Mercy Among the Children (43 page)

“It looks like years in prison,” Autumn said. “But let’s just you and I stay out of it — for Mom and Dad’s sake, please?”

“What about Dad?” I said.

“Connie Devlin knows — but he will always await the best deal he can get — he is in a position to trade one crime off the other. He sits in his house and has the police patrol it — orders pizzas — but all that will come to an end,” Autumn said. “Just for Percy’s sake, don’t you get involved — they won’t get away — there is nowhere for any of them to go except into a jail cell in Dorchester. Remember you said everything would change for us? Please?” She reached out and squeezed my hand.

I stayed awake all that night, and all Thursday drinking.
Percy was staying home from school trying to help the old dog, Scupper Pit, who was at its end and lay near our wood stove feebly wagging its tail.

I believe that the beating Percy had taken had broken something in him, so near was it to his mother’s death. He kept trying to do all the things he believed he needed to do. As if someone was watching him. Every day he tried to give me a present — sometimes it was nothing more than Father’s socks.

“Look what I got you, Lyle,” he would say, coming out from a closet.

Sometimes he phoned the Pits to ask after Teresa May, who was at the hospital in Halifax, and if he could send her a letter because he had two jokes. So I helped him write his letter. But though I had told him I would mail it, I didn’t. It sat in the little jar on the table waiting to go.

Once, listening to the radio, he phoned in to answer a quiz that would win him a hundred dollars. I still remember him standing with the phone in his hand and waiting his turn to speak. But he spoke so softly and got the answer wrong. He hung up, turned to me, and smiled.

“Oh, Lyle,” he said, “I almost got it —”

I would wake up periodically because Scupper, who lay on a mat near the stove, would begin to whine.

I finally told him I would take Scupper to the veterinarian on Friday. Autumn had to do a run-through that day of the play she had written with her drama teacher. But the more I thought of Connie Devlin the more insane I became. I was driven forward by the idea that my father’s life would be nothing if I did not act.

I sat in my room brooding. I frightened myself when I saw my reflection in the mirror. And Thursday night Autumn opened the door when I was getting out of the tub. She saw the slashes all across my arms and chest from the knife I carried.
It had taken me a good three years to make those marks. She gave a start, and then with a feeble smile said:

“Ah yes, Love — the death of a thousand cuts. I know it well.”

That Friday morning I woke after Autumn had gone. The wind had turned cold. A blizzard was starting and snow was seeping through the back wall. We needed a new wall, but even Autumn didn’t seem to care anymore.

I had a feeling that Connie Devlin would get away again. This blizzard on the very day Autumn had told me they were going to arrest the three of them was a trick by God, it was God’s punishment against my family. He loved Connie Devlin more than He loved me. I thought of Mathew escaping. Mathew would always escape.

In my mind’s eye I saw Devlin packing his clothes. How stupid the police were!

I would kill Devlin. It didn’t matter to me if he had killed Dad or not. Nothing mattered except to act. I would go to prison. And there I would one day kill Mathew and Rudy and Danny Sheppard.

“You want to hear a joke?” Percy asked me as I was thinking this and peeling the label off a quart of Napoleon wine.

“What,” I said.

“What do you say to a shy turtle?”

“I don’t know, Percy, I don’t know.”

“You say to a shy turtle — come out of your shell,” Percy said. He giggled, and I didn’t answer.

“I heard that joke — I heard that joke — last week,” Percy said.

His chest heaved and he coughed again. He had problems with his lungs, the smoke from our wood stove got to him. He blinked at me and tried to think of another joke but got confused. He fidgeted, trying to think of something to say. As
I started for the door he tried to tell me the first joke again. Then he ran back to the dog.

It had started to snow long before I left the house.

SIX

Mathew was right. Cynthia and Leo had become engaged a short two weeks before. But in seeing him that day, Rudy had missed what was evident to others in the house; and what Cynthia wanted to keep secret as long as she could. Leo had had a stroke, and Cynthia had been put into the position of a nurse. This had happened the very night of their engagement as he opened a bottle of champagne. He stood, to get a bucket of ice, laughed about something, turned to speak, felt weak, and fell in front of her.

She got him to a chair where he shook violently. He refused to go to the hospital, and stayed mainly in his room, suspicious of everyone and angry when she made sounds or tried to help him. He kept asking for certain papers, and notes, and she was kept running trying to find them for him, frightened to death of his temper.

A week ago she telephoned Freddy Snook, asking him to come down and help. He appeared with an unsigned will, made up without clear beneficiary, telling her the old man had left no power of attorney. The estate was in limbo because Leo had that Irish suspicion of wills.

“What do you mean,” Cynthia said, lighting a cigarette and pausing just slightly to blow out the match, “power of attorney?”

“No one to take care of his bills — or handle the finances of his estate — so when it is probated it may all return to the government. I told him and he said —”

“Poor Leo,” she said. “What did he say?”

“He said he was going to give everything to — you — after you were married. He had no one else, except supposedly his other daughters; Gladys herself being so ill.” Snook said this in a way that showed how little he believed in those other daughters.

“How much would all this stuff be worth?” Cynthia asked, sniffing, and looking about with the petulant curiosity of a child.

“I don’t know — he lost a terrible amount — his mill is gone, he had to clean up the spill and pay restitution, his store is gone at a big loss, he has not received the bulk of his insurance, and he lost the construction job on the bridge because of — circumstances beyond his control — so.”

Cynthia nodded. “So — how much?” she sniffed.

“Well — he’d have close to 250,000 in cash in the bank — and with his property, his construction equipment — his holdings in the new marina in Newcastle — probably 2.5 to 3 million.”

Snook told her that since her claim might be contested at probate, if she had power of attorney she could at least control the funds — that is, the quarter-million dollars — and keep it away from Percy, Lyle, and Autumn, his “fraudulent” grandchildren. He was prepared to act on her behalf — so far no
real
grandchildren came forward. He was worried just slightly about Isabel Young, who had taken up their cause before. He said they must get Leopold to sign because he feared another will, probably tucked away in the safe upstairs.

“Then that’s what we will have to do,” she said.

It was done by wearing Leo down — because he wasn’t sure what they wanted. He was afraid of Cynthia going away and leaving Gladys. He was also terrified of going to the hospital.
Cynthia, sensing this, spoke about her daughter, Teresa May, who had gone to Halifax.

“I want to stay here — I want to stay with you — but I might have to go —”

Leo looked at her and kept trying to tell her something.

Cynthia, hearing Leo struggle to speak, ran from the room and sat in the alcove on the second floor, looking over the bay, crying, her knees shaking so much she could hear them knocking together. Back in the room Fred Snook faced Leo and began to lecture him about the greed of the Hendersons — the
flight
of Sydney Henderson at the time of Elly’s death. It was time to sign the will, he said.

“She might be going,” Freddy said, looking over his shoulder toward the door. “God, you don’t want to lose her! We better do this while we can. I mean at least power of attorney — hmm?”

Snook’s back was sticky with sweat, his gestures suddenly coarse. The air smelled of sickness and an aging man. Leo, cheeks sucked in, teeth in a jar, looked hopelessly after his fiancée — whom he had recently held for the first time.

Freddy, kneeling by Leo, kept the paper straight, the pen in his hand. It was one of those bright, glassy January days.

“Cripes,” Snook said at that moment, jumping up, when he realized that Cynthia’s leaving had caused Leo to wet himself, and it had doused his leg. Leopold McVicer, once the terror of the river, was now feeble and old.

Freddy went to the door and called to her. Then he went to the bookshelf and came back with a thick history book, with “Gladys McVicer, Grade 8, Netherwood School for Girls, 1961” on the inside cover to place under the paper. Cynthia came back. She stood at the door watching, remembering she had studied that book in school so long ago, and had liked the picture of the mountains and the clear blue lake.

Freddy was thinking he could not go through with it, but Leo, trying to wave Cynthia in, looked at them with sudden sharp glittering eyes, the kind that invalids have in a moment of crisis, and he signed his name legibly and in duplicate.

Cynthia went weak. Her legs buckled. She did not know why God had shone His bounty and love on her. But she could not let on, in any way, that He had. She had done this for
Leo’s
peace of mind. Just as Leo wet himself when he thought she was leaving, Cynthia peed herself on seeing him sign, too excited to care.

Once Cynthia had in her possession the greatest weapon of her life, power of attorney for Leopold McVicer’s estate, she no longer needed Mr. Snook. She did not answer his phone calls. She needed her family or her friends no longer.

She believed her security depended on her finding the other will and destroying it. She knew she had very little time. Everything had to be done soon. The gossip about Leo having suffered a stroke and her being nothing but a gold digger was spreading out like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pool. This ripple grew wider and could not stop, for if it did, other, larger ripples would overtake it. Freddy would use this against her if he could.

The Thursday I stayed at home drinking, Cynthia went to Leo’s room, closed the door, and dressed him. Folding her hands in front of her, wearing a loose top over black leotards and small ballet-shaped slippers, she told him that people wanted her gone, and were out to destroy her.

“Never,” he managed.

“Well, they don’t want me here — and I might have to leave —”

“Why —?”

“Why — jealousy,” she said. “I never seen such a bunch of jealous leeches as those I used to know.”

She was suspicious of this word
probate
and what it may signify when Leo died. She asked him about his other will. She told Leo that he must trust no one but her, or Gladys would have to be sent to a
mental institution.

“What would anyone try?” he managed.

“To take control of your money and estate so you can’t get at it — Freddy Snook been telling everyone you’re incompetent. He wants to freeze your accounts. That’s why I put him out of the house — he wanted me in on it. Imagine! Well, none of this is up to me, is it? So I am planning to leave tonight. The last thing I need is suspicion cast upon me! I’ll just take you to the hospital — it’s all I can do to keep from crying — I’ve done nothing in my life but shed tears!”

Leo’s eyes sharpened. He kept pointing to the notepad by his bed. She handed it to him, and he scrawled, almost illegibly, “Take money out,” tore the sheet off, and handed it to her.

She sighed. More power suddenly thrust into her hands.

It was not yet noon when Cynthia took the cell phone, took Gladys’s Cadillac, and drove Leo into Chatham. She persuaded him to stop at the Peking Palace Restaurant. They had sweet-and-sour chicken balls in a dining room of empty tables with heavy silver utensils, white tablecloths, and a Chinese waiter in a spotted red blazer.

The day smelled of gravel and sanded sidewalks, and winter sky, with its white traces of clouds. There was very little sun to be found.

Then she helped him across the main street in the middle of the day, with sidewalks shaped like bobsled runs. She stopped the traffic by waving his heavy rubber-tipped cane, leading him by the hand past heavy dark wooden stores and shops separated by empty and lonely lots strewn with used Christmas
trees, their icicles caught in the small breeze; the wild crazy Cynthia Pit and the last great lumber baron of our river.

They went to each bank, and each one smelled of sterile winter and artifacts of business swiftly moving into the computer age. He had always mistrusted banks, since he was a child and his mother was home dying of tuberculosis. Leo never entered a bank without remembering this. And he never forgot that
his
people were more like Cynthia than Dr. David Scone or Diedre Whyne. His people had the country on their backs. His people came from the Hill or Injuntown. His people were the ones betrayed, laughed at, scorned as much as the natives and blamed for being bigots. His people were like Elly McGowan (McGowan the name Leo gave her — because it was his mother’s maiden name: all was hidden, you see, by wily Father Porier).

His eyes glanced from one teller to the other, trying to decipher their thoughts, knowing them to be
the others
— those who did not know, and did not understand, neither boldness nor power, nor goodness. No, they were not the ones who could ever make a decision on a man’s life by themselves. He hated them, and he took Cynthia’s hand.

“Mathew,” he whispered, “is better than the lot of them —” And he waved his cane in a high arc and then dropped it quickly.

“We are here to do some business,” Cynthia Pit loudly declared.

She followed his instructions implicitly. She kept open the main account for his construction company. She emptied the other accounts, some of them untouched for years, in four different branches. One was an account opened in 1954 that held money from the cut above Russell Road — that is a cut a quarter of a century old, and most of the men who worked it dead.