Mortal Memory (23 page)

“Do you remember saying that these men had actually seen the monster?” she asked. “That they'd looked it in the eye?”

“Yes.”

“We have to do that, too,” she said. She picked up a single photograph and handed it to me. “We have to look it in the eye.”

It was a picture of my father standing in front of the hardware store on Sycamore Street. It had been taken the day he'd opened the store, and all of us were with him. I, an infant, slept obliviously in my mother's arms, while Jamie and Laura seemed to hang like small sacks from my father's hands.

It was the first photograph she'd shown me in which we were all together, and something in it frightened me so much that I actually drew back from it unconsciously, as if it might strike out at me.

I handed the picture back to her. “Okay,” I said. “Now what?”

She looked at me evenly. “As a picture, a family tableau, it's practically idyllic,” she said.

“Yes, it is. So what?”

“We've been through each of the relationships in your family,” Rebecca said. “Now we have to look at the possibility of something outside the family that might have had some bearing on the murders.”

It was then I knew that we were racing toward the end of it. She'd gotten as much information about my family as she expected to get from me. Her final task was simply to assure herself that in getting the story of my family as it related to its destruction, she'd gotten the only story there was, that there were no loose ends, that my father fully and completely conformed to her archetype of “these men.”

“You mean another person?” I asked. “Someone connected to my father? A lover, something like that?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said.

The very idea seemed preposterous to me. It was as if I could accept the fact that my father had slaughtered his family more easily than the notion that he might have loved someone outside the circle of that destruction.

“I don't think he was the type to have another woman,” I said offhandedly. “Of course, a love affair is not something he would have talked about with a nine-year-old boy.”

Rebecca looked at me. “Would he have talked about it with Laura?”

The question brought back a quick play of memory.

“Maybe,” I said. I remembered how, during the weeks before her death, my sister had appeared to stiffen and grow cold toward my father, to give him unmistakably hostile glances. I'd noticed the change at the time, but been unable to understand it.

“I can say that things did change between Laura and my father,” I added. “At first, after we came back from Cape Cod, they seemed closer than ever. But not long after that Laura withdrew from him.”

Suddenly I saw this change as the key to everything. The last link my father had had with us, his love for my sister, had abruptly broken. His one and only tie to us had snapped, setting him free to kill us all.

I remembered the look on my sister's face when she'd glanced at my father from time to time during the last month of her life. The sense of admiration that I'd always seen in her eyes was entirely gone. It had been replaced by something deeper and far grimmer.

“She seemed very disappointed in him,” I said. “It was as if she'd come to despise him.”

Rebecca said nothing.

“Maybe that was what my father couldn't bear,” I added after a time, “the fact that he'd lost Laura.”

“Or that she'd simply come to love someone else,” Rebecca added cautiously, “the way teenage girls inevitably do.”

I saw my sister again in the long green reeds, the arch of her white back in the moonlight.

“You mean Teddy Lawford?”

“He wrote quite a few letters to Laura,” Rebecca told me. “Swenson found them in one of the drawers of her dressing table.” She reached into the briefcase and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “Laura wrote him back, too,” she said, as she handed me the paper. “This is a copy of the last letter she wrote to him.”

“Where did you get it?” I asked as I took it from her hand.

“Swenson got it from Teddy when he went up to Boston to interview him about the murders.”

“Swenson interviewed Teddy? Why?”

“He considered him a suspect for a while,” Rebecca said. “But Teddy had been at the University of Michigan on the day of the murders.” She nodded toward the letter. “It's dated November 15.”

While Rebecca looked on, I read what was probably the last letter my sister ever wrote:

Dear Teddy:

Hi, I hope you are okay, and that everything is still going well at college. I wish I could say things are better here, but they're not. They're worse than ever. Jamie's a bastard, like always, and Stevie's just a kid. My father stays in the basement, but I don't go down there anymore. If I ever see you, I'll tell .you what he did. I don't want to say it in a letter. Someone might see it, and I don't know what he would do if that happened. He's such a fake, Teddy, such a cheat.

Teddy, sometimes I get really scared. I feel like something's going to happen, but I don't know what.

Damn, this is a depressing letter. I'm sorry, but it's just the way I feel. Maybe something will brighten me up in the next few days. If it does, I promise to write and let you know.

Love,
Laura

Once I'd finished reading, I handed the letter back to Rebecca. She kept it in her hand, waiting for me to speak. When I didn't, she repeated the line that had struck her as the most important: “‘If I ever see you, I'll tell you what he did.'” Her eyes bore down upon me. “What do you think Laura meant by that?”

“I have no idea.”

“‘Fake.' ‘Cheat.' Why would she use those words?”

I realized that Rebecca had gone full circle, returning to her original point. “Another woman, you mean,” I said. “You think it's possible that he was cheating on my mother, and that Laura found out, and somewhere in all that, he decided to kill us?”

Rebecca didn't answer, but I could tell that her earlier questions had been generated by more than speculation.

“If your father had a lover,” she said, “then he can't be included in my study.”

“Yes, I know, Rebecca,” I said. “But is there some reason why you think he might have had another woman other than Laura's letter?”

She hesitated a moment, looking at me with an expression which always signaled the fact that she was about to reveal something she had previously kept hidden. “Well, there's a detail that always bothered Swenson,” she said. “He was never able to track it down exactly, and I think you're the only person who might know what it means.”

“What detail?”

“The fact that almost five months before the murders your father bought two tickets on a flight to Mexico City,” Rebecca answered, the revelation completed. She glanced down at her notebook. “He made the reservation on June 15, 1959. The flight was scheduled to leave from Idlewild Airport in New York City.”

“On what day?”

She looked up at me. “November 19.”

I felt a sharp pang. “The day of the murders,” I said.

“But he canceled those same tickets over a month before the murders,” Rebecca added. “On October 10. So, on November 19, as far as we know, he had no travel plans.”

I repeated the most relevant aspect of what she'd told me. “But the main thing is that before that, he'd reserved two tickets, not just one.”

“He made the reservation in his own name,” Rebecca said pointedly, “One for him and one …” She stopped for a beat, “… for someone else.”

“And this ‘someone else,'” I said, “there was no name?”

Rebecca shook her head. “He made the reservation by phone, and he never gave a name for the second person.”

“For his lover, you mean.”

“If he had one,” Rebecca said doubtfully.

“You don't think he did?”

“If I'd thought that, I wouldn't have gotten this far in studying him,” Rebecca said. “Even Swenson was never able to trace him to any other person.” She shrugged. “Everything about your father points to a family man.”

“Everything except that ticket.”

“Yes.”

I let it all pass through my mind slowly, trying to think if I'd ever seen the slightest sign that my father had had his own version of Yolanda Dawes, some pale, slender female with thin, spidery arms, the mythical destroyer of homes. I thought of various possibilities. There was Mrs. Hamilton, the minister's wife who lived across the street, but she was far older than my father, matronly and overweight, hardly a candidate for romance. Next door, Mrs. Bishop, even older, lay bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. There were other women in the neighborhood, younger, sleeker, their legs tightly bound in the pedal-pusher pants so common at the time, but it didn't seem possible that they would have cast a longing glance at the middle-aged man in gray work clothes who sometimes cruised by in his old brown van.

Then, quite suddenly, I thought of someone.

“Well,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to emphasize the point, “there was this one woman who worked for my father.”

Rebecca's eyes bored into me. “Who?”

“Her name was Nellie Grimes,” I said. “I didn't know her very well.”

“Was she a neighbor?”

“No. She just worked for my father.”

A divorcee, with a three-year-old daughter, Nellie had begun to work in the hardware store in the fall of 1956. My father had needed someone to straighten out the store's tangled bookkeeping system, but after doing that, Nellie had stayed on to handle the part of the business my father despised, the dismal mountain of paperwork involved in keeping the store stocked, billing credit customers, even paying the store's own bills. He'd never liked any of the minutiae of running his own small business, and after Nellie came on, he'd turned all of it over to her. Thorough and highly organized, Nellie had quickly become indispensable to my father, a woman, as I'd once heard him describe her, “of many talents.”

“‘Of many talents,'” Rebecca repeated as she wrote the phrase in her book. “Who did he say that to?”

My own answer surprised me. “My mother.”

“So your mother knew about Nellie Grimes?”

I labored to dismiss the disquieting notion that there might have been an edge of cruelty in my father's description of Nellie, as if he were bent upon making the contrast between “poor Dottie” and a woman of “many talents” as painful as he could.

“Well, she knew who Nellie was,” I answered casually. “All of us knew who she was, that she was this woman who worked for my father.” I shrugged. “But I don't think it occurred to any of us that there might have been something going on between them.”

I thought of all the times I'd seen my father and Nellie together, simply standing in one of the store's cluttered aisles, or hunched over Nellie's desk in the back, the two of them trying to straighten out some incongruity in the books. Everything had always looked perfectly normal between them. Neither had ever exhibited the slightest sense of a clandestine relationship, of secret hideaways or kisses stolen behind a potted palm.

“It always seemed like an ordinary, professional relationship,” I said.

Rebecca gave me a penetrating look. “Then why did you bring her up?”

“Just as a possibility,” I answered, dismissing it at the same time. “Nothing more than that.”

But it was more than that.

I knew that it was more because of the force with which Nellie had suddenly returned to me. I hadn't thought of her in years, and yet I saw her exactly as she'd appeared during the time she'd worked for my father.

She was a short, compact woman with curly light-brown hair, always neatly dressed, her lips painted a bright, glossy red. She had called me Skipper for some reason, and at the little birthday party my mother threw for me three months before her murder, Nellie gave me a blue captain's cap with a large golden anchor stitched across the front. Her daughter was named May, and at the party she'd stood, looking a bit confused, in a lacy white dress, a small, willowy child with long, blond hair and a vacant look in her light green eyes.

“Why did this woman in particular come to mind, Steve?”

“Opportunity, I suppose,” I said. “I mean, they were alone in the store a good deal. It would have been easy for him.”

“Would that have been enough for your father to have an affair?” Rebecca asked. “Just that it would have been convenient?”

The world “affair” struck me as an inappropriate one to use in terms of any relationship my father might have had with Nellie. It seemed too worldly and sophisticated a word for either one of them. Had the “affair” existed at all, it would have been carried out in cheap motel rooms off noisy, commercial roads. Or, perhaps, even worse, just a quick, sweaty tumble in the back of the hardware store. As such, it didn't strike me as the sort of thing my father would have done.

“No, I don't think so,” I told Rebecca. “Besides, he never struck me as being driven in that way. Toward sex, I mean, just for itself.” I thought a moment longer, my father's face returning to me, clothed in the curling smoke that had always seemed to surround him. “Love might have attracted him, though.”

“Could your father have gotten that from Nellie Grimes?” Rebecca asked.

I considered Nellie carefully once again, recalling the round face and hazel eyes, the somewhat large and rolling hips, but more important, the buoyancy of her manner, the uncomplicated happiness and jollity that seemed to pour from her, and which was so different from the general gloominess and withdrawal which characterized my mother.

I nodded. “Maybe,” I admitted.

My father kept a small army-surplus cot in the back of the store, and for an instant I saw him lying upon it, wrapped in Nellie's somewhat flabby arms, his old gray work clothes stripped away and bundled sloppily in a pile beneath the creaking springs of the old metal cot. It was not a vision I could sustain, however.