Skunk Hunt (57 page)

I was only staring back at them, but Uncle
Vern took it as a sign of rudeness. "What are you gaping at? My
scar? I was in a car accident. Satisfied?"

"I wasn't going to mention it, but now that
you've brought it up, that's one ugly scar."

I didn't intend it as a cosmetic depreciation
of his appearance--only as a dull observation of fact. But I might
have said, "Hey, you're ugly, get over it," and gotten the same
glum glare in return. The Vern-Marvin team was pretty battered, one
getting over a wreck, the other a gunshot wound. Calculating the
time since I had hovered over Skunk's corpse in the morgue, I
wondered if the two had received their injuries around the same
time, even the same day. But I recalled nothing in the news reports
about the owner of Ice Boutique being present during the attempted
robbery. Just a dumb-ass clerk with inordinate luck. On a snowy
day….

"You don't seem upset with me," Marvin
ventured.

"For killing Skunk and...his crony?" I said,
looking at Todd, then at Jeremy. "Well? Aren't either of you upset?
He was our dad. Remember? Well, maybe not Todd. He was outsourced
to Haliburton. It's only chance that we look alike."

To my surprise, they turned not to Marvin,
but to Uncle Vern.

"It wasn't all Marvin's fault," he said
lowly, as if hoping we wouldn't hear.

"And Skunk's crony, as you put it,
was
my
father," Todd added.
"So far as I'm concerned. I couldn't and wouldn't have a father
named 'Winny'."

Whoever's father was whoever, neither Todd
nor Jeremy seemed all that put out that we were in the company of
the man who had snuffed both of them. Maybe they had had time to
grow accustomed to his company in all those secret meetings they
had held in the usual place. If there was any disgruntlement on
their part, it appeared directed at Uncle Vern. Not wanting to be
left out, I joined them in giving the oldest man in the room a hard
glance. It didn't last long. I think I've mentioned that I'm not a
stare-down artist. It was enough, though, to miff Uncle Vern, who
probably thought I was still overly intrigued by his scar.
Fortunately for me, he was distracted by Todd and Jeremy.

"Don't give me that accusing look," he told
them. "I explained it to you a hundred times."

"Yeah, an 'accident'," Todd sneered.

"It
was
an accident."

"Only because you didn't let me in on it."
This came from Marvin, who had added his roundhouse glare to the
visual assault against Uncle Vern.

"Mea culpa, and let's shut up about it," said
Uncle Vern testily. "We agreed we wouldn't talk about this to
anyone without permission."

Permission from whom? I wondered. I expected
a chorus of incredulous guffaws from Todd and Marvin and Jeremy, as
would be appropriate in any classroom of over-aged underachievers.
Instead, they deflated, and with that I saw any hope that my
numerous questions would be answered slip away.

But I would give it a shot.

"Who wrote those letters? And did you really
get any letters, or was it just me?"

Oddly enough, I got an answer. Of sorts, and
after a pause long enough to brew coffee, if anyone had wanted a
cup.

"Skunk wrote them," said Uncle Vern.

Todd and Jeremy protested loudly. It was an
a-hah moment. I wasn't the only one being kept in the dark, after
all.

"I saw him laid out, don't forget," I said.
"He didn't mail those letters from the post-mortem office."

They gave me a sour look. A mute wasn't
supposed to be clever. He wasn't supposed to say anything at
all.

"Did you ID Winny Marteen, too?" Uncle Vern
asked.

"Why should I?"

"If not you, then who?"

He was getting back at me for gawping at his
scar. At least, that was how I interpreted the smug tug of his
lips. "How should I know and why should I care? Didn't Todd—"

When Todd showed me Winny's picture—next to
my mother, I was almost sure of it—and claimed them as his parents,
he seemed to have no idea Winny was dead. This had to be another
lie. I poked him with my eyes. "Didn't you say this Ben Neerson aka
Winny Marteen died in Cluelessland or somewhere?"

"Hong Kong," Todd blushed. "That was what I
was told by...someone. It wasn't until last week I knew how he
really died. It wasn't me who ID'd him."

Uncle Vern made the same kind of warning
harrumph he had given Marvin in the van when the pimpled wonder
told me he had shot my father.

You won't believe what happened next. Well,
you probably don't believe any of this, but what happened next is
the cincher. It happened, sure. But there are still people around
who don't believe George Washington was real—or Sherlock Holmes,
for that matter.

There was a light yet sharp tread on
the stairs. Someone had been upstairs, listening in. Everyone in
the room was surprised when the newcomer finally appeared. But
surprised in different ways. Uncle Vern and Marvin were more put
out than astonished, as though the newcomer was committing an
utterly unexpected, borderline horrific
faux pas
. Yvonne Kendle's reaction was similar,
but much higher on the cagy scale, as if she knew this was a moment
that demanded silence. On the other hand, Jeremy and me fell into
Laurel and Hardy mode.

For a week I had received hints that this
moment would come. Someone of average intelligence—the common
reader, for example—would have seen this coming a mile away. But
caught up as I was by hurricane forces, I had not seen the kettle
boiling away merrily in the middle of the storm. There had been no
red herrings being tossed about in the waves. The picture of a
Barbara-like chin and the possibility that my mother was the
unlikely wife of Winny Marteen had been real. I knew that because
she was now standing before me.

As though stunned by a blow, I staggered
backwards. Something squelched under my foot. There was a shout of
pain. And then I was falling onto a coastline of fat and beer
suds.

Under normal circumstances, Yvonne would have
easily tossed me aside like a discarded turd, but I had flung my
arms backwards to cushion my fall and they became unnaturally
ensnarled. My hand somehow swooped under her blouse and got tangled
in her oversized bra. A romantic might claim "we were as one", but
an engineer would assert we were spatially disabled. Yvonne finally
managed to throw me onto Jeremy's lap. This being comparatively
solid ground, I should have been able to leap up. But my one-shot
lover gave me a shot to the chest that knocked me into Jeremy's
chin. He grunted with pain, then gave a shout as I planted my hand
on his crotch and pushed off. I stumbled backwards, disorientated,
and would have landed on the floor if someone had not taken me by
the arm and steadied me. Alarmed, I yanked loose and turned—and
came nose-to-nose with my allegedly dead mother.

"Hello, Mute," she said with a vague smirk
compounded of guilt and grievance. Before I could protest, she took
me by the shoulders and gave my forehead a peck.

I think it was the first time she had ever
kissed me.

"I wished I could've seen your face when you
met Todd," she said.

The letters
, I
thought. And then:
Hey, she's as tall as
me
....

My conspiracy-heavy portfolio took a big hit
when Jeremy, who up to this moment had sat frozen next to Yvonne,
jumped up from the couch and dashed across the room.

"Mom!" he cried as he buried her in his arms.
He had tears in his eyes—real ones, I think.

"I wondered when you were going to give me
some sugar." Mom managed to cinch the fingers of both hands behind
Jeremy in a loving hug that I found nauseatingly syrupy but also a
bit sinister. It was like the grasp of a drowning swimmer resigned
to taking her would-be rescuer with her to the bottom. It was the
kind of reunion my aversion to treacle would have prevented if Mom
had shown any inclination to spatter me with parental goo.

"Remember, Mom, when you used to sing me to
sleep with alibis?"

I didn't correct him because he might have
been right.

"Lullabies, dumb ass," said Todd when I
didn't step in.

Jeremy must have sensed the tentacles closing
on him, because he made an effort to pull away. He was a bit
alarmed by Mom's reluctance to let go and toggled in her arms
before breaking free. She was over fifteen years a stranger, and
had abandoned him as well as Barbara and me, so she couldn't
exactly be overflowing with affection.

Mom acknowledged Jeremy's hesitation to
participate in a Crazy Glue moment with a sad shrug. But it was not
only rejection that caused her to drop back with slow consideration
into the nearest chair. She had only been thirty—or maybe her late
twenties—when she disappeared from our lives. While close-to-fifty
wasn't ancient, her joints were obviously stiffer. I doubted she
was bowed by woes or guilt. Maybe she had a touch of arthritis.

"Don't take it so hard," Mom said. "I lost
two husbands on the same day, at the same time."

This drew a plaintive cry from Killer Marvin.
"Gee, Mrs. Skunk, it really wasn't my fault."

"And you know I've already forgiven
you," she said with languid despair that was so phony the ice under
her Avon stayed frozen. "And don't whine to me. I'm not
your
mother."

This appeared to give Jeremy and me—and Todd,
I guess—license to whine to our hearts' content. In fact, Todd
looked ready to screak his guts out. Everything indicated that he
had been living with Mom all these years, so I guess he had had
plenty of practice. But when he glanced at me all stoic in the
center of the room (actually, it was four-dimensional ignorance),
he swallowed his whine like a good boy.

"If this is all about the Brinks money..." I
began.

"You're sitting on the principle" said Jeremy
like a sour accountant. "We didn't know. We were stewing in that
cesspit while Mom sank it all in this..." He seemed to have second
thoughts about calling it a palace. So much for sugar.

"Okay," I said, "that's what I figured
before. Then why all the games? The letters? We got shot at, and
now there's Carl and Dog, dead—so you know how dangerous it is. You
said 'principle', right? Where's the interest?"

"Carl?" Mom said, bemused. "And did you
say...'Dog'? Who in the world are you talking about?" She looked at
Uncle Marvin.

"You may have seen something on the news," he
said, placating her with a weak wave of his hand. "They're no one
of consequence."

"Not anymore," I snapped. Mom might not be
buying into the sniper attack, but there was no denying the
festival of corpses on my second floor. If she had seen it on
television, the names of the deceased would have pended
notification of next of kin. But there had been camera crews all
over Pine Street and she would certainly have recognized the
house.

Suddenly, irresponsibly, I thought about
Monique—who, come to think of it, was now perfectly unattached, my
foremost competitors having been perfectly dispatched. But
wait...there was still Todd. Monique had not been able to tell us
apart. Not at first. So sharing her with him would sort of be like
sharing her with myself. No threesomes, though. God forbid.

I was finding Jeremy's ignorance of Mom's
existence difficult to swallow, a skepticism reinforced by his
denial of the sniper. There were crosscurrents of intrigue at work
here, and it was hard to say who held all the threads. I scanned
each face and sensed a gaping hole in every one of them—until I
came back to Mom. There was a euphemistic hole there, too (her brow
had put in a twitch or two when I mentioned the ambush), but not
quite as large as the others. I tried to visually lift the hood of
disguise. And I wasn't the only one annoyed by her reticence. The
collective gaze was shifting away from me to my mother. And about
time, too.

"Even before this evening, your mother
realized things have gone too far," Uncle Vern said, leaning
forward in his chair like a trucker shifting gears. "Putting aside
monetary concerns for the moment, you need know this situation goes
back long before Brinks—"

"Vern, even a clam knows when to keep its
trap shut," my mother snapped. Wow. She had never talked like that
when Skunk was alive, and Vern was no Skunk. None of us were, not
even Jeremy, although he had inherited enough genetic junk to stink
on hot days.

"Who gets hurt most if you talk?" Mom
continued, her face and tone taking on all the sharp angles of her
culture-free upbringing. I was beginning to feel relieved that she
had left home. What had she put Todd through all these years?

"None of us comes up 24-Karat," said
Vern.

"You least of all." Mom felt all the
stares waffling around her and drew herself up. "What are you
looking at? I don't have the answer.
He
does."

All those flailing eyes turned back on
me.

"Hey," I said, my common sense ducking for
cover.

"You know, even if you don't know you
know."

We all know a lot of things we don't know,
because we never bother thinking about them. As a rule, that
usually means that's because they aren't worth thinking about. My
audience seemed convinced I knew something, one way or another.

"So again, what is it I'm supposed to
know?"

"You should know."

`"Uh—"

"After all, you were Skunk's favorite."

If I had opened a tuna can and found a live
shark I couldn't have been more surprised. In fact, I couldn't have
been more surprised if my mother had shown up alive after all these
years.

"That's dumb," I said stupidly. "That's
stupid," I added dumbly.