Bloodline (43 page)

“R
oxanne,” I said.

“She's got a gun,” Roxanne said. “It's in her right hand.”

Her voice was gentle, almost sympathetic. She looked at Genest and Genest looked at us. Her eyes were bright and her hair was wild. I stood beside Clair, five feet from Roxanne, ten from Genest. The barrels of our guns were pointed at the ground.

“What's going on?” I said.

“What's going on?” Genest repeated. “Oh, my God, I don't know what's going on. Oh, my God.”

I looked at Roxanne. She looked back at me, then at Janice.

“Why don't you put that gun down, miss,” Clair said softly. “We don't want anybody to get hurt.”

“Hurt,” Genest blurted. “Why shouldn't somebody get hurt? Everybody gets hurt. Everybody I know gets hurt. The whole world gets hurt, doesn't it? Everybody I know is hurt. I hurt them. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

She put the gun to her temple.

“No,” Roxanne said. “Please, no.”

“Janice, don't do that,” I said.

Clair watched, motionless. Genest lowered the gun to her side.

“What do you care, McMorrow?” she said. “You could write about me, then. Can't libel the dead. It's what you said, right?”

She laughed. A girlish, unnatural chortle.

“Can't libel the dead. I like that. So you can't libel me. I'm dead. I am.”

Genest paused. She wasn't looking at any of us. She wasn't looking at the woods, either.

“Oh, Jesus help me,” Genest said. “It was all okay, you know. Missy was in school. Her baby was okay, too. You saw that house, McMorrow. The kid'll end up a doctor or something. And there's more where they came from. She was saved. Missy was, too. They paid cash, so the next one was saved, too.”

“Saved from what?” I said.

“Saved from what? From this goddamn society that strangles women at birth. Saved from this goddamn country that's like the Chinese. In some village, drowning the baby girls. We just do it slower. Like Missy's mother. Screwing and drinking to try to forget what she could have been.”

“Like what?” I said, trying to keep her talking.

“Goddamn, McMorrow. Are you thick or what? Fulfilled herself. Become something more than a damn receptacle for some man's bodily fluids.”

“She had Missy, didn't she?”

“Had Missy,” Genest said. “Like a cat having kittens in the barn. So they can have more kittens. All in the name of love.”

She laughed again.

“I work twelve hours a day to try to hammer home to these girls that they can be more than an accessory to some drunken football
player. They don't have to give themselves to the first muscle-bound idiot who comes along, grabs them, and tosses them onto the seat of some pickup truck. It's their lives, for God's sake. They only get one.”

“And you helped them,” Roxanne said, her voice soft and soothing. “You helped them.”

“I tried, didn't I? We found a way to give the baby a life. Give these girls a life, not pack it in at seventeen. Close the book. At fifteen, the next sixty years are nothing. Postscript. Really, we made two lives where there were none. And we ended up with enough money to save the next one.”

“How much did the Flanagans pay?” I asked her.

“Thirty thousand,” Genest said, gun still at her side. “They didn't have to wait ten years for a healthy white baby. Isn't that a disgrace? This color thing? But we split the money three ways. Missy got a start on college. If it hadn't been for that money, she never would have gone to college at all. Putnam, that coward, got his cut for arranging the papers. Birth certificate and everything. The new mom left for six months and came back with her own baby. Not somebody else's. Not adopted.”

“So that's the catch? That it wouldn't be adopted?”

“Hey, it was what they wanted. I guess they didn't want the kid to go looking for her birth mother or something. And they were willing to pay. The money was used to fund the next case.”

“And Missy screwed it up.”

“Somebody got to her. One of her pea-brained relatives. The daddy. I don't know. Kenny was in pretty deep.”

“The dad?”

Janice grinned.

“Mr. Tough Guy. And you know why he wouldn't talk? Because he was afraid everybody would know Missy had just gone and given away his baby. His property.”

She said it in a deep, mocking voice.

“Would have blown his macho cover. What a fool.”

“So you told him I was gonna blow it for him.”

“Right. I was hoping you'd just leave, McMorrow. But no, you had to be a tough guy, too. God, men are such idiots.”

“So what happened to Missy?” I asked.

Roxanne glared at me.

“Missy was a great kid. I loved her. She was the second girl in the pipeline, the underground railroad out. The first one was Tracy. She's supposed to go to school in Florida. Missy was next and, oh, she was so bright. She wanted to be a nurse, but I'll bet you she would have ended up in medical school. Just a smart, tough kid.”

“Who wanted her baby back,” I said.

Janice looked right at me, but her eyes were strange and faraway.

“They got to her. The whole male-dominated, barefoot-and-pregnant guilt thing.”

“What about the other father? Of the baby, I mean. Jimmy something? The one who just vanished?”

Janice smiled.

“He didn't vanish,” she said. “He went to live with his father in San Diego.”

“Courtesy of you?”

“One one-way ticket. It was the least I could do to get the guy out of the way. That one worked great. It was all set.”

“What was?”

“Everything. The baby was fine. Just like Missy's.”

“So let's go. It'll be okay,” Roxanne said.

“No, it won't,” Janice said, her face still shining from her tears. “It won't be okay. It's over. Can you believe that I killed Missy? I didn't mean to, but she was going to go to the police or something. We were there and I said no, but she said she was going right then, and I grabbed her and held her and she kept trying to get past me, and I said no and then I pushed her down. I was on top of her, and I held a pillow over her head and then she was dead. It was just so quick. l didn't think it could happen so quick.”

“And her mother.”

“Her mother wanted money. Her mother was a drunk and a slut. She found some papers of Missy's and she wanted money for them. I couldn't let the whole thing be destroyed by her, could I? Because she'd always want more. I mean, I was right. It was right. It was. It was right, and oh, God, it's gone so wrong. You asking all these questions, McMorrow. And Putnam, he was up here. He told me. He was gonna sell the whole thing out, wasn't he? He threatened to go to the police. About me. And then Missy and her mother, and all I wanted to do was help. I really did. I wanted to help.”

“You did want to help,” Roxanne said, and took a step toward her.

Genest put the gun to her temple, a flit of a movement.

Roxanne called out “No,” and Clair's shotgun roared and blew off Genest's left foot.

36

C
lair had fired the shotgun from the hip. It was loaded with buckshot. Genest had screamed as she was falling, and then she had lain there on her back, breathing in rapid, shallow breaths and looking up at all of us like she'd never seen us before. Clair had put his belt around her ankle for a tourniquet.

He carried her back to the house, his big arms wrapped around her shoulders and legs like a lifeguard's. I carried the guns. We ran all the way down the trail to the house. Roxanne stayed alongside Genest, talking to her to try to keep her from going into shock. When we reached the house, Clair laid Genest on the floor next to the woodstove in the kitchen. Mary put blankets over her and Clair had put a pillow under her legs to raise her feet. Except one was more or less gone.

The cruiser beat the rescue truck to the house by five minutes. The cops, county deputies, questioned us and took the guns. And then, as the paramedics worked feverishly on Genest on the kitchen floor, Clair stood over them and watched quietly.

“You okay?” I said, sidling up to him.

“Oh, yeah,” Clair said. “How 'bout you?”

“I don't know yet.”

“She'll make it okay,” he said.

“Foot's gone.”

“Yup.”

“You seem pretty calm about it.”

Clair gave a little shrug.

“From the list of options, this was the best one. You have to remember that. Consider everything in context.”

I looked at him.

“Like in war. You'd get out of a firefight with two men lost. Three. People would expect you to just crack up over it, but they'd forget that, given the crappy situation you were in, losing nobody wasn't an option. The other choice was losing twenty. Thirty.”

I thought about that as I watched. What war had done to make Clair what he was. What something in Genest's life had done to mold her.

The paramedics had her lower leg wrapped in bandages, an IV in her arm. Her eyes were open but she was staring blankly, in a state that was something other than consciousness.

“A foot is better than a head?” I murmured to Clair.

“And much better than losing her and Roxanne. Those were the choices.”

“I know that,” I said. “It's just hard.”

“Yup,” Clair said. “Life's hard sometimes.”

“And this is one of those times.”

“Yeah, it is,” he said.

For a couple of days I stayed home with Roxanne, drinking tea and talking to Poole and a bunch of other cops. Roxanne came and sat at the table with the cops, too. They were shy with her, except for one detective who was a woman. She and Roxanne talked a lot about other things, and it helped.

I told the story so many times that after a while, I began to wonder if any of it was true. It was like I'd read it somewhere, seen it on television. It came in snatches, vivid but disconnected and unreal.

Genest had simply knocked at my door. The police had found her car pulled into the brush near the main road, a half-mile away. They figured she'd come through the woods. Nobody had seen her come or go.

She had been friendly, smiling. Genest had said she was an acquaintance of mine, that we'd met as I was doing the baby story, and she had some more information. Roxanne had liked her and had invited her in for coffee while she waited for me to get back. When Roxanne turned her back to fill the kettle, the gun had come out. The plan, Genest had told police, had been to kill both of us. Then, on the path in the woods, Roxanne had reached out and put her arm around Genest's shoulders. She had told Genest she understood, and the whole thing had come tumbling down. But I feared it would be a long time before Roxanne trusted her instincts again.

“I underestimated everything,” I told Poole. “I never thought it could end up like that. I never thought we could be killed.”

“People kill for reasons you wouldn't believe,” he said, his hand wrapped around a mug of coffee. “It just seems like a good idea at the time.”

“But killing us to save some baby who hasn't even been conceived?”

“That's one of the more sensible reasons I've heard,” Poole said.

“Why didn't I see it coming, then?”

“If everybody saw it coming, people like me would be out of work,” he said.

“Don't thank me,” I said.

Putnam and the Flanagans were in trouble, but no one could say how much. I asked Poole if the Flanagans would lose Missy's baby, and he said he didn't know. Poole said he figured Kenny would be charged, too, but it looked like he didn't know much. Kenny told the cops he thought Missy had been killed by some college kids. Neither her death nor the fate of his baby daughter concerned him as much as the prospect of going to jail.

Poole said it would be tough to tag Putnam for the murder, but he would be an accessory, get a conspiracy charge for the cover-up. The baby stuff alone would get him disbarred. He was finished, and I hadn't written a word.

Genest had been in surgery a lot, as doctors tried to fix her leg as best they could. Poole said her lawyer would try to get her off on an insanity plea, but it was a long shot, that she'd probably go from her hospital room to a cell.

“But she's insane in some way,” I said.

“They all are,” Poole said. “It's just a question of degree.”

The police stopped coming after three days. The reporters stopped calling, and the television crews went on to the next tragedy. I asked Roxanne if she wanted to go back to Colorado but she said no. I asked her if she wanted to go to an inn on the coast and hide out, and she said no to that, too.

“I want to do it here,” she said.

“Do what?” I said.

“Just love you,” she said. “I feel like it's all we have left, and I don't want to lose it.”

So that's what we did.