The King of Lies (11 page)

My mind was awash, but one question had to be asked. “Does Mills know that Ezra cut Jean out of the will?” I asked.

“That question,” he replied, seeming to relax into himself, “is best presented to Detective Mills. Now go away.”

“I need to know, Clarence.” I held my hands out, palm up. “Please.”

“I’ll not interfere with her investigation. Take it up with her or leave it alone.”

“When did he cut her out? What date?”

“My obligation to you does not extend beyond that of executor and primary beneficiary to this will and the trust it establishes. Given the circumstances surrounding your father’s death and the police interest in the matter, it would be unwise, for either of us, to take this matter further. I intended no other impression. Once the will is in probate, you may contact me at any time during business hours to discuss any relevant matters. Beyond that, we have nothing to talk about.”

“What date was this will executed?” I demanded. A reasonable question, one within my rights.

“November fifteenth,” Hambly said. “Year before last.”

One week before my father disappeared.

I left, too angry to be scared. But I knew how it would play to the cops. If Jean knew that Ezra was going to cut her out of two million because of her relationship with Alex, it would be one more reason to kill him. That’s how Detective Mills would see it. Did Jean know? When did she know? When did Ezra cut her out? I could hear Mills asking those exact questions. But had she?

Damn Clarence Hambly and his petty vindictiveness!

Back in the truck, Bone scrambled into my lap and licked my face. I rubbed his back, glad for the company. I realized that for the past days, while addled by alcohol, grief, and anger, the world had moved on. Mills had not been idle; she’d targeted me. I was a suspect. The concept was too much. I couldn’t get my head around it. In the past day, I’d come to understand so many things, none of them pleasant. Now this. I had fifteen million dollars, but only if I surrendered what little remained of myself.

I sat in that driveway, under windows that looked like mirrored eyes, and dark thoughts twisted my mouth into a bitter smile as I thought of Ezra’s will and his last effort to manipulate me. My life was still a mess, but in this regard I knew something that Ezra didn’t, something that he could never imagine. Black humor moved where the fear snake had been; it bubbled like hot oil and it released me. I pictured Ezra’s face, the horror if he only knew, the utter disbelief. I didn’t want his money. The price was too high. The thought made me laugh, so that’s what I did as I drove away from Hambly House, circa 1788. I laughed like an idiot. I fucking howled.

Yet by the time I got home, the hysteria was gone and I was empty. I felt lacerated inside, as if I were full of glass; but I thought of Max Creason, who’d had his fingers broken and his nails ripped out, yet who still has the strength and humor to tell a total stranger to stop being a pussy. It helped.

I put Bone in the backyard with food, water, and a belly rub, and then I went inside. My note to Barbara was where I’d left it. I picked up the pen and added this: “Don’t be surprised to find a dog in the backyard—he’s mine. He can come inside if you want.” But I knew it wouldn’t happen; Barbara didn’t like dogs. The one I’d brought to the marriage, another yellow Lab, had never gotten to come inside. We’d been together for three years when I married Barbara; then he went from constant companion to barely tolerated nuisance, another casualty to poor choices. I vowed that that would never happen again. As I watched Bone from the kitchen window, I felt the great hollowness of the house around me, its emptiness, and I thought of my mother.

Like my father, she was raised dirt-poor, but, unlike Ezra, she’d been content in her own skin. She’d never wanted the big house, the cars, and the prestige, none of it. Ezra, however, had been ravenous, and as he
bettered
himself, he came to resent her for the constant reminder she was. Ezra had hated his past, been ashamed of it, and history had shared his bed.

This was my theory, for how else could two people rise from abject poverty, bear two children, yet end up worse than strangers?

Years of this resentment had made my mother as hollow as this house, the well into which Ezra had dumped his anger, his frustration, and his hatred. She’d taken it all, borne it, until she was a shadow, and all she had for her children was her fierce embrace and the admonition to be silent. She’d never stood up for us, not until the night she died. It was that brief strength, that incandescent flash of will that had killed her, and I’d let it happen.

The argument had been about Alex.

When I closed my eyes, I could see the ruby red carpet.

W
  e were at the top of the stairs, on the broad landing. I looked at my watch because I had to look away from Jean and from my father. She was defying him, and the explosion was building. It was four minutes after nine, dark out, and I barely recognized my sister. She was not the broken-down wreck that the psychiatric hospital had sent back to us. Not even close.

Mother stood, stunned, hand to her mouth. Ezra was shouting, Jean shouting back, jabbing a finger into his chest. It could not end well, and I stared as if at a train wreck; and I watched my mother reach out, as if she could stop the train with her ten small fingers.

And I did nothing.

“That is enough!” my father yelled. “That is how it’s going to be.”

“No,” Jean said. “Not this time. It’s my life!”

Father stepped closer, towered over her. I expected Jean to melt away, but she did not.

“It stopped being your life when you tried to kill yourself,” he said. “Then it became mine again. You’re barely out of the hospital. You can’t possibly think right about anything. We’ve been patient, we’ve been nice, but now it’s time for her to go.”

“Alex is none of your business. You have no right to ask that.”

“Let’s get one thing clear right now, young lady. I’m not asking. That woman is trouble and I’ll not have her messing up your head. She’s just using you.”

“For what? I’m not rich. I’m not famous.”

“You know what.”

“You can’t even say it, can you? For sex, Dad. Yeah. For sex. We’re fucking all the time. What’re you going to do about it?”

Father went suddenly still. “You’re an embarrassment to this family. It’s disgraceful the way you two carry on.”

“So there it is,” Jean said. “It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s all about you! It’s always been about you! Well, I’ve had it.”

Jean turned to walk away. She didn’t look at me, didn’t look at Mother; she just turned and took a single step. Then Ezra grabbed her. He jerked her so hard that she fell to her knees.

“Don’t you walk away from me! Not ever!”

Jean pulled herself to her feet and twisted her arm free. “That’s the last time you’ll ever put your hands on me,” she told him.

The moment seemed to freeze, Jean’s words hanging between them. I saw my mother’s face, pure despair, and again her eyes beseeched me. Yet the shadow of my father held me, and Mother must have sensed this.

“Ezra,” she said.

“You stay out of this,” he commanded, eyes on Jean like a promise of violence.

“Ezra,” she repeated, taking a monumental step toward him. “Just let her be. She’s grown now, and she’s right.”

“And I told you to shut it!” His eyes never left Jean, and when she tried again to turn away, he snatched her up and shook her, an angry boy with a boneless doll; but Jean had bones, and I feared they might break. “I said don’t you ever walk away from me!” Then he was grunting, incoherent, and Jean’s head was loose on her neck. I watched as my mother took hell into her hands.

“Leave her alone, Ezra.” She pulled at his massive arm. Jean had gone completely limp, but he continued to shake her. “Damn it, Ezra,” she shouted. “Leave my daughter alone!” She began to beat on his shoulders with her narrow fists, and tears shone in the seams of her face. I tried to move, to speak, but I was paralyzed. Then he struck out, a backhand that traveled forever; and then she was falling. Time seemed to stand still but didn’t; then she was crumpled at the foot of the stairs, another boneless doll in the house my father made.

Jean collapsed when my father released her. He stared at his hand and then at me.

“It was an accident, boy. You see that, don’t you, son?”

I looked into his eyes, saw for the first time that he needed me, and felt myself nod; it was an irrevocable step.

“Good boy,” he said. Then the ground fell away and I tumbled into the deep well of self-loathing.

I have yet to find its bottom.

I
f they’d found Ezra with only one bullet in his head, I’d have called it suicide. How else to deal with the truth of his actions? And yet the greatest sin can be one of omission; such was my burden, the cost of which was my mother’s life and my immortal soul. Protecting Jean was my responsibility. I knew my mother’s weakness as I knew my father’s rage. Without words, she’d begged me to intervene, pleaded as only the weak can plead. I don’t know why I didn’t act, but I fear that my soul is flawed by some tragic weakness born under my father. For it was not love for him that stayed my hand, never love. Then what? I’ve never known, and that question haunts me still. So I’ve lived with my failure, and slept with the memory of a cartwheel dance down ruby-covered stairs.

Jean was barely conscious when it happened; she never knew for certain, but she guessed, and in my eyes she saw the lie that had become Ezra’s truth. When asked, I said that Mother had slipped. She had tried to intervene in an argument and she’d slipped. It was just one of those things.

Why did I cover for my father? Because he asked me to, I guess. Because, for the first time, he needed me. Because her death
was
an accident, and because I believed him when he said that nothing good could come of the truth. Because he was my father and because I was his son. Maybe because I blamed myself. Who the hell knows?

So the police asked their questions and I spoke the horrible words; thus Ezra’s truth became my own. But the rift between Jean and me was irreparable; it grew into a chasm and she retreated into her life on the other side. I saw her at the funeral, where the last shovel of dirt went onto our relationship as much as it did onto mother’s casket. She had Alex, and for her that was enough.

By midnight on the night of my mother’s death, the police had gone. We followed the darkened ambulance because we didn’t know what else to do. At the back door of the hospital, she left us, carried by strangers into that pale, still building, taken to some cold room where the dead wait in silence. We stood in a light November rain, we three, speechless under a streetlamp and the weight of our own private thoughts. The truth of her death lay upon us, and our eyes refused to meet. But I studied my father when I could, caught the play of water down his face, the clench of muscles under whiskers that gleamed white under the light. And when the words finally came, they came from Ezra, as I knew they must. “Let’s go home,” he said, and we understood. There was nothing else to say.

At the house, the lights were on, and we sat in the living room while Ezra poured drinks. Jean refused to touch hers, but mine disappeared like magic and Ezra poured another. Jean’s hands clenched and unclenched, wrestled on her lap, and I saw bright half-moons where nails bit into her palms. She rocked minutely, wound tight, and at times I heard her keen. I reached for her, but she jerked away. I wanted to tell her that I was not Ezra, not that it would have mattered. I see that now.

No one spoke and the minutes drew out, the only sound that of ice on glass and the heavy tread of Ezra’s pacing.

We all jumped when the phone rang. Ezra answered it; he listened, hung up, and looked at us, his children. Then he left the house without a word. We were stunned, floored, and Jean left right behind him, a look on her face that I’ve never forgotten. At the door, she turned, her words like razors in my soul. “I know he killed her. And damn you for protecting him.”

It was the last time I saw Ezra alive. For ten long minutes, I stayed in that house of horrors, that house of broken dolls; then I, too, left. I drove to Jean’s, but her car was gone and no one answered when I knocked. The door was locked. I waited for an hour, but she didn’t return. I went home and, in the best voice I could manage, informed my wife of the night’s events. Then I had another drink. Eventually, I put her to bed, then sneaked out. I spent the rest of the night at Stolen Farm, weeping on Vanessa’s shoulder like a goddamn child. At dawn, I crept into bed, where I put my back to my wife and watched gray light swell from beneath the blinds. I kept myself utterly still and held on to Ezra’s truth as if for my very life. At the time, I thought it was worth something, but time can be a murderous bitch.

I
 felt pain and looked down at my hands, clenched so tightly on the kitchen sink that they were bloodless. I released them and they burned, but the pain was relative. I forced the images of that night back into the past, where I’d tried so hard to keep them. I was home. Bone was in the backyard. Ezra was dead.

I heard an engine outside and walked to the laundry-room window. A car was moving slowly up the driveway, and recognizing it, I thought of fate and of inevitability.

My life had become a Greek tragedy, but I’d done what I thought I had to do—to keep the family whole, to save what was left. I could not have known that Ezra would be killed, that Jean would despise me; but there is an undeniable sharpness to fact. Mother was dead. So was Ezra. Nothing would change that, not my own guilt, not a lifetime of pain. Done is done, end of fucking story. So I asked myself, as I had so many times, What price redemption, and where to find it?