Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What is it?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Come on,” I said.

  We dashed down to the end of the porch and dropped into the mulch of the flower beds. Ducking around the side of the house, we huddled against the wall and waited as the car pulled in and came to a stop. We heard the doors open and slam shut, followed by voices I recognized as they drew closer to our hiding place.

  “I don’t suppose we can take down this dreadful yellow tape,” Patricia said.

  “It won’t be long, ma’am,” Bobby Carwile said. “We’ll be finished here in another day or two. Then we’ll have a crew come out and take care of everything for you. I can recommend a good cleaning service also, when you’re ready.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Patricia replied. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Patricia,” said Charles Culver.

  “It’s what Mummy would have wanted,” Patricia said.

  “What Mummy would have wanted?” said Charles, derisively aping Patricia’s bogus accent.

  “That’s right,” Patricia meekly replied.

  “Please,” Charles said scornfully. “You sound like a fool.”

  Cinnamon couldn’t resist peering around the corner for a look. There was no point in trying to stop her; besides, I wanted to have a look myself.

  The three of them faced the door together, preparing to enter: Carwile in his usual navy blazer, tie, and chinos; Charles in a tan trench coat that hid his soft frame, making him look somehow more imposing than I remembered. Patricia wore a calf-length tweed skirt, a tan camel-hair blazer, and a patterned blouse buttoned to the neck. She’d cut her hair into a pageboy style that had the effect of making her look curiously sexless.

  Poor Patricia, I thought. She was so dazed. All the pompous bluster had gone out of her, replaced by a faint hint of anguish.

  The three of them stepped inside and shut the door behind them.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered.

  We scampered over into the trees.

  “Wow,” Cinnamon said. “That was freaky.”

  The field between the two houses was bordered on one side by Boone’s Ferry Road and on the other side by woods that lined the path down to the barn. To avoid being seen from the windows of Twin Oaks, we walked through the trees, listening to the wind.

  “So that was Patricia, huh?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And the other man, besides the cop—that was her brother, Charles, right?”

  I nodded.

  “He seemed like kind of an asshole,” she said.

  “I’ve never heard him talk to anyone like that before,” I said. “I haven’t hung around him much, but still. I’m sure they’re both pretty messed up about what happened. Paul says people grieve in different ways. Like, what’s the right way to act after your parents get murdered?”

  “Maybe they did it,” she said.

  I hadn’t given much thought to that possibility; I’d been too worried about whether Paul and Leigh were responsible to consider anyone else besides devil worshippers and Manson acolytes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  It couldn’t have been Charles, or Patricia, I thought. Both of their whereabouts at the time of the killings were well known. Charles had been out of the country on business. Patricia had been in Maryland with Nelson Waltrip, spending a long weekend going to the races at Pimlico and visiting friends in Annapolis. The police had to send someone out to the track to find her when the bodies were discovered.

  We came out of the woods behind the stable, out of sight of the house. Looking up at the shuttered door of the hayloft, I remembered what Paul had found in the straw by the blankets. Was that the right way to act after your parents have been murdered? Maybe there wasn’t a better one. Maybe it wasn’t her idea—Nelson Waltrip might have begged or persuaded or even forced her to do it. Maybe it hadn’t been them at all—maybe it had been left by the killers, or even by Brad Culver himself, getting a little action on the side. Maybe that’s why it happened; maybe the killer was just a vengeful cuckold who had covered his tracks with the devil-worship stuff and the bullet in the leg.

  Cinnamon reached into her bag for a cigarette and lit up.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But I was thinking about a lot of things: About how frumpy and plain Patricia had looked back on the porch of Twin Oaks, and how the sight of her looking that way had made me both sad and a little embarrassed, as if I’d wanted her to look sexier so that Cinnamon would be impressed, or jealous, or even a little threatened. About everything that had happened in and around the stable, from the night I’d found Culver staggering drunk and helped him back up to the house, and what happened afterward with Patricia, to the day Leigh interrupted us and drove me off to make her confession. And I thought about Cinnamon—how much I wanted to be taken seriously by her, how I had hoped things would turn out that afternoon, and how differently they were going.

  “Sorry,” I said. “This is a little weird.”

  Cinnamon puffed out a bit of smoke and smiled. There we were—me and my Cinnamon Girl, alone in the woods with the whispering wind and sun-dappled ground beneath the spare shade of early spring leaves.

  She stepped toward me. I reached tentatively for her hips.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I want you to.”

  I kissed her—thanks to Patricia, I thought—less inexpertly than she might have expected.

  It would be silly to say that we were in love. After all, I had only ever kissed one girl before—one woman, to be more precise. But the sensation that came over me in that moment was completely, overwhelmingly, sublimely new. And though Cinnamon was no innocent, nor was I, what passed between us there felt pure and good and true.

  WHEN WE REACHED the house, we found Leigh’s bicycle leaning against the front porch steps. Back in the Royal Chamber, we found the Old Man in his armchair, Leigh on the couch facing him, a book open on her lap. Paul sat next to her, one leg propped across his other knee, stroking his beard. They looked so natural together, as if they’d never been apart.

  “This is Cinnamon,” I said.

  “Cinnamon?” the Old Man asked. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “Oh, hush, Mr. Askew,” Leigh said. “I think it’s lovely.”

  To my surprise, Cinnamon blushed.

  “We were just about to have tea,” Paul said. “Would you care for some?”

  “Sure, I’ll have some tea,” Cinnamon said, sniggering slightly, as if taking tea in the afternoon was a ritual unique to the Boone’s Ferry bourgeoisie.

  Paul went to the kitchen. Leigh closed her book and placed it on the coffee table. She looked different. She had on makeup—nothing garish, just a touch of blush and eyeliner and pink lip gloss. She’d spent a little more time on her hair, which was still short but had grown enough to look less severe. She wore a navy V-neck sweater and a pair of new jeans. I wondered whether someone had advised that she try to look more normal.

  “What are we reading?” I asked.

  “Rebecca Recalls,” Leigh said.

  “I’ve heard of that book,” Cinnamon said. “People have been passing it around at school. It’s supposed to be pretty twisted.”

  “It’s a true story,” Leigh said.

  “Do you mind?” the Old Man said. “It was just getting good.”

  “Sure, Mr. Askew,” Leigh said.

  The Old Man crossed his arms and nodded. Leigh resumed her reading.

  Rebecca Recalls was the true story of how the author, Dr. Susan Gregory, was treating a patient named Rebecca for depression after the stillbirth of her baby. Using hypnotherapy, Dr. Gregory helps Rebecca recover lost memories of years of ritual abuse at the hands of a satanic cult, which she’d been brainwashed to forget. Through hypnotherapy, Rebecca recollects that her own mother—a closet devil wo
rshipper—had offered her up years earlier as a pawn to the cult, which included numerous highly placed members of the local community. According to the text, these putative civic pillars regularly participated in child rape and sacrifice for the pleasure of the Evil One. To hide their activities, the cult members brainwashed their sex slaves and performed their human sacrifices with babies stolen from the maternity ward at the local hospital. There, numerous doctors and nurses who were also secret cult members manipulated indigent single mothers into believing that their babies had died of natural causes; in some cases they were able to seduce the mothers themselves into joining the cult. Dr. Gregory teaches young Rebecca about the love of Jesus and helps her to be “born again.” With God’s help, doctor and patient do battle against the nefarious cult, ultimately taking on the devil himself. It would all have seemed ridiculous were it not so effectively unnerving.

  Paul had returned with the tea tray and sat down as Leigh read. The Old Man drifted off and began to snore. Leigh folded the book shut, and the four of us rose quietly and retreated up the stairs to Paul’s room. Paul took his chair by the window and lit up; Leigh sat on the floor next to him, where she could reach up to steal the occasional drag from his cigarette. I sat on the bed next to Cinnamon, who fired up one of her own, tipping her ashes into a saucer on the bedside table.

  “That’s some book you brought this week, Leigh,” I said. “How did you pick that one out?”

  “Oh, everyone in the Bible study is reading it,” she said. “With everything that’s happened, the director of Christian education at Holy Comforter has decided we all ought to get up to speed on the latest knowledge of SRA.”

  “SRA?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Satanic ritual abuse,” Leigh said.

  “I thought you were talking about those standardized tests we took in elementary school,” Paul said.

  “You hush, Paul Askew,” Leigh said. “You know precisely what I’m talking about. SRA has been all over the news, with the McMartin Preschool trial and whatnot.”

  Even before the Twin Oaks killings, congregants of various churches had been circulating books and pamphlets containing information about cult activity and satanic ritual abuse. Still, no one—least of all Leigh—could pretend that the sudden interest in SRA around Spencerville had much to do with the McMartin Preschool trial. The whole town knew about the bullet in the leg by then, and Leigh’s bizarre scaling of the roof of Twin Oaks, and the borrowed track shoes. Everyone also knew that Paul and Leigh’s alibi was dubious and that they both had good reasons to hate the Culvers, who lived just a few hundred yards away from us. It certainly didn’t look good that the murders had occurred within two months of Paul’s showing up out of nowhere after seven years missing, as if he had come back to settle a score. Add to that Paul and Leigh’s former association with a child-molesting hippie guru and the rumors of Leigh’s horrific late-term abortion, which seemed to bear discomfiting resemblance to the grisly narrative of Rebecca Recalls.

  “How does one become an expert on satanic ritual abuse?” Paul asked.

  “Some of the leading authorities are survivors,” she said. “It’s a true story. These cults are spreading all over the country.”

  “I was in what most people would call a cult,” Paul said. “So were you. Do you think we have repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Leigh said. “But no, Paul. As much as I’ve tried to forget, I remember it all.”

  None of us knew what to say. It was the first time I’d heard Paul make any overt reference to New Nazareth, the first time Leigh had mentioned it since she’d first told me the story.

  “We saw you over at school today,” Cinnamon said to Leigh. “What was that all about?”

  Leigh laughed.

  “You were right,” she said to Paul. “She is very direct.”

  “Sorry,” Cinnamon said. “Just curious.”

  “I don’t mind,” Leigh said. “It’s pretty simple. Since people have been saying such awful things about me, I thought I should just go have a talk with Mr. Carwile. He’s such a nice man. He was very interested in what I had to say.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Paul said.

  “So what did you tell him?” I asked.

  “Everything I could think of,” Leigh said. “Everything they wanted to know.”

  “I wish you would have listened to Rayner, Leigh,” Paul said.

  “Please, Paul,” Leigh said. “The day I look to Rayner Newcomb for advice on anything is the day I have myself committed.”

  I glanced at Cinnamon, expecting to catch her stifling a giggle. Instead she looked on earnestly.

  “Embarrassing as it was, I told them about falling into the creek and then ending up over at Rayner’s with Paul. Then they started asking about me and the Culvers—about Charles and the wedding and so forth. We ended up talking a lot about the past. You have no idea how good it felt to just unload all those things. When I told them about climbing up on the Culvers’ roof to see the angels, I realized that I hadn’t even thought about it much myself since it happened. Boy, that was crazy of me, wasn’t it?”

  No one said a word.

  “It was pretty simple,” Leigh continued. “I’d stopped taking my Thorazine. I was tired of feeling . . . well, tired. Numb. Half-asleep. I’d been feeling so good lately, so good that I thought I was ready to be—I don’t know—normal again. It’s very hard to accept that this is who I am now—that this is what it will always be like.”

  Paul reached down and grasped Leigh’s shoulder. She took his hand and kissed it.

  “Well,” Leigh continued, “I had been thinking for a while that I’d like to see Mrs. Culver and apologize to her for how I had embarrassed her family. And I wanted to give her back the ring and tell her that I wasn’t angry with Charles about the way things ended between us. I had Paul back, after all. It seemed like it was meant to be.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “Right when I got to Twin Oaks,” she said, “I had my vision.”

  “Your vision?” Cinnamon asked.

  “Of the angels, swirling around above me. I know everyone thinks I’m mad,” she said, “and I understand the chemical explanations. But these visions are more real to me than anyone here in this room.”

  She smiled.

  “The world we see is just a partial impression of what’s all around us,” she said.

  She studied the palms of her upturned hands.

  “To see such beauty,” she said, “is overwhelming.”

  “I get that,” Cinnamon said. “Totally.”

  Paul lit another cigarette.

  “You’ve really got to quit, Paul,” Leigh said.

  “I quit everything else that’s bad for me,” he said. “Let me have this one thing.”

  “For your health, darling,” she said.

  “You sneak one every now and then,” he replied.

  “Only because you’re a terrible enabler,” Leigh said.

  Here they were, thrown together again, playfully chiding each other like an old married couple. Wasn’t that what I’d always wanted?

  “What did you think the police thought of your story?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure they just think I’m a loon,” Leigh said.

  “Do you think they believed you about being over at Rayner’s on Thursday night?” Paul asked.

  “You never know,” she said. “There’s no love for Rayner Newcomb on the Twin Oaks Task Force.”

  “He has that effect on people,” Paul said.

  “So how did you and Bobby Carwile leave things?” I asked.

  “Unresolved,” she said.

  I walked to the window and looked out across the field to Twin Oaks. The patrol car had left with Charles and Patricia and whatever they had come for.

  “They were there earlier,” I said. “Charles and Patricia. With Bobby Carwile. But they’re gone now.”

  “We went over to peep at the murder hou
se,” Cinnamon said.

  “That’s what the kids at school are calling it,” I said.

  “We almost got caught,” Cinnamon said.

  “They drove up while we were there,” I said. “We had to hide behind the house. Did you know Charles was in town?”

  “I saw him yesterday, over at Kiki Baumberger’s,” Leigh said. “I went over to see Patricia, and he happened to be there. We had a nice visit, all things considered.”

  “Sounds a little awkward to me,” said Cinnamon.

  “It was a bit chilly, to tell you the truth,” Leigh said. “I don’t think Charles is convinced I’m not somehow responsible for all of this. Then again, he’s the first to point out that a lot of people over the years have wanted his father dead.”

  “How is Patricia?” I asked.

  “Oh, she’s distraught,” Leigh said.

  “She’ll feel better once she collects her inheritance,” Paul said.

  “But there is no inheritance,” Leigh said. “Mr. Culver lost almost everything in the same deal that ruined your poor father. They’d been living off Charles for months. Patricia had no idea her father had been paying her allowance with money given to him by Charles.”

  The Culvers’ lives had seemed to go on completely untouched by the disaster that had left us penniless and on the verge of losing our home. It had never occurred to any of us that Brad Culver might have been just as broke as the Old Man. Again I remembered what Paul had told me—that the Culvers would get theirs. Boy, did they ever, I thought. Once more I thought of Patricia—how desperate she must have felt, losing her parents that way and also learning that she was going to have to find a way to survive just like the rest of us mortals.

  “Poor Patricia,” I said, almost unconsciously and with complete sincerity.