The Dead Past (26 page)

"And Carl came here and you both started making calls to Margaret?"

"Only me. Carl couldn't do anything but think about the day when Daddy left and never came back. Carl found out the cop who killed our daddy was the sheriff now and started calling him too, and sending presents the way the papers said our daddy had done. Carl thought it was poetic justice. I did, too. Tons didn't know."

"What do the willow swatches mean?"

She actually smiled and I wished she hadn't. "It was Carl's idea. He left them because our house in Gallows had a large willow tree out back and our daddy built us a tree house in it. Nothing big, just a few planks nailed together, but the three of us always played there. It fell apart but Daddy rebuilt it, until he didn't come home anymore."

My mouth was dry; there wasn't enough satisfaction in this, not the way I'd hoped. "And Richie?"

Deena cocked an ear and I heard the sound, too: Tons snoring, muttering, smacking his lips, and one of the dogs growling at the door. It shook her as she repeated what she'd said the other day, with the same empty tone. "He was a good kid." The baby had hushed and Deena whispered. "But he was silly and stupid. He thought we were doing it for fun, like a game. I still just wanted to see her, but she wouldn't even open the door. We were scared she'd call the police. Richie broke in through the back and let me and Carl in. She started to scream and Carl shoved her and then shoved her again, yelling about our father, and Richie started getting scared. I grabbed her and shook her and she slid to the floor and turned over on her back. I needed to know what my father had seen in her. I needed to know about my father, don't you understand that?" I did. "And then she was dead, just like that. Didn't take a minute." Deena's eyes glazed. "Richie thought he could make it look like a robbery and stole some jewelry, and he said he wiped his fingerprints off the glass, but he must have left some. After a few weeks he got careless and tried to pawn the bracelets and get a little cash, except he sunk himself. And. . ." She let it fade, staring at nothing.

"And your brother decided Richie was too dumb to get away clean, and when the kid got caught he'd tell the cops everything. So Carl killed Richie."

"I didn't know he would," she said, a subtle hint of pleading in her voice. It was the only time she'd shown any regret at how the circumstances had played out. More tears streaked her face down to her chin, but no sniffling, no sobbing. "They were supposed to just go driving through the park, Richie's favorite place to hang out, trying to think things through a little, and Carl said they started to argue and Richie started telling him stuff until my brother couldn't
take
Richie anymore; the kid could be like that sometimes."

Her reasoning made my hair stand on end. "So it really was a fluke that he left Richie in my yard."

"You live near the far end of the park. It must've happened right there."

"You said as much when you told me, 'How could it mean anything?' It just happened to be a nice spot for his impromptu act of leaving one of your father's old letters for
Broghin
. And tonight you watched his house. You found my grandmother there and saw
Broghin
leave and then you set up your little Wizard of Oz skit." All a game, so very fun. "Why didn't you cut the phone wires, too?"

"I thought I did," she said. "There were a bunch of them. They were a lot thinner than I expected. I just stuck a branch behind them and pulled hard. There weren't even any sparks or anything."

"Why did you kill Karen?"

"I didn't," she said.

"Your brother, then."

"He didn't, either. There was no reason for that."

My stomach knotted. Deena walked by me and we went into the living room where Tons was still snoring in the exact same position. I kept an eye out for her trying to let the dogs back in. I picked up the phone and started to call Lowell.

Deena pulled
Tons's
hair until he opened his eyes and said, "What?"

She had been resigned before, but now one final chance to get out of this was still open and she gave it a shot. "He's crazy! He broke in here!" The baby began crying again. "I think he killed Richie!"

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"He killed your brother, Tons! Get him!"

He sat up and came at me, staggering, arms raised. I ducked his one wild punch, swung, and tapped him lightly on the chin. Tons went down like his namesake's amount of bricks.

He crawled forward for a moment, pointed at my leg and said, "You're bleeding on my floor, man." I wasn't quite chastened enough to apologize for the fact. Tons tried to get up and fell asleep halfway to his knees.

Richie started telling him stuff
.

The child wailed and Deena's eyes met mine. "Is she Richie's?" I asked.

She cooed into her daughter's face, infant gripping a strand of her scarlet hair like a lifeline out of a world with such a beginning as this.

"I don't know," she said.

I waited until Lowell showed; he came with Roy and another deputy, both of whom had their guns drawn low for the dogs. Seeing Anubis' work earlier in the day prepared them for another encounter with savagely protective canines. But being thrown through a glass door was enough to take some of the resolve out of the Dobermans. One was semi-conscious on the porch, and the other barked insanely but wouldn't leave his brother's side.

I had told Lowell most of it over the phone and filled in the gaps when he got here. He listened without comment. The child's crying didn't distract him, and neither did Deena's humming or Tons' snoring. Roy grabbed the rifle off Richie's bed, and he and the other deputy searched the house and the trailer out back for the .22. They discovered Carl's belongings, but didn't find the gun.

At one point Lowell said, "That son of a bitch," and I knew he was talking about
Broghin
, who might have avoided all the trouble if only he'd leveled with his own men.

"Why do you think he didn't come clean from the beginning?" I asked.

Lowell said, "Because he was scared. Seeing that letter brought up a lot from his past. I know that story about the stalker and how
Broghin
tripped over him skulking around Margaret's house and killed him in a tussle, but they never found out who he was.
Broghin
shot the perp in the face back when he was just starting out, still the only man he ever killed. For twenty-five years he's been living with that. It does something inside."

The ghost of a ghost. The chance of a ghost.

"His own private ghost," I said. "He couldn't share it with anybody." Twenty-five years of replaying his moment up on the stage giving his speech and taking his bows.

"Yeah, I guess." Lowell looked quite ready to fold the sheriff into an origami swan. "When men like him get scared they take it on their shoulders, make it personal and muck it up. They want control, only they don't have any so they walk around with their heads half screwed off."

"I sort of told you that a few days ago."

"Yeah," he said. He'd been wrong to completely trust
Broghin
, and it would never be the same in town again.

"He should have given you a holler."

Deena asked if it would be all right if she changed the baby, and Roy nodded and escorted her into the other room. Tons drooled on the rug, and I didn't want to be around when they woke him up and explained what had happened. He'd lost his brother, wife, and brother-in-law, and if the police wanted to pursue the drug charges based on what they'd found in the house, he might very well not see his infant daughter for a couple of years.

Roy found the tape recorder and played it. An eerie, ghoulish keening filled the house, like a bubbling, choking victim: "
We have waited for this moment to
. . ." He shut it off quickly and muttered, "Freaky goddamn people."

Lowell motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen. I did and he turned and stared at me, granite features unreadable.

"What?" I asked.

He wet his lips and told me what Wallace had found out about Karen Bolan.

~ * ~

Broghin
got there a few minutes later; we looked at each for a long time while he went through the motions of taking charge of the scene. His demons had been dealt with and you could tell he felt like getting back into his old shoes. Lowell had respected him, Anna had trusted him, and his wife had loved him, and still he put them all into danger because he didn't have the strength to give up the
limelit
glory day of his career. He'd tampered with evidence, knew much more than he was willing to relate. He reminded me that we all had our fantasies and did our best, and occasionally acted our worst, in order to live up to them. For twenty-five years he kept a sacred memory of speeches and parades: killing Deena's father might have been the day he looked back on as the happiest of his life. He didn't want to give it up.

"Kendrick," he said. "Let me…"

I drew my arm back ready to haul off and break his jaw, started forward with it with all the frustration working at me like scalpels, a sudden migraine fragmenting my skull, but somewhere between me and him I lost the urge and nearly fell forward into his arms, and the room started to whirl as I looked up into his sweaty face and I had to go outside to throw up.

~ * ~

The worst part, perhaps, was that I meant to take time and sort the remainder through, drive around wishing for stray lightning bolts of inspiration, but instead I went immediately across town to where I understood I had to go. The subconscious mind is a perverse associate of ourselves which takes credit for our meanest assumptions; good, I thought, maybe that will help me get to sleep tonight. I didn't want to believe I had consciously thought what I was thinking. The same idea had occurred to Lowell, I was certain, but whether he held back because he was a cop and needed a warrant to do anything or because he was giving me the opportunity to end it myself, I didn't know. I hoped it was because he was a cop. This type of responsibility I could live without.

It was after eleven, but the front porch remained on. I parked at the curb and fumbled in the back of the Jeep until I found a bent screwdriver. It would do.

I got out and started up the driveway. A cat wandered over and brushed against my leg, tail looping around my ankle. I picked her up and held her close, no longer smelling the faint antiseptic odor in her fur. She meowed loudly and nibbled at my finger. I put her down.

The door of the El Dorado was unlocked. I opened it and the hospital stink dropped on me. In the dim illumination of the dome light I could see that the weather stripping around the window was cracked and discolored in spots; I used the screwdriver to pry loose the
Dezus
clamps and took the door panel off. The seat, rug, and window had been cleaned, but blood and minute traces of skin tissue had run down the window seal and dried inside the car door.

Bile rose halfway up my throat, but I had nothing left to give. I got out onto the lawn and took deep breaths and thought I'd be all right, but then a second wave hit and I knew I wouldn't be. I made a dash for the primrose hedges under the mailbox and dry-heaved. I lost whatever was left in my stomach. There wasn't much, but it felt like everything I'd eaten in the past week.

In five minutes I was well enough to ring the doorbell.

Doug Hobbes answered. He looked even more distraught than his wife Lisa had been: drawn and quartered, with the meaty red bags under his eyes flaming. I couldn't even picture Karen's husband Willie looking worse than Doug did now: blank stare, patches of beard stubble and razor cut scabs, mouth like a lipstick slash. His disheveled hair spilled in ratty clumps, and I saw that his hairline had begun to recede pretty badly and he'd been covering the fact with some creative styling.

"Hello, Doug."