Just Fall (26 page)

Lucien ushers the American into Castries Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The dull brick of the exterior belies the richness of the interior. Emerald green and deep purple walls are stippled with gold leaf vines. There are lavish displays of tropical flowers, bright purple altar cloths, carved and gilded columns, painted panels depicting biblical scenes, and numerous flickering red glass candle holders lit by the devout and hopeful. The red-and-gold ceiling is cantilevered to best display stained-glass panels so exquisite they could convert a nonbeliever. One depicts a beatific, haloed, dusky-skinned Madonna. She gazes lovingly at the black baby Jesus she cradles in her arms.

Lucien gestures to one of the carved wooden pews, then sits next to the stranger. He realizes he hasn’t been in this church since his mother’s funeral. After her untimely death, Lucien lost the comfort his faith had once provided him. It comes as a surprise to realize he thought of taking the American nowhere else.

The American wears jeans and a powder-blue windbreaker, too hot for the weather. Scuffed deck shoes. Crumbs of sleep gather in the corners of his eyes. His body is composed; his hands hang loosely, the wrists draped over his knees.

Lucien stays silent, not certain he can trust his own voice but also knowing that silence is sometimes the best way to get someone to talk. The American meets Lucien’s appraisal with a frank inquiry of his own.

“Is there a reason you wanted to talk in a church? Rather than at the station?”

The questions take Lucien by surprise. “If you have legitimate information to share, I suggest you do it now. Let’s start with your name.”

The stranger shrugs, an acquiescence. “My passport says my name is Marshall Weston. But my real name is Matthew Walsh.”

Lucien lifts an eyebrow. It isn’t often people blithely announce they are traveling under a false passport. He nods for the American to continue.

“In order for you to understand what I am about to tell you, I need to go way back, to my own beginning. Is that all right?”

Marshall Weston (née Matt Walsh) had been born to a junkie mother, father unknown. He was placed in foster care and bounced from home to home until he was eleven. Then, unable to stand it, (“it” being his life in general, his foster parents in particular, and most particularly the sounds almost every night of his foster father in the room next door with his seven-year-old foster sister), Matt stuffed a knapsack with some clothes, a carving knife he filched from the butcher block in the kitchen, a can opener along with three cans of tuna, two apples, and fifty dollars he stole from his foster mother’s secret stash in the laundry room. Then he hit the streets.

He lived on his wits and occasionally on his back. But every single shitty thing that happened to him made him more determined to change the course of his life. He was not going to be a junkie like his stupid bitch mother; he was not going to be a creep like his stupid-ass foster father. He learned that he was not only street-smart, but very smart.

When he was sixteen, he got a job with a moving company that was looking for cheap off-the-books workers. By the time he was twenty-six he had launched his own business, and was committed to hiring homeless people who needed a hand up.

He felt like a success but didn’t allow himself to get cocky. He realized, as he grew his business, that his was one of many tragic stories, with a happier ending than most. He felt grateful but humble. He kept his expenses low, his head down. Until of course the sociopath he had since come to know as Quinn showed up at his place of business.

Lucien interrupts. “Quinn?”

Matt strokes his scarred mouth. Then he tells of arriving at his company garage one morning. Of being told a story of a long-lost father and a missing son and being asked to call a young employee, Rob Beauman, into the office. How Quinn had tortured Matt, cut off his lip. How when he regained consciousness he found both Rob and Quinn gone.

After the horror of that morning, Matt had been hospitalized for days. He told the police he had surprised a robbery in progress. The perpetrator, he insisted, had been masked. Fearful of Quinn’s promised retribution, he told the cops he never saw his attacker. He protected Rob and never mentioned the young man had been present. Lying. It was one of many survival skills Matt had honed while living on the streets. After a time, the detectives interviewing him moved on to new cases, ones with a better chance of a solve.

Plastic surgery partially repaired his lip but the scars didn’t mar just skin. Matt lived in fear that the maniac who had mutilated him would return. So he relocated to a new city, assumed an alias, started a new business; people always needed movers, he just had to hustle. He still hired kids from the streets, but he befriended them less often. He thought about Rob, wondered where he was, how he was, what he was doing, if he was even still alive.

One balmy spring night, when he locked up his garage, he found Rob standing in the shadows, waiting for him. At first he didn’t recognize him. Rob was older of course, but different in other ways too. Harder. Wary. Weary. But also lighter. It was contradictory, but true.

Over rancid black coffee and overly sweet peach pie, in the unforgiving light of the crummy diner down the street, Rob explained why he was there. He was in love with a woman, Eleanor Larrabee. And she in turn loved him. He felt like he was home when he was with her. This naked admission gave Matt’s heart a surge of envy; never in his life had he felt that way.

Rob went on. Quinn was willing to let Rob go to be with Ellie, but only if he killed Matt. Matt interrupted to ask why—after all, it had been years since Matt had even seen either one of them. Rob explained. Quinn had told him it was because Matt could link Quinn and Rob, but Rob was convinced it was really just a part of Quinn’s twisted sadism. A way to punish Rob before letting him go free. Rob, however, had a plan. Matt had changed his identity once; Rob proposed he do it again.

Within days, Matt had sold his business, claiming he wanted to retire early and do some traveling. He took the money from the sale of the company and divided it. He hid one half through a series of complex bank transactions in order to set up his new life. With the other half he created a small endowment to help homeless kids and teenagers in his original name. At least a part of Matt Walsh would live on that way.

He bought a ticket for Indonesia, claiming Southeast Asia was first on his bucket list. The night before he was to leave, he took his former employees out for drinks. He toasted them again and again, seemingly in excellent spirits, leaving only when it was certain that many witnesses would be able to attest to his inebriated state.

Rob met Matt at a secluded spot near a stretch of sharply curving highway known locally as Devil’s Run. Matt couldn’t look at the body in the passenger seat of Rob’s rented Dodge. The corpse was about Matt’s age, weight, and height; even his hair color was a close match. He was naked. Rob had stripped him bare and disposed of his clothes.

Matt stripped off his own clothes, climbed clumsily into the new clothes and shoes Rob had bought for him. The silence of the night was cut only by muttered phrases—“Lift his arm.” “Push.” “That’s it.”—as they wrestled the clothes Matt had discarded onto the dead man. They positioned the corpse in the driver’s seat of Matt’s pickup truck.

Matt snapped his watch onto the dead man’s wrist and then, for the first time, he faltered. The man was already dead, but what they were about to do was repugnant. In a brusque voice Rob said, “Wait in the rental. I’ll take it from here.”

Later, Rob drove Matt to the airport. They didn’t speak. But as Rob left Matt at the terminal for his flight to Canada, the two men hugged. Matt could smell smoke and oil on Rob’s clothes and something more, the charred stench of burnt flesh.

Matt’s death was attributed to drunk driving.

Lucien broke in here. “What about the body? Didn’t they try to match dental records? DNA?”

Rob had assured him, Matt answered, that someone who knew the needed result, if not the reason why, would conduct the body’s formal identification.

Matt moved to Toronto, became Marshall Weston. He started all over again.

Here Matt pauses. Then, looking steadily into his eyes, he tells Lucien about coming home from work yesterday and receiving the severed lip in the mail.

Lucien Broussard has heard many stories in his years as a cop. The one the man sitting across from him has just told is crazier than any of them.

“We had agreed that Rob would only reach out to me if and when his life was in danger, his life and that of the girl he was going to marry. I owe him that. He saved my life. That’s why I’m here.”

Lucien plucks at a loose thread hanging on his shirt cuff. A button tumbles to the church floor. “So if what you say is true, then you believe Rob Beauman and his wife are here on the island.”

“Yes. At least his wife is.”

“And this Quinn is on the island too.”

“I don’t know for sure. But I believe so.”

“So you don’t have any idea where they might be?”

“None. As I told you, Ellie sent me a package. It held a key to a P.O. box here on the island, in which there was a letter. The letter didn’t give me much more detail. But I will tell you this: Rob and I had agreed that the plan would be to leave further information. Bread crumbs creating a trail.”

Lucien studies him appraisingly. Then he asks, “And the severed lip?”

This telling little detail about the murdered Carter Williamson still hasn’t been released to the press.

Matt’s fingertip touches his mouth. He grimaces. “In the letter she said it was the lip of the man she admitted killing.”

“Pretty insane, don’t you think? Slicing off a man’s lip just to send a message?”

“The world of Quinn is insanely dangerous, Detective. Computers can be hacked, letters intercepted, phones have GPS. A lip in an envelope means nothing, except to me and to Rob. Until I opened that post office box, I thought the message to come here was from Rob.”

“Why are you telling me all of this? Are you saying that your friend and his wife, despite being killers themselves, are, what? Worthy of rescue? That we should find them and then ride in, guns blazing, and save them from this devil Quinn? And then what?”

A priest enters the cathedral from one of the side doors. He makes his way to a confessional booth. Matt blots the sheen of sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief. “I just want to find them. I swore to Rob that I would help him.”

“You do understand that they have committed crimes? From what you have told me, Mr. Beauman has been working for a criminal organization for years. And you say that Eleanor Larrabee admits she murdered Carter Williamson and then mutilated him. She is also a person of interest in connection with another murder here on the island.”

“You do what you need to do, Detective. All I can ask is that you understand this: Some people are born into darkness, some people fall into it over the course of their lives. To find a man like Rob Beauman, who suffered both, but maintained loyalty, kindness, his essential humanity—I refuse to believe he is irrevocably broken. And if he loves this girl, she’s not broken either.”

“You are a loyal friend.”

“I have also known my fair share of darkness.”

The tale is extraordinary, fanciful, bizarre…and yet it rings true. And what other options does he have? Officially on leave, Lucien knows he must follow this lead through.

“So what do you suggest we do now, Mr. Walsh?”

“Take me to the last place Ellie Beauman was known to be. If Rob taught her what we had worked out, she will have left a message.”

The day was appropriately overcast, the gray headstones of the cemetery bled seamlessly into the steely sky. As the rabbi spoke about Ethan, Marcy wept quietly into a crumpled tissue. Her mother-in-law sat next to her, her face a frozen mask of grief.

Toward the back of the small throng, Ellie and Rob stood together, clad in black. Ellie swayed a little as her spike heels sunk deep into the moist earth and Rob placed a steadying hand on her elbow.

The rabbi signaled it was time to lower Ethan’s coffin into the cold, dark earth and Marcy rose to place a handful of dirt on its lid. This act snapped her thin veneer of control. She began to sob.

“It’s so awful,” Ellie murmured into Rob’s ear. “Who would ever do such a sick thing?”

Rob shook his head. His hand tightened on Ellie’s elbow, the same hand that had shoved Ethan to his death.

They offered their condolences to Marcy, to Ethan’s parents and three brothers. Milled about exchanging the awkward pleasantries that funerals seem to demand, rendered even more so because of the abrupt and violent nature of Ethan’s death. Finally they took their leave, relieved and guilty. Relieved to be away from the presence of naked grief—guilty, in Ellie’s case because death hadn’t chosen them, in Rob’s case because it had, and because Ellie must never know.

In the car back to their apartment, they clutched each other’s hands but did not speak.

As soon as they were inside, they tore at each other, frantically ripping at buttons and tugging at zippers. They made love often, but never before had it been like this, this ferocious, visceral attack, the brutal need to lose themselves and the memory of Marcy’s heartbreak in the affirmation of each other’s living, breathing bodies.