Seven Days Dead (38 page)

“But—” She has questions, which are pressing, but Émile has other ground that he feels is best to hoe first, so jumps back in when she’s not quick to formulate what’s confusing to her.

“Sandra asked a moment ago how Mrs. Matheson got the Reverend Lescavage onto the ridges. That baffled me also, and held up my investigation, even though I was suspicious of her from the get-go. In a way, she wanted to keep it to herself, not tell me, and if a lawyer was in the room, she wouldn’t have. Fortunately, she has few skills as a criminal and is even more inexperienced at being accused. She still hasn’t had the sense to lawyer up. ‘Shysters,’ she calls them. Anyway, I, too, couldn’t imagine that she dumped him in a truck, then dragged him through the wind and the rain over that rough terrain to where he died. She finally let it out because she was proud of herself. She buffaloed him.”

“She what?” Maddy asks.

“Manipulated him. She knew how Orrock controlled him, so she did the same. He’d lost his faith, and either for that reason or for some other, he hated it when others did well for themselves preaching about faith. Or, let’s say, the potential to fly based on their faith. He
especially
hated people preaching faith when he knew they were fakes. He spent his life preaching faith, with honesty, then lost it. Still, it was hard to lose it, and he took that seriously, too. He was offended that an outright charlatan might preach about faith. He felt diminished by that. She knew that the cult was going up to the ridge in the storm. They always did, and she had inside information. She did business with them. She induced the reverend to come out with her to spy on them. He was obsessed with the cult. He’d like nothing better than to make fun of them in his next sermon, as he often did. As well, he was feeling miserable, he’d just killed a man, he was not in his best mind, I suppose, so off he went. Mrs. Matheson said that the pastor was a pushover, always had been, and partly she counted on that. She also told him she had her eye on a tree she wanted to transplant, and needed his help. She could only do it in the dark since it was on public property. That allowed her to take along a shovel. He was thoroughly unsuspecting. Then up there, she pulled out a dulse-harvesting knife and made him dig his own grave. While digging, he told her some of the things I just told you. Some things he’d already related. Trouble is, he hit rock. He was arguing with her, apparently, saying that a shallow grave disrespected his corpse. That animals might dig him up and she’d be caught. All that became moot when he hit solid rock. The oldest rock on earth, as it happens. She didn’t believe him. In the dark, she couldn’t see. She dropped her guard and checked to see if he couldn’t keep digging and while she was doing that he smashed the spade across her face and ran. He’d had it with being a pushover.”

“Gracious,” Sandra says under her breath. “What some people do for money.”

“Follow the money. I’m not the first detective to adopt the motto.”

“So we’re not related, Roadcap and I. Whew. Am I related to Ora?”

“You’re not getting this, are you?” Émile clarifies for her. “I understand. It’s an avalanche of information and it’s all unexpected. Your father is not your father, so you’re not related to anyone.”

“Who
is
my father? I don’t understand. My mother slept around, too? That’s what I don’t get. Does she know? Mrs. Matheson? Does she know who my father is?”

This is as deep as he wants to go, but he knows he’s going deeper.

“She does,” Émile informs her. He glances at Sandra for a measure of her strength to help him get through this.

Maddy waits. She doesn’t want to ask. She can’t bring herself to speak.

“Your father—” Émile begins, but Maddy interrupts.

“Don’t tell me,” she says. “Oh God, no. Don’t tell me. I know. I think I know.”

“Who?” Sandra asks.

They wait in silence.

“Do you want me to tell you?” Cinq-Mars asks the tall woman, who clasps her elbows to ready herself.

Maddy nods.

“Aaron Roadcap’s father. August James Roadcap.”

Still seated, Émile locks eyes with Maddy. She wavers, and chooses to sit down again. He’s glad of that, as there’s still more to come.

“August James Roadcap is my father,” she says, wanting it confirmed.

“Yes.”

“The man who threw my mother off a cliff.”

“The man who was sentenced to prison for that.”

She nods again, trying to process the news, and rubs her arms. Then she stops, as competing strands of thought twist through her mind. She’s noticed the difference in what they said.

“The man who threw my mother off a cliff,” she repeats in order for him to confirm exactly that.

“No, Maddy. The man convicted of the crime. The man who threw your mother off a cliff…”

Émile hesitates. He needs to know that she’s waiting for this. That she’ll hear it just once and know it at the same instant.

“The man who did that was the man you used to know to be your father. August Roadcap went to jail for the crime, and never revealed that he knew who really did it.”

“Why not?” By asking that question, Émile knows that she’s understood him.

“To protect you. And to protect his son. Although he was not his biological son, either, as we know. He was Orrock’s. Still. He’d been bringing him up as his own, and loved him.”

“He knew? He knew that my father was the real father?”

“I noticed something when I saw the birth dates that Sandra transcribed for her numerology exercises. As Mrs. Matheson related the story to me, your mother was no longer having relations with her husband. Orrock couldn’t have cared less, at least according to Mrs. Matheson—one of his many younger lovers. Apparently, she was something of a beauty in her youth. Orrock did care when he discovered that his wife was pregnant. A different deal. That meant not only that he had been cuckolded, because he knew he hadn’t had relations with her, it also meant that he was not in charge of his wife’s life anymore, that someone had taken advantage of his neglect. He could not stand for that.

When he discovered who it was—Roadcap—he went after that man’s wife. He plotted to seduce her, and with his wealth, he did so. Obviously, that marriage was rocky as well, given that the elder Roadcap was having an affair with another man’s wife. She got pregnant, with Aaron, and that would appear to have been the end of it. His wife was pregnant with another man’s child, now he had knocked up the other guy’s wife. Maybe it could have ended there—he’d exacted his revenge. Trouble is, Orrock was never a man to settle for a tie. He bided his time. When the moment was opportune, after the kids were born, he took revenge upon his wife by throwing her off Seven Days Work. His planning was so meticulous that he was able to implicate her lover—your mother’s, his wife’s, lover—in the crime.”

“Oh, Mom, my poor mom, what a miserable life she must’ve had.”

Suddenly, the whole of her body shakes and with some violence. Sandra slides across to her, stroking her forearm, saying soft words. Émile knows as well that it’s not just this news, but all of it over the previous days, that has done her in.

What comes on quickly is quelled nearly as fast, and when she’s calm again, Émile adds, “She loved you. What you have to appreciate is that she loved you as her child,
and
as the child of a man she cared about dearly. The man she risked everything for. She may have been trapped in a miserable marriage, yet she found love with Roadcap. That man also loved you. He made a deal with the devil and never protested his innocence too strongly. He never accused Orrock. He couldn’t have made that stick anyway. He never admitted guilt, either, but the case against him was circumstantial albeit strong enough, and his defense was weak. His case was unnecessarily weak because he kept certain things to himself to protect both you and Aaron Roadcap. The children.”

“That’s why my father used to walk to Dark Harbour so often when I was young. When … when we were both young.”

“Your lives were in Orrock’s hands, yours and Aaron Roadcap’s, and Orrock made a vow to the elder Roadcap, which he kept in exchange for his silence, to protect the two of you, and raise you well. Grace Matheson tells me that he had a claim to fame, that he kept his promises once he made them. In doing so, Orrock reveled in his revenge. He found it sweet. All part of his control-freak nature, of course, but there you have it.”

Several minutes go by in silence. It’s darkening outside, as this portion of the island is sheltered by the western ridges, so light disappears earlier. Sunrises are brilliant, though. Sandra and Émile come together at one point, briefly embrace, then wait for Maddy to find her balance. She knows everything about her lineage now, but she still needs to talk a few things through. “So my father was Roadcap’s, and his was mine. Different mothers, though, right? Right.” And finally she concludes, “Holy shit,” and sits down again.

Sandra slips away to the bathroom and returns with Kleenex. Maddy dabs her eyes. She attempts to smile, tries to laugh, but nothing works out well. And yet she’s recovering.

“I’ll tell you one thing. If my
former
father thinks he can manipulate me after his death like he did in life, he can think twice. He can damn well bury himself. He can make his own bloody arrangements. I’m no longer involved in the funeral.”

Sandra looks across to Émile as though to seek his counsel, perhaps help change Maddy’s mind, but she sees instead his approval of Maddy’s statement. Sandra relaxes, thinks about it, then agrees. Why not? Let the bugger bury himself.

“What about our nutty professor?” Maddy asks. “Why’d he go over the ledge?”

“He was involved with those who want to fly. He rented the former City Hall for them at his own expense. He was up on the ridge with the other wannabe fliers when Lescavage was killed. He was one of the first two people to come across the body. I imagine that later he suffered what our Reverend Lescavage would have called a ‘loss of faith.’ He realized that he was never going to fly. He wrote an e-mail to a friend, who sent it back to the police here, in which, in cryptic, and I’d say cynical, language, he suggested that he might make one last attempt. To fly. I think he jumped off the cliff to see if an act of pure belief, of pure faith, would work. I’m also thinking that he expected it wouldn’t. In any case, he didn’t fly. Blame gravity. By all accounts, he went straight down. Maybe he lifted off the ground for a second, had a fleeting moment of ecstasy. After that, a nosedive. Part of his loss of faith may have come from his growing knowledge that he was being used.”

“Who by?”

“Mrs. Matheson, for one. The fliers, for another. You see, Matheson was using the cult and their American connections, including Professor DeWitt, to set up a distribution network in the States for island dulse. Control the distribution, you control the trade. They were working to set up their own shadow network and take the business away from your father and Roadcap. Aaron worked for your dad. Your former dad. Orrock arranged for him to be raised in Dark Harbour after his father went to prison and later his mother died. Saw to his education. Gave him work and increasing responsibility. Roadcap didn’t think your father was such a terrible guy. What he’ll think now that the truth is out is another story. He’s in for a shock. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know that Orrock was his biological father. Or what he did.”

“I guess you’ll have to tell him,” Maddy says.

Émile continues to look at her without responding, until finally she wonders why and looks back.

“Or you could,” he suggests.

She snorts a little, but her condition causes a release of mucus, and she has to clean up with Kleenex again.

When Cinq-Mars continues to study her, she protests. “He hates my guts. I’ve always hated his. Now? After this? I just took his fortune away from him. Now he has several million more reasons to despise me.”

“He thinks you’re a tide,” Émile says.

“What?”

“He refers to you as a tide. You flow in every few years, then flow back out again. At least in his mind.”

“A tide? He thinks I’m a tide?”

“A tide.”

She gets his point, that he wants her to think about that, and she does.

“Okay. All right. Why not? I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him that his father didn’t kill my mother. That my father did. But really it was his father who killed her, just not the father he thinks it was and not the one who went to jail. I’ll tell him—” Her voice breaks. “I’ll tell him that my mother and the man he loved as his father, that those two loved each other. The man and woman who loved us both loved each other.” She falters a trifle. “I’ll tell him
that.
”

She says it with a dollop of sarcasm in her voice, but Émile suggests an alternative slant. “Actually, if I were you, that’s exactly where I’d begin. The man he loved as his father was yours, and that man loved your mother so much, he was willing to live out his life in prison, in silence, rather than risk any further damage inflicted upon her child.”

Maddy looks up at him.

“I’m just saying,” he adds, “it might be a starting point.”

Sandra and Émile come together again. Sandra makes a motion to suggest that perhaps it’s time to leave. Maddy, though, is agitated by yet another question.

“Why … why was Aaron Roadcap on the ridge that night?”

Émile shrugs. “He keeps visiting the scene. Where your mother died. Where the man he thought was his father was wrongfully destroyed. But you’re right. That’s not the only reason. He was also there to spy on the cult. He perceived that they were helping his unknown rival in the dulse trade, and he wanted to understand them, perhaps to undermine them, or to discover who they were working with. That’s one thing. He uncovered that Professor DeWitt was part of that bunch. That alone put pressure on DeWitt, and may have contributed to his fall. What also might have contributed to his fall was the little charade he pulled off with Grace Matheson, pretending he didn’t know her when she faked her accident. They put on a real song and dance for whoever might come along. It happened to be me. I’m guessing that he started figuring out why she’d hooked him into that. He went along with it because she told him she was drunk and rammed a parked car, and now needed to account for the damage on her truck. One more drunk-driving charge and she’d lose her license. They didn’t know I was a cop. They just wanted a witness, a dupe. I happened to drive by. Anyway, that’s what Roadcap was doing. Finding out about the components of the group. Just like Lescavage was doing, I suppose.”