Final Notice (27 page)

My hand clamped around the gun in my coat pocket. "What have you done to her?"

He shook his head. "I'm not going to tell you. Not yet. Not until I'm ready. And you know better than to try to force me." He crossed his legs and said, "Sometimes I think this is all Haskell's fault. I mean the way I am. He made it so easy. He was too tenderhearted. He let Mother push him around. Oh, God, the things I used to get away with when I was a kid. Stealing cookies, candy, money. She'd always blame him. It was always his fault. My poor, poor brother. Do you know how long it took the Reaves woman to die." Jacob snapped his fingers and rainwater shot from their tips. "But Hack ... it took him two whole years. And he suffered every minute of every day. I was with him at the end. He made a true confession. I wouldn't feed him until he did. He'll be redeemed." Jacob gazed out into the night and said, "We'll all be redeemed."

"I can understand how you felt about Effie Reaves," I said. "But what about Twyla?"

"I don't know why I did that," he said remotely. "Do you always know why you do the things you do?"

I had to shake my head, no.

"Sometimes I'll just be sitting in my room reading. Only when I look down at the page, it's all torn up. Like I've been sketching, only I've cut things up." He looked down again at the sidewalk. "I cut them up. Like with my drawings, when I get mad because they're not right. You see, there's this gap between what's in here" -he tapped his forehead- "and..." He held up his hands and stared at them dispassionately. "It's as if they have a will of their own."

"And Kate," I said heavily. "Why her?"

"Something about the way she looked. Her hair, I think. That color of blonde, like coins on a tablecloth. Her body. There's something wrong with beauty -don't you know that? If it could stay inside, if it didn't touch the world, why then it would be fine. But it makes its way into your heart and then you burn. Can you take a live coal into your heart and not burn? That's what the Bible says. It says women turn men into crusts."

His eyes shifted behind the mask, but he didn't catch his mistake.

"Where is she now?" I asked him. "Where is Kate?"

"Oh, she's all right. I haven't killed her yet. She's down that hill on the right side of the park, tied to a tree. I told her I'd be back to finish when we were done. You know," he said as he pulled a long hunter's knife from his coat pocket, "you remind me of my brother. I can talk to you."

I stared at the knife in Jacob's hand and at the forlorn look in his eyes. "Don't!" I shouted. "Don't do it!"

Jake shook his head and whispered, "Too late."

He leaped off the stone wall, the knife cocked above his head, and I pulled the trigger of the Colt. It went off with a terrific bang, slamming my elbow into the back of the bench. The muzzle flash burned a hole through the coat pocket -a three foot tongue of fire that licked Jacob Lord's chest, lifted him off the pavement, and sent him flying backwards, in a` bloody smear, all the way down the long, stony hillside to the river and to his death. The last look I saw in his eyes was one of almost gentle disappointment.

The gun blast was still echoing through the trees as I started running down the sidewalk to the west side of the park. It took me five minutes to find her in the dark, tied to an oak, halfway down the hill, a gag in her mouth. There was blood all over her blouse from where he'd been cutting her, and her face was' sheet white. But when I fell to my knees beside her and cried,

"Kate! Kate!" her eyelids flickered and I felt my heart move again inside my chest.

"You're  goning to be all right," I said fiercely and tore the gag from her mouth.
.
"It hurts," she whispered.

I untied her arms, lifted her off the ground, and carried her to the park road. Foster, Levy and DeVries were waiting at
the top. I put her gently into the car and A1 drove her to the emergency room at General.
 

KATE SPENT two days in Cincinnati General -getting sewn up and transfused and shot full of antibiotics and pain killers. I stayed beside her from morning to night. Every time I looked over at her, I saw her sassy, blonde face smiling up at me. It made me understand why hospitals didn't supply double beds.

"My hero," she'd say and bat her eyes.

It made me blush.

So did Miss Moselle, who showed up on Sunday evening with a Ouija board and a bundle of papers under her arm. She sat down beside me and said, "I've finally finished your chart."

"And?" I said.

"You are a very unlucky man."

I laughed.

"But that will change in the next few months," she said with great assurance and smiled at Kate. "I see a long trip ahead of you. And romance."

"You do, huh?"

She reached into her purse and pulled out two plane tickets. "These are for you, Harry, darling," she said with real tenderness. "It was my idea, but Leon and the rest of the librarians chipped in. There's a check here, too, from Leon -for services rendered. He would have come by himself, but he was called downtown." Miss Moselle put a hand to her mouth and whispered, "I think he's finally going to be promoted. Things won't be the same without him," she said with a sigh.

"You'll break his replacement in quickly enough," I said. She giggled.

I looked at the tickets, which were for Jamaica, and at the check, which was for twelve hundred and fifty dollars or one week's work, and said to Kate, "When are we going?"

Kate grinned and said, "We?"

"We."

"That suits me fine," she said. "You see I'm a changed woman. A completely reformed character."

"Completely?" I said.

She nodded and then she said, "Aren't I?"
 
 

We stopped at Potter's Field before we left. That's where the County had buried Jake Lord and his brother Haskell. Their mother had decided she wanted no part of the funeral. It was a cold blue day with a wafer of a moon in the eastern sky and just a trickle of wind running down the grassy hillside. There wasn't any headstone, just a mound of fresh earth. We had to ask the digger -a seedy-looking hillbilly with a red bandana around his head- which graves they were buried in.

He looked at a placard hanging on his tool shed and said, "They're buried together. One atop t'other." Then he coughed and said, "Saves space. Couple others buried with 'em."

He showed us to the grave and I stood there for a minute looking at the freshly turned earth.

"I still feel sorry for them," Kate said. "In spite of... of everything. Don't you?"

"I don't know," I said. "He doesn't seem real to me. I guess he never will. You know I must have talked to a dozen people last week, some of them pretty knowledgeable folks, and I still don't understand Jake Lord."

"Let's go," Kate said with a shiver.

I took her hand and we walked back up the dirt path to the car. A little boy, probably the gravedigger's son, was sitting on the ground, playing mumblety-peg with a penknife. I watched him through the rearview mirror as we drove off and thought of Jake Lord. Then Kate tugged at my arm and smiled at me. And all I wanted to think about was her.