“Yes,” he said. “You were fun for a while there, Pat, but now I’m bored. Okay. Gotta go kill your bitch and that big freak. Be right back.”
He stood and turned toward the door, and I stretched out a numb hand along the floor as the pain blew up in my chest.
Scott Pearse laughed. “The guns are a good five feet past your legs, Pat. But you keep trying.”
I gnashed my teeth together and screamed as I raised my head and back off the floor and managed to sit up, and the blood poured out of the hole in my chest and saturated my waist.
Pearse cocked his head at me, turned his gun in my direction. “Way to take it for the team, Pat. Bravo.”
I stared at him, willed him to pull the trigger.
“Okay,” he said softly, and pulled back on the hammer. “We’ll end you now.”
The door behind him flung open, and Pearse turned, got off one round that blew a chunk out of Bubba’s thigh.
But Bubba never stopped. He covered Pearse’s gun hand with his own and clamped his other arm around Pearse’s chest from behind.
Pearse let loose a guttural scream and tried to twist his body out of Bubba’s grasp, but Bubba squeezed tighter, and Pearse began to gasp, began to make high-pitched keening yelps, as he saw his gun hand move against his will up toward the side of his head.
He tried to twist his head away, but Bubba reared back and butted his massive forehead into the back of Pearse’s head so hard it sounded like a pool ball exploding.
Pearse’s eyes spun from the shock of impact.
“No,” he yelped. “No, no, no, no.”
Bubba grunted with the effort, blood pouring down his leg as Angie scrambled out into the hallway on all fours and grabbed her .38.
She rose to one knee, pulled back on the hammer, and pointed it at Pearse’s chest.
“Don’t you fucking do it, Ange!” Bubba screamed.
Angie froze, finger curled around the trigger.
“You’re mine, Scott,” Bubba whispered hoarsely in Pearse’s ear. “You are all mine, sweetie.”
“Please,” Pearse begged. “Wait! No! Don’t! Wait! Please!”
Bubba grunted again and slammed the muzzle of Pearse’s gun into Pearse’s temple, shoved his finger over Pearse’s and around the trigger.
“No!”
Bubba said, “Feeling depressed, isolated, possibly suicidal?”
“Don’t!” Pearse batted at Bubba’s head with his free hand.
“Well, call a hot line, but don’t call me, Pearse, ’cause I don’t fucking care.”
Bubba shoved his knee into Pearse’s spine, lifted his feet off the floor.
“Please!” Pearse kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Bubba said.
“Oh, God!”
“Hey, asshole? Say hi to the fucking dog for me, will you?” Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pearse’s brains out the other side of his head.
36
I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet had entered my upper left chest just below the collarbone and exited through my back, and I’d lost three and a half pints of blood before the EMTs reached the house. I was comatose for four days, and I woke to tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes in my arm, and tubes in my nostrils, hooked up to a respirator, so thirsty I would have signed over the contents of my savings account for a single ice cube.
The Dawes apparently had some pull downtown, because a month after we’d rescued their son, the illegal weapons charges against Bubba simply vanished. Sure, the DA’s office seemed to say, you walked into the Plymouth bunker with enough illegal firepower to invade a country, but you brought a rich kid out alive. So no harm, no foul. I’m sure the DA would have adopted a different attitude had he known Pearse’s original extortion leverage had stemmed from evidence linking the Dawes to a baby switch, but Pearse wasn’t around to discuss it, and the rest of us who knew the secret declined to mention it.
Wesley Dawe came to visit. He held my hand and thanked me with tears in his eyes, and he told me the story of how he’d met Pearse through Diane Bourne, who in addition to being his therapist had also been his lover. She, and eventually Pearse, had controlled his fragile mind through manipulation, mental and sexual power games, and erratic withholding and dispensing of his medication. It had been his own idea, he admitted, to blackmail his father, but Diane Bourne and Pearse had taken the idea several steps further, ultimately turning it lethal when they came to thinking of the Dawes’ fortune as their own.
In mid-’98, they’d made him their hostage, kept him tied to the chair or his bed, exercised him at gunpoint.
I hadn’t regained my voice yet. It had disappeared when the bullet nicked off a microscopic shard of collarbone and sent that shard careening into my left lung, collapsing it. When I did try to speak those first few weeks, all that came out was a high-pitched wheeze, like a kettle, or Donald Duck losing his temper.
But voice or no voice, I doubt I would have said much to Wesley Dawe. He struck me as sad and weak, and I couldn’t shake the image of a little petulant boy who’d stirred up all this trouble—whether intentionally or not—simply because he needed to throw a snit. His stepsister was dead, and I couldn’t blame him, exactly, but I didn’t feel much desire to forgive him either.
When he visited my room a second time, I pretended to be asleep, and he slipped a check from his father under my pillow and said, “Thank you. You saved me,” in a whisper before leaving the room.
Since Bubba and I were both stuck in Mass General for a while, we ended up beginning our physical therapy together, my arm withered and his right hip replaced by a metal one.
It’s an odd sensation to owe your life to another. It humbles you and makes you feel guilty and weak and your gratitude is sometimes so immense, it feels like an anvil tied to your heart.
“It’s like Beirut,” Bubba said one afternoon in hydrotherapy. “What’s done is done. Talking about it won’t do any good.”
“Maybe not.”
“Shit, dude, you’d have done the same for me.”
And sitting there, I felt a calming certainty in my chest when I realized he was probably right, though I’m not sure that with one bullet in my hip and another in my thigh I’d have been capable of what he pulled off against a guy like Scott Pearse.
“You did it for Ange,” he said. “You’d do it for me.”
He nodded to himself.
I said, “Okay. You’re right. I won’t thank you anymore.”
“You won’t talk about it anymore either.”
“Cool.”
He nodded. “Cool.” He looked around the collection of metal tubs. Mine was beside his, and there were six or seven other people in the room, all soaking in hot, bubbling water. “Know what would be really cool?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Some weed. Right about now?” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it, though?”
“Sure.”
He nudged the middle-aged teacher in the tub beside his. “Know where we can score some pot, sister?”
The woman Bubba had shot when we’d first entered the bunker was identified as Catherine Larve, a onetime model from Kansas City who’d specialized in print ads for midwestern department stores during the late eighties and early ninties. She didn’t have a criminal record and very little else was known about her during the years since she’d left Kansas City with the person neighbors had assumed was her boyfriend—a handsome, blond man who drove a ’68 Shelby Mustang.
Bubba was released from the hospital ten days before I was. Vanessa picked him up, and even before they went back to his warehouse, they drove over to the animal shelter and got themselves a dog.
Those last ten days in the hospital were the worst. Summer died and autumn encroached outside my window, and all I could do was lie there and listen to the sounds of seasons trading places in the voices of people ten stories below. And I’d be left to wonder how Karen Nichols would hav
e sounded in the newly minted briskness if she’d held on long enough for the heat to end and a leaf to fall.
I took the stairs to my apartment slowly, one arm around Angie, the other squeezing a racquetball in my hand, working the muscles in my ever-so-gradually healing arm.
The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn’t as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.
“We’re home,” Angie said when we reached the landing.
“Home?” I said. “You mean my home or our home?”
“Ours,” she said.
She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie’s flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck’s waiting in the fridge.
Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you’ve molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.
“Home,” I said.
It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweatshirt, which I’d tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a bum, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I’ve learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.
My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.
One was a cassette tape I’d thought I’d lost, a bootleg of Muddy Waters playing live with Mick Jagger and the Red Devils. Another was a book Angie had loaned me, which I’d given up on after fifty pages and stuffed back there in hopes she’d forget it. The third item was a roll of electrical tape I’d tossed up there last summer when I slapped some around a fraying cord and was too lazy to walk it back to my toolbox.
I picked up the cassette, tossed the book back into the darkness, and reached for the electrical tape.
But I never touched it. Instead, I sat back on the floor and stared at it.
And, finally, I saw the whole board.
37
“Mr. Kenzie,” Wesley said when I found him down by the pond at the back of his father’s property, “what a pleasure to see you.”
“Did you push her?” I asked.
“What? Who?”
“Naomi,” I said.
He jerked his head back, gave me a confused smile. “What are you talking about?”
“She chased a ball out onto this pond,” I said. “That was the story, right? But how’d the ball get out there? Did you throw it, Wes?”
He gave me a small, strange smile, pained, I think, lonely. He turned his head and looked out at the pond. His gaze grew distant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back slightly, his shoulders tightening, thin body rippling with a slow shudder.
“Naomi threw the ball,” he said softly. “I don’t know why. I’d walked on ahead.” He tilted his head to the right. “Up that way. Lost in thought, I suppose, though I can’t remember what I was thinking about.” He shrugged. “I walked on, and my sister threw the ball and it got ahead of her. Maybe it took an odd bounce off a rock. Maybe she threw it out onto the ice to see what would happen. It doesn’t really matter why. The ball went out on the ice, and she followed it. I heard her footsteps on the ice, all of a sudden, as if someone had, on a whim, flicked on a sound track. One moment I was locked in my fucked-up head as usual, the next I could hear a squirrel pawing the frozen grass twenty yards away. I could hear snow melt. I could hear Naomi’s feet on the ice. And I turned my head in time to see the ice break under her. It was so quiet, that sound.” He turned back to me, cocked an eyebrow. “You’d think not, wouldn’t you? But it sounded as if you were crumpling tinfoil in your hand. And she,” he smiled, “she had this look on her face of utter joy. What a new experience this was going to be! She never made a noise. Didn’t cry out. She just dropped. And she was gone.”
He shrugged again, then picked a rock up off the ground and threw it high above the pond. I watched it plummet through the hard autumn air and then make a tiny splash in the center of the pond.
“So, no,” he said, “I didn’t kill my sister, Mr. Kenzie. I simply failed to keep adequate watch on her.” He placed his hands back in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, gave me another flash of that pained smile.
“But they blamed you,” I said, and looked back across the lawn to the porch where Christopher and Carrie Dawe sat with their afternoon tea and sections of the Sunday paper. “Didn’t they, Wesley?”
He pursed his lips, nodded at his shoes. “Oh, sure. Sure.”
He turned to his right and we began to walk slowly along the pond in the midafternoon glow of a late October Sunday. His steps seemed uncertain, and then I realized it was more an awkwardness in the roll of his right hip. I looked at his shoes, saw that the sole of the right was two inches thicker than that of the left, and I remembered Christopher Dawe telling us Wesley had been born with one leg shorter than the other.
“Bet it didn’t feel good,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Being blamed for your baby stepsister’s death when you hadn’t truly been responsible for it.”
He kept his head down, but a wry smile curled up his weak lips. “You have an odd gift for understating the obvious, Mr. Kenzie.”
“We all need our talents, Wes.”
“When I was thirteen,” he said, “I vomited up a pint of blood. A pint. Nothing wrong with me. It was simply ‘nerves.’ At fifteen, I had a peptic ulcer. When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with manic depression and low-grade schizophrenia. It embarrassed my father. Humiliated him. He was sure if he just toughened me up—tortured me enough with his mental games and constant put-downs—I’d one day wake up made of firmer stuff.” He chuckled softly. “Fathers. Did you have a positive relationship with yours?”
“Not by a long shot, Wesley.”
“Forced you to live up to his expectations, maybe? Called you ‘useless’ so many times you started to believe it?”
“He held me down and burned me with an iron.”
Wesley stopped in the trees, looked at me. “You’re serious?”
I nodded. “He also hospitalized me twice and reminded me on a weekly basis that I’d never amount to shit. He was as close to evil as I’ve ever come, Wesley.”
“My God.”
“I didn’t drive my sister to her death to get back at him, though.”
“What?” He threw his head back, chuckled. “Come on now.”
“Here’s what I think happened.” I snapped a twig off the branch in front of me, tapped it against my outer thigh as we walked along the tip of the pond, then started back down the other side. “I think your father blamed you for Naomi’s death and you—some poor fucking basket case back then, I’m guessing—you were this close to cracking up when you stumbled on the medical records, discovered Naomi had been switched for another child. And for the first time in your life, you had a way to play payback with your father.”
He nodded. He glanced down at his right hand, at the small nub of flesh that was all that remained of his index finger, and then he dropped the hand by his side. “Guilty as charged. But you’ve known that for months. I don’t see how you—”
“I think ten years ago?” I said. “You were just a sad, fucked-up freak with a medicine cabinet full of pills and a scrambled, genius brain. And you came up with this easy ploy to get a good allowance out of Daddy, and for a while that was good enough. But then Pearse came along.”
He gave me that studious nod of his, half contemplative, half contemptous. “Maybe. And I fell under his—”
“Bullshit. He
fell under your spell, Wes. You were behind this the whole time,” I said. “Behind Pearse, behind Diane Bourne, behind Karen’s death—”
“Whoa, whoa. Hold up.” He held out his hands.
“You killed Siobhan. It had to be you. Pearse was accounted for and neither of the women in that house could have lifted her.”
“Siobhan?” He shook his head. “Siobhan who?”
“You knew we’d come into that house sooner or later. That’s why you drew us in with the five hundred grand. I always thought it was a small amount. I mean, why should Pearse settle? But he did. Because you told him to. Because sooner or later, when it all got messy and difficult, you realized the only thing better than getting the money you felt you were the proper heir to would be becoming the proper heir again. You reinvented yourself, Wes, as the victim.”
His confused smile widened and he stopped at the edge of the pond, glanced over at the back porch. “I really don’t know where you get your ideas, Mr. Kenzie. They’re quite fanciful.”
“When we came in that room, the electrical tape was at your feet, Wesley. That means someone had either been about to bind your feet and forgot, which I find unlikely, or you—you, Wesley—heard us come through the door, popped the racquetball in your mouth, considered binding your feet, but then figured you might not have time and went for the rope on one wrist instead. Only one of your wrists was bound, Wesley. And why? Because a man can’t tie both his wrists to opposite arms of a chair.”
He studied our reflections in the pond. “Are you done?”
“Pearse said I couldn’t see the whole chessboard, and he was right. I’m slow on the uptake sometimes. But I see it all now, Wesley, and it was you pulling strings from the get-go.”
He tossed a pebble at my reflection, turned my face into ripples.
“Ah,” he said, “you make it sound so Machiavellian. Things are rarely that way.”
“What way?”
“Smooth.” He tossed another pebble in the pond. “Let me tell you a story. A fairy tale, if you will.” He scooped up a handful of small stones and began to throw them, one by one, out into the center of the pond. “A bad king of haunted lineage and barren heart lived in his palace with his trophy queen and imperfect son and imperfect stepdaughter. It was a cold place. But then—oh then, Mr. Kenzie—the king and his trophy queen had a third child. And she was a rare creature. A beauty. Stolen, actually, from a peasant family, but otherwise without flaws. The king, the queen, the older princess, even the weak prince—my God, they all loved that child. And for a few brief, spectacular years, that kingdom glowed. And love filled every room. Sins were forgotten, weaknesses overlooked, anger buried. It was golden.” His voice trailed off and he stared out over the pond and eventually shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then, on a walk with the prince—who loved her, who adored her—the baby princess followed a sprite into a dragon’s lair. And she died. And the prince, at first, blamed himself, though it was clear there was truly little he could have done. But that didn’t stop the king! Oh, no. He blamed the prince. So did the queen. They tortured the prince with their silences, days of it, followed by sudden malevolent glances. They blamed him. It was plain. And who did the prince have to turn to in his grief? Why, his stepsister, of course. But she…she…rebuffed him. She blamed him. Oh, she didn’t say so, but in her blissfully ignorant way—neither condemning nor forgiving—she drove a stake far deeper than the king or queen had. The princess, you see, had balls to attend, galas. She wrapped herself in ignorance and fantasy to block out her sister’s death, and in doing so, blocked out the prince and left him alone, crippled by his loss, his guilt, by the physical shortcoming that kept him from reaching the dragon’s lair quickly enough.”
Prayers for Rain Page 34
