One Monday We Killed Them All (28 page)

So we went up. The paint of the abandoned concession stand was fading, the green wood warping. We parked the car on an empty street paved with bottle tops and filter tips. She got out of the car and looked at the deserted place. The summer throngs had shuffled the grass flat and carved countless messages in the weathered wood.

She pointed to the foundation where a house had been. “That was where we lived.” She turned and stared at the house where she and Cathie had been held captive. “That was the Belloc house. I cried when they moved to Ironville. So did Mary Ann. She was my best friend, the only girl my age I knew.”

She walked toward the house and I followed her, slowly. She leaned against a gate post and stared at the front door.

“I didn’t know him at all,” she said wonderingly. As I was about to speak I suddenly realized she was talking about Dwight. I remained silent. Sam Hessian had told me it would be a good thing for her when she could bring herself to talk about him.

“He was just like the rest of them. I’d come looking for him, to help him. I’d had trouble finding out where he might be. They yanked me inside and they were all yelling at me. The woman hit me. I turned toward him, starting to cry because I was confused, and he hit me in front of them. And I told myself it was what prison had done to him, but I knew it was a lie. I knew nothing had ever changed him. He had always been just the same, and I had always been able to pretend he was somebody else, because I needed that somebody else—who didn’t exist. That’s when the somebody else died, the day before he did. The person Larry killed, I’d known him only one day, so I couldn’t mourn him. Mary Ann and I played in that attic. We cut the ladies out of an
old Sears Roebuck and pasted them on a cardboard and had big tea parties. Dwight went up there once and tore all their heads off, all their pretty heads clean off.”

I came up behind her and put my hand on her waist. She moved away in instinctive, hurtful rejection. She looked beyond the house.

“I’d like to go up the mountain, Fenn.”

“Do you feel well enough?”

“The path isn’t too steep. We don’t have to climb fast.”

The trail was obscure. Squirrels cursed us, and jays sounded the alarm. There was no view until we reached the top. Most of the top was a huge gray rounded stone, like the back of some incredible lizard. From there we had the illusion of looking straight down into the village. Our car was a beetle in the dust, shiny in the sunlight.

“It’s cooler up here,” I said.

“Always.”

She walked to the other side of the summit, to a place where the stone had fallen away so as to form sitting places. She sat and looked toward Brook City. I sat next to her on a lower place, half-facing her. I looked at her calm profile.

“I used to know that all the glamor of the world was down there, Fenn. I would grow up and go down there and be a great lady. I would give my own tea parties.”

“Please, darling,” I said, and my voice was husky.

She looked down at me with a puzzled expression. “All little girls have those thoughts and dreams. I wanted to be the—
center
of something. I wanted to be terribly
needed.
So there would be a lot of things I could do. But my children need me. I can be sure of that, at least. I thought Dwight did, but I was wrong. So, I’m not complaining, dear. I can make do.”

She smiled. Something which had been trapped and tied within me moved then with a terrible, gasping strength, and broke free, flooding, spilling, choking me. I ground my face against her skirt, and heard my voice saying, “Help me. Help me. Please help me.”

When I could look at her, my tears blurred the look of a startled wonderment on her face. She said, “But—you don’t really
need
anyone. You’re so—complete, dear. I’m glad you can love me in your own way, but you’ve never wanted me to—give more than a little. It’s always made you uncomfortable—even
a little thing like me telling you I love you. I’m used to—making do with what I have.”

One word hit me harder than all the others. “Complete!” I said. “Without you—I’m nothing. All the world has been turning to ice. You’re the only warmth. Nothing else is worth a damn. I just can’t—can’t—”

And then her arms and her warmth were around me. I talked for a very long time. Some of it, I guess was incoherent. In the most special sense, I had never talked to my wife before. In another sense, I had never talked to another person—I had never let anyone see inside me. I had never known how many defensive layers there were until I stripped them all down, one after another. It was a brutal therapy, emotionally exhausting.

When it was over, we knew each other. I saw all the love revealed in her eyes, and in the shape of her mouth, a luminous confrontation, so that I could not get enough of looking at her. There are no cold men or cold women. There are only people so lonely, so frightened, they hide all which can be hurt.

When it was done, we were like lovers soon after they have first met. There was a feeling of celebration and anticipation. She reached under the twisted roots of an ancient pine which grew out of the rocks, and found the treasure of her childhood. The box was intact, but rusted shut. I pried it open.

I held my hand out and she gave me the treasures, one by one. A spotted sea shell. An oriental coin. A tarnished button with a green glass jewel. Some fragments of red ribbon. A disintegrating bit of notebook paper, with a small girl’s printing in ink which had faded so I could just manage to read it.

She looked at me with a considerable pride.

“See?” she said. “I love you. It was for you all along, waiting right here for you. And for all the rest of our lives, you are going to have to remember this date, and always give me something, because maybe this is the day we met.”

The other part of it came a week later, in Larry Brint’s office.

“I can’t see it, Fenn,” he said, shaking his head in a troubled way. “The place is beginning to come back to life. Two plants re-opening, and they’ll be breaking ground for the brand-new one next month. And Davie Morissa is wearing
Kermer’s shoes, and it’s going to work out just about right for everybody, so by the time you’re set to take over this desk, you ought to be in a position to do more with it than I’ve ever been able to do.”

“I’m sorry, Larry.”

“The way everything turned out, you’re completely acceptable to the Hanaman group, Skip Johnson, everybody. You can’t give up this kind of a deal, boy.”

“I have to.”

“You’re giving up your security.”

“That money that was impounded, the money found in the locked glove compartment of McAran’s car is finally being released to Meg. Kowalski had to put up a hell of a fight to get it. The net she’ll get will be about two thousand.”

“Enough to retire on, obviously.”

“Enough so we can go away and look around for a place where we’ll feel like settling down.”

“I have to say you don’t look worried. Fenn, tell me. I know you’re sort of an idealist-type fella. Is it because you’re fed up with the kind of compromises and deals we have to make here in Brook City to give the people as much law as we can afford?”

I shrugged. “That’s bothered me. I guess it always will. I’ll find it wherever I go. There’ll be more of it some places and less of it at other places. I’m able to live in a world I can’t change.”

“Is it because you told her it was you killed McAran?”

“I told her that. We both think we understand it. We can live with it. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to live with, but we can manage. It wouldn’t drive us away from here. I told her a lot of things, Larry.”

“Then
why
the
hell
do you think you have to leave?”

“I don’t think it will sound like much of a reason to you.”

“Try me.”

“I’m turning into another kind of person, Larry. It isn’t easy. It’s making me happier than I’ve been. I’m learning—emotional honesty. But all the old grooves and habits are here. They slow me down. It’s worth it to both of us to have every aspect of our life as new to us as—as this is. Maybe I won’t be as good a cop as before. Meg seems to think I’ll be a better one. But we have to find out somewhere. Can you accept that?”

“I have to, I guess.” He sighed. “I’ll write the references you want.”

“One month from now okay?”

“It will be okay, Fenn. The city fathers will return to you exactly fifty per cent of what you’ve put in the pension fund, out of the kindness of their hearts, so you better apply soon. They move slow in the Treasurer’s office.”

Halfway to the door I stopped, turned and looked at that worn, schoolmaster’s face. “Thanks, Larry.”

“For what?”

“For a lot of things, but right now, thanks for not putting it on a personal basis, for not asking me as a personal favor to you to stay on.”

“I thought of it. What would you have said?”

“Do you think I ought to tell you?”

“Probably not, Fenn. Probably not. One answer would tempt me, and the other answer wouldn’t make either of us feel any better.”

Dockerty caught up with me as I was going down the wide stairway. He looked like a man on his way to an embassy reception. “What are you smirking about, old boy?” he asked me. “That’s a lecher’s look if I ever saw one. You must have something tasty lined up. It isn’t like you, you know.”

“Very tasty,” I said.

“And with no prejudice against a policeman?”

“A little maybe. But I can talk her out of it. I’m on my way to phone her.”

“Who is this idiot creature you’re seducing, Lieutenant?”

“My wife.”

After ten seconds of silence he sighed and said, “I’ll make no comment about her taste, old friend. But yours is beyond reproach.”

About the Author

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.