Rebecca didn’t answer me directly, but grew distant, perhaps even apprehensive. “Maybe we should end the interview for tonight, Steve.”
“Why?”
“I just think it would be best,” Rebecca said firmly, leaving no doubt that the interview was over.
She walked to the door, opened it, then followed me out into the darkness, slowly walking me to my car as a swirl of leaves played at our feet.
“I’m sorry this is so hard for you,” she said.
“It’s a lot of things, Rebecca,” I admitted. “It’s not just my past.”
At the car, I stopped and stood very near to her. I could almost feel her breath.
“When do you want to meet again?” I asked.
She watched me hesitantly, but said nothing.
I smiled. “Don’t worry, Rebecca. I’ll go all the way through it with you.”
She nodded. “In all the other cases, there were no survivors,” she said. “I guess I should have known how hard it would be for you, but I just hadn’t had the experience before.”
“It’s okay,” I assured her.
I opened the door and started to get in, but she touched my arm and drew me back around to face her.
“You should only go as far as you want to, Steve,” she said. “No farther.”
“I know,” I told her.
I could feel her hand at my arm, and I wanted to reach up and hold it tightly for a long time. But I knew that close as it seemed to me, her hand might as well have been in another universe.
“Well, good night, then,” she said as she let it drop from my shoulder.
“Good night,” I said, then got into my car.
It was still early, so I stopped off at a small restaurant and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee before going home.
Marie was at the sink when I walked into the kitchen. Peter was at the table, chopping celery.
“You’re home early,” Marie said. “We’re making a tuna dish.”
“I’ve already eaten,” I said idly.
Marie’s eyes shot over to me. “You’ve already eaten?”
I nodded obliviously.
“You got off early and didn’t come home to have dinner with Peter and me?” she asked, in a voice that struck me even then as deeply troubled, as if in this small twist of behavior she’d already begun to detect the approach of her destruction.
“I guess I did,” I said, then added defensively, “Sorry. I just wasn’t thinking.”
Marie looked at me brokenly, but I did nothing to ease her distress.
“I’m going to lie down for a while,” I said, then headed up the stairs.
Once upstairs, I lay down on the bed, my eyes staring at the blank ceiling. Below me, I could hear Peter and Marie as they continued to make their dinner together. Below me, as I realize now, they were shrinking. I should have seen it, like a murderous vision, as I lay alone on my bed that evening. I should have seen Peter fleeing down a dark corridor, Marie cringing behind a cardboard box. I should have seen the circle tightening, felt the first bite of the noose.
But that evening I felt nothing but my own distress. I remembered Rebecca as she’d stood beside me only a short time before, and I knew that I’d wanted to draw her into my arms. Perhaps, at the time, I’d even imagined that she was all I really needed to solve the riddle of my life. But I realize now that Rebecca was only the symbol of those other things I had wanted even more.
“In the deepest and most inchoate longings of these men,”
Rebecca would later write, “there was a central yearning to be embattled, a fierce need for a fierce engagement, so that they saw themselves in that single, searing instant not as killers slaughtering women and children, but as soldiers in the midst of battle, men heroically and perilously engaged in the act of returning fire.”
It was months later, and I was alone, when I read that passage. By then, I was wifeless, childless, homeless. Everything was gone, except my one need to “return fire” as my father had, in an act of sudden and avenging violence.
ELEVEN
DURING THE LAST days of October, as fall retreated and the first wintry rains began, I felt as if some sort of countdown had begun. It wasn’t a radical change, only a shift in direction, a sense of moving into the final phase of something. There was a helplessness about it, a feeling that I no longer controlled my life, that perhaps, a creature of disastrous circumstances, I had never actually controlled it. It seemed my father had destroyed that web of connections which might have given me context, a place to stand in the world. After that, I’d drifted here and there, but always in reaction to something outside myself. I was an accidental architect, an accidental husband, an accidental father—an accidental man.
“They felt their lives were dissolving, didn’t they?” I said to Rebecca at one of our meetings toward the end of October.
Her reply went to the center of how I’d come to feel. “No,” she said. “They felt that in some way they had never lived.”
But rather than thinking of myself at that moment, my mind focused once again on my father, and I remembered how, in the days preceding the murders, he’d seemed to sink into a profound nothingness. For many hours he would sit alone in the solarium, silent, nebulous, hardly there at all. At other times, he would stand by the old wooden fence, his hands deep in his pockets, staring emptily across the lawn. At the very end, he had even stopped answering the phone when it rang at the house on McDonald Drive. It was as if he could no longer imagine that the call might be for him.
“He’d become a worthless shell,” I told Rebecca at one point. “He’d been stripped of everything by then.”
It was the word “stripped” that seemed to catch in Rebecca’s mind. She repeated it slowly, as if it had conjured up something even darker than my father’s crime.
“Stripped to the bone,” I said assuredly. “There was nothing left of him.”
I recalled the dreadful baiting which Jamie had continued to inflict on Laura, and how, in the last weeks, my father had sat by and let it go on day after day. The force that had once moved him to defend my sister had dissipated.
Rebecca didn’t challenge my description of my father’s disintegration, but I could see that it disturbed her. For a time, she even seemed curiously disoriented, as if she’d lost her way somehow. At the next meeting, her questions skirted away from the final days of my family’s life. Instead, she concentrated on other issues, our routines and schedules, the division of chores, all the minutiae of my family’s existence.
Then suddenly, during the second week of November, she regained her direction. It was as if after standing poised at the edge of something for a long time, she’d now decided to plunge over the side.
I arrived at her cottage late on a Thursday afternoon. She’d already started a small fire in the hearth, and it was blazing warmly when I arrived.
“It’s cold out,” she said as I came through the door.
I nodded and began to take off my coat.
“I like November,” she added. “I think it’s my favorite month.”
It struck me as an odd choice. “Why?”
She thought a moment. “I guess because it’s cold enough to make it clear that winter really is coming,” she said, “and that we need shelter.”
I shook my head. “Too rainy,” I said. “Too confining.” I shook my shoulders uncomfortably. “It gets into your bones.”
I sat down in my usual seat, then waited for Rebecca to ease herself into the chair across from me.
But she didn’t do that. She took a seat at the table by the window instead, her briefcase already open before her. For a few seconds, she hesitated, her eyes glancing first out the window, then back to her briefcase, then at last to me.
“Do you remember saying that these men had actually seen the monster?” she asked. “That they’d looked it in the eye?”
“Yes.”
“We have to do that, too,” she said. She picked up a single photograph
and handed it to me. “We have to look it in the eye.”
It was a picture of my father standing in front of the hardware store on Sycamore Street. It had been taken the day he’d opened the store, and all of us were with him. I, an infant, slept obliviously in my mother’s arms, while Jamie and Laura seemed to hang like small sacks from my father’s hands.
It was the first photograph she’d shown me in which we were all together, and something in it frightened me so much that I actually drew back from it unconsciously, as if it might strike out at me.
I handed the picture back to her. “Okay,” I said. “Now what?”
She looked at me evenly. “As a picture, a family tableau, it’s practically idyllic,” she said.
“Yes, it is. So what?”
“We’ve been through each of the relationships in your family,” Rebecca said. “Now we have to look at the possibility of something outside the family that might have had some bearing on the murders.”
It was then I knew that we were racing toward the end of it. She’d gotten as much information about my family as she expected to get from me. Her final task was simply to assure herself that in getting the story of my family as it related to its destruction, she’d gotten the only story there was, that there were no loose ends, that my father fully and completely conformed to her archetype of “these men.”
“You mean another person?” I asked. “Someone connected to my father? A lover, something like that?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said.
The very idea seemed preposterous to me. It was as if I could accept the fact that my father had slaughtered his family more easily than the notion that he might have loved someone outside the circle of that destruction.
“I don’t think he was the type to have another woman,” I said offhandedly. “Of course, a love affair is not something he would have talked about with a nine-year-old boy.”
Rebecca looked at me. “Would he have talked about it with Laura?”
The question brought back a quick play of memory.
“Maybe,” I said. I remembered how, during the weeks before her death, my sister had appeared to stiffen and grow cold toward my father, to give him unmistakably hostile glances. I’d noticed the change at the time, but been unable to understand it.
“I can say that things did change between Laura and my father,” I added. “At first, after we came back from Cape Cod, they seemed closer than ever. But not long after that Laura withdrew from him.”
Suddenly I saw this change as the key to everything. The last link my father had had with us, his love for my sister, had abruptly broken. His one and only tie to us had snapped, setting him free to kill us all.
I remembered the look on my sister’s face when she’d glanced at my father from time to time during the last month of her life. The sense of admiration that I’d always seen in her eyes was entirely gone. It had been replaced by something deeper and far grimmer.
“She seemed very disappointed in him,” I said. “It was as if she’d come to despise him.”
Rebecca said nothing.
“Maybe that was what my father couldn’t bear,” I added after a time, “the fact that he’d lost Laura.”
“Or that she’d simply come to love someone else,” Rebecca added cautiously, “the way teenage girls inevitably do.”
I saw my sister again in the long green reeds, the arch of her white back in the moonlight.
“You mean Teddy Lawford?”
“He wrote quite a few letters to Laura,” Rebecca told me. “Swenson found them in one of the drawers of her dressing table.” She reached into the briefcase and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “Laura wrote him back, too,” she said, as she handed me the paper. “This is a copy of the last letter she wrote to him.”
“Where did you get it?” I asked as I took it from her hand.
“Swenson got it from Teddy when he went up to Boston to interview him about the murders.”
“Swenson interviewed Teddy? Why?”
“He considered him a suspect for a while,” Rebecca said. “But Teddy had been at the University of Michigan on the day of the murders.” She nodded toward the letter. “It’s dated November 15.”
While Rebecca looked on, I read what was probably the last letter my sister ever wrote:
Dear Teddy:
Hi, I hope you are okay, and that everything is still going well at college. I wish I could say things are better here, but they’re not. They’re worse than ever. Jamie’s a bastard, like always, and Stevie’s just a kid. My father stays in the basement, but I don’t go down there anymore. If I ever see you, I’ll tell .you what he did. I don’t want to say it in a letter. Someone might see it, and I don’t know what he would do if that happened. He’s such a fake, Teddy, such a cheat.
Teddy, sometimes I get really scared. I feel like something’s going to happen, but I don’t know what.
Damn, this is a depressing letter. I’m sorry, but it’s just the way I feel. Maybe something will brighten me up in the next few days. If it does, I promise to write and let you know.
Love,
Laura
Once I’d finished reading, I handed the letter back to Rebecca. She kept it in her hand, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she repeated the line that had struck her as the most important: “‘If I ever see you, I’ll tell you what he did.’” Her eyes bore down upon me. “What do you think Laura meant by that?”
“I have no idea.”
“‘Fake.’ ‘Cheat.’ Why would she use those words?”
I realized that Rebecca had gone full circle, returning to her original point. “Another woman, you mean,” I said. “You think it’s possible that he was cheating on my mother, and that Laura found out, and somewhere in all that, he decided to kill us?”
Rebecca didn’t answer, but I could tell that her earlier questions had been generated by more than speculation.
“If your father had a lover,” she said, “then he can’t be included in my study.”
“Yes, I know, Rebecca,” I said. “But is there some reason why you think he might have had another woman other than Laura’s letter?”
She hesitated a moment, looking at me with an expression which always signaled the fact that she was about to reveal something she had previously kept hidden. “Well, there’s a detail that always bothered Swenson,” she said. “He was never able to track it down exactly, and I think you’re the only person who might know what it means.”
“What detail?”
“The fact that almost five months before the murders your father bought two tickets on a flight to Mexico City,” Rebecca answered, the revelation completed. She glanced down at her notebook. “He made the reservation on June 15, 1959. The flight was scheduled to leave from Idlewild Airport in New York City.”
“On what day?”
She looked up at me. “November 19.”
I felt a sharp pang. “The day of the murders,” I said.
“But he canceled those same tickets over a month before the murders,” Rebecca added. “On October 10. So, on November 19, as far as we know, he had no travel plans.”
I repeated the most relevant aspect of what she’d told me. “But the main thing is that before that, he’d reserved two tickets, not just one.”
“He made the reservation in his own name,” Rebecca said pointedly, “One for him and one …” She stopped for a beat, “… for someone else.”
“And this ‘someone else,’” I said, “there was no name?”
Rebecca shook her head. “He made the reservation by phone, and he never gave a name for the second person.”
“For his lover, you mean.”
“If he had one,” Rebecca said doubtfully.
“You don’t think he did?”
“If I’d thought that, I wouldn’t have gotten this far in studying him,” Rebecca said. “Even Swenson was never able to trace him to any other person.” She shrugged. “Everything about your father points to a family
man.”
“Everything except that ticket.”
“Yes.”
I let it all pass through my mind slowly, trying to think if I’d ever seen the slightest sign that my father had had his own version of Yolanda Dawes, some pale, slender female with thin, spidery arms, the mythical destroyer of homes. I thought of various possibilities. There was Mrs. Hamilton, the minister’s wife who lived across the street, but she was far older than my father, matronly and overweight, hardly a candidate for romance. Next door, Mrs. Bishop, even older, lay bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis. There were other women in the neighborhood, younger, sleeker, their legs tightly bound in the pedal-pusher pants so common at the time, but it didn’t seem possible that they would have cast a longing glance at the middle-aged man in gray work clothes who sometimes cruised by in his old brown van.
Then, quite suddenly, I thought of someone.
“Well,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to emphasize the point, “there was this one woman who worked for my father.”
Rebecca’s eyes bored into me. “Who?”
“Her name was Nellie Grimes,” I said. “I didn’t know her very well.”
“Was she a neighbor?”
“No. She just worked for my father.”
A divorcee, with a three-year-old daughter, Nellie had begun to work in the hardware store in the fall of 1956. My father had needed someone to straighten out the store’s tangled bookkeeping system, but after doing that, Nellie had stayed on to handle the part of the business my father despised, the dismal mountain of paperwork involved in keeping the store stocked, billing credit customers, even paying the store’s own bills. He’d never liked any of the minutiae of running his own small business, and after Nellie came on, he’d turned all of it over to her. Thorough and highly organized, Nellie had quickly become indispensable to my father, a woman, as I’d once heard him describe her, “of many talents.”
“‘Of many talents,’” Rebecca repeated as she wrote the phrase in her book. “Who did he say that to?”
My own answer surprised me. “My mother.”
“So your mother knew about Nellie Grimes?”
Mortal Memory Page 17
