Authors: Jeff Abbott
I MUST'VE DOZED OFF. WHEN TOLD YOUR
father killed his brother, sleep is a natural escape. While I juggled theories and ideas as to who had murdered Lolly, I kept seeing Bob Don's face hovering above my own, his kind eyes, his gentle smile, his hearty laugh that made you know you were as welcome as could be. I could not see him pressing a trigger, killing his own brother. Even in self-defense.
Was Gretchen lying?
I didn't believe so. But I didn't want to swallow her entire story. My eyes felt heavy and I shut them, for just a moment.
Paws pressed against my heart and I awoke with a start. Sweetie stood on my chest, his tongue lolling out of his mouth with exertion. He stared down at me with enormous and forlorn eyes. Also at loose ends, I knew how he felt.
I sat up, scooping the little dog into my arms, and stood to stare out the window. No more rain fell, but the sky was mottled with dark clouds, like a snake's skin; the next wave of bad weather wasn't far off. The Coast Guard boat bobbed in the waves; Mendez and Yarbrough still blessed us with their company. I am not a superstitious man, but I wondered why this little Texas island served as a nexus for disaster: the shattered
Reliant
and its valiant men entombed beneath the waves, the massacred boys on the beach, the collection of graves amassed in the cemetery, the lonely marker of little Brian Riley Goertz.
TOO BRIEF A TIME
, his inscription had read. I wondered if the same tragic air that haunted this
island had warped this family somehow, some cold hand reaching beyond its grave to shape human life.
I shook my head and Sweetie wriggled in my arms. I chided myself for this sudden gothic veer in my thinking. Reality was an old warm dog against your skin, writhing to be petted. Attributing bad conduct and human sadness to the island air seemed ludicrous. This was not Shirley Jackson's Hill House. Nothing walked here alone. My sour temperament was my own fault, not that of arcane foulness seeping through the rooms. Holding Sweetie, I went and closed my door.
What brushed your eyelids this afternoon as you slept?
I sat on the bed and set Sweetie on the covers. He chased his tail in a quick, single circle as if assuring himself he was the only pup present, then curled up into a crescent of fur and watched me with his huge peasant's eyes. I scratched the top of his head and his ears lay low with pleasure. I felt a surge of affection for this little dog, not without some surprise. I wondered if Sweetie sat watching his mistress while she composed her missives of hate to me.
Life is odd, I thought. Usually I warred with Gretchen and got along peaceably with Bob Don. Now the situation was reversed and I felt an uneasy soldier. And the battle might be brief. Bob Don sounded ready to proceed in life without the travails of trying to forge a relationship with me. And just how was I supposed to protect him from his own past? The task seemed impossible. And how was he going to react to Gretchen confiding in me? He might well—
The ceiling creaked above me.
I sat very still on the bed. Old houses cry out in the struggle against time, and this one, weathered by sea and wind and rain, was no exception. But that noise had sounded like the distinct pang of weight against old wood.
Another faint scream of a trodden-upon board, then another.
Why on earth was anyone tiptoeing around the attic?
I stood. Sweetie suddenly bolted upright, flung himself off the bed, and scrabbled at the door like the room was ablaze. I inched the door open and he shot out like a jag of
lightning. His claws skittered on the hardwood floor of the hallway and he bounded down the staircase.
I eased the door shut quietly. A long minute passed, then another soft footfall from above—away from the wall that held my window, moving toward my closet.
I tiptoed—after all, if I could hear them, they might hear me—to the closet door and carefully opened it. The door swung open on silent hinges. I fumbled for the light cord. Another creak sounded.
A trapdoor occupied a back corner of the big closet. I'd noticed it when I unpacked, in the same abstract way one notices the particular shade of color the walls are painted. I reached toward the trapdoor, wondering if I could feel the weight of another person on the opposite side of the wood. I didn't touch the door, though—I suddenly felt the sharp gnaw of fear. And remembered the ghostly tickle I'd felt against my skin, and the kitchen door that had swung open with no one near.
Idiot. No such thing. Ghosts don't exist, and if they did, they wouldn't make boards creak.
Minutes crawled by like hours. I heard someone walk down the hallway, Sass's voice out in the garden calling for Aubrey, a voice raised downstairs in anger that I suspected was Philip's. The sea wind played against my window in capricious gusts. Rain began again, whipping against the window, the striking drops sounding like a child's fingers thumping against the glass.
The attic held its silence.
I tarried another ten minutes, then opened the trapdoor. Disuse made the hinges shriek, and I cringed, waiting to see a face appear in the black doorway. Dust motes danced around my face and I sneezed. No response issued from the darkness, so I unfolded the wooden steps attached to the door and clambered into the attic.
The house was old, but the attic seemed decades older. The air tasted ancient, tinged with time and dust. I realized, with some disappointment, that I didn't have a flashlight to guide my way.
I retreated to my room. I could still hear Aunt Sass braying for Aubrey, like she might holler for a wayward
dog. I wondered if maybe Tom had gotten ahold of Aubrey and was busy resolving their unfinished business by beating Aubrey to a pulp.
Or maybe Aubrey had been sneaking around the attic while his mama called for him out in the garden. I watched Aunt Sass from the window, huddled underneath her umbrella. No Aubrey materialized. Aunt Sass'd catch cold if she didn't get out of the storm.
A quick exploration of my room revealed no flashlight, but I did find a candle and matches. I'd hoped as much, since the frequent storms along the coast could result in power outages. I had no idea if the island had its own generator.
I ascended back into the attic, feeling a tad like a male Jane Eyre, wondering if a raving former wife of Uncle Mutt's awaited me in the darkness. Ridiculous. I'd let a goofy, scared dog and my own overactive imagination propel me away from logic. I am always reasonable and I refused to let myself be girded by the most inane doubts and fears.
Why be afraid of a dark attic? You just found out your father killed his crazy brother. And that this whole clan covered it up for years. You should be more afraid of this family. What'll they do to you if they learn you know about their little conspiracy?
Darkness cloaked me. My candle provided meager illumination. The attic was long, running the length of most of the house. I wondered if each and every room offered access to the garret the way my closet did—surely not. But folks made odd architectural decisions in olden days. I decided it might be worthwhile to identify every point of ingress the attic offered.
Forgotten homes of spiders dangled from the rafters, the errant dust the only prey caught in their clutches. The air smelled of the sea. I began moving toward the south side of the house, away from my room.
Boxes and trunks dotted the walls, arranged haphazardly wherever they were deposited. The grime of long memories coated the containers I ran my fingers across. Locks and old tape kept time out. Nothing here that I could see had been
disturbed. But someone had been here. If not taking something—perhaps hiding something?
I looked for the signs that any container or object in sight was new. Nothing gleamed as freshly unwrapped from plastic. There was little here that spoke of recent years.
I stared down at my shoes, now smeared with dust. The floor itself was dirty and I should have thought to see if the intruder had left footprints in his wake. I began backtracking along the floor, keeping the candle's gleam close to the boards.
I heard the wind gust against the glass, the rain building. I thought again of Aunt Sass, yelling out in the rain for her son. I felt a tug of concern for her, to my surprise. Perhaps it was easier now to understand her vitriolic reaction to my wavering about Bob Don's status in my life. She knew what hell he'd been through after Paul's death; maybe she felt he needed a new connection of family and I was his best chance, something gone right after the fabric of his old family became irreparably stained.
Then I saw it—a tennis shoe's tread in the grit. Then another. And another, stepping back over the first. The prints stopped at an array of boxes and trunks, outwardly indiscernible from the rest of the Goertz family detritus that clogged the attic. I put the candle close to the cartons, looking for signs of recent contact.
I finally found one trunk where the dust had been brushed away from the clamps. A fat blot disturbed the grit on the floor. I guessed someone had knelt here, and I believed it had been a man—the knee and shoe prints were large, like the Goertz men. I eased the trunk's lid open. It moaned in quiet protest.
Clothes lay in militarily perfect folds, creases still sharp, although the garments themselves smelled musty. I fingered through the stacked shirts and pants.
They were a boy's clothes, long unworn.
A catcher's mitt, a cracked softball nestled in the web of its leather, lay on one side of the trunk. I brushed fingers against the glove. It was silky with wear, softened in the way only a child's sweat will. I had a shortstop's glove with
the same feel back home, and I smiled with the memory of it. A baseball cap for the Houston Astros, fitted for a child's head, lay perfectly next to the mitt. The logo was old, the colorful stripes left over from the early 1980s. I remembered it—I'd worn a similar cap myself.
I pulled the cap out carefully. For some reason, I felt compelled to treat these items with reverence, as though I'd unearthed them from a long-buried time capsule. Below the cap was a stack of familiar blue-backed books. I smiled again as I withdrew the top volumes from the stack.
The Flickering Torch Mystery. The Secret of the Caves. The Shattered Helmet.
All classics from Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys series. The spines were worn with reading and rereading. These books had been loved. This series had been my favorite boyhood reading as well, tagging along on adventures with the intrepid Frank and Joe. I had even bragged once to Sister that when they made a Hardy Boys movie, I'd be the natural choice for Joe. She'd laughed at my arrogance.
These belongings could have been mine.
I put the books back in the trunk. I rooted about in the clothes some more. Finally I found, at the bottom, a V-neck burgundy sweater, the kind every boy is given during some Christmas and naturally loathes. A diamond-shaped monogram of BGR, the
G
huge and pointed for the surname, was sewn on the right breast of the sweater.
Brian Riley Goertz.
I felt as though I'd just brushed the satin in a coffin and my hand had come away smeared with some noxious substance. I wiped my fingers against my khaki shorts, feeling uneasy.
I groped through the clothes. Either something had been taken from this trunk, or someone wanted to mull over memories of Brian, or—
Someone wanted to hide something, and chose this as their cubbyhole. My fingers brushed through the garments again, and I touched cardboard. Sandwiched between two shirts was a small box, the sort used to store jewelry. It had
been taped shut, but I peeled the tape off and opened the box.
An assortment of men's jewelry lay inside. An old elastic watchband snaked its way through two rings. I examined the booty; the watch was an old Timex, and the face of it was smashed. One ring was a simple wedding band with no inscription; the other ring was a college ring, for Corpus Christi State University.
A man's jewelry, secreted among a dead boy's belongings.
This jewelry, then, wasn't young Brian Goertz's. Paul's, perhaps, given to his son? But if so, why pack it away after Brian's death? Unless Deborah couldn't bear to have her father's effects, or didn't want them. The jewelry box seemed an intruder in the trunk of Brian's belongings, and—
Realization shuddered down my spine. A wedding band. A smashed watch. A college ring from the city that was the cradle of the Goertz family. Paul Goertz's body had never been found, according to the family.
This jewelry might be confirmation of everything Gretchen told me. I imagined a dimly lit sculptor's studio in Corpus Christi, Nora Goertz's dead body sprawled across the putty-speckled floor, her face a wet red mess, the smell of gunfire crisping the air. So what then? Paul Goertz turns from the carnage and calmly slips off his watch, his wedding ring, and his college ring before he goes to stalk Gretchen and meet his own death? It made no sense.
The picture seemed all wrong. Maybe not—if he was going on the run, and the jewelry could be used to identify him. Had Paul's mind worked that way? And perhaps he'd removed his broken watch, if Nora had smashed it while fighting for her life. Perhaps.
Or perhaps the family, complicit in their burial of Paul's body to shield Bob Don, stripped the corpse of its jewelry before disposing of it forever.
That made no sense. Did they plan on presenting the watch and rings to Brian one day—
here, my boy, these belonged to your disappeared, presumed dead daddy. Wear them in health.
No.
Why would the Goertzes save this? It could be found one day, and implicate them all. A slim chance, yes, but why even take the risk?
I thought for a minute. No easy answer reared its head.
I emptied the rest of the trunk and found nothing else that piqued my interest. I ran my fingers along the trunk's lining, but no mysterious catches or bumps to indicate hidey-holes presented themselves. I leaned back on my heels and sighed. An armor of falsehoods covered this damn family, an unyielding barrier I'd have to blast my way through to get to the protected core of truth.
I stood and hurried down the length of the attic, looking for other entrances. I found one. Over Candace's room, at the other end of the house. Damn. She was probably out and whoever came up here took advantage of her absence. I walked slowly back toward the trapdoor leading to my room, feeling an odd coolness descend on the attic, as though the outside rain robbed the air of its July heat. I knelt again by Brian's forlorn trunk.