Day of Wrath (26 page)

I walked back to the bedroom and sat down beside her on
the bed. She glanced at me nervously.

"You don't think anybody saw us, do you?" she said. It
was a thought that had bothered me—that Lavelle might have been having
me watched. But I hadn't seen anyone hanging around the lot or the building,
and I was fairly certain we hadn't been followed home.

I told her no, but her eyes stayed frightened.

"I want you to do something for me, O.K.?" she said and
didn't give me a chance to reply. "I know you're in bad shape, but I want
you to hold me. I mean, you don't have to fuck me. just hold me for awhile."

I put my arms around her and she curled up beside me.
Together we watched the sunlight dying in the bedroom window.

"You feel like talking?" I said to her after a time.

I felt her nod. "I guess so."

"
You said something before about Robbie needing help.
What did you mean?"

Grace pulled the blanket over her legs and lay her head
on my thigh. "I heard them talking," she said. "This morning. In the kitchen.
I think Logan and Irene want to get rid of her."

"
You mean kill her?"

Grace nodded.

"Why?"

"She knows," Grace said. "She knows about what happened
to Bobby. She went off with him on Wednesday afternoon, and when she came
back, she was hysterical. I think she would have killed herself if Theo
hadn't been there. He's been looking after her ever since."

I took a breath and said, "What did happen to Bobby?"

"
I don't know it a1l," she said.

"Then tell me what you do know."

She hugged herself tightly under the blanket and closed
her eyes. "Bobby came to the farm on Wednesday afternoon. He'd been there
every day since Sunday, when he dropped Robbie off. She'd been acting like
a whore all week, sleeping with everyone. She even slept with Irene, and
you had to be crazy to do that. Irene really dug it, too. I think that's
what was bothering Bobby the most—that Irene was screwing Robbie. And
I mean all the time. The girl just walked around with this sort of spaced-out
look on her face, like she'd wandered I into a candy store and there was
nobody at the register, and every time Irene or one of the guys whistled,
her eyes would go kind of hard and knowing. It was weird, like she only
came alive when she was being screwed. And even then, it wasn't as if she
understood what it meant. It was more of an animal thing. You could hear
her screaming dirty words all over the house. At first, it was funny. Then
it got old. And then it got kind of scary—especially when she was with
Irene. It didn't sound like love-making. I don't know what it sounded like—something
dirty and sick and cruel. It really got to me.

And to Bobby worst of all. Man, he'd sit outside on the
porch and you could just see his face crack up. I don't know how he could
stand it."

"He loved her," I said softly.

"
He really did," she said. "I guess he thought she'd get
it out of her system. But I knew better. What's wrong with Robbie is part
of her system. She was born with it. I even tried to talk to him about
it. I told him to forget her. And he got furious and said I didn't understand
her—that she'd had a hard time. I understood her, all right. Every one
of us at the farm came from one screwed-up family or another. We were all
outcasts and orphans. That was the beautiful thing about Theo. He gave
us more than a place to stay—he gave us the home we never had. And it
really was a family out there. Or it was until Irene came along."

"When was that?"

"About six months ago," she said. "Theo was having a bad
time financially, so he told us he was going to make a sacrifice for the
good of the family and take on a business partner. After that, Irene started
coming out to the farm.

At first it was cool. She was really devoted to Theo,
following him around like a puppy. It was like this was all some kind of
new life for her—a new beginning. Theo dug it, too. He was always kind
of vain, and she knew how to play on his vanity for all it was worth. Pretty
soon, things began to change. Irene started bringing some of her weird-ass
friends out to the farm. Converts, she called them, as if Theo were a kind
of god or a religion. They began to party with us. Real wild affairs, with
blow and smack. When you get that cooked, you stop thinking about what
you're doing and just go with the flow. And that's pretty much what all
of us did. It got to be an ugly scene. All the music drained away, and
it was just dope and sex and Irene, sitting there in her black leather
pants. Theo knew it was getting out of hand. He even threatened to kick
her out if she didn't shape up. And for a while she acted meek and repentant.
Then something happened a couple of weeks ago, and everything went to hell."

"Some men came to the farm," I said. "They threatened
to kill Clinger."

Grace looked surprised. "How did you know that?"

"A girl named Annie told me."

"
Annie!" Grace said. "Where is Annie?"

"In Denver, I think. That's where she said she was going."

"Annie," she said again.

"She told me that Clinger had gotten himself involved
in a drug deal and that it hadn't worked out."

Grace nodded. "That's right. Irene was the one who talked
Theo into the deal. She'd been feeding him money right along, but Theo
had big debts. They figured one large deal might get him back on his feet
again. She was going to finance it."

"What went wrong?" I asked her.

"Irene backed out at the last moment," she said. "She
claimed she couldn't get the money together, but I think that was bullshit.
I think she did it to show Theo who was really boss. And it worked, too.
Because after that she practically moved out to the farm. And Theo didn't
say a word. It seemed like their positions had completely reversed—like
it was her place instead of his. She hired Logan and another man named
Reese for protection. And the place started to look like an Army camp.
That's when a lot of the family started to leave. That was the week that
Robbie came."

"What happened on Wednesday?" I said.

"Bobby blew up. He came out to the farm and told Irene
and Logan to keep their hands off Robbie. There was a fight and Theo had
to step in to stop it. I think Logan and Reese would have killed Bobby
if he hadn't stopped them. Robbie was crying and Theo was practically crying
and Bobby was a mess. Theo really loved him, because he was so good-natured
and talented. And Bobby loved Theo, too. He modeled himself after him.
That was what made the scene so terrible. They were both crying and Bobby
said that if Theo didn't let Robbie come with him, he was going to the
cops and tell them about the drug deal. But Theo hadn't been keeping Robbie
at the farm. She'd wanted to stay there. And Theo respected that. I don't 
know if Bobby was serious or not about the cops. I think mostly he just
wanted Robbie back. She was all he ever really wanted."

"And Theo let her go with him?"

"She decided to go herself."

"Why?" I said.

"I don't know. She was pretty scared."

"Do you think she loved him?" I said—mostly to myself.

Grace thought about it for a second. "I think she wanted
to," she finally said.

I got off the bed and walked over to the window. The sun
was almost down. It hung above the elm trees in the back yard like a spot
of blood in the sky. I stared into it and said, "Who killed Bobby Caldwell?"

"
Irene," Grace said.

"How do you know?"

"I just think she did. She and Logan and Reese."

I turned back to the room and said, "I think she did,
too."
 

NEITHER OF US SAID ANYTHING TO EACH OTHER FOR A time.
I stared out the window, at the elms turning colors in the sunset, and
Grace curled up again beneath the blanket. After awhile, I sat down beside
her.

"
You don't hate me, do you?" she said in a small unhappy
voice.

"For what?"

"For being part of it? For not telling you about it the
other day? I was thinking . . . maybe you wouldn't have gotten beaten up,
if I hadn't lied to you before."

"No," I said. "I don't hate you."

Only I was thinking about Irene Croft, who'd told me that
everyone lied. I was thinking that, in a world of liars, she'd finally
come to the end of her patience and gone furiously mad. The violence must
have been there all along, burning inside her—the home fires, the hearth.
But she'd kept it banked for years, living of? the contempt she felt for
all those lies that other people told each other. Those lies had shaped
the truth for her into something wicked and perverse. And somewhere in
the last years or months that had led to Wednesday night, somewhere between
the drugs and the liaisons and the cold mornings after, that truth had
driven her crazy.

Perhaps the murder had seemed like an unselfish act to
her—to kill the boy who threatened her beloved Theo. Or perhaps she 'd
ceased to care about Theo when his lies and his world had been exposed
for the illusions that they were. Perhaps she'd ceased to care about anything
but the red, appetitive fury inside her. That fury was the real meaning
of the murder. And I knew that it was still burning and that, having broken
out once, it would take even less provocation for it to break out again.
She was already planning a second killing, in the face of her family's
effort to hide the first one. Maybe that was why she was doing it—to
throw their pride right back at them, soaked in Robbie Segal's blood. I
wondered if Lavelle had known that that was what she'd been planning, if
that was why he'd proposed to trade Robbie for my silence about the drugs
and the Caldwell killing. Maybe it was the Crofts' way of saving the girl's
life. Because they couldn't cover up a second killing—I simply knew too
much and so did Grace and Theo and Bannock. Only Lavelle had needed a couple
of days to set the conspiracy up—to pay off Clinger's debts and enlist
Bannock and talk to Pastor Caldwell.

What he didn't know was that those two days were going
to be too long. That all that was standing between Robbie and a terrible
death was one weak, vain man, who was hanging onto her as the last remnant
of his own hopes. A little piece of hell was blazing in Clinger's farmyard,
spewing terror like smoke and turning all the man's dreams and love into
char. He wouldn't be able to hold out much longer, and if he did, perhaps
Logan and Reese and the Croft woman would kill him, too.

Grace fell asleep in my arms, exhausted by her fears and
memories. And I sat there beside her and wondered what I was going to do—without
police help, without enough evidence to get the FBI interested, with certain
violence waiting for me at the end of that dusty farm road. I wondered
if the girl was even worth saving. Because she was as mad as the world
she'd run off to—my lost Robbie. And that, in the end, had been the real
difference between her and Eastlawn Drive. Not my romantic projections
about freedom and conformity.

Those had belonged to me, to the part of me that had been
prodded to life by the dismal look of that street and the pitiless pieties
of its householders. As Grace had said, her mother and the Rostows and
all the rest of that gray neighborhood might have played a role in distorting
the  girl's character, but what was wrong with her couldn't finally
be accounted for in terms of a house or a street or a neurotic mother.
If I'd been smarter, less set on living out my own adolescent gripes, I
could have seen it from the start. In the gape-mouthed stupor of her photograph.
In all the broken plates and dishes that Mildred had pasted so patiently
back together. In the hostile vagueness of the friends who had described
her. In the mad scenes in the Pentangle bar and later at thefarm. Saving
her now—to be brought back to the cage of Eastlawn Drive—seemed pointless
and cruel. How could she go back, I asked myself, after Irene and Bobby?

And in spite of the fact that I couldn't answer the question,
in spite of the tragedy that would certainly ensue, I knew that I was going
to go get her. Because no one else would. Not Bannock or Lavelle, who were
perfecting their scheme of obstruction. Or Al Foster, who couldn't see
beyond his badge. I couldn't even bring in the state cops, for fear that
a bunch of police cars might send Irene into a final, murderous spasm.
It had to be me. And the reason, finally, wasn't for her mother or for
myself or for Robbie, either. It was for the boy who had loved her and
died for her. If she hadn't meant a thing to anyone else; she meant the
world to him. And that made her worth saving.

The bedroom had begun to go dark. The evening sky a violet
skein drawn across the window, with just a thread or two of fire woven
through it. I lifted Grace's head onto a pillow, got up, and walked into
the living room. I sat down at the desk and took two envelopes out of the
bottom drawer. I wrote Grace's name on one of them, got three hundred dollars
in cash out of the cash box, and put the money in the envelope. I didn't
seal it. Then I took a piece of paper from the desk and wrote down all
I knew about the Robbie Segal case. When I finished, I stuck it in the
second envelope.