Skunk Hunt (41 page)

Five minutes later we were outside. Kendle
had said nothing within that time frame except, "Let's get the fuck
out of here," thereby resting my case. She was pretty stupefied by
Jeremy's arrival. He was acting like a blind man, frequently laying
his hand on her breast to make sure it was really her. He only
stopped when she threatened to break his jaw.

"And you would deserve it, Doubletalk," I
emphasized.

"Doubletalk?" Kendle said. "That's Jeremy's
nickname? You really grew up calling your brother that?"

Jeremy dropped his face into abject misery,
demonstrating the horrid childhood he had been subjected to. I
could only hope his adulthood was equally rotten. But whatever
sympathy he had won from Kendle (precious little, was my guess) was
tossed out the window when she asked him how he had found her.

"GPS, of course," he said.

"You bugged my van!"

"Sure."

He said this with such vacant innocence that
Kendle immediately saw demanding an explanation would be hopeless.
People were bugging each other left and right. The electronic
version was the civilized extension. I would have laughed if I
hadn't been reeling. I couldn't say if I found Kendle repulsive or
merely disgusting. That she had something going on with my brother
was not beyond belief, but certainly beyond palpability. I felt the
little I'd had for breakfast stirring in jealous rage, forming a
nice greasy ball that would be useful if I barfed. We all want what
someone else has. I had been struggling to find a way to get Kendle
out of my hair, and now that Jeremy was running a hand through her
oily locks I wanted proof of her fidelity—evidence which obviously
wasn't coming my way. More important was the question of how long
they had been a couple, and what kind of conspiracy they had been
brewing between them. They had acted like strangers at the
abandoned farmhouse. Had that been their first meeting? Had they
exchanged phone numbers without my noticing? This display of
familiarity on Jeremy's part suggested they had known each other
for some time. On the other hand, Yvonne had wasted no time
bringing me to sack.

Kendle was going through a change of life
experience. She had had done to her what she had done to others,
all without consent. She was melting from overheated poetic
justice, and the oven was set a shade too high. Her face and
breasts sagged in premature old age. Her expression of superiority
slid off into a godawful mess. That Jeremy had planted a tracker on
her van was an outrageous betrayal of trust, justice, and every
other holy icon in her cupboard. Americans believe in the sanctity
of secrets, the primary one being that nobody should have the right
to know where you are except when you want them to. Probably 90% of
Kendle's self-esteem was derived from violating the privacy of
others, the natural consequence of being the exception to the rule.
The remaining 10% was background noise, the minimal allotment of
self-esteem needed to perform the banal script of staying alive.
Jeremy had co-opted her reason for existence. It was sort of like
copyright infringement.

"Jesus, Yvonne, don't take it so hard," said
Jeremy, strangely like a father asking his daughter not to lose her
innocence by basing her world view on appearances alone. "It's not
like we've got anything to hide from each other."

Kendle shot me a visual plea which wasn't too
hard to interpret. I wasn't exactly sympathetic, seeing as she had
been playing two brothers off one another. Hell, maybe Todd too,
although I suspected in some things he was more discriminating.
This was a first impression, of course, and considering how I had
faired with the rest of my family, it wasn't worth much.

The chemistry was skewed. Yvonne's reaction
was not entirely due to the tracking business. I got the impression
that she felt my brother had dropped out of character, that he
wasn't playing his assigned role, and she didn't know how to
redress the scene to match the rest of the play, a cross between
Hamlet and Charlie's Aunt. I thought back on Jeremy's alternating
personae, the oafish slob and streamlined geek. Should I include
forger in the equation? Had he written the letters that had started
all of this?

"Cm'on, Babs, give me a hug, at least."
Jeremy held out his arms, leaving him wide open for a gut shot.
Kendle couldn't pass up the opportunity. I grinned maliciously as
Jeremy doubled over without enough wind for an 'oof!' I found
myself wondering if this should be categorized as police brutality
or domestic violence. Probably a bit of both.

"So what's going on?" I said, taking
advantage of my brother's temporary absence from the
conversation.

"Your brother here..." Kendle began.

"Yes?"

"He's nothing more than a rag-ass crook."

"Well, yeah," I said, shrugging off the
obvious.

"He told me he knew where the Brinks money
was...and he's been stringing me along ever since."

I noticed her posture improving. She was
getting a grip on herself. I realized I was slumping and tried to
stand straight.

"So now we know," I said.

She gauged me narrowly.

"You figured it out for yourself," I
continued. "Skunk somehow got the money away from the Congreve
brothers—
all
of it—and started
a second family."

"In the same town?" said Kendle, giving me
the ol' Devil's Advocate evil eye.

"He couldn't risk living with them. He would
have stuck out like a sore thumb on River Road. But why go to the
trouble of having a second family if it's not close by? There
wasn't much chance of them running into each other. River Road
shops at the mall. The people I grew up with bought their beer and
chips from the local Korean store. I don't know about where the
rich go for entertainment. Maybe they watch the groundskeepers mow
the lawn." I watched Jeremy slowly rise from the parking lot
tarmac, where he had been nursing his stomach. "Doubletalk was the
weak link. He must have remembered where he spent his first six
years. He had to have wondered why they dumped him on us, and what
he missed out on."

"Oof," said Jeremy.

"And I can guess why they moved him to
our house," I continued, on a roll. "If he treated Todd the same
way he treated me and Sweet Tooth, the
other
mother probably wanted him out. Skunk must
have thought a lot of her, letting her dump Doubletalk on us like
that. Maybe that's why my mother killed herself."

Jeremy recovered enough wind for a brief
protest. "Hold on!"

"I don't mean she killed herself because of
you," I said. I would have treated the topic more seriously if I
had known my mother better. I was eight when she chose luggage-free
emigration to the sky. I guess my afterimage of her was vague. All
young boys think about is how to dodge their mothers, and don't
spend much time thinking about them as people. I didn't have enough
memory to hang a coat on.

After waiting for me to elaborate, Yvonne
said, "I think he means your mother killed herself because she
couldn't stand Skunk giving all that money to someone he really
loved."

"The
other
mother?" Jeremy was frowning
mightily.

"Don't dwell on it," Yvonne said, for some
reason bunching her fist.

"Oh, right," said Jeremy. Then his face
twisted leerfully. "You've met Todd? Where? When?"

"I'll tell you later," Yvonne Kendle said
gruffly.

"Bet that knocked the beans off your plate,"
he laughed. "Is he still as much a retard as when we were kids?
Doubletwits!"

"Hey, who was
my
mother? Why would Todd be the golden child
unless..." I gasped. Had I been kicked out of Heaven?

"You can't handle the truth," said my
sub-moronic brother, using his precious wind to quote a movie
trailer.

"Try me."

"Well, to tell you the truth...I don't know."
Jeremy tried on a sheepish look. On him it looked like a goat.
"Hell, Mute, I can't remember what I had for lunch let alone way
back then."

"You didn't have lunch," Kendle reminded him.
"That's why you didn't puke when I gutted you."

She said this with the malevolent
relish of a hunter dressing her kill. Showing due caution, Jeremy
retreated a few steps. He looked at me. "Don't dump on me. It
was
her
idea to play along
after we got the letters."

"We've reached the finger pointing stage?" I
said. It seemed a little premature. The blame game doesn't usually
begin until you know what the object of blame is being blamed for.
But seeing as Yvonne Kendle wasn't exactly blameless about a number
of things, I was already primed to believe him. "None of this makes
sense. If you're sure about where the Brinks money went, why stir
things up?"

Jeremy shifted from numbnuts to numbnoggin. I
gave him a ruminating look. Or maybe I looked like a ruminant.

"So you grew up in the West End?" I demanded,
righteously indignant.

"I told you I don't remember much about it,"
said Jeremy.

"And Todd is living in that big house
on Ferncrest...with Mr. and Mrs.
Neerson
?"

"Give me a break." Jeremy hung his head. "I
haven't been there in over twenty years. Right…?" He glanced at
Yvonne, as though confirming his own life history. "For all I know,
he lives by himself. Perfect setup. He can party whenever he
wants."

He was summoning an image of party after
party, and he had not been invited to any of them. Could my twin
brother be my polar opposite? I could not remember the last time I
had been to a party. I somehow missed the office Christmas shebang
at the Science Museum. I didn't know if I was supposed to wait to
be invited, or if I was just supposed to show up, so I skipped
it.

"What if there's a will?" Jeremy
continued.

"There is a will," I said. "Flint has it
right now. Someone named Benjamin Neerson is leaving everything to
his wife and kids. The address named in the will is the Ferncrest
house."

Yvonne was even more perturbed than my
brother by this news. "You know some Neerson guy?"

"Todd, yeah. But…" Jeremy shrugged.

"Even if there isn't a will," Yvonne
continued a little breathlessly, "he should get his share."

This little sentence revealed a host of lies.
Yvonne must have realized this, because she suddenly turned away.
If she was concerned with Jeremy's portion, that could only mean it
was to her benefit. And if it was to her benefit, she wasn't all
that concerned with returning the loot to its proper owners.

"Are you really a cop?" I demanded.

"She's a security guard at Powhatan State
Prison," said Jeremy defensively. "That's close enough."

"Close enough to what?" I said. "You gave me
that story about losing your job if you didn't lose—"

"Right," Kendle said, cutting me off at
'weight'—a sore topic. "I work for the Department of Corrections,
all right? I deal with cops all the time." She paused. "Okay, the
weight part is true."

"How did you find out there was coke on the
money we got at the farm? How did you trace it back to
Whats-itz-land?"

"East Timor," she said. "I have friends on
the force," she added, sounding like a knight out of Star Wars. She
was a regular Opie One Canapé.

"Did you give your 'friends' the whole fifty
thousand, or just a sample bill?" I asked.

She didn't answer. I gave Jeremy my deadliest
glare, which should have at least induced a headache. Instead, my
own head began to hurt. Jeremy had spent time at Powhatan, which
was apparently where these two clowns had met. I had slept with a
jailbird's lover, a jailbird who happened to be my brother, or
half-brother, or maybe some drunken stork had dumped one or both of
us in the wrong tree. My identity was fading fast. You might think
I'm putting improper emphasis on the paper trail. An antique can
still be beautiful without a trace of provenance. But try telling
that to the guy who totes a treasured family heirloom to the
Roadshow, and who is told on national television that his
diamond-studded trunk is junk. In this case, junk DNA. My
bloodstream rattled with discarded cans, broken bedsprings and
other assorted refuse.

"I deal with morons all the time," I fumed.
"That doesn't mean I'm one of them."

It was my way of saying a prison guard was as
much of a cop as the man on the moon, but I regretted the tone,
which placed me in the very group I was trashing. I was going to
make amends with something more elevated, when I was stopped by the
sour looks Jeremy and Yvonne were giving me. They assumed I was
talking about them, which made sense, seeing as they were
morons.

"Impersonating a cop is a big-time felony," I
said, trying to assert the appearance of intelligent life within my
skull. Maybe if I scared them they would treat me with more
respect. I backed away when Kendle looked ready to slug me.
Actually, Jeremy's fist was balled, too, but to get to me he had to
pass close to her, and he wasn't ready for that.

"I showed you my ID," Kendle said, reaching
into her pocket and pulling out a plastic ID with an irresistibly
unflattering photograph under the laminate. "I can't help it if you
can't read."

I leaned forward for a closer look. It was a
Department of Corrections ID. "That's not—"

"What?" Kendle said sharply, cutting me
short.

This wasn't the simple business card she had
shown me at the Science Museum. She probably had had a gross
printed up at the Office Depot just to impress schmucks like
me.

"So you sent those letters to me and Sweet
Tooth, and pretended to get one yourself," I continued when all
they could offer was threatening growls. "You got us all stirred up
for no good reason. We never knew where the money was, and now we
know it's gone. If you want me to help pay for a lawyer to contest
a will, you're out of luck." I looked at Yvonne. "You've seen where
I work. I make just enough to get by, and that's it." For good
measure, I added: "I don't like the way you've made it look like
Skunk has come back from the dead. You scared Sweet Tooth almost to
death. Cm'on," I turned to Jeremy. "'Fess up!"