All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  The maid came in with a tray and set it down on the massive coffee table in front of Franny. Behind her toddled the baby, now dressed in overalls and a striped T-shirt. He was clutching a nursing bottle.

  “Thanks, Juanita,” Franny said. “Come here, Alex, and meet a friend.”

  The baby grinned and toddled toward her, holding his bottle aloft. He teetered as he neared the table and Franny reached out to steady him. “Say hello to Molly, sweet boy.”

  Alex lowered his head and started to suck on his bottle.

  “Hello, Alex,” Molly said.

  Juanita scooped him up and carried him off.

  Molly watched him go with regret, thinking it might not be so bad being a grandmother if she could look as good as Franny and have a maid to do the work.

  Franny poured the coffee into a delicate bone china cup. “How do you take yours, Molly?”

  “Black. Thanks.”

  Franny poured herself a cup. “I wonder what the bag ladies have nightmares about.”

  “Being us. Having to go to work and wear pantyhose.”

  Franny laughed. “Do they say that?”

  “No, but they do say that after you’ve been on the street a few years it’s too late to go back to the working world and its constraints. Even though their existence is miserable.” The coffee was vanilla-flavored and delicious. “Great coffee. But, even though we know that, there’s still a little twinge of attraction to them, isn’t there?”

  Franny looked up, surprised for a second, then murmured, “Yes. Yes. Maybe it’s the temptation to just stop all the struggling and give in. Just let it all go. Such a relief.”

  “Sweet surrender,” Molly said. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

  They looked at one another and nodded.

  Now was the time, Molly decided. She took a sip of coffee for courage. “Franny, yesterday at the legislature I saw Olin Crocker. I didn’t talk to him, just caught a glimpse of him.”

  Franny sipped her coffee. “Yes. I know he’s been doing some lobbying. I ran into him at a fund raiser out here for Jim Renkert. About a month ago. Hadn’t seen him since … back then, when it happened.”

  “Same with me. Did you talk to him?”

  “No.” Her lips were tight, as though she were stopping herself from saying more.

  Molly went on. “Right after I saw him, I was having lunch with Rose and Parnell. They talked about the funeral—I’m so sorry to hear about that.”

  Franny nodded. “Poor Frank. Willie was the apple of his eye.”

  “Rose said you said it reminded you of my daddy. That he committed suicide too.” She watched Franny’s face drain of animation. “Did you say that? Do you think it?”

  “Oh, Molly. So that’s why you’ve come.”

  Molly nodded.

  “You haven’t laid him to rest, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m sorry something thoughtless I said got back to you and upset you.”

  “But you did say it?”

  “Yes. We were talking about brilliant people being more … prone to depression and suicide.”

  Molly leaned forward. “Franny, you really believe my daddy killed himself?”

  Franny’s cup rattled on its saucer. She set it down on the table. “I know he did.”

  It was a body blow. When she caught her breath, Molly said, “You know he did?”

  Franny nodded.

  “How?”

  “Oh, Molly, this is still so hard for you. Do you really want to go into this?”

  Molly looked out at the lake, which seemed to be sending off golden sparks now as the sun approached its midday intensity. “I have to. Tell me.”

  “All right.” Franny closed her eyes. “God.” She leaned back into the corner of the sofa. “I know he committed suicide because I worried the whole week before it happened that he might do exactly that.”

  Molly was short of breath. “You did? Why?”

  “The week before his death, Vern was”—she held her hands out as if begging for the right word to fall into them—“depressed doesn’t even approach it. He was distraught, tormented. It was so extreme I thought he ought to be in a hospital, but I couldn’t even get him to see a doctor. I’ve never seen anyone in worse shape.”

  Molly was stunned. She didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true that this had been going on without her knowing it. “Is this true?” she whispered.

  Franny nodded. “He was in crisis, total agony, for a week before it happened.”

  “I never saw any of this.”

  “Of course not. You were a teenager and you were busy with your own life, just as you should have been. And he didn’t want you to see it.”

  Could it be true that her daddy was despondent, even suicidal, that last week and she hadn’t noticed? Hot guilt squeezed at her. Where had she been that week? On Mars? No, she’d been having her first romance, with a senior baseball player, Sam Gardner, Sam of the long sinewy arms and the smooth back, Sam who had introduced her to baseball and sex. She’d been seeing him at every opportunity, and she’d been getting ready for exams. She’d been worrying about getting pregnant, she’d been playing on the tennis team, she’d been resenting the growing closeness between Franny and her daddy. They’d just told her they were getting married and she’d been hoping it wouldn’t happen. But she had not been paying any attention to her daddy.

  “So,” Molly said, “he was depressed. Why? What was the problem?”

  “Darling, I wish I knew. It seemed to come out of the blue. One day he was happy, riding high. The next day he just crashed. I asked him, begged him, to tell me what it was. All he said was he was sorry but he couldn’t marry me and he wanted me to go away and leave him alone.”

  Molly’s heart stopped dead with surprise. “He broke your engagement?”

  “That was the least of it. He said he was unfit for marrying anyone, that he should never have gone this far with me, he should have known it was impossible.”

  “But why?”

  “Molly, if I knew the answer to that, my life the past twenty-eight years would have been easier. There isn’t a day I haven’t asked myself why.” She leaned forward so she was inches from Molly and spoke in a voice so low Molly had to strain to hear. “Vernon Cates was the love of my life, my other half, the man I was born to love. And in spite of what he said to me that last week, I believe I was the love of his life too. That may sound corny to you, but it’s true.”

  “I can’t believe this. That whole year he was courting you, he was giddy with happiness. Why this all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t know.” Franny sat back into the corner of the sofa. “Something happened. We were together on the houseboat one afternoon, and it was wonderful. He got a phone call, just before dinner. It was Harriet calling from Lubbock. He was clearly upset after he talked to her. We’d been planning on going out for barbecue, but after the call he said he’d have to beg off. Some old business acquaintance was coming in from Lubbock and he needed to take care of it alone. I didn’t mind, I had some paperwork to do on a closing, and I wanted to spend time with Kevin. When I saw Vern the next night he was a different man. He said our wedding was off, and I needed to leave him alone.”

  Her voice cracked on the last word. She picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee, looking at Molly over the rim. “I had no pride, Molly. I refused to go away. I wouldn’t accept it. I begged him to go to a counselor with me, to see a doctor, to elope with me, anything I could think of. All week, I kept at him. I said I’d never let him go.

  “Then, a week after all this started, he disappeared…. And five days later he turned up dead in the lake.”

  “You sure it was Harriet who called?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask her about it later?”

  “Oh, yes. Many times.”

  “And—?” Molly prompted.

  “And she’d never discuss it. She said it was nothing, that she was just
checking in with her brother. Molly, his face after that phone call—he looked like he’d just heard the world was ending.”

  “When did you see him last?” Molly asked.

  “The night before he disappeared. I stopped by the houseboat to see him. He was sitting on the deck in the dark, drunk, flipping one of those gold Mexican coins he loved, and drinking straight bourbon. I told him I loved him and he told me to get off his property. Actually, he shouted it at me.”

  “To get off his property!” Molly was shocked. “I never heard about any of this. Did you tell Crocker this?”

  Her lips got tight again. “Sure, but Crocker wasn’t worth a damn.”

  “That’s the kindest thing you could say about him. But you agreed with his ruling of suicide.”

  “Yes, but if there had been foul play, Crocker would never have figured it out. He was too busy trying to cop a feel.”

  Molly was stunned. “You too?”

  “Crocker was a dirty old man even though he wasn’t old then.”

  For a split second Molly felt like telling her about what had happened with Crocker, but it was something she’d never talked about. She didn’t want to bring up the feelings. It was like resisting throwing up: you knew you would feel better afterward if you went ahead and did it, but the violent upheaval and the foul taste in your mouth were too unpleasant. She simply agreed: “He definitely was a dirty old man.”

  “Molly, if I had it to do over again, I still wouldn’t know what to do. I saw Vern needed help, but can you get a man committed because he’s decided not to marry you? I don’t think so.”

  Molly was in turmoil. To calm herself, she felt compelled to lay out her case against suicide, simply and forcefully, as she had done for herself hundreds of times. She started in the usual place: “Franny, the man didn’t own a gun.”

  “I know.”

  “And there’s no record of his buying one. I checked every gun store in Texas.”

  “Did you? That must have taken awhile.” “About six months. Daddy hated guns.”

  “I know.”

  “He was coming to see me inducted into the National Honor Society the next night. And we’d invited some of my friends to go to dinner in Austin afterward.”

  Franny was nodding.

  “He never, ever broke a promise to me, not once. He would have written me a note, something.”

  “Honey, I know it’s hard to accept.”

  “His writing career was finally taking off.”

  “Yes, I think maybe it was.”

  “As much as I hated it at the time, he was madly in love with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Franny, someone killed him, then sank the houseboat to destroy all his notes and papers. Someone did that because he was writing something dangerous to them. I’m sure of it.”

  Franny reached out and picked up Molly’s hand. “Maybe Vern destroyed those things himself.”

  “Franny, no.” Molly withdrew her hand. “He was a man who kept everything. He had my mother’s poems in those files, his parents’ love letters, my school projects, every essay I ever wrote. Even if he were going to kill himself, he’d have left those things for me.”

  Franny responded with a sigh.

  “And what about the houseboat?” Molly said. “Did he sink his own houseboat that he loved?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To clean up, get things tidy. People who commit suicide often destroy their journals and other files first. Willie did it too. He’d gotten rid of everything. There wasn’t a scrap of paper in his room.”

  Molly sat back in the big chair. The plushness of the cushion sucked her in, made her feel that she would never be able to get up. Suicide. She had never, not for a moment, accepted the medical examiner’s suicide ruling. Now, for the first time in all these years, she was shaken in her conviction. Should she believe all this? Was Franny telling the truth or did she have some ax to grind here? Was she covering up for somebody?

  “What’s your best guess?” Molly asked. “About that phone call?”

  “Molly, I don’t have one. I’ve gone through all the possibilities—financial ruin, paternity suits, old crimes. I just don’t know what could be so devastating, so bad, that we couldn’t have worked it out.”

  “And Harriet wouldn’t say?”

  “No. You know how close they were.”

  Molly nodded. They had been lifelong confidants, Vernon and Harriet, and she had often felt deprived at not having a brother or sister to share that kind of relationship with.

  “Harriet knew Daddy had broken off your engagement?”

  “Yes. I talked to her, too, that week. She had already heard it from Vern and she was worried about his depression. We discussed it. She talked it over with Parnell Morrisey in Austin. There was lots of phone calling going on. She was trying to get him to a psychiatrist.”

  “A psychiatrist! Aunt Harriet was doing that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she always said psychiatry was a hoax.”

  “That’s what people say when they haven’t needed it yet.”

  Molly pushed her hair back from her face. It was starting to get hot in here with the noon sun beating in the window. “Well, whatever Harriet knows is gone forever,” Molly said. “Alzheimer’s. Rose told me. Such a shame.”

  “Yeah, sometimes she recognizes me and sometimes she doesn’t.”

  “So unfair.”

  They stopped talking because they heard the front door open and slam shut. Molly put her hands on the chair arms to brace herself. She had dreaded this. It must be Frank Quinlan home from the golf course. She had never met Quinlan, although she had had a stormy interview with his father and older brother many years ago. It was getting really hot in here now; she wished Franny would turn up the air conditioning.

  A small, fit man with white hair and a sunburned face burst into the room. He wore a turquoise Ralph Lauren shirt, white shorts, and deck shoes with no socks. “Hi, darling.” He strode over and leaned down to give his wife a kiss. Molly watched him closely. It had been two and a half decades since she had made her accusations against Quinlan’s family and the oil company they owned. She had tried to have charges brought against them and had been quoted in the newspaper as saying that they had murdered Vernon Cates. It had happened a long time ago, but it was not the sort of thing anyone forgot.

  Frank straightened up and looked at Molly. “Miz Cates?” His mouth tried to smile, but it seemed afraid to, as though someone had told him the best way to treat a cobra was to smile at it and he was doing his damnedest. He tried the smile again and this time it worked.

  Molly extended her hand to him. “Hello, Frank. I’m Molly. Nice day for golf.”

  Looking relieved, he took her hand and pumped it. “Yes, yes. Beautiful day on the course. Franny said you were coming out. She was so pleased you called. Sure is nice to have you here at our home.” Frank Quinlan looked more like a kindly retired coach than a murderer, but Molly had seen too many sweet-faced murderers to believe that these things were written in the flesh.

  He looked at Franny. “Can I get you pretty ladies anything from the kitchen?”

  “I don’t think so, dear,” Franny said. “Thanks.”

  “Well, that being the case, I think I’ll go round up old Alex for a boat ride.”

  “He’d love that,” Franny said. “Don’t forget his pre-server—on the hook at the back door.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you, Molly.” He backed away in evident relief, a man exiting a snake pit.

  “Good to see you, Frank,” Molly said, thinking what a blessed relief social conventions were in a situation like this.

  The women were silent until they heard a door close at the other end of the house.

  Franny leaned forward and smiled to defang what she was about to say. “Surely it can’t be true that you think that man killed your daddy?”

  “Oh, Franny, I do
n’t know. I do know Quinlan Oil was trying to keep Daddy from publishing his story on the white oil scam. I know they tried to pay him off. I know the article never got published because my father was killed and the backup material destroyed.”

  Franny appeared to be listening carefully. “Jasper Quinlan was not a nice man. Frank will be the first to admit it. But I don’t believe Jasper would have killed anyone. Frank I’ve known for twenty years, and I’ve never seen or heard of him doing an unkind thing. I knew him during his wife’s long illness, when I would happily have become his mistress, but he doesn’t believe in infidelity even under extreme conditions. I know how much he loves children. He would never kill anyone. Find some other tree to bark up.”

  “Franny, I never said he did it. It’s a big family.”

  “True. But he was active in the company then. He would have known about this, Molly. He says he is certain no one involved with Quinlan Oil had anything to do with your father’s death. I’ve never known him to lie.” Franny’s cheeks pinkened with the fervor of her belief.

  “What did he say when you told him I was coming out this morning?”

  Franny hesitated. “When I told Frank you’d called and that you were coming out, he said that, back at the time you were going around making wild accusations, you got them all upset. Real upset. He thought you were a crazy woman. But after what happened with our poor Willie, he understands how you would do anything in the world to avoid believing that someone you love has committed suicide. He said if there were any other possibility for Willie, he’d go to the ends of the earth to find out.”

  The ends of the earth, Molly thought, leaning back into the plush chair. At the very least.

  Molly was invited to stay for lunch, but she declined. She wanted only to get in her truck and drive. She needed time and solitude to think this over. She headed back toward Austin, intending to go straight home, but when she came to Four Corners, to her surprise, her truck turned left onto Bullick Hollow instead of right onto 2222. Apparently she was headed to Volente.