A grave denied (20 page)

So it was with an impure and righteous sense of purpose that Dandy Mike was doing more or less the same thing that Kate Shugak was, albeit with little finesse and still less ability. His progress took him from ex to ex, interviewing girlfriends past and distant past, asking them if Len Dreyer had dropped by to fix anything lately. The amazing thing was, he wound up with a list that wasn’t dissimilar to Kate’s, though neither of them knew it at the time.

Len Dreyer had logged almost as many miles in pursuit of jobs as Dandy had of women.

He also wasn’t quite the monk Kate had been led to believe. Really all that meant was that Dreyer had had nowhere near the action Dandy had, but that he had gotten laid occasionally. “It was kind of weird,” Betsy Kvasnikof said. “He was kind of there, you know? And I was hurting from Dad going off right after I graduated, you know? Mom was mooning around like a lost soul and I was taking care of Rob and Sandy full-time. I guess I was looking for a little comfort, you know?”

“Did you get it?” was Dandy’s tactful reply.

Betsy looked annoyed, at either Dandy or Dreyer or both. She was a slender, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties with big, innocent brown eyes that made her look like she was still in her mid-teens. “No,” she said shortly.

Dandy, usually so smooth at getting what he wanted out of women, backed up a little, but not all the way. “Did you, er-”

“Did I sleep with him? Yes. Did I have a good time? It was okay, I guess.” She smiled at Dandy with a sweetness he remembered. “Not as good as some who came after.”

Dandy grinned. “Naturally not.”

She laughed. “Oh, you.” She looked over her shoulder. “I think I hear my husband’s truck. Best you leave now.”

“I heard that.” He kissed her good-bye, and then he kissed her again. The back door was closing on him at the same time the front door was opening on her husband, but it wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to. He trod noiselessly around the house and went to his truck, parked discreetly on the shady side of a turnoff down the road.

“When are you leaving?”

Dinah winced. Bobby had no tact. Still, it was a question worth asking.

“When you agree to come with me,” Jeffrey Clark said.

That is, when the answer was something you wanted to hear, Dinah thought.

“Which will be a cold day in hell,” his brother replied. Bobby’s face wore the same expression it had for three days, angry and unyielding.

In that way alone were the brothers similar. Jeffrey was tall, slim, and elegant. His clothes looked freshly pressed, his hair was groomed to perfection, even his teeth, straight and white, looked tailored to fit his mouth.

Not that they’d seen much of them in the last three days, Dinah thought.

His cheekbones were high and sharp, supporting thickly lashed brown eyes. His brow was broad, his mouth firm-lipped, his jaw solid. He looked like something off the cover of
GQ,
and Dinah’s fingers itched for her camera. She didn’t dare, though. After the first shock of her overwhelming whiteness had faded, Jeffrey Clark had simply pretended that she didn’t exist. She could live with that. She couldn’t live with his attitude toward Katya, which was one of horrified disgust. If he called her daughter a mongrel again, she would rip his tongue out of his throat. She whacked viciously at the bread dough she was kneading on the kitchen counter and tried not to listen to Part 92 of the argument that had started Tuesday upon Jeffrey’s arrival and showed no signs of abating three days later.

“I’m not going anywhere, Jeffie,” Bobby said. “Least of all to Tennessee. I haven’t been home since I joined the army and I’m sure as hell not going back now.”

“It’s Jeffrey.”

“Sure, Jeffie,” Bobby said.

“Dad’s dying.”

“The sooner the better.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“The hell I don’t.”

“He wants to see you before he crosses over.”

Bobby snorted. “I could give a shit what that bastard wants, dead or alive.”

“You have to forgive him, Bobby, the way he’s forgiven you.”

Uh-oh, Dinah thought, almost sorry for Jeffie.

Almost. She kneaded bread and wondered where Kate was. For some reason Kate was the only one among them who didn’t send Jeffrey Clark into pontifical orbit. Maybe he’d fallen into passionate, unreasoning, uncaring love with her. Maybe he’d marry her and whisk her home in lieu of his brother.

Maybe Kate would find whoever burned her cabin down and not hurt him.

Meanwhile, back at the front.

“Is he in pain?” Bobby said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said.

“Good,” Bobby said, with a grim kind of relish.

“You don’t mean that.”

“The hell I don’t!”

Katya, used to Daddy’s bellows, was unacquainted with the tenor of this one. Her face puckered. Bobby plucked her from the middle of her toys and cuddled her. He dropped his voice but from fifteen feet Dinah could still hear the venom in it. “Lynnie is dead because of him.”

Jeffrey’s voice sharpened. “Lynnette Adams is dead because she committed a mortal sin, and when she was called to account for it, tried to wipe it out by committing another, and then the worst one of all. She was damned from the beginning.”

Dinah froze, wrist-deep in dough. Where was the first-aid kit, exactly? Bathroom, that’s right, above the sink.

After a moment of silence that positively sizzled, Bobby spoke in a tone that was a mixture of silk and razor wire that Dinah had never heard before. “Don’t let me hear you say anything like that again, Jeffie. Not ever. Lynnie was a sweetheart, my sweetheart. We had plans, Lynnie and me. Because we got ahead of ourselves and she had an abortion doesn’t make her a sinner.”

“Dad didn’t hold the razor to her wrists in that bathtub, Robert.”

“And it wasn’t Dad calling her a whore from the pulpit, either, I suppose?”

Dinah, chilled to the bone by the menacing purr issuing forth from the man previously known as her husband, found herself holding her breath. She looked over her shoulder at the gun case standing in one corner of the room. Still locked. Good.

The silence was broken by a tiny whimper. Dinah risked a look over her shoulder and saw her daughter hugging as much of her father’s neck as she could get her arms around. “Daddy mad,” she said in a tiny voice. “Daddy mad. Don’t be mad, Daddy. Please.”

Both men, glaring at each other, were recalled to the present. “It’s okay, baby. Daddy’s not mad at you. Daddy’s never mad at you.” Bobby rocked his chair back and forth with a hand on the wheel. Her arms relaxed and her head drooped to his shoulder. Dinah noticed she didn’t let go of her father’s neck.

In a more civil tone, Jeffrey said, “Mom needs you.”

“Yeah, well, I needed her when I was sixteen and she was nowhere to be found.”

A brief pause. “She gave you life.”

“I didn’t have a vote in that, Jeffie. That was their choice. This is mine.”

“Robert-”

Dinah gave up the pretence of blissful ignorance and came around the corner, hands cupped so she wouldn’t dribble flour all over the floor. “Give it a rest, Jeffrey, why don’t you. Go on back to Auntie Vi’s. Take a drive, see something of the Park while you’re here.” And give my man a break, she thought.

He turned his head and stared at a point somewhere above her left shoulder. In three days he had yet to look her in the face. She would never forget the shock in his when Bobby had introduced them, and the repugnance in his voice. “You married a
white
woman?”

“All right,” he said now, still staring straight past her. “I’ll be back this evening.”

“Don’t bother,” Bobby said.

Jeffrey left without replying.

There was a whole lot of quiet going on following the muted slam of the door behind him. Everyone listened intently to the footsteps going down the steps, over the grass, the opening of the door to the battered blue Nissan truck Auntie Vi had rented to Jeffrey at a more extortionate rate than usual, the starting of the engine, the sound of it receding over the creek and down the road.

“So.” Dinah blew out a breath. “That could have gone better.”

Bobby cracked out a laugh. “You’ve said that every day since he came.”

“I’ve meant it every day since he came.”

He gave her an incredulous look. “For chrissake, woman! The man has yet to call you by name! Don’t fucking tell me you’re on his side!”

She went back to the kitchen and started kneading dough.

She heard the squeak of rubber on wood as he followed. “Dinah?”

“Jeffrey’s right about one thing.”

“Oh? And that would be what, exactly?”

Dinah took a deep breath and prepared for the storm. “He is your father. He gave you life. He wants to see you. You owe him.”

She closed her eyes and braced herself. When he said nothing, she looked around.

He was weeping.

Katya raised her head from his shoulder and stared. She touched the track of one of his tears with a pudgy little finger. “Daddy sad?” she said. Her voice broke. “Daddy sad,” she wailed, and started to sob, a horrible, heartbroken sound that struck both parents to the core.

Dinah gave her hands a quick wash, made up a bottle, and stashed Katya in her crib where, thankfully, for once Katya subsided without complaint and fell asleep with a milky face. Dinah marched back to her husband, shoved his chair into the living room, ordered him onto the couch, and curled up half in and half out of his lap. She put her arms around him and she hung on and that was all she did for about an hour, listening to the beat of his heart against her ear, feeling the intermittent shudder in his body when his breath caught. She hung on and she wouldn’t let go and she wouldn’t move. Slowly, steadily, he began to relax, one muscle group at a time. He rested his forehead against her shoulder. “I can’t go back, Dinah.”

She burrowed closer. “A day’s travel, a day there, another day to get home. Three days you’ll be gone, tops.”

“I don’t want to.”

“He’s your father.” She raised her head and searched his face. “Bobby, don’t you have one good memory of your father? Did he take you fishing, or hold you on your first bicycle, or cheer you on during a baseball game? Did he read you a story over and over again, or hold you when you were sick, or let you crawl in with him and your mother when you had a nightmare?”

He let his head fall back against the head of the couch and closed his eyes. “Maybe. One or two of those.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe all. But Lynnie’s dead because this supposedly good man called her a whore in front of her parents and her family and her friends. And me.”

Dinah chose her words carefully. “They called you a fornicator, and a sinner.”

He said nothing.

“And you didn’t kill yourself.”

His laugh was brief and bitter. “No, I let the Cong take care of that for me.”

She straddled his lap and took his face between her hands. Never before had she noticed how white they were against the black of his face, and she could and would curse his brother loud and long for that. “Bobby, what if he dies? What if he dies and you don’t say good-bye?”

“I said good-bye a long time ago, Dinah.”

“What about your mother?”

He shook his head. “I always came second to Jeffie. He was the oldest, the smartest, the most gendemanly. If she has Jeffie, she won’t want me.” He looked at her with a ghost of his old twinkle. “Jeffie got a full scholarship to MIT, did you know?”

“I think I heard him mention it twelve or fourteen times.”

They both laughed a little.

Kate walked in, followed by Johnny with a full daypack over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” she said. “The evil brother strikes again.”

Bobby managed a smile. “And how was your day, dear?”

Johnny let the screen door slam behind him. “Kick him out, Bobby.”

“I did, squirt.”

“Good. Look at what we’re studying in science, Bobby. Light is both a particle and a wave, did you know that?”

Bobby was more than glad to have the subject changed. “Explain it to me, squirt.”

The men folk retired to the central console and bent over Johnny’s textbook. Bobby’s voice eventually regained full volume.

Dinah poured Kate coffee and set about trying to salvage the bread dough. “Want some fry bread?” she said over her shoulder.

Kate moaned. “Auntie Vi stuffed me full earlier today.”

“Does that mean you don’t want any more?”

“Did I say that?” Kate pulled out a large skillet and poured in oil and set it over a medium flame. She took the plateful of round patties of bread dough and fried them until both sides were a golden brown. She set the first batch on the table along with butter, powdered sugar, honey, and three kinds of jams and said, “Come and get it!” stepping back quickly so she wasn’t trampled in the rush.

She returned to the stove where the second batch was already in. “So?”

“Same old, same old.” Dinah sighed and closed her eyes briefly. “He’s only been here three days, Kate, and all I can think of is how nice it would be if our friendly neighborhood grizzly would just… kill him and serve him up for Sunday brunch to her cubs.”