Mortal Memory (31 page)

“I think so,” I told him.

He looked vaguely surprised to hear it. He stared at me quietly, his breath coming in long hard pulls and quick exhalations. “Well, maybe he did,” he said. The mask lifted, lingered for a moment at his mouth, then fell again. “But maybe he didn't.” He tried to go on, but his breath could not carry the weight of another sentence. He took a quick inhalation, then added, “He got away, that's for sure.”

“All the way to Mexico,” I said.

Swenson nodded. “Using nothing but back roads,” he said, “or we'd have picked him up for sure.” He coughed suddenly, a hard, brutal cough, his face reddening with the strain. “Sorry,” he said quickly, then returned to his story. “He left all his money in the bank.” He looked at me pointedly as he drew in another aching breath. “Does that sound like a well-thought-out plan?”

I looked at him, puzzled, my eyes urging him to go on.

Swenson shifted uncomfortably, the large head sinking and rising heavily, its little wisps of reddish hair floating eerily in the veiled light. “He left the house at around six o'clock.”

In my mind I could see him go almost as clearly as Mrs. Hamilton had seen him, a figure in a gray hat, carrying nothing with him, not so much as the smallest bag.

“He went downtown to the hardware store after that,” Swenson said. A short cough broke from him, but he suppressed the larger one behind it. “Several people saw him go in, but since he owned the place, nobody made anything of it.”

“What did he do in there?” I asked.

“He cleaned out the cash register,” Swenson answered. “Took every dime.” The mask rose again, then fell. “Then he went to that little store near your house.”

“Oscar's?”

Swenson nodded. “He bought a lot of food and stuff for the trip.” He stopped. The mask climbed up to his mouth, settled over it for a long, raspy breath, then crawled back down into Swenson's lap. “And he made a phone call.”

“A phone call?”

“From that little phone they had out front,” Swenson said, without emphasis. “We don't know who he called,” he added, “but the kid that was standing behind him, waiting to use the same phone, was sure that he never got an answer.”

“Someone else,” I said in a cold whisper, “he was calling someone else.” The face of Nellie Grimes came toward me, lifting slowly, gently, as if offering a kiss.

Swenson's great head drifted to the left. “Someone else, that's right.”

“Rebecca told me that you spoke to Nellie Grimes,” I said.

Swenson returned the mask to his lips, sucked in a long breath, then let it drop unceremoniously from his mouth. “It wasn't her.”

“Then who was it?”

Swenson wagged his head wearily. “I don't know.” He brought the oxygen mask to his mouth again, took in a long, noisy breath, and let it fall back into his lap.

I could feel a tidal fury sweep over me as I imagined him at that phone, still working feverishly to carry out his escape. It was a rage which Swenson could see in its full, thrusting hatred, and it seemed to press me back roughly, like a violent burst of wind.

“You're looking for him, aren't you?” he asked.

I stared at him icily, but did not speak.

“You want to kill him for what he did that day,” Swenson said. He seemed neither shocked nor outraged by the truth he'd come upon. By then, no doubt, he'd slogged though a world of death. His only word was one of caution.

“There'll be more to do after that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He lifted the mask to his face, leaned into it, and took in a long, rattling breath. “Someone else,” he said when the mask lowered again, “like you've already said.”

“Someone else, yes,” I asked. “Someone waiting for him at an airport or a bus station, or just on a corner, waiting for him to pull up in the car.”

Swenson shook his head slowly, ponderously, as if there were heavy weights inside his head. “No,” he said. “Someone who was already with him. Someone in the house.” He looked at me intently. “Someone helping him.”

I stared at him, astonished. “Helping him?” I whispered. “Helping him kill us?”

Swenson nodded. “We followed your father's tracks down into the basement,” he said. “They were very bloody, and they went all the way down to the third step.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But that was as far as they ever went,” Swenson added laboriously, wheezing loudly now. “The only tracks on the basement floor were the little ones your mother made through those pools of water that had seeped in from the rain.”

I nodded, waiting, as I knew I must, for the thing that didn't fit.

“But if your father had fired at your mother from the third step,” Swenson added, “then he would have riddled the box she'd hid behind.” His head shifted back and forth, as if with the weight of what he knew. “But that box wasn't hit at all,” he added. He brought the mask to his face and sucked in a long, mighty breath. “It hadn't been moved, either,” he added as he lowered it slightly, “because if someone had moved it, it would have left a smear of blood.” He looked at me pointedly as he returned the mask to his mouth, took a long, heavy breath, then lowered it again. “Someone walked around that box and shot your mother,” he began again, his voice high and tremulous now, breaking with the effort these last words had cost him. “Maybe brought her back up the stairs, too,” he added, “because there were no tracks from your father's shoes that went below that third step.”

“Did you tell Rebecca this?”

He nodded.

“What did she say?”

“She said he must have changed before he went downstairs,” Swenson answered.

“Is that possible?”

“Well, we found his bloody shoes and clothes in the bathroom upstairs,” Swenson said. “And there was that small amount of time between the second shot and the last one.”

“Was that long enough for him to have changed his clothes, then walked down to the basement and killed my mother?” I asked.

Swenson looked at me solemnly. “Rebecca thought so.”

“Do you?”

For a moment, he seemed to review the whole terrible choreography of my family's murder, his head lifting slightly, as the mask dropped into his lap.

“No,” he said finally, “I think there was some …”

A quick breath left him, and he leaned back into the pillows, brought the plastic mask to his mouth, and drew in a tortured, wracking breath. “Someone else,” he said, on what seemed like his final breath, the mask returning quickly to his mouth, his eyes peering motionlessly over its rounded, plastic rim, watching me, animal-like, as if his green, amphibian eyes were poised just above the surface of a murky, pool.

Someone else.

As I drove back toward my hotel room that afternoon, I thought of nothing but those words. I remembered that Nellie Grimes had used the same words in her interview with Swenson. She had insisted on my father's innocence, then ascribed the blame simply and mysteriously to “someone else.”

My lips parted in the only answer I could offer at the time. “The other woman,” I whispered.

But who?

It was nearly night when I arrived back at the hotel. As I headed across its dank, cluttered lobby, the little bald desk clerk who'd regarded me so suspiciously over my long stay unexpectedly motioned me toward the reception desk.

“There's a package for you,” he said, then reached beneath the desk and handed me a small, rectangular box.

It had been sent first to my house in Old Salsbury, then to the offices of Simpson and Lowe, and finally forwarded to me here. For a single, surreal instant, I sensed that it had come from my father, some macabre remembrance he'd sent to mock and torment me, a blood-encrusted strand, perhaps, of my mother's hair. I tucked the package quickly under my arm, took the stairs up to my third-floor room, and tossed it, unopened, on the bed.

It lay there for a long time while I sat beside the window, staring out at the deserted street, still trying to reason out the identity of the unknown woman who, in the end, had helped my father destroy not only one, but both my families. Step by step, I once again walked the paces of my father's crime, following the bloody tracks Swenson had followed, a trail that led from Jamie's room to Laura's, and finally down the basement stairs to where two women had waited for him, one crouched behind a cardboard box, the other standing over her, waiting in an awesome silence for the shotgun to be passed.

I drew my eyes away from the window and let them come to rest on the small, brown box that had arrived at my hotel that day. I went to the bed, picked it up, and began to open it slowly, ritualistically, as if I were uncovering a treasure of vast renown, some relic from an ancient faith.

It was no such awesome thing, of course. It was nothing more than Rebecca's book.

I stared at it, disappointed, exhausted, barely engaged enough to keep my eyes upon it. Still, it had its own dark allure. The jacket was rather melodramatically illustrated with the face of a sinister-looking paternal figure, but the title seemed as cool and academic as its author:
THESE MEN: Studies in Family Murder,
by Rebecca Soltero.

For the rest of the night, I sat at the window of my room and read Rebecca's study of “these men.” One by one, she explored and exposed them, moving through those elements of character and background which united them, closing in on that single element which joined them together in a dark, exclusive brotherhood, the fact that they were, above all, deeply romantic men. So much so, that each of them had found a kind of talisman, an emblem for his extreme and irreducible yearning. “Creatures of a visceral male romanticism,” Rebecca wrote, “each of these men had found a symbol for what was missing in his life.”

True to her method, she then ticked these emblems off.

Crude and childish, they would normally have seemed no more than the physical representations of men who had become locked in boyish fantasies. But under Rebecca's transforming eye, they took on an occult and totemic symbolism: Fuller's baseball bat, Parks's simple curl, Townsend's foreign stamps, Stringer's safari hat, and last, as Rebecca described them, “the sleek racing bikes of William Patrick Farris.”

“By clinging to these symbols,” Rebecca wrote, “these men made one last effort to control a level of violent romantic despair which women almost never reach.”

With the exception of my father, each of them had even gone so far as to take these totemic objects with them in their efforts to escape. Fuller had thrown the bloody bat into the back seat of his car; Stringer had worn his safari hat onto the plane he'd hoped to take to Africa; Townsend had stuffed his briefcase full of foreign stamps beneath the seat he'd purchased on an eastbound train; and Herbert Parks, though trying to disguise himself in other ways, had stubbornly maintained his enigmatic curl.

The tenacious hold of these symbols upon the imaginations of the men she'd studied led Rebecca unerringly to the final conclusion of her book:

In the minds of these men, the most immediate need became the elimination of whatever it was that blocked their way to a mythically romantic life. That is to say, their families. Essentially, they could not bear the normal limits of a life lived communally, domestically, and grounded in the sanctity of enduring human relations. Instead, they yearned for a life based, as it were, on male orgasmic principles, one which rose toward thrilling, yet infinitely renewable, heights of romantic trial and achievement. In time, they came to hold any other form of life in what can only be described as a murderous contempt.

But even as I read this final passage, I wondered if it could actually be applied to my father. For where, in all the descriptions of vast romantic torment which dotted Rebecca's book, was the man who'd puttered with a bicycle in the basement and played Chinese checkers with a little girl, and who'd said of these simple, normal, intensely humble things, “This is all I want.”

Once more, I read the section of Rebecca's book which dealt with my father. She'd written elegantly and well of my family's life, and even given my father an exalted place among her other subjects by suggesting that his particular totem, the Rodger and Windsor bikes, provided the most fitting symbol for the destructive male romanticism she had studied and at last condemned, “a thing of high mobility and speed, self-propelled and guided, capable of supporting only one lone rider at a time.”

Only one?

Then to whom had he passed the shotgun that rainy afternoon?

Once more I imagined the “someone else” with whom he might have joined in such murderous conspiracy, but even here, I found that there was still something missing, something that didn't fit.

And so, at last, I returned to the small stack of crime-scene photographs Rebecca had sent to me. Slowly, one by one, as the early morning light built outside my hotel window, I peered at each picture, my mother's body behind the floral curtains, her blood-encrusted house shoes on the floor beside her bed; Jamie, faceless, beneath the wide window, his biology book opened to the picture of a gutted frog; Laura, her body wrapped in a white terry-cloth robe, her bare feet stretched toward the camera as if trying to block its view.

By the time I'd returned the last of the pictures to the envelope that had contained them, I still was no closer to knowing if Rebecca had been right about my father. At least for me, she had not yet solved the mystery of his murderousness, but she had doubtless offered the only clue as to where and how it might be solved.

FIFTEEN