One of Us (18 page)

None of us have anything to say after that. We stand in the cold and
snow without speaking at all for a length of time that would be impossible among any of the people I know back in the city.

Dave reaches down and picks up his shovel.

“One more thing that’s always kind of bugged me about that night. It’s probably nothing, but I was one of the last guys out, since I was the youngest and I got all the crap work. I was lugging out some equipment when Mrs. Dawes caught hold of my arm and said, almost begging, ‘Can you help me?’ I thought she was talking about cleaning up the fire damage, and I told her we didn’t do that. They’d have to call a private contractor.”

“Sometimes I wonder though,” he says while his eyes travel along the chimneys across the street, pausing for a moment at each plume of smoke. “I wonder if that’s what she was talking about.”

seventeen

M
Y MOTHER HAD TO
have killed her baby because there was no one else who could have done it. Anna Greger had to have killed herself because there was no other way it could have happened. Neither of these scenarios were ever actually proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The explanation given for each event came from the necessity for an explanation and the inability of anyone to come up with a better one.

Now the case of Marcella Greger’s murder looks as if it’s heading down a similar path. Two theories are currently circulating: a random psycho broke into her house and killed her even though there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle and nothing was stolen and it would be highly unusual for a psycho to have the proclivity or take the time to carefully draw a picture of a stick figure hanging from a gallows on the bathroom wall in blood. Or the ghost of Prosperity McNab did it. In my opinion, the chance of either proving to be true is about the same.

My suggestion to Rafe that Scarlet Dawes could be involved is too outlandish. It’s as inconceivable as the thought that someone other than Anna Greger lit herself on fire or that someone other than my mentally ill mother would have had a reason or opportunity to kill her infant and bury her in our backyard.

But what if the explanation for all three of these tragedies happening in this tiny town is an unthinkable one? Does that mean it must be otherworldly?

My mind drifts back to my case files sitting in Tommy’s living room and the crime scene photos of Baby Trusty.

Or could the answer be a monster did it?

MY FATHER’S HOUSE SQUATS
on a muddy slope at the very edge of the street at the end of its row as if unwanted and gradually shunned there over time, almost hidden now by vines and rogue shrubberies and a sprawling rhododendron on one side that’s grown as high as the roof. Although practically opaque with dirt, the windows aren’t broken and suggest someone is living here, however it’s obvious no one ever looks out of or into these bleary panes of glass. They’re the eyes of a beast staring slyly and stupidly at the outside world, concealing secrets and plotting destruction.

I’m convinced this structure has a memory, and when my father dies, I’m going to have it torn down. It’s the only merciful thing to do.

I get out of my car and start up the front walk toward the porch. My tsunami guilt rises up before me, a gigantic shimmering wall poised to crush me. It’s grown bigger in the last several hours.

“Where’s Molly? Where’s my baby? I can’t find my baby!” my mom shrieked at the top of her lungs while being hauled off in handcuffs.

Those were her words. Even after my dad found the body and called the police. Even after they explained to her that her baby was dead.

“Where’s Molly?” she kept screaming.

She’s crazy, everyone said. Only a crazy woman could look at her own dead baby and ask where she is. I agreed. My mom was crazy. I abandoned her. I didn’t stand up for her.

But Tommy did. Tommy never wavered in his insistence that Mom was incapable of killing anyone, least of all her own child. And who would know better? Mom was his child. He’d been dealing with her problems for twenty-five years. I’d only been in her life for five, and she’d been taking care of me.

The guilt crashes down all around me. I stand perfectly still on the bottom porch step and wait for it to do its damage then ebb before confronting my father.

I continue making my way up the steps. No matter how many years I stay away, I can never approach the front door of this house without my heart racing and muscles tensing. In my head, I’m already running.

I’m about to knock when the door opens and my dad is standing in the shadows, his silver beer can and the white globe of his belly in an undershirt the only parts of him fully visible.

The surprise makes me take a step back and I’m certain he’s been watching me from inside along with the house, the two of them muttering to each other about what a useless, chickenshit of a boy I am.

“You finally decided to come see me,” he says. “I heard you was in town taking care of Tommy. What a wasted trip. Someone that old you just let ’em die.”

He takes another step toward me and comes farther into the daylight.

My eyes drop instinctively to his feet. He’s wearing slippers with tears in them where the padding shows through. He can’t do much damage with those.

“You know there are tribes in Africa who take their old people and stick ’em up in a tree with a basket of fruit when they get a certain age and just leave ’em there ’cause they can’t keep up anymore. Someone should’ve stuck Tommy up a tree a long time ago,” he goes on.

He’s become an old man himself, his drinking having aged him well beyond his actual years. The skin on his face is sallow, spotted with broken capillaries like someone has dipped a finger into a pool of blood and flicked it at him. Deputy Dawg bags hang beneath his foggy eyes. I wonder how much of his stomach’s girth is the result of his diet and how much is caused by the bloat that accompanies the beginnings of liver failure.

I feel him studying me.

“Takes a lot to get you out of that ivory tower of yours.”

“I don’t live in an ivory tower.” I’m able to find my voice. “‘Ivory tower’ is a reference to academia.”

“Jesus. Still can’t say a goddamn word around you without you correcting it. So what color is your tower? Green ’cause it’s covered in money?”

I swallow back the burning in my throat.

“I don’t have a tower.”

He takes a gulp from his beer and lowers his gaze to my feet. He stares at my shoes. To him they represent Management.

“How much you pay for those?”

“Not much.”

My dad openly, almost happily, resents my success. When I was younger, he took my aspirations as personal insults. He thought the only reason I got good grades was to try and make him feel stupid, the only reason I wanted to go to college was because I thought I was better than him.

If he believed in evolution I’m sure he’d probably be convinced the only motivation Man had for learning to walk upright was so he could rub the monkeys’ faces in it. But he’s a creationist. He believes he was made in God’s image.

“You here for a reason?”

“I wanted to talk to you about something. How are you doing?”

“I’m doing great as you can see.”

Despite the outward appearance of his home and his person, I’m sure he is doing great because he’s doing exactly what he wants to do: nothing with a beer chaser.

He hasn’t worked in almost forty years but has somehow still been able to constantly upgrade his TVs, trucks, and power tools, the only things he cares about, and he was doing this even before I started sending him money.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

I wait for him to ask about me, knowing he won’t.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” he says.

Crazy or not, I tell myself, a mother knows her own child.

“I really need to ask you something.”

“How many years it been since I seen you and you suddenly need to ask me something? In person? Face to face?”

“Yes.”

“Well?” he says.

“Was the dead baby Molly?” I’m able to push out.

“What? What’d you just say to me?”

I think he’s going to hit me and I have to fight the urge to bolt. I clench my trembling fists and stick them into my coat pockets so he can’t see them.

“Mom said it wasn’t Molly but no one believed her. I have to know the truth. I don’t care if you didn’t stick up for her at the time.”

“You listen here, boy. Your mother’s fucking loony tunes. She killed her own baby and of course she’s gonna lie about it.”

“Dad . . .” I choke out the painful syllable.

I’ve always wanted to be able to say that word and have it mean something other than “Stop!”

“If that baby wasn’t Molly, who the hell was it? Huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if that baby wasn’t Molly, where’s Molly? Huh?”

These were the same questions Rafe and I were asking earlier, but we were seriously trying to come up with answers. Why would Dad ask them? How would they even occur to him unless he’s already asked them of himself?

“You should go,” he says.

He takes a final gulp of beer and holds out the empty can to me.

“Pitch that for me.”

I walk back to the street, holding the can in one hand, waiting to hear his door slam before laying my cheek against the roof of my car the way the teachers used to make me put my head down on my desk in shame when I finished my tests before everyone else.

eighteen

SCARLET

M
Y FRIEND COURTNEY HAD
a pair of red shoes, too, but they were hideous, nothing like the ones that belonged to the yellow-haired girl I watched clip-clop across the Lost Creek elementary school gym. Technically, Courtney’s weren’t even shoes. They were ankle boots, flat and scrunched, the same color as a clown’s nose. She tucked her jeans into them and wore them with one of her many drab oversize sweaters. Their boldness was completely out of character for her, and I often wondered what possessed her to buy them.

Courtney had her share of problems. She was an asthmatic bulimic who was addicted to pain medication, plagued with phobias, and had been discarded by her parents because they found her multiple suicide attempts to be inconvenient, especially the one that occurred during her father’s bid for a senate seat.

I went to school with other girls who had even lengthier résumés of woe and ill-treatment, castoffs from wealthy families who didn’t want to deal with them and their so-called problems: addicts, anorexics, suicides, manic-depressives, sluts, and kleptos. Bonsai Girls I called them after the mutant miniaturized trees everyone admires and wants to have but no one can keep alive except a trained expert. These girls were freaks of nature, too, their psyches stunted and deformed just like those tiny tree limbs.

Of all the Bonsai Girls, Courtney was the most rarified, the most
delicate, the one requiring the most attention and skill to keep alive, the one whose loveliness and fragility and ability to exist in a world dominated by the large and loud impressed even the most callous soul.

I liked her well enough. She was no threat to me. My family had more money. I was prettier, smarter, and had a far superior wardrobe. I was better than her in every way I wanted to be. The only area where she excelled and I didn’t was in getting people to love her. This didn’t bother me because I’ve never had any desire to be loved. I prefer being feared. It gets the same results but without any hugging.

I never gave Courtney much thought until the arrival of Jacqueline, a newly transplanted fabulously discontented French Bonsai who had a penchant for stealing both things and people. Her parents chose to discard her after one too many expensive objets d’art disappeared from their home and she slept with both her mother’s lover and her father’s mistress.

We hit it off immediately, spending countless hours together blowing smoke rings and discussing how pointless everyone’s existence was compared to ours. Despite her brooding Gallic ennui, she had a surprising sentimental streak. The first time I told her this, she blushed as adorably as Heather the Holiday Inn waitress.

Jacqueline had only one flaw I could discover: she was hopelessly smitten with the tragic, sweet, and wheezy Courtney. This didn’t concern me at first, but eventually she started spending too much time with her, and when they weren’t together, she talked about her endlessly.

The solution to this annoying state of affairs came to me during English class. Along with assigning us the usual literary crap penned by frigid nineteenth-century British females deemed appropriate for American girls of a certain age, we had a teacher who also tried to engage us in what she called “thought exercises.” She presented us with moral dilemmas we might encounter in the real world and we had to write a short essay explaining what we would do and why.

One day the question was what happens if you fall in love with your best friend’s boyfriend?

It wasn’t much of a thought exercise in my opinion. There were only two answers: forget about the boy and stay true to your friend, or
screw over your friend and go after the boy. In one scenario you’re a drip, in the other you’re a skank. I’m not either.

I wrote I would kill my friend, and when her boyfriend came to her funeral I would win his love by consoling him. This would be a win-win situation. I’d get the guy without betraying my gal pal.

The teacher refused to even grade my essay and I was sent to the school shrink, which was no big deal since we all saw him once a week anyway. More important, it gave me an idea for a way to get Jacqueline back.

Courtney had mentioned to me that she was allergic to penicillin when she saw me taking it when I had strep. She told me how it made her break out in these disgusting hives and how it made her trachea swell shut. I was skeptical. My brother, Wes, was allergic to cats, but all that happened to him was a runny nose and itchy eyes.

The infirmary always kept a small supply of the drug. It was easy enough to steal and easy enough to dissolve into a can of Dr Pepper that I brought to her one afternoon when she was studying alone in her room while her roommate was somewhere else.

I stayed and watched just to make sure everything went well. It turned out she was right: she really was allergic. From the way her eyes bulged and she clawed at her throat I could tell she was suffocating, and the hives were beyond disgusting; they covered her entire body like a film of scalded milk.

“I’m doing you a favor,” I explained to her, and I think she understood what I meant.

She had tried to kill herself many times and failed; I took care of it for her. One more thing I was better at than she was.

However, my plan didn’t work. Jacqueline was so devastated by what happened to Courtney that she had a nervous breakdown and dropped out of school. It was for the best. She was starting to bother me.

I’ve been thinking about Courtney because I’ve been thinking about the yellow-haired girl. I’d like to track her down and find out what happened to her, maybe drop in and pay her a visit and see if she still has those shoes.

I told Gwen I’m not leaving until I find out the truth behind Anna’s
letter and that involves finding a person, too, but I know I don’t have the patience to mount a search on my own. I don’t want to hire someone. I don’t know what I’ll find and I might not want to share the information with anyone, including a private investigator.

I did conduct a little Internet search on Danny Doyle, though. I should have known from the suit but I was still surprised to discover the extent of his success and fame. For a psychologist, that is.

Walker wouldn’t tell me why Danny was here the other day, but I assume from the questions he asked me that the visit might have had something to do with Marcella Greger, although I don’t know why he’d have any interest in that. I’m intrigued by him. I like go-getters. I can’t stand the whiners who comprise most of the human race. “Boo hoo! My life sucks. Life isn’t fair. Wah wah!”

That’s why I’ve always secretly approved of the Nellies. They failed miserably, but at least they tried to get what they wanted. Anna used to fill my head with tales of their bravery and sacrifice. I knew her stories were biased and I couldn’t believe everything she told me, but most of it sounded plausible.

She was related to one of the executed Nellies, a boy named Peter Tully. He was the only child of a widow who adored him, and she was so devastated by his untimely death that she died of a broken heart a month later. That’s the nice version. Anna said she took some kind of poison and it was an agonizing death. Probably a lot like Courtney’s.

Anna loved to tell me this particular story and I always suspected the reason behind it was because she liked rubbing in the fact that my own mother didn’t love me at all. She could barely stand to be in the same room with me. If I were to die, she’d go on living just fine.

I thought I had resolved all my feelings of abandonment and betrayal by Anna a long time ago, but this note her cousin discovered has reopened all those scabbed-over wounds. I don’t understand why she didn’t tell me herself.

The only explanation I can come up with is that she was waiting until I got older. Maybe if she hadn’t had her accident, she would’ve told me.

Everyone else called it a suicide. I called it an accident because I
knew she didn’t have any idea how upset I was going to be when she told me she was getting back together with her old boyfriend, the scum who got another woman pregnant and married her instead of Anna. They were running off together into the sunset and she was going to leave me behind with Gwen. Even this wasn’t the part that bothered me the most. I couldn’t get past the idea that she never stopped loving this jerk and was willing to forgive him. It really bothered me.

I guess it was a suicide and an accident. She accidentally caused her own death by disappointing me.

Walker and Gwen are having breakfast in the east-wing sunroom. Untouched silvery snow reaches over the grounds before blending into the lavender-shadowed hills. The sun is shining and the icy glare makes it almost impossible to look outside for too long.

I could live here someday. Not full time, obviously, but this place does have its charms. I know Wes won’t fight me for the house. He hates it. He thinks it’s haunted. And Gwen has no power anymore. I’d just have to get Walker out of the picture.

I walk over to the table and give Walker a kiss on the cheek. He’s reading a newspaper and an iPad and doesn’t look up at me but smiles and squeezes my hand I’ve laid on his shoulder.

I don’t kiss Gwen. Instead, I toss a day-old newspaper onto the table in front of her. I know she must have already seen it but I can’t help myself.

“Look at that,” I say. “Someone killed her.”

Gwen’s already poor color pales even further as she glances down at the front-page story about Marcella Greger. She reaches for her Bloody Mary.

“Isn’t this cozy? One big happy family. Except for Wes, of course,” I comment as I take a seat. “By the way, I think I’m going to visit him and the wifey and the girls in New York.”

“That’s a good idea, Button,” Walker says.

“When?” Gwen asks, a note of panic in her voice.

“Not for a few days. I have some business to take care of first.”

Clarence brings me a cup of coffee. I point to Gwen’s drink and tell him I’ll have one of those, too.

“So, Daddy,” I say brightly and give Gwen a wink, “what do you think about what’s going on around here? Did you hear about Marcella Greger’s murder? She was Anna’s cousin.”

“I did hear. Terrible. The local consensus seems to be there’s a random crazed killer roaming the countryside, since the woman didn’t seem to have any enemies.”

“So you don’t think the Nellies have risen from the dead?”

He puts down his paper and smiles at me.

“Wouldn’t this be the first place they’d come?”

We both laugh. Gwen downs half her drink.

“But how do you explain the gallows painted on her bathroom wall in blood? That doesn’t sound like a random psycho. And what about Simon Husk?”

“Please, Scarlet. You sound like one of those NON people,” Walker says.

Clarence brings me my Bloody Mary along with a bottle of Tabasco. He remembered I like things spicy.

“I guess it all depends on how you look at it,” I respond. “Some people want them to remain standing forever as a reminder. Others want them torn down because they are a reminder. They consider them to be a black eye not only for the state but for the entire country.”

“Let me tell you something about our country,” Walker begins to pontificate, leaning back in his chair. “Not so very long ago my great-grandfather had ten men executed with hardly any evidence against them. The whole region, the whole state, the whole country rallied behind him and applauded his efforts to get rid of the riffraff that wanted to undermine capitalism with their unions. No one stood up for them. No one supported them and their struggle to try and provide safer working conditions and a fair wage for the common man or if they did, they kept it to themselves out of selfishness and fear.

“An individual’s power put up those gallows and collective shame has kept them up. Nothing is more American than that.”

He rises from his chair and I wonder if he’s expecting us to applaud.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies. I have some work to do.”

Gwen stands, too, and watches her husband leave the room. She
looks uncertainly back and forth from me to the door like she’s trying to decide if she should make a break for it.

“Are you going to kill me, too?” she asks, trying to keep her voice from quavering.

I take the cap off the hot sauce and start shaking it into my drink.

“Kill you, too? Are you accusing me of being a killer, Gwen? What a drama queen you’ve become lately. Would you like me to kill you?”

She begins to speak and a sob catches in her throat. She swallows it and composes herself.

“Please stay away from my son.”

I finish stirring my drink with a piece of celery then take a loud, crunching bite out of it.

“I have no interest in your son, lady. He’s nobody to me.”

I TRY TO HANG
out at the house but everything reminds me of Anna. Not long after she died I was sent away to a boarding school. Prior to that I went to a private school, but it was close enough that I could still come home on weekends. I’ve never spent any substantial time in this house when she wasn’t here.

Anna and I didn’t have the smoothest relationship. We fought a lot, but only because we were both strong-willed and wanted our own way. When we agreed on something, all was well. When we didn’t, things could get a little tense, but I respected the fact that she was the only person who ever stood up to me. She said it was for my own good. She was trying to provide the guidance and discipline a child needed from her mother that I didn’t get from mine. I wasn’t always receptive to the idea, but I knew she always had my back. She was the one person I could depend on.