He laid the flat piece of metal on the ground and blew away a film of ash.
“Dynamite,” he told Graham. “Look here, see the fern pattern in the metal? This stuff’s the right gauge for a trunk or a footlocker. That’s probably it. Dynamite in a footlocker. It didn’t go off in the basement, though. Looks like the ground floor to me. See where the tree’s cut there where that marble tabletop hit it? Blown out sideways. The dynamite was in something that kept the fire off of it for a while.”
“How about remains?”
“There may not be a lot, but there’s always something. We’ve got a lot of sifting to do. We’ll find him. I’ll give him to you in a small sack.”
* * *
A sedative had finally put Reba McClane to sleep atDePaulHospitalshortly after dawn. She wanted the policewoman to sit close beside her bed. Several times through the morning she woke and reached out for the officer’s hand.
When she asked for breakfast, Graham brought it in.
Which way to go? Sometimes it was easier for them if you were impersonal. With Reba McClane, he didn’t think so.
He told her who he was.
“Do you know him?” she asked the policewoman.
Graham passed the officer his credentials. She didn’t need them.
“I know he’s a federal officer, Miss McClane.”
She told him everything, finally. All about her time with Francis Dolarhyde. Her throat was sore, and she stopped frequently to suck cracked ice.
He asked her the unpleasant questions and she took him through it, once waving him out the door while the policewoman held the basin to catch her breakfast.
She was pale and her face was scrubbed and shiny when he came back into the room.
He asked the last of it and closed his notebook.
“I won’t put you through this again,” he said, “but I’d like to come back by. Just to say hi and see how you’re doing.”
“How could you help it?—a charmer like me.”
For the first time he saw tears and realized where it ate her.
“Would you excuse us for a minute, officer?” Graham said. He took Reba’s hand.
“Look here. There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there’s nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That’s what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn’t kill you and he couldn’t watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid. If you let yourself believe there is, you’re a sap. I’m coming back to see you in a day or so. I have to look at cops all the time, and I need relief—try to do something about your hair there.”
She shook her head and waved him toward the door. Maybe she grinned a little, he couldn’t be sure.
* * *
Graham called Molly from the St. Louis FBI office. Willy’s grandfather answered the telephone.
“It’s Will Graham, Mama,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Graham.”
Willy’s grandparents always called him “Mr. Graham.”
“Mama said he killed himself. She was looking at Donahue and they broke in with it. Damn lucky thing. Saved you fellows a lot of trouble catching him. Saves us taxpayers footing any more bills for this thing too. Was he really white?”
“Yes sir. Blond. Looked Scandinavian.”
Willy’s grandparents were Scandinavian.
“May I speak to Molly, please?”
“Are you going back down toFloridanow?”
“Soon. Is Molly there?”
“Mama, he wants to speak to Molly. She’s in the bathroom, Mr. Graham. My grandboy’s eating breakfast again. Been out riding in that good air. You ought to see that little booger eat. I bet he’s gained ten pounds. Here she is.”
“Hello.”
“Hi, hotshot.”
“Good news, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
“I was out in the garden. Mamamma came out and told me when she saw it on TV. When did you find out?”
“Late last night.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Mamamma was probably asleep.”
“No, she was watching Johnny Carson. I can’t tell you, Will. I’m so glad you didn’t have to catch him.”
“I’ll be here a little longer.”
“Four or five days?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe not that long. I want to see you, kid.”
“I want to see you too, when you get through with everything you need to do.”
“Today’s Wednesday. By Friday I ought to—”
“Will, Mamamma has all Willy’s uncles and aunts coming down fromSeattlenext week, and—”
“Fuck Mamamma. What is this ‘Mamamma’ anyway?”
“When Willy was real little, he couldn’t say—”
“Come home with me.”
“Will, I’ve waited for you . They never get to see Willy and a few more days—”
“Come yourself. Leave Willy there, and your ex-mother-in-law can stick him on a plane next week. Tell you what—let’s stop inNew Orleans. There’s a place called—”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been working—just part-time—at this western store in town, and I have to give them a little notice.”
“What’s wrong, Molly?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong… I got so sad, Will. You know I came up here after Willy’s father died.” She always said “Willy’s father” as though it were an office. She never used his name. “And we were all together—I got myself together, I got calm. I’ve gotten myself together now, too, and I—”
“Small difference: I’m not dead.”
“Don’t be that way.”
“What way? Don’t be what way?”
“You’re mad.”
Graham closed his eyes for a moment.
“Hello.”
“I’m not mad, Molly. You do what you want to. I’ll call you when things wind up here.”
“You could come up here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? There’s plenty of room. Mamamma would—”
“Molly, they don’t like me and you know why. Every time they look at me, I remind them.”
“That’s not fair and it’s not true either.”
Graham was very tired.
“Okay. They’re full of shit and they make me sick—try that one.”
“Don’t say that.”
“They want the boy. Maybe they like you all right, probably they do, if they ever think about it. But they want the boy and they’ll take you. They don’t want me and I could care less. I want you. InFlorida. Willy too, when he gets tired of his pony.”
“You’ll feel better when you get some sleep.”
“I doubt it. Look, I’ll call you when I know something here.”
“Sure.” She hung up.
“ Ape shit,” Graham said. “ Ape shit.”
Crawford stuck his head in the door. “Did I hear you say ‘ape shit’?”
“You did.”
“Well, cheer up. Aynesworth called in from the site. He has something for you. He said we ought to come on out, he’s got some static from the locals.”
Chapter 51
Aynesworth was pouring ashes carefully into new paint cans when Graham and Crawford got to the black ruin where Dolarhyde’s house had stood.
He was covered with soot and a large blister puffed under his ear. Special Agent Janowitz from Explosives was working down in the cellar.
A tall sack of a man fidgeted beside a dusty Oldsmobile in the drive. He intercepted Crawford and Graham as they crossed the yard.
“Are you Crawford?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Robert L. Dulaney. I’m the coroner and this is my jurisdiction.” He showed them his card. It said “Vote for Robert L. Dulaney.”
Crawford waited.
; “Your man here has some evidence that should have been turned over to me. He’s kept me waiting for nearly an hour.”
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Dulaney. He was following my instructions. Why don’t you have a seat in your car and I’ll clear this up.
Dulaney started after them.
Crawford turned around. “You’ll excuse us, Mr. Dulaney. Have a seat in your car.”
Section Chief Aynesworth was grinning, his teeth white in his sooty face. He had been sieving ashes all morning.
“As section chief, it gives me great pleasure—”
“To pull your prong, we all know that,” Janowitz said, climbing from the black tangle of the cellar.
“Silence in the ranks, Indian Janowitz. Fetch the items of interest.” He tossed Janowitz a set of car keys.
From the trunk of an FBI sedan Janowitz brought a long cardboard box. A shotgun, the stock burned off and barrels twisted by the heat, was wired to the bottom of the box. A smaller box contained a blackened automatic pistol.
“The pistol came out better,” Aynesworth said. “Ballistics may be able to make a match with it. Come on, Janowitz, get to it.”
Aynesworth took three plastic freezer bags from him.
“Front and center, Graham.” For a moment the humor left Aynesworth’s face. This was a hunter’s ritual, like smearing Graham’s forehead with blood.
“That was a real sly show, podna.” Aynesworth put the bags in Graham’s hands.
One bag contained five inches of a charred human femur and the ball of a hip. Another contained a wristwatch. The third held the teeth.
The plate was black and broken and only half was there, but that half contained the unmistakable pegged lateral incisor.
Graham supposed he should say something. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
His head swam briefly and he relaxed all over.
“…museum piece,” Aynesworth was saying. “We have to turn it over to the turkey, don’t we, Jack?”
“Yeah. But there’re some pros in theSt. Louiscoroner’s office. They’ll come over and make good impressions. We’ll have those.”
Crawford and the others huddled with the coroner beside his car. Graham was alone with the house. He listened to the wind in the chimneys. He hoped Bloom would come here when he was well. Probably he would.
Graham wanted to know about Dolarhyde. He wanted to know what happened here, what bred the Dragon. But he had had enough for now.
A mockingbird lit on the top of a chimney and whistled.
Graham whistled back.
He was going home.
Chapter 52
Graham smiled when he felt the jet’s big push rocket him up and away fromSt. Louis, turning across the sun’s path south and east at last toward home.
Molly and Willy would be there.
“Let’s don’t jack around about who’s sorry for what. I’ll pick you up inMarathon, kiddo,” she said on the phone.
In time he hoped he would remember the few good moments—the satisfaction of seeing people at work who were deeply committed to their skills. He supposed you could find that anywhere if you knew enough about what you were watching.
It would have been presumptuous to thank Lloyd Bowman and Beverly Katz, so he just told them on the telephone that he was glad to have worked with them again.
One thing bothered him a little: the way he felt when Crawford turned from the telephone inChicagoand said, “It’s Gateway.”
Possibly that was the most intense and savage joy that had ever burst in him. It was unsettling to know that the happiest moment of his life had come then, in that stuffy jury room in the city ofChicago. When even before he knew, he knew.
He didn’t tell Lloyd Bowman how it felt; he didn’t have to. “You know, when his theorem rang the cherries, Pythagoras gave one hundred oxen to the Muse,” Bowman said. “Nothing sweeter, is there? Don’t answer—it lasts better if you don’t spend it talking.”
Graham grew more impatient the closer he got to home and to Molly. InMiamihe had to go out on the apron to board Aunt Lula , the old DC-3 that flew toMarathon.
He liked DC-3’s. He liked everything today.
Aunt Lula was built when Graham was five years old and her wings were always dirty with a film of oil that blew back from the engines. He had great confidence in her. He ran to her as though she had landed in a jungle clearing to rescue him.
Islamorada’s lights were coming on as the island passed under the wing. Graham could still see whitecaps on the Atlantic side. In minutes they were descending toMarathon.
It was like the first time he came toMarathon. He had come aboard Aunt Lula that time too, and often afterward he went to the airfield at dusk to watch her coming in, slow and steady, flaps down, fire flickering out her exhausts and all the passengers safe behind their lighted windows.
The takeoffs were good to watch as well, but when the old airplane made her great arc to the north it left him sad and empty and the air was acrid with good-byes. He learned to watch only the landings and hellos.
That was before Molly.
With a final grunt, the airplane swung onto the apron. Graham saw Molly and Willy standing behind the fence, under the floodlights.
Willy was solidly planted in front of her. He’d stay there until Graham joined them. Only then would he wander along, examining whatever interested him. Graham liked him for that.
Molly was the same height as Graham, five feet ten inches. A level kiss in public carries a pleasant jolt, possibly because level kisses usually are exchanged in bed.
Willy offered to carry his suitcase. Graham gave him the suit bag instead.
Riding home to Sugarloaf Key, Molly driving, Graham remembered the things picked out by the headlights, imagined the rest.
When he opened the car door in the yard, he could hear the sea. Willy went into the house, holding the suit bag on top of his head, the bottom flapping against the backs of his legs.
Graham stood in the yard absently brushing mosquitoes away from his face.
Molly put her hand on his cheek. “What you ought to do is come on in the house before you get eaten up.”
He nodded. His eyes were wet.
She waited a moment longer, tucked her head and peered up at him, wiggling her eyebrows. “Tanqueray martinis, steaks, hugging and stuff. Right this way… and the light bill and the water bill and lengthy conversations with my child,” she added out of the side of her mouth.
Chapter 53
Graham and Molly wanted very much for it to be the same again between them, to go on as they had before.
When they saw that it was not the same, the unspoken knowledge lived with them like unwanted company in the house. The mutual assurances they tried to exchange in the dark and in the day passed through some refraction that made them miss the mark.
Molly had never looked better to him. From a painful distance, he admired her unconscious grace.
She tried to be good to him, but she had been toOregonand she had raised the dead.
Willy felt it and he was cool to Graham, maddeningly polite.
A letter came from Crawford. Molly brought it in the mail and did not mention it.
It contained a picture of theShermanfamily, printed from movie film. Not everything had burned, Crawford’s note explained. A search of the fields around the house had turned this picture up, along with a few other things the explosion had blown far from the fire.
“These people were probably on his itinerary,” Crawford wrote. “Safe now. Thought you’d like to know.”
Graham showed it to Molly.
“See? That’s why,” he said. “That’s why it was worth it.”
“I know,” she said. “I understand that, really I do.”
The bluefish were running under the moon. Molly packed suppers and they fished and they built fires, and none of it was any good.
Grandpa and Mamamma sent Willy a picture of his pony and he tacked it to the wall in his room.
T
he fifth day home was the last day before Graham and Molly would go back to work inMarathon. They fished in the surf, walking a quarter-mile around the curving beach to a place where they had luck before.
Graham had decided to talk to both of them together.
The expedition did not begin well. Willy pointedly put aside the rod Graham had rigged for him and brought the new surf-casting rod his grandfather sent home with him.
They fished for three hours in silence. Graham opened his mouth to speak several times, but it didn’t seem right.
He was tired of being disliked.
Graham caught four snappers, using sand fleas for bait. Willy caught nothing. He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his T-shirt stuck to him.
Graham waded into the water, scooped sand in the backwash of a wave, and came up with two sand fleas, their legs waving from their shells.
“How about one of these, partner?” He held out a sand flea to Willy.
“I’ll use the Rapala. It was my father’s, did you know that?”
“No,” Graham said. He glanced at Molly.
She hugged her knees and looked far off at a frigate bird sailing high.
She got up and brushed off the sand. “I’ll go fix some sandwiches,” she said.
When Molly had gone, Graham was tempted to talk to the boy by himself. No. Willy would feel whatever his mother felt. He’d wait and get them both together when she came back. He’d do it this time.
She wasn’t gone long and she came back without the sandwiches, walking swiftly on the packed sand above the surf.
“Jack Crawford’s on the phone. I told him you’d call him back, but he said it’s urgent,” she said, examining a fingemail. “Better hurry.”
Graham blushed. He stuck the butt of his rod in the sand and trotted toward the dunes. It was quicker than going around the beach if you carried nothing to catch in the brush.
He heard a low whirring sound carried on the wind and, wary of a rattler, he scanned the ground as he went into the scrub cedar.
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