The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  “But why does he think he needs me, for that?” Nate asks. “And why did he pick such a cruel way to do this to you?”

  I sag against him, and he quickly puts an arm around me to prop me up. “It isn’t over, is it, Nathan?”

  “Not on your life,” Steve says.

  “I call that an unfortunate choice of words!” I mumble, making my cousin laugh. “But speaking of my life, do you two realize we’re only two blocks from where it started?”

  “You want a plaque on the door?” Nathan jokes.

  “No, I want to go over there.”

  “Now?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s a beautiful night, we have the streets to ourselves, we don’t have anything else to do, and I want to walk over there. Will you guys come with me?”

  Steve doesn’t really have a choice, not if he wants to guard my body, but even Nathan agrees to come along. I offer each of them an elbow as we walk along, but only he hooks his arm through mine.

  The old homestead appears even larger by night than it did by day. There are three stories, counting the large attic, and by modern-day standards, it’s nearly a mansion. My mother came from a bit of money herself, and my father’s traitorous parents made a lot of money writing screenplays during the years when better writers couldn’t get hired because of their alleged Communist affiliations. It all came down to me, what my aunt and uncle didn’t spend on my education and vacations for all of us, but this house didn’t. They sold it when they moved Nathan and me to Florida, and they used the proceeds to buy their next house. (My father had made the mistake of making his brother-in-law my trustee.) “Marie’s parents would want her to have a nice place to live” was their rationale at the time for spending my money on a vast place on the water, and when they sold that, they made another bundle and claimed it all belonged to them, since “Marie’s parents would want her to have a nice place to come home to anytime she wants.” I long ago decided that it isn’t worth fighting about, although if my life had turned out differently, if I hadn’t made so much money of my own, I might have another attitude about it.

  The last owner of this house was out of luck, apparently.

  Though the white paint is dingy gray and peeling now, there’s still enough of it to make the house gleam white under the quarter moon. We amble up one side of the circle drive, not even trying to be quiet, since the houses on either side appear to be vacant, too. Once this was a gorgeous block of southern-style homes, all grace and charm, but now it has an empty, haunted atmosphere.

  “Too bad,” Nate says, and I know what he means.

  Too bad this beautiful house is falling down, too bad the town is deteriorating, too bad for so many reasons, too damn bad.

  “I want to go inside,” I announce.

  “It isn’t safe,” Steve warns.

  “And it’s all boarded up,” Nate observes, pointing out the plywood that is nailed over one of the downstairs windows.

  “Well, I know one room that will still be open,” I tell them. “Follow me.”

  I take off toward where I see that the gravel drive branches into the west side yard and I follow that weedy path until it brings us around to the rear.

  “Oh, my God,” I breathe, and stop in my tracks.

  “What?” Nate asks, sounding alarmed.

  “It’s the magnolia tree! The one that James told me he could see from the window of the parson’s chamber.”

  “Don’t scare me like that. I thought you saw a ghost.”

  The old tree has grown to monstrous size, which magnolias can do here in the South. Its branches push against the house now and offer even more privacy and darkness than they did when my parents were hiding runaways here.

  “Come on!”

  The past, as it’s been told to me, is rushing in on me now. Maybe it’s the mint juleps I drank, maybe it’s the accumulation of all that’s happened in the last few days, maybe it’s only that I’m living on an emotional edge, but I feel as if I’m walking back into that night when my parents disappeared. There’s the door at the back of the house, the one that was always left open in the old days so that visiting preachers might come in and stay the night. I touch my hand to it, and it gives, and as it gives way into a dark and empty room, I feel as if I can sense them on the other side of the wall. I hear Rachel talking to the other black woman my mother sometimes hired. I hear my parents talking in their room upstairs as they dress for the Fishers’ picnic. I hear a telephone ring, hear my father walk to answer it, hear the muffled distress in his voice. I hear a baby cry and my mother hurry to comfort it.

  “It’s creepy,” Nathan says, behind me.

  Steve hasn’t come in. When I look back and see him framed in the doorway, he looks as if he doesn’t want to join this game.

  “The bed probably was there,” I tell Nathan, pointing to where I mean. “Look, here’s the bathroom! Not much left of the fixtures. James said this was the first time in his life he ever used indoor plumbing.” I walk back out of the bathroom and into the bedroom again. “And over there, that would be a natural place to put a table.”

  “There’s something on the floor,” Nathan says, his voice sounding hollow in this echoing room. “Somebody left something here. You want a souvenir, Marie?”

  “What is it?”

  He’s standing nearer to it, so he bends and picks it up.

  “Just an ashtray. Some homeless person must have spent the night in here. He left his cigar.”

  The hair stands up on my head, on my arms, on my neck.

  “His what?”

  “Cigar.”

  Max Cady smoked cigars. In MacDonald’s book The Executioners, Max Cady smoked cigars.

  Somehow, I manage to get out the words to tell them.

  “Jesus, Marie! You’re scaring the crap out of me,” Nate exclaims, once he’s heard it. Quickly, he sets the ashtray back down on the floor. “You think this Paulie Barnes was here?”

  I hurry over to crouch down and take a look.

  Just as in the book, this is a “well-chewed” cigar.

  “Yes,” I say, feeling like a deer being watched by somebody in a hidden blind. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You can’t say that soon enough to please me,” my cousin says and helps me to my feet so fast he nearly knocks me over. “Let’s get the hell out of here. But how did he know we’d do this?”

  Thinking of the incident with the hawks in the Keys, I say, “He didn’t. He just likes to plant his little traps in case I fall into them.”

  As we hurry back down the gravel drive, I’m thinking, He’s been here, he’s been in Sebastion. Or, worse, he’s in Sebastion now.

  I’m shaken by finding the cigar, and so I disappear quickly into my bedroom, leaving the men to talk about it if they want to, or watch TV, or read, or sleep. I just want to be by myself. No, that’s not true. I want to be with Franklin.

  Since the closest I can get to doing that is with my computer, I turn it on and check my E-mail. When I see his familiar e-address in my mailbox, I nearly feel like crying from gratitude.

  “All right, I’ll tell you about the damned dog,” he starts in, and even with all that has happened tonight, even after being scared out of my wits by a well-chewed cigar, I can’t help but grin at my computer screen. He sounds so pissed. Just like Franklin.

  The damned dog’s name is Mabel. We’re keeping her, because there’s no way to take a dog away from little kids. I should say I’mkeeping her. Truly refuses to have her stay there until Mabel is house-trained, so I’ve got the job of crate-training her. Don’t get me started on this. This isn’t what you need to know anyway.

  We tried to track Mabel through humane societies, dog pounds, and pet shops, but no luck. What we’ve finally decided is that she’s a stolen dog. Yes, I’m doing everything I can to find her owners—that’s the only possible way of getting rid of her that the kids could understand—but I’m not hopeful. I think we’ve got us a dog.

  Oh, all right. She’s
a nice dog. Poops a lot.

  In the bedroom in Sebastion, I suddenly have a fit of the silent giggles. Out of an act of meanness, something rather adorable has come. The kids must be thrilled, even if their parents aren’t.

  Franklin’s E-mail continues:

  As for the ribbon with the card that had your name on it, it’s just a generic ribbon and card with your name typed on it. Probably impossible to trace,but that doesn’t mean we won’t try. I’ve talked to Detectives Anschutz and Flanck, by the way, and the three of us are coordinating everything we’re doing.

  Okay, I told you about the dog. Tell me about you.

  And that’s all. No “Love, Franklin,” no endearments, no nothin’.

  But it’s way more than enough. It speaks of continued care and concern, and that’s all I need to feel right now, that’s almost comfort enough. And suddenly I realize it would be stupid to withhold from him the information about what has happened tonight. I’ve got to tell him. He can share it with the detectives. I need their expertise, all of it. And so I spend the next hour writing everything I can think to tell him, and I send it off into the ether.

  My mailbox chirps. A new E-mail has arrived from Paulie Barnes.

  My dear Marie,

  Do you give any thought to life after death?

  If there is such a thing, will you come back to haunt me? How will I know that it’s you, my dear? Will you slam doors, make the lights flicker, pour salt into sugar bowls as poltergeists do? I can’t quite picture you making whoo noises in the night, or floating down corridors in a filmy white dress—

  Reading that, I remember my dream and am frightened and appalled that he could latch on to an image so close to the reality of something in my own head.

  They say that when dead people hover around the living, it is because they are stuck at the place where they died. They can’t move on. I hope for your sake that doesn’t happen to you, Marie, because I don’t think you’ll want to linger in the place where I will kill you. Believe me, you won’t like it there. You won’t want to be conscious there even one more minute than you have to. But then, you don’t have to worry about that, because I’ll be helping you to hurry on to investigate the afterlife.

  When you’ve severed the thread of life, once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, I suggest that you speed away. Unless, of course, you wish to stick around to see how our book is doing?

  I tell you what, Marie. I promise that I’ll drop back by the place where you died to give you a sales report. I’ll read the reviews to you and any fan mail we receive through my E-mail that cannot—as you have no doubt learned by now—be traced by any law enforcement agencies.

  And now for your final assignment, your last chapter.

  You’ve written how we “met,” which is to say how I first contacted you. You’ve written as much as you know about your own background. And you’ve done a nice job of describing for me your terror at what awaits you. Now I want you to write down your feelings about what it is like to know that you’re going to die very, very soon, and that you don’t know where, or why, or how, or by whom. Submit that to me by morning, Marie. If you don’t, I’ll be checking in with your cousin Nathan to see what he can tell me about you, and I won’t ask him gently.

  It is signed as always, “Yours truly, Paulie Barnes.”

  And at the top is the now-familiar return address in the body of the E-mail: executioners@capefear.com.

  Without even stopping to wonder if I’m doing the right thing, I forward it instantly to Franklin. Somehow, just knowing he’ll know makes me feel a little better. He hasn’t said he misses me—though why should he, all recent things considered? He hasn’t said he loves me, nor have I said it to him, he hasn’t even said whether his ex-wife is going to “allow” me into her children’s lives again. But he’s still there. Still hanging in here with me, through everything. Through thick and thin, some people might call it, which is on a moral par, I’d think, with those other well-known clichés such as “rich and poor, in sickness and in health.”

  I think I can get to sleep on the strength of that, alone.

  It’s only as I’m falling asleep that something else strikes me.

  Our shy innkeeper, Mo Goodwin, is so quiet and unprepossessing that I didn’t even notice her absence tonight. I did note that only white former members of Hostel were there, but I hadn’t missed Maureen. She said she’d been invited, too, but she never showed up, and nobody mentioned her. Somehow I have a feeling that’s the story of Maureen Goodwin’s life, that she never shows up and nobody misses her.

  29

  Marie

  It’s no fun to wake up to a hangover and a ringing telephone.

  “Marie, it’s Robyn Anschutz,” announces the obscenely energetic voice in my ear. I may have to kill her for calling so early, only since she’s a homicide detective, she’d probably find out I did it.

  “Robyn.”

  “Paul is hollering at me to tell you it’s him, too. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Need caffeine. Or a blood transfusion.”

  “Wild night, huh? Listen, the reason I’m calling. All right, Paul! I hear you! The reason we’re calling is that we’ve been going down that list of murderers in your books, and we think maybe we’ve got something. A. Z. Roner? The doctor who killed nurses, the one that Franklin put away and you wrote about?”

  “Yeah.” I’m picturing the skinny, fresh-faced, homicidal, rapist former high school valedictorian in my bloodshot mind’s eye. “He’s still on death row, right?”

  “Yes, but are you aware that his older brother moved to Florida to be close to him?”

  “No! Where in Florida?”

  “Well, near Starke, so he’s not all that close to Bahia, but close enough. And do you remember anything about Roner’s younger sister?”

  That was several books ago, and I have to scrape the dregs of my memory to get there. “Oh, my God, Robyn, she lives here in Alabama! I can’t remember—”

  “Mobile. Quite a little coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, it may only be coincidence, Robyn, but I’ve got to tell you that was just about the most uncooperative family I ever interviewed. They stuck by him to the bitter end. I used to think that Franklin could have shown them videotapes of A.Z. doing the crimes and they’d still have claimed that somebody framed him.”

  “What did they think of you, Marie?”

  “They thought I was going to make him look good.”

  “Oops. Think they could be real, real pissed at you?” “I know they are. They wrote to me after the book came out. But they were up front about it, Robyn. There wasn’t anything sneaky or anonymous about it, they just came right out and told me I suck.”

  She laughs. “I’m glad I don’t get fan mail. But listen, Paul and I think we’re on to something here. We’re going to find out if by some chance the brother loves computers and the sister is a frustrated writer. You met them when you interviewed them, right? You remember what they both look like? We think you ought to keep an eye out for them, Marie.”

  “I will. And thank you so much, both of you.”

  “Do you have anything new for us?”

  “Yes, I’ll send it to you today.”

  “Hey, listen, does it ever rain where you are?”

  “Yeah, it’s incredibly green here.”

  “I wish I was there,” Robyn Anschutz says. “Maybe they’d let me wash my car.”

  Over breakfast downstairs served by a quiet Mo Goodwin, Nate asks, “Who the hell was that who called so early?”

  “My police friends in Bahia.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They think that Paulie Barnes could actually be a brother and sister of that homicidal doctor I wrote about a few years ago, remember him? A. Z. Roner? Killed nurses?”

  “That creep? Hey, this is great that they know who it is.”

  “They don’t know for sure,” I caution him.

  Mo has brought us platters of scrambled eggs, chee
se grits, country ham and redeye gravy, bacon, sausage, toast, various juices, and coffee, a combination that I wouldn’t have thought I could face this morning. But now I find that I am surprisingly hungry. Maybe it’s optimism.

  “If it’s good enough for the cops, it’s good enough for me,” Nathan insists. “I’m going home.”

  “You’re leaving?” I stare at him.

  “Look,” he says, leaning toward me, trying to cut Steve out of this conversation, “I’ve been thinking about it. You don’t need me here, Marie. I don’t even know why I am here. You’ve got to admit, nothing really bad has happened—nobody’s died, nobody’s been injured, nobody’s been kidnapped, for God’s sake—and it looks like nothing bad is ever going to happen. I don’t mean to be selfish, but I haven’t got time for these stupid games the Roners are trying to play with us.” His intensity takes on a wry look. “I’ve got scripts to write that will never sell, Marie. I’m a busy guy. It takes a lot of time and energy to fail as often as I do. And I hate this town. It gives me the creeps. I don’t want to be here, not even for you. I want to go home.”

  I feel devastated that he would leave me like this.

  Scraps of childhood memories come, unwelcome, reminding me that my beloved cousin has a long history of leaving me in the lurch. I use the term advisedly, because the first time, or at least the first one I can remember, was literal. I had “lurched” onto a tree limb, propelled from the step he made from the interlocked fingers of his small hands. I flew upward, landing hard enough on my midsection to knock the wind out of me. It hurt, it scared me, I thought I was going to die because I couldn’t breathe. When some air found its way back into my empty lungs, I started to wail that I wanted down. Nate ran off to get his mom, I thought. But nobody came to my rescue. When I got my wind back I began to bellow. I was so little, up so high, and I was so scared and in pain and pissed off by then that I must have sounded like an enraged baby rhino bawling for its mother.