‘We didn’t do it immediately. Remember when you and Ralph went out to trick or treat? It would usually have been you and Dave, Danny and Dave forever, but me and Dave fixed it so it would be you and Ralph. We changed then, and said nothing from then on.’
‘Why?’
‘I know, pretty childish, huh? Maybe our excuse was, we were kids. I know I just wanted to fuck with Ralph, and the idea he’d be following Dave around like a puppy, thinking it was me, must have amused me. You know how it was; you had the same kind of thing going on with Dave. Anyway, point of the story coming up: when Ralph says the bottle was thrown by a P, well, that wasn’t me, man, I had become an F. Ralph was a P himself, and the other one was Dave. Does that make things any clearer?’
‘And why was everyone so insistent that it was me?’
‘Dave said he saw you. I knew it wasn’t me. Ralph, well, Ralph just went along with it.’
Danny is silent, trying to fathom it. Dave. It had to be Dave. Dave had made Danny take the blame, when all these years it had been his fault.
Bing Crosby sings ‘Out of Nowhere’ on the radio, the sound all crackly, as if the wavelength has been disturbed.
You had the same kind of thing going on with Dave. Had he? He couldn’t remember Dave following him around. Certainly not after the fire. If anything, there had been a look in Dave’s eye every now and again, a look that said: I know what you did. It’ll be our secret. None of the others had looked at him like that.
I know what you did.
I know who you are.
Dave.
‘Gotta go, Dan. Back to the twenty-first century.’
‘Just one thing. When I spoke to Dave earlier today, he said something about a wife, an ex-wife. I never met her. Did you?’
‘You know, I think I did. It was a while ago, twenty-odd years. Yes, I did, we had them out to dinner. She was nice, funny, mouthy. She was a … what my old man would have called a pistol, know what I mean, like she was one of the boys? I don’t know that Dave liked that much. But I guess she couldn’t have liked Dave much either, since it didn’t last any length of time, the marriage.’
‘Any chance you can remember her name?’
There’s a pause, filled by Crosby crooning Johnny Green’s haunting, off kilter song.
‘It was one word. Wasn’t Kay, but something like Kay. Bee. Jo. Doh. Dee. Dee, I think that was it.’
Danny finds himself short of breath again. Calm. Calm.‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, because she had that Irish name, Deidre, or Deirdre, however you pronounce it, and that’s just what she said – growing up she had a pain in her ass listening to people mangle it, so she decided she’d use a name no one could mess up. And that was what she settled on. Dee.’
Lost in the Stars
Charlie T thought, or thought he thought, that he would be devastated by Angelique’s death, but he’s almost horrified, certainly fascinated, to discover that he’s actually relieved. Maybe it was the way she had come out of the trees and pounced on the wee one, rubbing the chloroform rag in her face all crooked backed, like a witch in a fairy tale. Maybe it was the fact that she was too fucking full of herself all of a sudden, bossing him this way and that, not that he didn’t like it a bit, but he couldn’t have liked it a lot, otherwise he would have been a lot more upset than he is, which is, not really at all for her, but a lot on account of how the fuck is he going to manage the kids?
He has a compact Steyr S9 tonight, fifteen in the magazine, twelve left, one in the chamber. He doesn’t want to have to point a semi-automatic pistol at children, but he will if it’s necessary. The obvious thing is to get to the aunt’s house, it can’t be too far, you wouldn’t walk kids that size more than a mile at this hour, or in these conditions. The younger one is wailing, the wee soul; the older one is over by her aunt’s body, touching her face, trying to will her back to life. She stands then and glowers at him.
‘You are a bad man,’ she says. ‘Irene, come here.’
Irene goes to the older one and sidles into her, and a protective arm is placed around her shoulder, like a bird coming under her mother’s wing. He is a bad man, and no mistake. This goes against every rule in his book.
‘We have to move,’ he says.
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ the older one says. Irene’s wailing is getting louder. They have to get the fuck out of there now. Charlie raises the gun and waves it at them, making sure Irene can see it. Pick on the younger one, there’s a brave fella.
‘We have to move. Get to the house. And then we can ring for Mum and Dad, OK?’
Irene nods, her lip out. Barbara frowns, and raises a stick she has in her hand, but flinches and drops it when he waves the gun at her. He comes around behind them.
‘We’ll send back for your aunt.’
‘Ring an ambulance.’
Charlie makes a sound that, despite himself, means ‘fuck all point in that.’
‘Ring an ambulance or we stay here,’ the older one says in a voice that could curdle butter.
‘Barbara!’ says Irene.
‘I don’t care. We don’t know if she’s dead.’
Fair enough. Charlie T calls Mr Wilson.
‘Charlie?’
‘Ambulance, please. Yes, I’ll hold.’
‘Has the target been dispatched?’
‘Yes, I’d like to report the body of a woman on the path by the side of Lake Ripley in Cambridge, Wisconsin. Access from the steps at the rear of Ripley Fields.’
‘The client will meet you at the sister’s house, Mr T. And you’ll carry out his instructions from then on, do you understand?’
‘No, explain,’ Charlie says.
‘He has something in mind. Some kind of display. For which he is willing to pay, more than double. He’ll clear your gambling debt entirely. A fresh start, Charlie. And all you have to do is carry out his instructions to the letter. Understood?’
Charlie wants to protest, wants to set conditions, wants to insist that deep down, he’s a good man. But he’s not, is he? Deep down, maybe he is, but it’s fuck-all use deep down. Up here on the surface, pointing a gun at two wee girls having just murdered their aunt, walking past the broken body of his girlfriend and stopping only to take her purse so that it can’t be traced to him, ready to deliver children into the hands of Satan knows what kind of fucker. He’s already gone through the aunt’s pockets, got her keys and phone. Barbara’s right. He’s a bad man, by anyone’s definition.
The girls walk in front of him. He trains a small Maglite on them. He won’t ask where the house is, as the teenager in training there will insist on not telling him, and he doesn’t want to have to bully it out of the wee one, who’s still sobbing quietly to herself, God love her. He’ll just watch the way they walk, watch for tells when they get near. He didn’t come down in the last shower.
He’s better off. All that kidnapping crack. Fuck’s sake. What kind of a future would they have, she’s smothering old folk in the hospital, he’s a professional assassin. Fantasy land. That’s not the kind of girl you settle down with. Not at all.
Barbara is leaning over and whispering something in Irene’s ear. He can’t hear it, but he can hear the squealed reply.
‘We can’t, Babs, we can’t. He’ll shoot us, he’ll shoot us.’
‘What’s that, Irene?’ Charlie T says.
‘Aunt Donna’s house is up there,’ Irene says, pointing to a forest pathway leading up the side of a hill.
And Barbara makes a noise, a growl of frustration and rage.
Charlie T takes a coil of nylon rope and, keeping the Steyr in full view at all times, ties Barbara’s right wrist to Irene’s left, then pulls the rope forward and winds it around his right arm and sets off up the hill ahead of them. Too much scope for them to hive off left or right and vanish, or at least, need to be chased down.
‘Tell me if I’m going too fast, or pulling the rope too hard,’ Charlie T says. Irene is not going to stop crying any time soon. Bar
bara sets her face in a grimace of hatred and rage. And like that, Charlie T tugs them steadily up the hill toward Donna Brogan’s house.
Dancing in the Dark
So it wasn’t Danny Brogan who burnt his future wife’s family to death after all. They weren’t her family to begin with. It was Dave Ricks, and the family belonged to Dee St Clair, or Claire Bradberry, as she had once been called. And here they sit in the front seat of an SUV in the long winding drive of dead Donna Brogan’s house in Cambridge, Wisconsin, on Halloween night.
It’s impossible to know from the outside what is being said, or even how it is being said. We could make some deductions, based on whose head is bowed (Dee’s) and whose face seems the more animated (Dave’s). But let’s not wait any longer out here in the cold Halloween air. Let’s join them inside the car.
‘All right,’ Dave says, palming his cell phone. ‘The target is down; the kids are on their way here.’
Dee looks at him, her lip curling. ‘“The target is down.” Don’t you mean, “Donna Brogan is dead”?’
‘I don’t have any problem spelling it out.’
‘It’s not too late to stop it, Dave, to stop it all. Just pack up and go, let them get back to their lives. Haven’t we done enough?’
‘Danny is close to knowing, he was on his way around to Gene Peterson, it’s a process of elimination. And the police are sniffing around, or so you say.’
‘They’ve a couple of dead bodies to investigate.’
‘And a couple more to be added. So they won’t just drop everything at our say so. You know it is too late to turn back. We can’t drop anchor until we bring the ship to harbor.’
‘Stop it. “Target down”, “ship to harbor”. You sound like a villain in a comic book. It’s bad enough, what you’ve … what we’ve done, but … the children.’
‘Yes, the children. That’s how it all began, isn’t it? On our wedding day that wasn’t really a wedding day. Because of my insistence on telling you everything the night before. Because of Danny Brogan.’
Dee counts to ten, trying not to let her exhaustion and despair seep into her reply. Tries to keep it neutral, as if it is the first time she’s said it.
‘It was a shock. To think that you were there, that night. A shock that I couldn’t recover from immediately …’
‘Our wedding day …’
‘No one was there. It was a private, almost a secret wedding. What difference did it make – we had been together a while – what difference did it make if the day itself was less than perfect?’
‘It made a difference. It was the beginning of the end.’
‘We could have … I’ve always said this, we could have made it work.’
‘Well. We didn’t. And there’s no justice in making me the guilty party. You were just as keen as I was to punish Danny when he married Claire. It was your idea to plant the notion that Claire was the missing Bradberry child. You had wormed out the fact that she was in denial about being adopted, had no interest in finding out who she really was. You were as motivated, maybe even more driven than I was.’
‘I know, I know—’
‘You were a woman scorned, as they would have said in the olden days. Scorned by Danny Brogan.’
‘You were scorned yourself. The first night we met, Danny was all we talked about. How you had done so much for him, but he was ungrateful. How he took his good fortune for granted. How he needed to be taught a lesson.’
‘But you contacted me. You made the first move, Dee. You see, it’s important not to rewrite history, not now when everything is coming to its logical end, not to say, “Oh, it’s all Dave’s fault, he’s the maniac, he’s the monster”. Danny planted a seed in your mind—’
‘Danny mentioned, or alluded to, some connection with the Bradberry fire in Madison. And then he clammed up. And you know how good I am at wheedling stuff out of people who think they want to keep secrets. Because no one really does. Everyone wants to confess. And even though he wouldn’t say any more about it, he was willing to talk about the guys. The Four Horsemen. Danny, Gene, Ralph and Dave. And you turned out to be the one, Dave.’
‘Until you were told the full story of what we did. What he did.’
‘Even then. Even then. Just the fact you were there. It took me a few days, but … I had never had an issue. I never blamed anyone. I had no memory of the night, or the house. My childhood was my adoptive home. Even then, we could have …’
‘You’re going to talk in song titles. Didn’t we almost make it? No, we didn’t.’
‘That was down to you.’
He wouldn’t sleep with her afterwards. Hadn’t slept with her much beforehand, in truth. She always thought it would develop. But then it stopped, and became something else. She had often wondered whether Dave was gay for Danny, but didn’t think so. Dave didn’t really need sex, not in the way most people need it. Dave was just too fucked-up.
‘It wasn’t just that. I could see with you, I was always going to be second best. And you’ve played your part like a pro, impersonating Claire’s best friend.’
‘I am her best friend.’
‘Yes. How sad is that for her?’
How sad is that for Dee?
‘And you may find it in yourself to be forgiving and compassionate, but hey, you still soaked the Brogans dry, money wise.’
‘I didn’t make him borrow an extra two hundred grand,’ Dee says.
‘No, but you made sure he missed out on getting it back. Danny got under your skin, didn’t he?’
Dave’s eyes flash, as they do whenever he talks about Danny. Dee’s eyes darken, her face a mask, a Dee face of bitterness and rue, and she thinks back to the few weeks she spent with Danny, twenty years ago. How excited she had felt, and then how humiliated. If there had ever been a ‘one’ or a notion of what ‘the one’ might have been like, Danny Brogan gave it body and soul. And then to drop her, to push her away, as if she were nothing. Maybe Dave is right. Dee is deluding herself if she thinks she’s some kind of innocent party. She’s stolen from the Brogans for years; she’s lied to Claire and set her up to inherit a set of recovered memories that would most likely destroy her.
She doesn’t care about Ralph (who showed no interest in her), or Jeff Torrance (who was so vain the one time they fucked, he kept looking at himself in the mirror), or Danny’s sister (who was the rudest person she’s ever met). She certainly won’t miss that horrible, filthy, slobbery dog. It’s just the children. Every time she thinks of them, she wants to cry. If there was a way of just stopping short of that, maybe encouraging Dave to have Danny and Claire killed first. Then he might consider it all square. But she doubts at this late stage whether that is feasible. You reap what you sow, and they’ve sown this all the way along, in their unholy inversion of a love affair. Sometimes it seems as if Dave loves Danny more than hates him. She knows he would have been content to draw this out longer and longer, for years, the pleasure, the power residing in tormenting him, knowing he could strike at any time. But then Ralph materialized, and it was action stations. Maybe that’s what has her feeling so deeply, crying so much – because in truth, she doesn’t care greatly for Claire’s children either, spoilt little brats at the best of times. Maybe the sudden realization that the end is upon them, that the scheming and dreaming is done and the day of reckoning is here. Maybe that’s what has her brimming.
Dave rolls down his window and leans out to look across the lawn. The night air is crisp and sharp with the promise of frost.
‘Any moment now,’ Dave says, and turns to her.
Is it her imagination, or does he smell of gasoline?
‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ he says, his eyes gleaming.
‘I probably don’t want to hear it,’ Dee says, but excited in spite of herself. Any gossip is good gossip.
‘The people who are managing this for us.’
‘Who are killing everyone,’ Dee says.
‘That’s right. Well, the guy
who’s running it all, the guy who’s in charge.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Is your brother.’
‘My brother?’
Dee feels queasy all of a sudden, and sweat sparks on her brow. Dave passes her a business card.
‘I had a PI investigate. There were two Bradberry brothers who had left home. One was a petty criminal in Cicero. He’s dead now, murdered. The other had done time for statutory rape in Racine, then became a high-end rent boy, then reinvented himself as this kind of businessman with a lot of serious security and political connections. Wilson, he goes by now. Turns out his business is murder. He runs the hit man who’s doing the work for us. He doesn’t know why I chose him, but when it’s all done, you can tell him.’
Dee opens the passenger door and slips down to the ground and vomits. When she’s finished, her hands scrabbled by the gravel in the drive, her throat sore and eyes streaming, she looks up and sees Dave staring at her as if she is a bug on a pin.
‘That’s exactly what you did when I told you Danny burnt your family to death,’ he says.
There is a footfall from the side of the house, and then a man in a red coat and a Wisconsin Badgers hat appears, with Barbara and Irene Brogan tethered to him.
‘Ready?’ Dave says.
Dee breathes in deeply. There is no way back now. And she is not someone else: this is who she is. Her brother. Her blood. She had all the clippings out again today, just like every Halloween. Even if she says she has no memory, no trauma, there is something there, some reptile stirring deep within her. Is it rage? Colder than that. The sense that she is entitled to revenge – not blood revenge, not heated and delirious, but a revenge that is her due. Maybe not revenge so much as logic, a necessary end to it all. She knows when it comes to it, she won’t feel a thing. She never really does. She has spent so long pretending to feel emotions she has never experienced. She is a better actress than Claire, of that there is no doubt. She has been acting all her life. She lets Dave extend his arm and help her rise. She looks him in the eye, holds his hands in hers.
‘Why are you doing this, Dave?’ she says.
All the Things You Are Page 27