Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons (24 page)

I sighed. That was how gossip got started.

So off we went to a park nine blocks wide and four and a half miles long to find a man whose description we didn’t have who was accompanied by an unknown number of children.

If they’d gone to Kristin’s garden, that might narrow it down— probably they were somewhere near the Music Concourse. There were gardens all around there, some simple flower beds and others more formal. There was the Rhododendron Dell, but it wouldn’t be in bloom now, so they probably weren’t there. The Conservatory was fabulous, but we thought if that was what Kristin liked, Mrs. La Barre would have mentioned its name.

That left Strybing Arboretum and the Japanese Tea Garden. We opted for the latter because it had “garden” in its name and because it was by far the more exotic of the two, the more likely, we thought, to appeal to a kid. We had decided on the simple method of calling “Eddie! Eddie La Barre!” as if looking for a lost child, meanwhile keeping eyes peeled for a man with at least two children.

But if they were in the Japanese Tea Garden, they eluded us. We climbed the moon bridge and elbowed our way through the teahouse, making ourselves obnoxious to one and all, but to no avail.

Next, we tried Strybing Arboretum, which is quite a bit bigger and harder to cover. We still had no luck. Undaunted, we popped over to the Garden of Shakespeare’s Flowers, and then we did go to the Conservatory, knowing perfectly well that just because Kristin liked some garden or other didn’t mean an entire family could spend a whole afternoon there. They could have gotten a quick hit of flowers and then gone rowing on Stow Lake for all we knew. It was starting to seem like a wild goose chase, but we couldn’t see turning back at this point— though Chris did insist on getting a hot dog before trekking to the Conservatory.

We entered the giant wedding cake, calling lightly, “Eddie? Eddie, where are you? Eddie La Barre! Oh, Eddieeeee.” It must have driven the other park goers nuts.

But it worked.

A man’s voice said, “Who’s that? I’m in here— who’s calling me?”

We followed it into the Pond Room, which was like a rain forest dripping tropical moisture, hot and sensuous. We could barely see anyone through the steamy mist. “Who’s that?” said the voice.

And we saw a man, a short, thick blond man who looked enough like Tommy La Barre to be his twin. He had four children with him, three of them clinging, apparently unnerved by the strange voices calling their dad. There were three boys and one little girl, a gorgeous thin little creature with hair that was neither thick and blond like her dad’s nor thick and black like her mother’s, but brown and wavy. She was dressed, not in a T-shirt and jeans, but in a sort of organza skirt topped with what looked like a bathing suit top. She was clearly at the age of dress-up, four or five, I thought.

The boys were small, though one may have been as old as ten, and they were dark like their mother, with finely wrought features. Genes, I thought, are wonderful things, and reflected that I’d really never seen an ugly child.

Eddie La Barre was a father of five and had recently had an affair with a twenty-three-year-old. It was a good escape, I guessed, but the memory of his angry, harried wife made it seem ugly and cheap, terribly unfair.

The little girl smiled. “We’re playing rain forest,” she said. “Watch out for the alligators, Ooooh, watch out!”

“You must be Kristin.”

“Uh-huh. You want to get in our boat? We’re going down the Amazon.”

The oldest boy blushed, caught playing with babies. The man said, “I’m Eddie La Barre. You were calling me?”

“Your wife told us where you were.”

Alarm showed on his face, something, despite the brothers’ similarities, that probably wasn’t in Tommy’s repertoire. “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all. We got your name from your brother. We wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”

And then a refinery exploded about ten feet away.

Or so it seemed.

La Barre pushed the kids to the ground and dropped, all four children screaming at once. We heard shouts and scurrying throughout the glass house, but Chris and I stood riveted, heads swiveling, unable to grasp what had happened.

Finally La Barre, catching on that we were sitting ducks, shouted, “Get down! Someone’s shooting.” There was another explosion. I dropped and heard Chris do the same; my only thought, wildly, crazily, not for us or the children, but for the marvelous old building:
Oh, God, not in here!

“Daddy!” shouted someone. “Daddy, stop!”

It was not a child’s voice, but a young woman’s I couldn’t place. Chris whispered: “Adrienne,” and I raised my head, but I couldn’t see anyone through the mist.

“Daddy, give me the gun. It’s okay, you don’t have to shoot anybody.”

“Adrienne, you stay out of this. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You came to get me, didn’t you? Well, here I am. I’m right here, and everything’s fine. We’ll go home now. We’ll go home and have a nice drink. Come on, Dad— it’s too hot to be out here. Maybe a Long Island iced tea.”

“I got the reporter; now I got to get the lawyers.
Then
everything’ll be fine. It’s not fine yet, Adrienne. You go home now.”

Eddie La Barre called, “Adrienne, go!”

“Who’s that?” Dunson’s voice changed, became the voice of a crazy man, paranoid, on edge.

“Dad, come on, now. Give me the gun and let’s go.” Ignoring her, he stepped into view. I could see him from the back, staring at Eddie, down on the ground with his children. “Whoever you are, you’ve got four kids. Hey, Adrienne, who is this guy?”

Adrienne walked into view also, but I noticed she didn’t get too close to her dad. “Dad, it doesn’t matter— let’s just go now.” She held out a hand but kept her distance.

“Stand up, mister.”

La Barre stood, but I heard him whispering to his kids: “Stay down. Don’t move.”

“You’ve got three beautiful boys, and I don’t have any. Hey, Adrienne, I can solve this thing. I’ll just take one of his boys.”

“Dad, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Adrienne spoke, not as if her father had suddenly snapped, but like a woman used to dealing with crazy people. I wondered what her life had been like and didn’t envy her. She stepped closer to the children.

Her father said, “You kids. Stand up.”

“No.” Adrienne and Eddie La Barre spoke at once. “Come on, Daddy.” Again she held out her hand. “Adrienne, you’re in my way.”

“We’ve really got to go home now.”

“Adrienne, don’t make me shoot you.” He fired again, another of those hideous blasts I feared would shatter the building.

She jumped at him, grabbed for his gun, and once again it went off. Adrienne’s body twitched and sank to the floor.

Dunson yelled, apparently to the world at large, “Now look what you made me do! I had a son, a wife, and a daughter, and now I don’t have anybody. I’m taking a kid. You owe me that.”

He kicked one of the children. “You. Get up.”

The little boy didn’t move.

He kicked another. “You!”

The kid made an “oof” noise.

“Come on, or I’ll kick you again.”

I followed the kid’s eyes to the still body of Adrienne, blood oozing from her upper chest. Seizing the opportunity, Dunson shouted. “Get up or I’ll shoot you.” The kid stood and Dunson had him in an instant, his left arm pinning the kid against his body.

Without thinking, I stood up. “Mr. Dunson.”

He whirled, and I saw the madness in his eyes.

“I thought you wanted me. That’s what you told Adrienne. I heard you.”

“The lawyer.”

“Look, take me instead of the kid.”

“But they got my son.”

“They got your wife, too.”

His face lit up. I hadn’t thought such a thing could happen in the circumstances. “I could kill two birds with one stone.”

I smiled. At least I worked my face in smile-like fashion; I can’t vouch for the effect. “Let the boy go, okay?”

“You come over here.”

My legs shook, but I did. He shoved the boy aside and grabbed me in one motion. “Let’s get out of here.”

And then we were running, running past horrified onlookers, our fellow Conservatory visitors, then just running, toward his car, I supposed. Sirens were starting somewhere in the distance.

A little too late, I thought. Just a little too late.

Since then I’ve wondered often if I should have struggled at that point, tried to break away, but my only thought was to get him out of the park. He had shot his own daughter and might shoot anyone, I thought, anyone or everyone, child or adult. I just wanted him out of there.

And yet we had to go somewhere. It didn’t occur to me that no matter where he took me, people would still be in danger.

He found a baseball cap in his car and jerked it on. It changed his appearance just enough, perhaps. He made me drive so that he could keep the gun trained on me, giving directions at every corner.

I was less afraid for the moment, and my heart slowed a little, knowing he probably wouldn’t shoot me now, not while his own life depended on my being alive.

I had time now to think, and I couldn’t get something he’d said off my mind: “I got the reporter.”

How was I supposed to interpret that? I shivered and tried to get it out of my mind. I needed to focus.

The man sitting next to me was so crazy he’d shot his only daughter, but perhaps there was some ounce of sanity left in him, some tiny speck of conscience that I could appeal to. I said, “Adrienne’s dead, I think.”

“Bullshit. I wouldn’t kill Adrienne.”

“But there’s a very good chance you did. You shot her in the chest.”

“Shut up!”

He broke the silence every now and then to give me directions. Once we were safely on the Bay Bridge, heading back to the East Bay, I tried again. “How did your wife die?”

“Suicide, goddammit. You know that.”

“After Sean died?”

He shook his head, but not, I realized, to signify a negative. It was the shake of sadness that people give. “It damn near killed her.” And then, realizing what he had said, he gave a mirthless hoot. “It did kill her. We had an old gun I kept around just in case. One day she ate it for lunch, right in front of me.” His head went from side to side— shake, shake, shake— as if the horror of it had loosened his neck bones.

“McKendrick killed Sean, and he killed Carlene. Bastard!”

“He deserved to die, I guess.”

“Damn right he did!”

“You must have gotten the keys to my partner’s car when you went to visit Adrienne at her office.”

“Of course I did. It was the perfect setup.”

“But my partner was innocent. She could have gone to prison for a murder you committed.”

“First of all, you just said it yourself— it wasn’t fuckin’ murder. It was an execution. He killed my son, I killed him; that simple. And so what about your damned partner? I lost Sean, and then I lost Carlene. Why shouldn’t the inside lose two of theirs?”

“The inside?”

“Yeah, the inside. You know what it’s like to have a vegetable for a son? To spend every fuckin’ nickel you make trying to keep him alive when he’s never going to talk or think or do anything except shit his pants? Carlene insisted on that. That’s why it hit her so hard when he died. She got born again after the accident, and she just knew Jesus wasn’t going to let her down. He was going to come right down from heaven and make her baby well again. Instead, he sent a lifetime of seizures and a case of pneumonia.”

I was losing the thread. “But what’s the inside?”

“Everything but us, missy. That’s the inside. Having Sean like that, having to live like that made us outsiders. Look at Adrienne! The girl dresses in black all the time. She’s not normal. There’s nothing normal about that girl. How could there be? Her little brother’s skull got cracked when she was five years old. How the fuck was she supposed to be normal?”

“Adrienne’s dead, Mr. Dunson. You got one on the outside too.”

“Adrienne is not dead! I wouldn’t kill my own daughter.”

Would you kill my friend Rob?

I didn’t have the courage to ask.

As we got off the bridge, I said, “Where to now?”

“Just listen, that’s all. I’ll tell you a little bit at a time.”

When I found myself looking out at the City from the East Bay hills, taking in the view of three bridges from Tilden Park, I realized where he was taking me.

“We’re going to Inspiration Point, aren’t we?”

“How did you know that?”

“Because I met Jason’s brother, Michael. He told me all about the accident and how it tore his family apart; how they never recovered from it. They became outsiders, too, you know. The parents died young— and so did Jason, of course. The sister’s a dry husk of a woman, and Michael’s either an alcoholic or headed toward it.”

“I’m supposed to care? Look at me? I’ve been an alcoholic for fifteen years! You know what my wife had to put up with? Goddammit, she was a saint.”

“Why are we going to Inspiration Point?”

“I’m going to kill you there.”

No clever rejoinder came to mind.

“You are Carlene today. She died, and you are going to die.”

“And you?” I had an idea this was it for him as well.

He nodded. “And I am, too.”

I couldn’t help thinking of the Indian summer day nearly two decades ago, not much later in the season than this, when the impulse of a moment, a young boy’s desire to see his dog run free, had started a chain of events that destroyed the lives of two families. At least two of the Dunsons were dead as a result— possibly three— and so was one McKendrick. Maybe Rob was too and perhaps I would be in a few minutes. It was so senseless, all this; it reminded me of the feud in
Huckleberry Finn
.

“What’s your name?” said Dunson. “I’ve forgotten.”

“Rebecca.”

“Today, Rebecca, you represent Carlene Dunson, who lived in horror and died in horror. It’s all I can do for her now.”

That enraged me so much I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “You’re going to kill me for her? You really think she’d want that? The saint? You think she’d have wanted you to kill your own daughter?”