Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  He glanced at her. “What’re you talking about? If you have to blabber, at least make some sense.”

  “I’m talking about Jeremiah being executed for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  She saw uncertainty flutter across his face, like a quick rustling of the leaves of a tree in the winds before a storm. Then he shook his head and grinned at her. “You’re trying to get under my skin, aren’t you, Dr. Gray? You’re a shrink, I remember reading that. You can save your breath. It won’t work. Hell, I’ve been interrogated by a lot worse than you.”

  “I’m not trying anything on you, Elijah,” she said calmly. “I’m just offering my sympathy. Your son didn’t deserve to die.”

  “My son was a good boy,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “He flipped out, is all. I’ve seen it before, in the field. It happens, and I’m not saying it’s right, but he shouldn’t have been punished like that. Taken away from me. From his Mama. That doesn’t bring Eleanor back.”

  “The Lord would have dealt with Jeremiah in His own good time, is that it? He could have repented and left it all up to the Lord?”

  Elijah turned toward her briefly, and she saw his eyes gleaming, from some inner light or simply from the sun’s reflection. “Exactly. You got that exactly right. It’s not anybody else’s role to judge what he did.”

  “Except he didn’t do it.”

  Elijah slapped the top of the steering wheel. “Damn, woman, what are you talking about? He confessed. The fool boy confessed. He took it all back later on, but he’d already done the damage.”

  “I want you to think about something,” PJ said. She took a deep breath and regretted it as her ribs ground together. “Suppose he confessed to protect someone else. Someone he loved a great deal.”

  “That only happens in books and movies.”

  “Real life can be stranger than books. Can you at least open yourself up to the thought?”

  “Her blood was on his hands. Sweet Eleanor’s blood was on his hands. He did it, all right.”

  “You saw the scratches on Jeremiah’s body, didn’t you? Do you think Eleanor could have made those scratches without using her fingernails?”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just answer.”

  “No.”

  “Well then, why wasn’t there any of Jeremiah’s blood or skin under her nails?”

  “Your precious Schultz explained that at the trial,” he said bitterly. “Her nails were freshly clipped. Jeremiah saw what her hands looked like. He clipped her nails, cleaned underneath what was left of them, and took the clippings with him.”

  “All that careful action from a boy who ‘flipped out,’ your exact phrase? And if he was going to confess, why try to conceal any evidence?”

  “A person flips out and realizes it right afterward. Can’t undo the killing, but he can protect himself. That confession—I guess the guilt just swept over him. I wish to God he’d never confessed. That set the police on him like ticks on a dog.”

  “Has it occurred to you that maybe Eleanor’s nails were clipped and cleaned to conceal the fact that there were no skin cells under them in the first place?”

  “You’re talking crazy. Can’t say I blame you, in your position.”

  PJ didn’t answer. She just looked out the window, refusing to meet his eyes when they darted in her direction, and waited him out.

  “Who’d do a thing like that?” he asked after a while.

  Hooked.

  “From the way you’re talking, I’m assuming you haven’t heard Jeremiah’s version of the story.”

  “Oh, and you have? What’d you do, go over to the cemetery and hook up earphones to his tombstone?”

  “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor, Elijah. I thought you just murdered people.” She regretted her sarcasm, but the words were out.

  He was quiet for so long that she thought she’d lost all chance with him.

  “When you say Jeremiah’s story,” he said, as if nothing had happened between the two of them, “are you talking about his confession? I know all about that.”

  While he’d been quiet, Elijah had gotten off the interstate. He was turning the car onto progressively smaller roads. They weren’t on gravel yet, but it was clear that they were heading for some isolated area. If she didn’t speak up now, she might not get a chance to.

  “Tell me something first. Is Schultz still alive?”

  “Far as I know.”

  PJ closed her eyes in mixed relief and pain. “I’m not talking about the confession. Jeremiah wrote a letter just before he was executed. It was hand-carried to Darla.”

  “You talked to Darla?” She heard genuine interest in his voice. “I haven’t seen her in… well, years.”

  “She didn’t want to be found. By me or by you, either, I’m sure. She doesn’t want anything to do with what’s left of the Ramsey family.”

  “That’s a hard thing for a father to hear.”

  PJ let the comment go by. There were even harder things for a father to hear coming up. “Darla never read the letter. It’s been in a box in her closet since the execution.”

  “You aren’t going to tell me he planned Eleanor’s murder, are you? ’Cause all this time I believed he flipped out. It’d break my heart to hear that he went over there intent on killing her.”

  “Elijah, it’s a lot worse than that.” PJ had no idea how the man was going to take the news. She hoped he wouldn’t run off the road. “Did you know Jeremiah and Libby were lovers for years, and that Eleanor was their daughter?”

  “Christ Almighty, you’re making this up. You’re trying everything you can think of to throw me off track. Jesus motherfucking Christ.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road, please, or slow down. Don’t get us both killed.” They were on a two-lane road with a lot of twists and turns.

  They rode in silence for a minute or two, the only noise Elijah’s hard breathing.

  “You’re making it up,” he said at last. “My son wouldn’t do that.”

  “It was Libby who urged him on. Jeremiah genuinely thought he was in love with her. It tore him up, but he thought he loved her.”

  “When did this start? Or when do you say it started?”

  “When Jeremiah was fifteen. It was Libby who went to him, not the other way around. But he must have felt some kind of attraction even then.”

  Elijah’s hands were tight on the steering wheel and the muscles of his jaw and neck were clenched. She wondered if she should try pulling her legs up for another kick, maybe try to open the door and drop out on the shoulder of the road. Where would she go from there, if Elijah wasn’t completely disabled?

  “How could this have gone on and I didn’t know about it?” His voice sharp as a switchblade, slicing through the thick fog of emotion around him.

  “You were overseas a lot, weren’t you? Eleanor found out who her true parents were. She never liked her mother much in the first place, and that knowledge clinched it. She did like Jeremiah, though. They had a good relationship. He writes lovingly of her in his letter.”

  “So that’s what Jeremiah had to say from death row? If it’s true, and I hope to God it isn’t, he should have kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. He should have taken that to the grave with him. You’d think he’d be ashamed.”

  “He was. But he wanted Darla to know who the true murderer was. I guess he wanted someone to understand and forgive him. And I’m sure he meant for Darla to tell you, when she was ready. It turns out she was never ready.”

  “This letter still exists? Darla still has it?”

  “No. The police have it now,” she said. She saw a tremor go through Elijah’s body. His family’s shame, exposed to the people he hated the most, the ones who had deprived him of his son. “I have a copy. I have a copy with me, Elijah, right here in my pocket. You can read Jeremiah’s words for yourself.”

  Color had risen in his face. “How do I know the whole thing isn’t
some trick you and Schultz cooked up?”

  PJ tried to shrug, and was given a sharp reminder of the state of her ribs. “Because it’s in his handwriting. And because Darla knows about the relationship between Libby and Jeremiah. She’s known for a long time.”

  “Can you take me to Darla?”

  “I doubt it. I talked to her in Dayton, Ohio, only a short time ago. She said she was going to disappear again, and she seemed serious about it.”

  “The true murderer, you said. Tell me about that. Tell me right now.”

  “Eleanor wanted to break up the sick relationship. She tried to get Jeremiah to move far away or just break it off, but he couldn’t. So she went after Libby. When Eleanor got pregnant, she threatened to go public with a story that you molested her and were the father of her baby. And that you molested kids at the day care centers.”

  Elijah slammed the dashboard with his fist. “That’s a lie! A fucking lie!”

  “Eleanor knew that. But it was a lie that gave her power over Libby. Either Libby stopped seeing Jeremiah, or Eleanor’s lie would crash her world. She’d lose the day care centers.”

  Elijah turned onto a gravel road. Agitated, he sped along, oblivious to the surroundings. Bouncing over the rough surface made PJ’s ribs hurt more. She stopped talking and groaned. He slowed the car down, and that helped a little.

  “Libby killed Eleanor,” she said in between gasps. “She framed her own son for it. She let him go to the gas chamber for a murder she committed.”

  “The blood,” Elijah said. “What about the blood?”

  “The day of the murder, Libby went home with Jeremiah after the two of them went shopping together. They had sex, and Libby scratched Jeremiah’s shoulder on purpose. Afterward, she cleaned him up with a handkerchief, then she put the handkerchief in a bag and took it with her. He wasn’t supposed to see that part. She had sent him into the shower to scrub the scratches with soap, but he saw through the open bathroom door.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Elijah shook his head.

  “When he got out of the shower, she was gone. Presumably she took the baseball bat from his closet at that time. He didn’t actually see that. Then she went back to her own home and beat Eleanor to death. She planned it, and she did it.”

  Elijah turned and looked at her. His eyes were dry, but an ocean of tears was held inside them.

  “Jeremiah didn’t know exactly what happened next, because he wasn’t here. He assumed Libby carefully cleaned Eleanor’s fingernails, then dampened the handkerchief and squeezed a few drops of Jeremiah’s blood onto the dead girl’s hands. She cleaned the fingernails to make it look like the killer tried to cover up but didn’t get all the blood off.”

  “Why’d he confess then, if he didn’t do it? How come he didn’t tell me when I visited him on death row?”

  “He confessed because his first impulse was to shield Libby. Later he changed his mind. He recanted, but couldn’t bring himself to directly accuse her even at the cost of his life. At the end, he wanted someone to know how he’d been used, but he couldn’t talk to you about it.”

  Elijah jerked the car sharply to the side of the road and turned off the engine. PJ noticed that they were at a mailbox pulloff. There was a long driveway that wound away into the woods. No home was in sight.

  When she turned to face him his eyes were unreadable, but the gun in his hand spoke plainly. She closed her eyes. He didn’t believe her, and her effort was a failure. She was a failure, and Schultz was going to die along with her.

  “Give me the letter,” he said hoarsely. It sounded as though his voice were full of nails.

  “I can’t,” she said. “My hands are tied.”

  He reached over and pushed her shoulder. He must have thought she was being flippant with him. “Which pocket?”

  She gritted her teeth against the pain. “Left front.”

  Keeping the gun trained on her with his left hand, he dug into her pocket with his right, pulling out the letter.

  He read slowly, with the sheets of paper draped over his right knee, raising his eyes frequently to check on PJ. She kept perfectly still, breathing shallowly.

  She used the time to try visualization, imagining all the pain flowing into her hands, then balling it up and tossing it away from her like crumpled paper. She went through the process twice, and told herself it helped.

  Forty-one

  CUT UNFOLDED THE LETTER, pressing it down on his knee with a trembling hand. His gun hand was steady, though. Fortunately he had learned early on to be just as deadly with his left hand as with his right.

  My dearest sister, the letter began. I write this in hopes of your understanding and forgiveness.

  He choked back his emotions. If the letter was real, Jeremiah had written to Darla, not to him. Jeremiah didn’t trust his own father with the terrible truth. The rejection hurt, even though he knew that was petty given the circumstances.

  Well, shit, he thought. It wasn’t the kind of thing a boy could run to his dad with, was it?

  He read through the letter carefully, looking for flaws, inconsistencies, looking for things he could point at and say it couldn’t possibly be so.

  Jeremiah’s words were powerful. He told his story from the time Libby first came onto him. She walked in on him in the shower, for God’s sake. She ran her hands over his slick soapy skin, and his young body responded. He was scared and ashamed, but he couldn’t push her away. Things didn’t go far that first time, just touching, but he couldn’t get the incident out of his mind. There was a next time, and a next, and he was buffeted in a storm of physical feelings and emotions he didn’t understand. Things moved fast, and she gave the orders. It was the Libby show, one hundred percent.

  How well Cut knew that feeling. Libby could run things like a military commander, and that was something Cut was comfortable with. He was good at following orders. The only thing that finally drove the two of them apart was quarrelling over money. She could be so wasteful.

  But Jeremiah didn’t excuse himself on that account, that Libby handed out orders. He said in the letter that he was equally to blame.

  Cut couldn’t help thinking that if he’d been home more, been around while the boy was in his teenage years, it never would have happened. Cut and Libby didn’t have any difficulties in the sex department. They could heat up the sheets and darn near set the bed on fire. He could have kept her satisfied, kept her from looking elsewhere. If only he’d realized what went on behind his back. How could he have been so stupid? He searched his memories, trying to find any times where doubts had intruded and he’d buried them. There weren’t any. He felt his cheeks get hot with shame. He was such a blind fool.

  Could he have prevented the whole thing if he hadn’t taken himself off to all the corners of the earth looking for adventure? Let’s be blunt, he thought. Looking for chances to get that order to kill. What kind of father is that? A sorry excuse for one.

  Cut looked over at his captive frequently, but she wasn’t causing any trouble. He could handle any kind of physical trouble she could raise, but she’d gone ahead and done what he’d laughed at earlier. She’d gotten under his skin, made him think maybe this load of garbage was true.

  Cut put his finger on small spots on the right margin of the letter. It was only a copy he was holding, so he couldn’t tell exactly what they were at first. His heart nearly burst when he touched them and recognized what they were. Tearstains.

  Jeremiah had cried when he wrote the letter.

  It was too much. Elijah’s mind snapped shut on it.

  Forty-two

  PJ NOTICED THAT IT was getting hot in the car by the time Elijah finished reading. Her mind might be fuzzy on the big things, but all the little discomforts came through clearly.

  She saw Elijah touching the paper gently with his fingertips, trying to connect with his son somehow. He ran his fingers over Jeremiah’s signature as if hoping he could learn the truth by Braille. At one point, she knew he was touching the t
earstains that were much clearer on the original than on the copy he held in his hands. Those stains were a large part of the credibility of the contents of the letter. She had felt the sincerity of Jeremiah’s statement as she read it. And the letter explained things like Eleanor’s clean fingernails, which had bothered PJ since her VR simulation of the killing.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, crumpling the letter awkwardly with his right hand. He tossed it into the backseat of the car. “It’s a plot of some kind. I’m sticking to the plan.” He shoved the gun back into his belt, started the car, jammed it into forward, and spun the wheels on the gravel as he started up the driveway.

  His denial came as a shock to her. “Elijah—”

  “I’m not listening to any more of your shrink lies.”

  “Ask Libby,” she said, desperation plain in her face and voice. “Look her straight in the eyes and ask her.”

  “Shut up!” He brought his fist down hard on her thigh. “Shut the fuck up!”

  PJ grunted with pain and doubled over. Tears sprang from her eyes at the sudden agony. Her left leg felt shattered inside. It was all she could do to keep from sobbing.

  When the pain eased a little and she raised her head, she saw that they were approaching a house in a clearing. It was a nondescript white farmhouse, with none of the character of her own childhood home in Iowa. The grass in the clearing was too overgrown to be called a lawn, but too short to qualify as a meadow. Shades were pulled down on the windows. In spite of the lush greenery surrounding the place, it looked bleak.

  This is the place I could die, she thought. And Schultz, too, if he’s not already gone.

  She hung her head in misery. Then she thought about Thomas, about what lay ahead for him. The thought of her son at her own funeral was too hard to bear. Her resolve rekindled itself, running up and down her spine like flames following a trail of gasoline.

  She wasn’t giving up. She would never give up, not while there was a breath left in her body and strength for a single beat left in her heart.