The Whole Truth (22 page)

There is no talking them out of it, either.

We all hope that time persuades them otherwise.

I've seen Natalie's inflatable life preserver ring still floating in their swimming pool. I know that Susan swims slow laps, clinging to it and crying. It breaks people's hearts to see the child's belongings still scattered around the house all those months later. But Susan gets furious if anybody suggests moving them out of sight, or giving them away.

"You'd feel better," people tell her.

"I don't want to feel better!" she explodes at them.

The McCullens cling to their anger and their guilt as hard as Susan clings to the plastic life ring in the swimming pool.

"We've got the TV on," Tony tells me. "We're always -waiting for the bulletin, to tell us they've caught him. I'm hoping he bleeds to death on the run. Either that, or when they find him, he tries to get away and they shoot him, and they do a better job of it than the judge did. I don't think I can ever sleep again until I know the bastard's dead."

Suddenly I feel overwhelmed in that small space with them.

"Where are the twins?" I inquire.

Susan looks puzzled, as if she has temporarily forgotten she has other children. Then she says, almost dismissively, "We took them over to a neighbor's house, to spend the night with their kids."

My heart sinks. I've seen this happen before: parents who lose one child to murder becoming so obsessed by grief and revenge that they can barely recognize the existence, much less meet the needs, of their other children. Equally painful is the opposite reaction, when grieving parents cling to their remaining children like fallen climbers to a lifeline. Either way, it's hell for the surviving children.

"Have dinner with us, Marie?"

"Yeah, come on," Tony echoes. "We need to talk to you anyway."

"Thanks, but I've got a plane to catch. I just wanted to tell you I was thinking about you. What did you want to talk to me about? Can it wait? I could call you from where I'm going."

The couple exchange glances. Suddenly, I feel wary.

"We don't want to be in your book," Tony says, gruffly.

The marble under my feet starts to crack.

"It's nothing against you," Susan assures me.

"We read those pages you sent us, and we just decided we don't want to be in the book," Tony says. Although most journalists never let the subjects of their articles read them before publication, I do, especially where the victim's family is concerned. I don't want to hurt them, and I do want to get things right. I had sent to the McCullens the sections of my manuscript that are written specifically about Natty and them.

It's a gamble, and this is the risk I take.

"Why?" I ask, through numb lips.

"It's all that stuff about this house," Tony says, looking embarrassed but obstinate. "I don't want people knowing all that, how it's free and all. It makes us look like moochers."

"I don't think it does," I say.

"All that stuff about spending too much money," Susan says. "I don't want people reading all that about us. You understand, don't you, Marie?"

I want to say to them, Do you understand that I don't need your permission for any of my book? Do you get it that you're news? I can write anything I want to as long as it's true, and I can prove it? But I can't say that to these suffering people, no way.

"I do understand," I say, because I certainly do understand the concept of having second thoughts about things. If they only realized to what lengths I have gone to protect them, even as it is written now! But I have to let it go. Later, I'll try to persuade them, or maybe I can rewrite those scenes in a way that appeases them without sacrificing my own integrity. I want and need their cooperation. Without it, the promotion of the book could be a disaster. I can just see the headlines and interviews: "Victim's Family Sues Writer." And there would be Susan on television, saying, "We pleaded with her not to write it."

Tony looks marginally more relaxed now.

"You take care of yourselves," I tell them as I start to leave.

Susan replies bitterly, "Why should we?"

"Because of the boys!" I urge her.

She gives me a quick hug. "Thank you for being so nice to us."

Naturally, I feel like the world's biggest hypocrite as I get back into my car, take out a pen and writing pad, and begin to scribble notes. I will change their minds about those scenes in the book. I . have to, that's all there is to it. But what will they say if it turns out that the man who murdered their child was himself abducted when he was Natty's age? Will they hate him any less? I recall Franklin's words, and I doubt it. Ray will still be the killer, and Natty would still be dead. With a sigh for the McCullen family and every family like them I have ever known, I drive on to catch my flight to Kansas.

Once in the air, I accept a cup of coffee from the flight attendant, and think about the truths I know, but won't publish, about the death of Natalie Mae McCullen.

Some things I will never tell anybody.

The way I wrote the story of how Tony McCullen went to bed the night his daughter died wasn't quite the way it happened. I won't be telling my readers the real reason why he didn't even think of looking in on his children. And I'm not about to divulge the probable truth about why Natalie woke up.

Tony didn't check on the kids, because he was horny.

"I don't know," he told me, trying to explain something that probably didn't require explaining. This is why ordinary people have to be protected by the journalists who "cover" them; they don't have any experience being "news," and they don't begin to understand how vulnerable they are to being quoted correctly, but embarrassingly. If they're plainspoken people like Tony and Susan, they're likely to blurt out truths they would never want millions of people to read. "It had been—God—I'll bet a week since Susan and I had done it. One thing and another, either the kids interrupted us, or one or the other of us was too tired, or some damn thing. And I was watching Leno, but he had a hog caller on, so I was switching over to HBO, and they were showing these episodes from foreign sex shows. French. English. I can't remember what all, but I remember there was even one from some Arab country, if you can believe that. All it was, was a belly dancer though.

"Anyway, they were showing everything, practically porno flicks, right there on HBO. Lots of huge boobs and dirty jokes and people humping each other, and sexy stuff, and I was just sitting there getting horny as hell. But I thought Sue was already asleep, and she hates it if I wake her up to screw."

But then he heard the toilet in their bathroom flush.

"I knew she was up. Hot damn. I flicked the tube off and hustled my young butt down the hall. God, I never gave the kids a thought, you know?"

Or the door locks, either.

"I just wanted to get there before she fell back to sleep."

If the security of their home passed through Tony's mind at all that night, he only thought he'd get to it later, afterward. Only, Tony fell asleep right after they made love.

Their front door was locked. Susan had seen to that earlier when she had looked outside to make sure the kids had driven their assorted rolling toys into the garage.

"Everything was in," Susan remembered, and I wrote down. "So I closed our front door and bolted it. I went into the family room and saw that Tony was watching Leno—he loves the opening monologue—so I kissed the top of his head, and he gave me a pat on my hair. I told him I was pooped, and I was going to bed."

They said good night to each other.

There was no talk of lovemaking.

"The twins had woken everybody up at dawn that morning," Susan said. "I don't recall why, just sheer energy, I think. It's like they're only wired to sleep a few hours at a time. Anyway, we'd had a few nights in a row of that, and I'd had it. I really needed some rest."

But she didn't get to sleep right away.

"I don't know what it was, but I couldn't fall asleep. I think I was worrying about all our bills and should I get a job and how much would child care cost, or should we just get out of this house, rent a little place where we could live more cheaply." Susan tossed and turned a bit. Then she got up to use the bathroom.

"It wasn't all that late. Eleven-twenty. I looked at our clock that glows in the dark. I got out of the bathroom and here came Tony slipping in the door. He took off his pants and I could see right away what he had in mind." Susan smiled faintly, but it didn't last. Her mouth began to tremble as she told what happened next. "I thought, what the heck, I can't sleep anyway, and it's been awhile."

She said, "We tried to be quiet, but there was a point where we got to laughing about some dumb thing and I swung my leg out and managed to knock into my bedside table."

Susan had several books piled there, novels she was hoping to get to. Her romance-loving sister had pressed them on her, saying she'd love them. The accidental kick jarred the table, which was all it took to topple the precarious pile of books.

"They really crashed," Susan said. "We held our breath, to see if it woke anybody up." Her eyes filled, overflowed, as she told the story. "We didn't think it did. We didn't hear any of the kids make a noise."

Within moments, she estimated, Susan and Tony were sound asleep, nestled in their favorite sleeping posture, with her head on his left shoulder and her right arm across his chest. They both thought that what probably happened was that the vibration of the books falling woke Natalie in the next room. Her bed lay up against the very wall the books had crashed into. She couldn't hear the noise, but the little girl was almost as attuned to vibrations and subtle movements as hearing people are to sound. To her, vibration was sound.

I would never divulge that truth in a book.

They hadn't been shy about telling me, but how would that be for them? To have everyone picturing them horny, laughing, careless, making the noise that may have awakened their daughter in the next room? I know that Susan can't stop putting cause and effect together. Her thinking goes: If she and Tony hadn't moved into that house, they never would have fallen into the temptation of living beyond themselves, and if they hadn't gotten into so much debt, she wouldn't have been awake that night worrying about money.

Tony wouldn't have heard her moving around.

They wouldn't have had sex.

The books would have stayed on the table.

Natalie would have continued sleeping in her bed.

Ray would have motored right on past their dock.

It could very well be that something else had awakened Natalie that night, but there was no convincing her mother or father of that. Susan and Tony hated Ray, but they blamed themselves.

No, I won't write that, I think again as the airplane flies me to the Midwest. Who needs to know that? I don't think anybody does. So, they're human. He wanted to make love with his pretty wife. They enjoyed it enough to get a little carried away. So, every couple should be so lucky to have a robust sex life.

Both of the McCullens implied to me that was the last time they ever made love. And I'll never write that, either. Besides, it might not be true. I can't always trust the people I interview to tell me the whole truth even when they think that's what they're doing. People forget, they gloss over, they get things wrong. And people do lie to me. Sometimes they know it's a lie, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I recognize it as a lie, or I get lucky and uncover the truth, and sometimes I don't. I hate to find out later, after a book is published, and then have readers, reviewers, or cops correct my mistakes.

If I'm going to publish this story about Raymond Raintree being Johnnie Kepler, it had better be ironclad true, is my thought as the plane descends toward the runway. If it isn't, I will have no ending, no identity for the killer, no motive, no scene of the crime, no idea where Ray is, and the victim's parents don't want to be in the book.

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I feel panic rise, and try to calm myself by remembering there are worse things in life than missing a deadline. And I am just about to hear of one of them. I reach for my lipstick and hairbrush, and mentally prepare to meet a retired deputy sheriff by the name of Jack Lawrence.

8

Raymond

"I can't get my brain wrapped around the new facts."

The retired deputy drives me south from Kansas City International Airport in a two-door green Ford pickup truck. He's got the air-conditioning going full blast at first, so we have to raise our voices to hear each other talk. Outside the truck windows, it's still eighty-seven degrees at nine o'clock in the evening, and even the inside of the truck door is warm to my touch.

"For so many years, I have been thinking of Johnnie Kepler as an innocent little boy," he tells me. "I felt so bad for him, and for his family. They're such good people, especially his mom and that older sister of his, Kimmie. I won't speak of his father, because we don't know what it would have been like to walk in that man's shoes. But now here we are with this news that the little boy we all mourned is still alive. Only he is a growh man who is supposed to have abducted another child, like somebody did to him. It is very confusing, and upsetting, very."

"I'm sure it is, Jack."

Around us, I can see nothing except highway, dark open fields, and well-lighted strip malls. The man himself is tall, lean, courtly. He carried my overnight bag for me, opened the passenger door, and helped me up with a firm hand on my elbow. He has a superb posture that pulls my own spine up straighter, but his face sags comfortably into bags and jowls, and his thinning gray and brown hair looks as if it could use a patting down. I'm guessing his age to be near seventy, which would put him in his late forties when the boy disappeared.

By the time I have been in his company for fifteen minutes, I feel as if I have known him for fifteen years. As I often do when I meet a nice man of his age, I wonder what my own life might have been like if I had been adopted by someone like this, instead of by my mother's sister and husband. I shake off the sentimental daydream in order to pay attention to the words of this man who, after all, I don't really know at all.