon interrogation room.The priest, who’d heard so many other people’s confessions, declined a lawyer, not wanting to carry in silence the weight of what he’d done any longer.The confession had poured out of him.His parishioners, his diocese, his friends, all were in shock.The whole town of Gloria was stunned.Nobody talked of anything else through the holidays.“The last person you’d ever ...” “I don’t believe it ...”
Connie had confessed that he’d killed Lyall but hadn’t meant to, he’d just meant to stop him from telling anyone what had happened that night at the playhouse after the game.He’d told how he’d smashed Lyall on the head with an iron pipe that he’d snatched out of the debris on the derelict dock.How, then desperate, he’d come up with a plan to disguise that death as a suicide.
How he had tied a rope around Lyall’s body, dropped him off the dock into the river, breaking a hole in the ice.Left him there while he let Barclay drive him home with the others—all of whom thought Lyall had walked back to town.
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Then later that night he had hurried back to the docks in his parents’
car, hauled up the body out of the river and put it in the trunk.
Had left the suicide note he’d forged under the concrete block with Lyall’s coat and wallet.
Had buried Lyall’s body in the beds of Father Cooke’s rose garden in the Immaculate Conception cloister, where he worked every afternoon.
And for years he’d thought all was well.He’d won the scholarship, he’d gone to Georgetown, then to seminary, he’d become a priest.
He’d tried to make up for Lyall by doing good.
But then Father Cooke had discovered Lyall’s corpse.
Yet, somehow even that had worked out for Connie.Easy enough to give the old priest, already having a heart attack from the shock, an extra push by confessing that he himself (beloved at Immaculate Conception) had killed his friend years earlier.Or maybe he’d even put cyanide in Father Cooke’s nitroglycerin tablet, but if so, that crime Connie wouldn’t confess.
All those years, climbing the ladder so fast that at twenty-seven he was head pastor of the large flourishing church where once he’d mowed the lawn and cared for the plants.So fast that he was chosen to be a monsignor, the youngest in the diocese.
Everything was all right until Ben, knowing he was dying and bur-dened with guilt, had confessed to Connie that he was coming the next day to tell me, and so the police, how a group of them had driven Lyall to suicide.
Even then Connie hadn’t panicked.Even then he’d set things up perfectly so that if we at GPD didn’t rule Ben’s death an accident, there’d be a backup; Connie would tie it to the Killing Club.But not to the Lyall part 2 7 2
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of the club’s past.That’s what Connie couldn’t afford.When Amanda tried to bring us back to think about Lyall, to what had happened that night so long ago at the Pine Barrens Playhouse, Amanda had died too.
Easy enough to make it look like Barclay was guilty of everything.Stalking Amanda.Following me in the car that night.The basement fire, the crossbow, the cyanide.Connie knew Barclay had every motive—greed (Ben and Pudge and Etten Landing), lust and jealousy and betrayal (Amanda), protecting the political career, hiding the domestic secret.
Connie had confessed with a kind of ironic pride, “Better than anything in the Death Books, Jamie, right? But not perfect.”
“Nothing human is, Connie.You know that.”
GARTH AND I AGREED we’d underestimated Connie.He reminded me that back at Hart High, Connie had always been able to copy anybody’s signature.He’d signed Garth’s report card for him once.So it wouldn’t have been hard to forge Lyall’s note, or, years later, Barclay’s suicidal “Sorry.” “Funny, I remember,” Garth said, “Connie told me once he wanted to be famous.Now he is.”
“You remember everything,” I said.“At least you remember the facts of everything.”
He shrugged.“Well, most of the time, even those are wrong.”
I said I wished these were.These facts were too sad.
He turned to watch the train come into view.Then he said, “Yeah, Ben and Amanda and Pudge and Barclay.Four people had to die but, hey, the bigger the body count, the bigger the story, right?” His smile was rue-ful in its cynical acknowledgment of the professional world he lived in.
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“Apparently so.Well, I’ll see you around.” I held out my hand.
His smile was smart and sexy and had an old affection in it.“What are you so mad about?” he asked me.“You don’t want me to leave?”
I stepped back so I could look at him.Yes, his smile was beautiful.I said, “No, Garth, I think I do want you to leave.”
He nodded, ruffling his hair.“Okay.Fair enough, Jamie Ferrara.But I’ll be back to see you in Gloria.You know that, don’t you?”
“How do you know I’ll still be here?”
“You, leave Gloria?” He laughed.
“Your train’s here.”
“Jamie, you’re always telling me things I already know.” Garth kissed me good-bye as the steaming train rumbled hugely into the station.
SNOW MELTED and more snow fell and turned to ice and melted and then it was Valentine’s Day in Gloria, New Jersey.
White teddy bears with red hearts and boxes of candy topped with silk pink roses all went 50 percent off at Solly’s Drugs, but Christmas trees, their needles sharp as pins now, were still waiting in the gutters for pickup as we passed Dante’s, closed, and the town green, and the gothic spires of Immaculate Conception, where there was a new young pastor working hard to help the parish get over Connie.
We were all on our way to Harbor House.My dad and Clay and Rod in the van with Dino.I was driving the men in my life to a free concert.
It was Sunday, and on Sunday we went to the senior care center to hear Dino play his guitar and sing to the elderly men and women (mostly women) herded together by my great-aunt Betty into the “lounge”—a 2 7 4
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homely room with lots of plastic folding chairs and tables and wheelchairs and walkers and the awful antiseptic smell.But “the old people,” as Dino called them, loved my baby brother.Probably for the first time in his “career,” he was a hit.
To Debbie Deklerk, my brother’s success at Harbor House was just one more example of the twisted humor of whatever immortal idiot was filling in for God.Just like the fact that she’d been caught in a freak week-long rain storm in Cancún at Christmas.Just like the fact that the only men in her life were her brother, Sam (who was marrying Megan Tymosz in the spring), and a gay guy she’d met at her Latin-dance classes.
During Dino’s “concerts,” Clay took digital photos of the most terminally ill, physically twisted and mentally out-of-it of the groups of old people wheeled into the lounge.Clay spent his weekends with us now.
These days Clay didn’t smile much, hardly ever talked.But, silent, he sat on that leather couch more than I did now, close to my father, watching old movies on television.And one night I heard him laugh with Dad at a scene in Caddyshack.
It was hard to tell whether Meredith was aware of her grandson’s absence or not.Barclay’s death seemed to be the last thing she had paid attention to.When I’d mentioned to her something about Tricia’s return to Philadelphia, she’d looked around the large living room as if surprised that her daughter-in-law wasn’t in it.
At Harbor House, with his sweet goofy smile and glittering curls, Dino finished “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” with a brief, incongru-ous guitar flourish taken from a David Bowie number that his audience probably didn’t recognize.But as they were very fond of Dino, they clapped as loudly as they could manage.
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With a Vanna White flourish, Aunt Betty, in her red sequined jacket with her bright blue slacks, turned the page of Dino’s “fake book” on the music stand to the next song she’d chosen for him.“All You Need Is Love,”
he said cheerfully.
Rod, standing tall and comfortable and steady by my father’s wheelchair, winked at me, pulling from his familiar old tweed jacket the plane tickets to Baja we’d ordered.We were leaving on our long-postponed vacation the next morning.Finally.Unless something awful happened in Gloria, New Jersey, that Chief Waige needed Rod to fix for him.
Dino walked up to a woman slumped over a tray in a mechanized chair with an IV pole.He kissed the thin hair on the top of her head.She looked up at him, startled.“Love is all you need,” he sang, bending toward her.
“Are you my son?” she asked him, puzzled.
“ ’Course I am.” My little brother grinned.
Rod leaned down, his hand touching Dad’s shoulder, to listen to something my father was saying to him.They smiled at each other.
Okay.Love isn’t all you need.But it’s better than anything else.
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
There would be no Killing Club without Josh Griffith.It has been a plea-sure for me to make up stories all these years with so rich an imagination as his.Thank you.
There would be no Marcie Walsh, living her very full life in Llanview, without the gifted and indefatigable writers and writing staff of One Life to Live.Thank you.
Marcie Walsh could never be anyone other than the extraordinary Kathy Brier, who plays the role.Thank you.
At Hyperion, my especial gratitude to Gretchen Young, Bob Miller, Zareen Jaffery, Claire McKean and Rita Madrigal.Your faith, your enthusiasm and your talents made this book possible.
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And, always, my thanks to Maureen Quilligan, beloved and best of readers.
—Michael Malone
My warm thanks to everyone in the Llanview Police Department who indulged me in all my questions and who forgave me all my mistakes.Especially,
Commissioner Bo Buchanan
Chief of Detectives John McBain
and Assistant District Attorney Nora Buchanan Thanks to my father and brothers.I’m proud that we’re a family.
To President Davidson of Llanview University and to all my friends there, my lifelong gratitude for your support.
Thanks as well to Michael Malone for his help and to the people at Hyperion for their encouragement.To Chip Kidd, I love the cover you created for my novel.
And most all, I want to thank Michael McBain, for believing from the beginning that I could write this book.
—Marcie Walsh
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Document Outline
Title page
Dedication
1: Jamie
2: Pudge
3: Garth
4: Rod
5: Ben
6: Connie
7: Barclay
8: Debbie
9: Shawn
10: Danny
11: Amanda
12: Lyall
13: Gert
14: Meredith
15: Tricia
16: Joe
17: Katie
18: Sweets
19: Etten
20: Dino
21: Abu
22: Isaac Wurtz
23: Clay
24: The Killing Club
25: Jamie
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Start
The Killing Club Page 24