Distant Blood (21 page)

I am usually a resourceful man, but my limbs and mind felt numb. I didn't want to sit through Gretchen's drunk. I wanted to bellow at Gretchen, but I kept my mouth shut. I sat next to her on the bed, watching the gentle flutter of flesh beneath her eyelids. Slowly those eyes opened and fixed upon my face.

“I don't understand how it happened,” she whispered, her voice barely louder than a sigh. “I didn't want to drink anything. I didn't. Never again.”

“What upset you?” She didn't answer me. Perhaps Lolly's death had nudged Gretchen back toward the demon rum. Seeing her die in front of all of us had been one of the most unnerving experiences of my life. I couldn't blame Gretchen for wanting to dull her own pain, but I felt disappointed in her.

“Gretchen, you don't need booze. We'll go over to the mainland tonight, find an AA meeting in Port O'Connor. You need to talk to folks about why you drank.” At least I assumed she did. What I knew about AA was gleaned entirely from television. I had done little to participate in Gretchen's sobriety other than offering unobtrusive support. I knew, with a keen and sudden tightness, I could have done more.

“Not AA. Not right now. Later.” She put her hand on the cool wetness of the cloth. “I don't understand. All I drank today was a little coffee and then a couple of Dr Peppers. Then—all of a sudden—I felt funny, craved a hit of wine. Couldn't—couldn't help it, Jordy! I couldn't help it!” She began to sob, a deep crying like she'd lost a part of herself that could never be regained.

I surprised the hell out of myself by taking her hand. She clasped my fingers hard. I bent over, whispering, “It'll be okay. It'll be okay.”

“No, no, it won't. He'll leave me. Bob Don said he couldn't take me drinking, he'd leave me if I fell off the wagon.” Dread widened her eyes. “Oh, God damn me for drinking!”

I squeezed her hand and said, “God won't desert you. Neither will Bob Don, or any of us.”

“Why”—she swallowed—”must you be so like him? Why? I can't give him a baby, I never could.” Her words slurred together like voices raised in distant hue and cry. Her drawl slowed and deepened; she almost sounded like a man.

“I'm sorry, Gretchen.”

“Oh, Jesus, don't be. I wanted his baby to grow inside me. Never could. Not meant to be, my mama said. She said God knew I'd make a lousy mother. God doesn't give babies to drunks.” Her eyes stared past my shoulder, riveted to the arabesque swirls on the ceiling. “Now Bob Don's got you, he's got his child. I don't got nothing.”

“You have your husband, Gretchen.”

“He'll leave me—” she sobbed, then hiccuped loudly. She covered her mouth with her fingertips and belched softly, a tear running down her cheek. Fear made her body as rigid as a board.

“He won't leave you. I won't let him,” I soothed. “Now, how much did you drink?”

She swallowed. “One whole bottle, and part of another. I snuck it out of the bar. I drank it up here. It made my mouth all cold, so I wanted to get warm. I decided I wouldn't— couldn't stay in the house. So I wanted to go to the beach, on the other side of the island. I could drink down there, yes I could. Maybe take a swim. A long swim …” She closed her eyes again, her breathing labored, her words mumbled. “I used to swim down there, when I was younger. Tom told me the sand's still soft. I used to swim there with Paul. We'd watch the egrets fly. We'd laugh at them clowning around in the shallows, scaring up fish.”

Her memories seemed as delicate as old lace. “Who's Paul?”

Her eyes were distant. “I thought I saw him again last night.”

“Who? Paul? Who is he?”

She shook her head.

I held her hand and didn't know what else to do. “And you don't know why you drank?”

“I was drunk before I knew it,” she muttered, absently rubbing her eyebrows. “I'm sorry I hit you this morning. I lost my temper. Stupid of me.”

I released her hand and walked over to the vanity, where a glass of Dr Pepper sat in its puddle of condensation. Some soda, its color lightened by melting ice cubes, remained in the bottom. I sniffed at the glass. Nothing. I sipped cautiously, rolling the liquid in my mouth. I went and spat the mixture in the sink just as Bob Don came in, followed by Candace and Aunt Sass.

Sass took one look at Gretchen. “Oh, dear. Drunk again.” She said it without malice, but also without pity. Pain stiffened Bob Don's face. Gretchen turned her face away into the comfort of her pillow, her shoulders hunched.

“Not exactly,” I said softly. “Her soda's been laced with Everclear. Someone set Gretchen up to drink.”

Bob Don convened an unlikely war council in Aunt Sass's room. Gretchen was napping off the wine, calmed and reassured by Bob Don that he wasn't bailing out of their marriage. Sass, Candace, Bob Don, and I sat on Sass's unmade bed. I kept a fair distance from Sass. I don't believe either of us had forgotten the harsh volley we'd exchanged after breakfast.

The room, even being one Sass occupied only as a guest, already bore her indelible imprint. Clothes lay haphazardly on the floor and across furniture, dropped where she'd shed them. Earrings lay in scattered profusion across a side table, and a forest of cosmetics bottles sprouted before a mirrored vanity.

“I hate to say it, Bob Don,” Sass began, after a hesitant glance toward Candace and me, “but she could have spiked her own drink and just claimed that she didn't mean to get drunk.”

He nodded. “But I don't believe she'd lie.”

“Alcoholics fib if they want to drink, hon. Remember that second husband of mine.” She glanced again with discom-
fort toward me. “Aubrey's daddy was a heavy drinker. Very heavy. I know how hard it's been for Bob Don.”

I said nothing. Her own imbibing last night had been of epic proportions. And I was no more comfortable with seeing Aunt Sass's pain than she was showing it to me. “I think her soda was laced. She was too miserable at the thought of Bob Don finding out she'd drunk.” I tugged at the corner of the comforter. The room felt stifling hot, despite the gentle circling of the ceiling fan overhead. The air smelled of Aunt Sass's perfume—sweet and slightly smoky, like a singed rose.

“So we're left with the idea that someone spiked her drink,” Candace said. “Why would someone want to get Gretchen drunk?”

“To hurt her,” Aunt Sass answered immediately. “If she's worked so hard to stay sober, like Bob Don says, nothing would hurt her more than to tank her up.” She reached for her brother's hand. “Honey. I'm so sorry. I feel so bad for her.”

I couldn't forget the slightly sneering tone that Aunt Sass had used yesterday when Gretchen announced her new sobriety. Perhaps I misinterpreted. Or perhaps Sass was just sporting her kindest face for the sorrowful moment.

“But why?” Candace persisted. “Who'd want her off the wagon?”

“Maybe there's no motive but meanness.” I stood and went to survey the beautiful bay from the window. The ocean offered no sign of a returning Uncle Mutt. I wanted time to speed up so we could leave this island. Lolly's corpse had been removed, but a pervading sense of death still itched at my skin, like a tendril of smoke.

“I don't understand, son,” Bob Don said to my back. I faced him.

“Meanness,” I repeated. “There's more tension in this family than kindness. Someone could have tampered with Gretchen's drink just out of sheer cussedness.” I” avoided casting accusing eyes toward Sass.

“Granted, getting Gretchen inebriated would hurt her,” Sass countered, “but I don't see anyone here wanting to
inflict that pain. I don't want to pick another fight with you, Jordan, but I've lived with a drunkard myself. I hate to play devil's advocate, but it's much more likely that Gretchen poured out that booze than any mysterious gloved hand with an ulterior motive.”

“You're right,” I said, and she blinked. “I would agree with you. Normally. But I've seen how hard Gretchen's fought for her sobriety, and I don't believe she'd toss it away on a whim. Either something upset her so badly she drank, and she doesn't want to tell us, or someone spiked her Dr Pepper.”

“Uncle Mutt terminally ill, Lolly dead, now this.” Bob Don shook his head. “Bad, bad days for this family.”

I, unknowing, proceeded to make them worse.

“Who's Paul?” I asked. Bob Don studied the brightly stitched rug on the floor. Aunt Sass conducted a careful examination of her flawless fingernails.

“Am I talking to myself here? Gretchen mentioned someone named Paul, thought she saw him last night.”

“Then she was drunk last night, too,” Sass said in a colorless tone. “Paul was our younger brother. He's dead. He was Deborah's daddy.”

“Oh.” The alleged murderer and suicide. “Were he and Gretchen close?”

Bob Don stood and walked out of the room. I felt a familiar pang that suggested I was tasting my own shoe leather.

“Yes, Jordan, they were. Once,” Sass answered, watching the doorway where her brother had retreated. “Paul was Gretchen's first husband.”

Bob Don had withdrawn to his own room to care for his wife. Candace claimed a headache. And I didn't feel like lingering in Sass's domain any longer than necessary. I took to the porch with a tall glass of Dr Pepper, ice, and a lime slice.

The stalwart Deputy Praisner no longer stood sentry there. Instead, I saw a bored-looking young female deputy
tossing pebbles off the dock. The sunlight glittered against the gun in her holster.

I sipped at my drink and considered the latest anthill I'd kicked over.

Odd, the minutiae you unearth around the roots of the family tree. I'd never known that Gretchen was previously married, much less to Bob Don's own brother. The Goertz family Christmas must've been extra festive the year that Bob Don and Gretchen exchanged vows. Marrying your sister-in-law—the surest way to drive two brothers apart.

I sucked on my lime, dumped its scraggly crescent back into the ice, and poured the rest of my soda over it. The sun felt warm on my face and the breeze was cool and fresh. I was at the coast—I should have been happy and relaxed. Instead I felt the pulsing rhythm of a nascent headache and a homesickness for my dull, plain family. No announcements of terminal illnesses at the dinner table, no gasping deaths on the dining-room floor, no drunken stepmothers sobbing out their sobriety. Only the gentle nagging of my sister about my latest misadventure, the repeated requests of my nephew to go horseback riding, the silent perambulations of my fading mother around the furniture at our new house, where she always seemed bound on some dear and secret journey. The Poteets were downright dull compared with the Goertzes. I preferred dull.

“You stare out at the ocean any longer, you'll go mad,” a voice observed. My cousin Deborah leaned against the white wood of the porch and smiled thinly at me.

“Madness fits here.” I spoke without thinking, hoping I hadn't offended her. She simply shrugged.

“Aunt Lolly.” She sighed. “I can't quite believe that she's gone. I keep expecting her to round that corner, chirping at Sweetie to come cuddle in her lap. Or hollering at me for some imagined crime.” Deborah stared out at the ocean, watching the great, mothering waves sliding across the sands.

I said nothing, enjoying the companionable silence and the whoosh of wind and water. I waited for her to talk; I guessed she wanted to voice her burdens. Her fingers
drummed a regular beat against the wooden rail of the porch, a metronome for her nerves.

“I don't want you to get the wrong idea about Lolly and me.” Deborah kept her gaze firmly on the expanse of water.

“I take it y'all didn't get along.”

She hung her head over the porch railing. “Oh, it's so complicated.”

“Hey, I'm the illegitimate kid. I'm the personification of complicated.”

It garnered a tense laugh from her. “You know Lolly took me in when my mother died.” She made no reference to her father.

“Yes.”

“Well”—Deborah ran a hand through her thick, dark hair and seemed to cast about for the right words—”that wasn't my decision. Had I my druthers, I'd have gone to live with Uncle Mutt. I've adored him since I was little. But he didn't want a child underfoot then; he was the fast and easy bachelor. So Uncle Mutt, in his grand role as patriarch, dispatched me to live with Aunt Lolly. It was kind of an arranged marriage, y'know? Neither of us were very thrilled.”

I thought about how badly Gretchen wanted a child. “Bob Don and Gretchen didn't offer to take you in?”

“No. Aunt Gretchen was … still drinking.” Deborah shook her head. “She wouldn't have wanted kids anyway.”

The child of her ex-husband.
I could understand why. Gretchen, Bob Don, his brother Paul—untangling that web would take time if I relied on Gretchen and Bob Don to speak up.

“Why was Lolly not a good match for you?”

“Because family propriety matters so to Lolly—perhaps more than it should.” She still referred to her aunt in present tense and I wasn't heartless enough to correct her. “Brian and I weren't anything more than stains on the Goertz name to her.”

“Brian?” I asked.

Her jaw worked for a moment, reining in strong emotion. “My brother. My little brother. He's dead, too.”

“Oh, Deborah, I'm so sorry.”

Her eyes filmed with tears, but she quickly blinked them away. “You'd have liked him real well, Jordan.”

“I'm so sorry,” I repeated. I make for a lousy comforter.

“Don't listen to the lies they tell,” she stormed with sudden fury. “Because they
do
lie.”

“Who's they?”

“This whole goddamned family.” Anger reddened her face and she grasped my hand, her trimmed nails digging furrows in my skin. “They'll tell you my dad murdered my mother and then went off and killed himself. But he didn't.
He didn't.”

I took both her hands in mine. Her skin quivered against my touch. I saw now she was too mad to cry. Fury contorted her face into a vengeful grimace.

“Do you want to tell me what happened? What's the truth?”

She didn't look at me; she stared back out at the lapping bay as she talked. “My mother—when I was just six, and Brian was only two—was found shot to death. In my father's studio. Her face had been blown off.” She stifled a shudder. “My father went missing. Later we—I mean Uncle Mutt—found a note that my father had left. He said he'd shot my mother, then snuck out here to Sangre Island and walked into the ocean. He said he was sorry for what he'd done and couldn't live with himself anymore.”