One of Us (25 page)

“She’s a psychopath. They don’t conduct their lives according to the same moral codes and standards of behavior that the rest of us do,” I explain. “Their social interactions are nothing more than plans to outmaneuver others in order to get what they want. They have no guilt. No remorse. No conscience. What seems a crime to us is an act of expediency or entitlement to them.”

“A problem solved.”

“In a sense, yes.”

Rafe turns off the stove and makes himself another drink.

“Do you think she was planning to kill Marcella Greger, though, or it just happened?” I ask him. “The sculpture she hit her with was a weapon of opportunity.”

“A can of gasoline and a dose of penicillin aren’t exactly things you carry around with you,” he replies. “Those murders were premeditated.”

“But I’m sure they had special meaning to her. There was a reason she decided to set her nanny on fire and poisoned a friend. I just can’t see her shooting someone. It may sound strange, but I think she’d consider it to be tacky.”

He grabs two plates from a stack on the counter and sets them on the table, then leaves the kitchen. He returns carrying two envelopes and a folder.

He hands me one of the envelopes.

“What’s this?”

“Marcella Greger’s niece brought this to me at the police station. Marcella didn’t have much, but she did have a will, and the lawyer who drew it up for her had this letter and instructions to give it to her niece when she died.”

I take out a four-page handwritten letter.

“Don’t bother reading any of that,” Rafe tells me. “Get to the last paragraph.”

“‘I’m enclosing a copy of a letter from my cousin, Anna, I found in her belongings,’” I read out loud. “‘The original is in my lockbox at the UPS store. I’m not as young as I used to be, plus accidents happen. If
you’re reading this it means I’m dead and I didn’t have time to tell anyone about this.’”

He hands me the other envelope. Inside is a single piece of paper.

On May 24, 1974, Gwendolyn Dawes caused the death of her one-week-old infant, Scarlet Dawes. I knew of a man who had a daughter of the same age he wasn’t able to care for and agreed to switch the babies.

It’s signed by Anna Greger.

“Gwendolyn Dawes killed her baby? That can’t be true. What about Scarlet?”

“Look at the date,” Rafe says.

It’s the day before Mom killed Molly.

“Sit down, Danno.”

My head is whirling. I have all the pieces; I just can’t fit them together.

“I really struggled with this. I thought about burying all of it and not telling you anything. No good can come of it. Nothing from the past can be changed. There’s no way to get any justice in the future—”

“What are you talking about?” I interrupt him. “What’s going on?”

“Listen to me carefully. When I came back from Vietnam, I found myself in some truly fucked-up way missing it.”

“You said Vietnam was like being in hell.”

“It was. That’s what I didn’t understand. I was back home. I was a civilian again. That’s what I wanted, but I felt like a stranger. I didn’t belong anymore. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a fact.

“I couldn’t hate the war the way protestors did, and I was the one who should’ve hated it because I was the one who was there, but that’s exactly why I couldn’t hate it as much as they did. They didn’t know what they were talking about. They were free to imagine whatever they wanted, but it wasn’t abstract to me. It was personal. The deepest emotions I would ever feel in my entire life I felt in Nam; not between some woman’s legs, not winning a championship football game, not teaching my child how to ride a bike, not getting a promotion at work, but in a
jungle on the other side of the world killing people who had never done a damn thing to me.”

People who were just like you, I think silently to myself, remembering our talk from long ago.

He sits down across the table from me and fixes me with his piercing stare.

“It may have been the worst thing that would ever happen to me, but it was also the most significant.”

He hands me a folder with a state police seal on the front.

“We were able to lift some DNA from the lipstick smudge on the glass,” he explains. “I called in a big favor and was able to get a rush job through the state crime lab.”

“Is it hers?”

“I don’t know that for sure since I didn’t have a sample from her to compare it to so I compared it to someone else’s.”

“What good does that do? Especially when you don’t know it’s hers to begin with?”

“We both know it’s hers,” he says with a dark finality.

I open it and study the results of the lab test.

“You’ve seen enough of these reports. You know what this means?” he asks me.

“It’s not enough for a match but the two subjects are related. A child? A sibling? We know she has a brother.”

“Yeah, she does have a brother, but I didn’t run this against Wesley Dawes’ DNA,” he says. “I ran it against yours.”

twenty-four

D
ON’T TELL HER, RAFE
insisted, but I convinced him that she probably already knows. This could be why she’s shown an interest in me and why she put that note in Tommy’s mailbox. It seems like something she would do. She loves to mess with people’s minds. It’s the same reason she drew the hanging man in Marcella Greger’s bathroom.

He still didn’t want me to talk to her, to let her know I know, but I told him I have to confront her. She’s my sister, I explained, but quickly added that I have no delusions about a future with her. I’m not going into this meeting with sentimental hopes of a tearful reunion, that we’ll throw our arms around each other and erase the past.

I know who and what she is and the impossibility of changing either. She has no moral boundaries and there’s no pill to cure this. No method of rehabilitation. No school of psychotherapy that can explain or fix her. Not even a fairy tale could provide a happy ending to our story. Unlike Wendy tending to Peter Pan’s shadow, no one can sew a conscience back on.

He agreed to let me talk to her but only if we met in a public place.

I suggested a drink at the Red Rabbit to her almost as a joke. She agreed.

I’m waiting at a scarred wooden table in a dark corner nursing a beer
trying to silence my mind but having no luck. Rage has pushed aside all other emotions including the grieving I will need to do over what my mother and Tommy and I have endured.

My rage is a brilliant red and sits perched on my shoulder, not square in the middle of my back the way Rafe’s hate once did. It burns hot against my cheek and casts a golden ruby glow over everything I see. It’s not a burden like hate; on the contrary, its righteous urgency makes me feel weightless.

In my work I’ve encountered every level of depravity, viciousness, and selfishness, but I’ve never come across anything as heinous as what my father has done.

My father conspired with an old girlfriend to take a child from her mother and a sister from her brother and sent his mentally ill wife to jail for a horrendous crime she didn’t commit. I recite the words calmly in my head. I feel like standing up in these booze-flavored shadows and saying them out loud, just as calmly, to the half-dozen raggedy men tossing back shots and sucking down beer chasers.

They wouldn’t be shocked. They’d take it all in stride. One more day in a company town.

Why did he do it? For what? Money? He certainly doesn’t live like a man who took a payoff for selling a baby and keeping his mouth shut for Walker Dawes.

I realize now when Walker shook my hand the other day he wasn’t seeing just the great-great-grandson of Prosperity McNab, but the brother of the girl he raised as his own daughter.

Scarlet just found out. Rafe and I are fairly certain of this. Marcella knew. It’s why Scarlet came back. To talk to her, to confront her, to silence her: it all finally makes sense.

Walker knows the beast he has lived with all his life, the monster he unwittingly brought into his home thinking she was an innocent stolen babe, is finally going to turn her reptilian gaze on him.

No wonder he was curious about me. He was evaluating our genes.

The door opens and Scarlet stands in silhouette under the outside light against a backdrop of black sky swirling with snowflakes.

Her entrance causes no stir. The men glance then go back to their
methodical drinking. Boss’s daughter. One more player in a company town.

She takes her time crossing the room, pausing to look at the old photos of miners and local landmarks on the walls and propped behind the bar. She orders a drink and brings it with her.

I study her face: the heart shape of it, the slightly upturned nose, the wide-set eyes; it’s my mother’s face slightly modified. I never noticed the resemblance before, but I wasn’t looking for it. Now I can’t see anything else.

She pulls out a chair for her mink then one for herself.

“How did it go the other night?” she asks me. “Did you get some?”

“How much do you know?”

“About your sex life? Nothing. But it can’t be too good if you were going after that.”

“Do you know who you are or do you only know who you aren’t?”

This question gives her pause.

She drinks while staring at me but doesn’t answer.

“The identity theft you were talking about at Chappy’s,” I go on. “Marcella Greger knew about it, too. It’s why you killed her.”

She continues staring at me. There’s nothing in her eyes. They’re as flat as the glass ones stuffed into Tommy’s deer head.

“What do you know?” she finally asks.

“I know you’re my sister.”

Her gaze doesn’t waver, but I can tell she’s been mentally slapped.

I don’t hurry her. I sit across the table and wait for her to decide what her next move should be. Rage burns hotly and contentedly beside me. I’m sure at this point my skin has melted from my bones and nothing is left but one of the charred skeletons from my dream.

If she reaches out and touches me, I will collapse into a pile of ash.

“I like it,” she finally announces. “I love it, actually. Because of me the entire Dawes fortune is going to end up in the hands of Prosperity McNab’s great-great-granddaughter. Talk about revenge. Talk about poetic justice.”

She smiles and takes a sip of her drink.

“That’s it? That’s your reaction? That’s all you’ve got to say? All you can think about is money?”

My outburst surprises her. It surprises me, too. I had planned to conduct this conversation without passing judgment or displaying emotion like I would any clinical interview with a psychopath.

I try to get my composure back.

“What about Wesley?” I ask. “And his children? Won’t they inherit, too?”

Would she be capable of killing an entire family? I wonder. How would she do it? It would have to involve explosives.

“I guess we can share,” she says, not sounding pleased with the idea. “I’m not unreasonable.”

“Then you have no intention of going public? Of letting the world know what happened?”

“Is that why you got upset? Is that why you’re all mad and mopey?”

She smiles at me again.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t let anyone else know. Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not embarrassed or appalled. I don’t care that my real family is white trash. I’m thrilled to find out that you’re my big brother.”

I watch and listen in amazement, knowing there’s nothing I can do or say that can make her understand that there’s something terribly wrong with her. She can’t feel empathy or compassion. Half the time she doesn’t realize she’s hurting people and the other half she doesn’t care.

“And there isn’t anyone else who knows,” she continues. “Believe me, Gwen isn’t going to say anything, and Walker doesn’t know—”

“He doesn’t know?” I interrupt her. “How is that possible?”

The man I met knows everything that goes on in his home and business. There’s no way anyone, even his wife, could keep something this big hidden from him. Scarlet should realize this, but her narcissism would make her prone to missing details about others.

“Trust me, he doesn’t know. That just leaves you and me. You didn’t tell Candy Cop, did you?”

“No.”

I think about Wade’s insistence that Rafe is in danger. Could the little dog be onto something?

“What about Mom?” she says.

Hearing her call my mom “Mom” makes my stomach lurch. There’s no affection or even regard attached to the word. She makes it sound indecent.

“What about her?”

“I’m kind of disappointed in her. How does a woman let someone steal her baby? And then when the other baby was found, how could she have believed it was hers? Don’t good mothers have some kind of intuition, some kind of maternal tracking device? Where was her due diligence?”

“Mom always knew the dead baby wasn’t her baby,” I say in Mom’s defense, “but no one believed her. Except for her father. Even I didn’t believe her. I thought she did it.”

When I look at Scarlet again, I still see pieces of my mom, but trapped in something cold and hard like her reflection seen in shards of broken glass.

“I suppose you think we should tell Mom. She’s spent all this time wondering what happened to me and wondering who that dead baby was in her backyard.”

“No,” I say forcefully. “No, she shouldn’t know. Her mental health is too fragile. It could cause her to have a psychotic break or it might not register at all. Nothing good could come of it.”

I don’t want Scarlet anywhere near my mother, but thinking about my love for Mom reminds me of something.

“You’ve forgotten someone. There’s someone else who knows.”

Scarlet gives me her full attention.

In my head I picture the first Walker Dawes standing near the gallows nodding his head to the executioner.

So this is how it feels.

“Our dad knows,” I tell her.

“Anna’s boyfriend,” she says slowly in the same tone of eerie giddiness she used when talking about Moira’s red shoes.

She finishes her drink, gives me one more stunning, empty smile, and stands to go.

“I’m sorry, Danny, but this is a lot to take in. I’m going, but I have one more question for you. What were you hoping to get out of all of this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you tell me?”

“If you had found out first would you have told me?”

“Good question. Assuming I hadn’t run into you the way I did and I didn’t know you at all? Would I have sought you out or any member of our family? Probably not. I’m only being kind. I’m only thinking of all of you. I think we can both agree you’d probably be much better off not knowing.”

She slips into the glossy heavy black fur.

“One more thing,” she says. “What’s my name?”

I conquered my worst fear today only to come face to face with a brand-new one.

“Molly,” I tell her. “You’re Molly Doyle.”

I FIND TOMMY DOZING
in his favorite chair with a book in his lap when I arrive back at his house. I go into the kitchen and pour milk into the battered saucepan that never leaves his stovetop.

“There he is. Our hero,” he says to me upon waking.

“Don’t call me that. I didn’t do anything heroic. I went into a coal mine, something you did almost every day for forty years.”

“But you were afraid of the mines,” he says. “You put aside that fear to help someone else. That’s bravery. That makes you a hero.”

One of his coughing spells wracks his body. He reaches for his empty coffee can and spits.

“But I want you to know there’s no shame in being afraid of the mines,” he says once he settles back into his chair. “I never knew a man worked in them who wasn’t. Every shift you think, ‘This might be my last glimpse of the sky, my last breath of fresh air,’ but you put those thoughts aside and concentrate on your job.

“I had a fellow work with me, a bolter. The most dangerous job in the mines. He went in and secured the roof for the rest of us. Young, strong, fearless as they come. One bright sunny Sunday afternoon he slipped and fell down his basement stairs. Broke his neck and died.

“Everyone took his death very hard. It seemed like a slap in the face, some kind of joke. He survived all the danger around him only to die in an almost silly way.”

He clasps his big, scarred, knotty hands together over the spine of his book.

“The randomness of life. Hard workers end up in the poorhouse while the lazy make fortunes. Health nuts drop dead of heart attacks in their forties while someone like me lives into his nineties. Terrible people have good things happen to them and decent people have awful things happen to them. There are no guarantees. No foolproof ways to protect ourselves from anything. If you stop to think about it too much, you’ll go mad.”

I wait for him to say more.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Don’t you have some words of wisdom to add?”

“No. I just wanted to tell you not to think about it too much.”

I shake my head at him.

“Come into the kitchen with me.”

“I’m not going to be around that much longer,” he says while raising himself out of his chair with his cane.

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s a fact you’re going to have to face. Don’t feel bad about it. I’ve lived much longer than I had a right to.”

He follows me and takes a seat at the table.

“My only regret is that I never made it to Ireland.”

“Put it on your bucket list.”

He laughs.

“I’m too old for a bucket list. The only list I have is the list of instructions for my funeral.”

“What does it say?”

“Blue suit.”

I set a cup of hot chocolate in front of my chair and a half cup of hot milk in front of him. I pour in a little maple syrup and give him his bottle of Jameson.

“What’s wrong, Danny? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I sit down and try to steady my voice.

“Grandpa,” I begin, “tonight I’ve got a story to tell you.”