Keepsake

by Antoinette Stockenberg

A beware of dog sign, rusted and hanging from only one of its holes, was wired to the chest-high chain-link fence. Quinn opened the gate without bewaring. The dog was dead, Quinn had no doubt; he knew where the bones were.

  Quinn walked up the five cracked concrete steps. Ignoring the bell, which was missing its button, he knocked and then waited. Three rectangles of glass in the door, stepping down from upper left to lower right, had been shaded with blue-lined pages of looseleaf paper, and one of the sheets had been pried from its tape to make a peephole. At six-foot-three, Quinn was able to see through the hole into the house.

  The view inside was dismal: an end table piled high with magazines and dirty dishes and topped with a ceramic lamp whose shade was akilter. A dirt-colored couch with lumpy, torn cushions. A carpet that was matted and gray and littered with bits of food and scraps of paper. And over everything, a pall of grime and grease, rage and despair.

  Quinn stepped out of view through the pulled-away sheet in the window. Eventually the door swung open a few inches. The smell of whiskey—bourbon, Quinn assumed—added one more layer of sourness in the air between Bronsky and him.

  "What do you want?"

  "A word," said Quinn, slamming the door clear of the coach's grip. It hit the wall with a bounce as Quinn pushed his way inside and grabbed the coach by the throat with one hand, pinning him against the stairwell as he kicked the door shut behind them.

  The warm, flabby flesh of the coach's neck felt irresistible to Quinn. He got a death grip on the man's windpipe, then loosened his hold just enough for the coach's head to slump back into position on his shoulders. Before the coach could catch his breath, Quinn tightened his grip and slammed him back into the wall again. This time he squeezed harder.

  Bronsky's round face turned florid; his eyes were no more than slits above puffy bags and a foul-smelling mouth-hole gaping for air. Just before the coach passed out, Quinn relaxed his hold on his throat, then tightened it and slammed him up against the wall another time.

  Bronsky couldn't speak, and Quinn didn't want him to. Not yet. Quinn positively needed these dribs and drabs of release; the alternative would have been to kill his old coach with a single blow. He eased his grip just enough for a trickle of air to flow down Bronsky's throat. The gurgling sound he made, so like a death rattle, was deeply satisfying to Quinn's ears.

  "Listen to me, you sorry sonofabitch," Quinn said, his face within inches of the loathsome one he knew so well. "You want to knock out little old ladies, you ask me first. You want to terrorize single women, you ask me first. You want to panic a bunch of churchgoers, you ask me first. Got that?"

  The coach was in no position either to shake or to nod his head. He squawked what sounded like a denial. It infuriated Quinn. He slammed the man's head against the wall again. This time the answer he got was more to his liking.

  "Ayight... ayight."

  Quinn let him go. "Where's the trophy you stole from the box in Mrs. Dewsbury's front room?"

  Coughing and sucking in air as he massaged his throat, the coach croaked, "I don't... have any trophy."

  "The hell you don't," said Quinn, sending the coach stumbling before him with a shove to his back. He scanned the living room, then said, "Where's your bedroom?"

  Since the coach looked like a man who didn't climb steps if he didn't have to, Quinn looked for and found a sleeping hovel on the first floor. It was at the end of the hall, next to the kitchen. He shoved Bronsky into the room and flipped on a light. The tiny bedroom smelled rank, a stale mix of booze and b.o. Quinn glanced around and saw the stolen trophy—a brass-plated football mounted on a wood base—sitting on a dresser whose drawers were hanging half out. He pulled a hanky from his hip pocket and used it to pick up the football by its stem. If the weapon still had fingerprints, it would have forensic traces of Mrs. Dewsbury as well.

  The coach glared at him. He looked almost indignant. "You're going to jail for this."

  Quinn snorted. "I don't think so. Not unless I follow through on the yen I have to bash in your head with this thing. And even there, I'm pretty sure the town would thank me."

  He walked past the coach out of the room, but then turned back for one last warning. "If I ever hear of another attempt by you to frighten someone—if you so much as whisper an unsettling word in anyone's ear—then I'll hunt you down and kill you. You know me well, Coach. You know I will. Are you sober enough to understand me?"

  The coach's glare of defiance quickly turned sullen. He let his gaze slither away from Quinn and hide in some laundry lying on the floor.

  "Yeah, I get it."

  Quinn muttered, "You asshole."

  As he walked out of the foul-smelling house with his recovered trophy, Quinn glanced through the broken blinds of a filthy window that looked out on a small, overgrown yard. It didn't surprise him to see a mound of soil piled next to a dug-up hole in the ground.

  Poor dog. His mortal remains were now in a plastic bag lying somewhere in the town dump. God only knows what kind of life and death the animal had suffered as the pet of this brute.

  All things considered, Quinn figured the dog was better off in the landfill.

  ****

  It was a fact that Coach Bronsky had an alibi for the time of Alison's murder—it was an unacceptable fact, but an undeniable one. Quinn would gladly have given all the money he possessed to prove that Coach had done the deed, but everyone knew that he and then-Sergeant Vickers had played poker with two other buddies all night long.

  Besides, Bronsky had never been linked, even as tenuously as Quinn's father had, to Alison Bennett. No gossip, no anecdotes, nada. Quinn's old coach might have been a scumbag, but apparently he wasn't a murdering scumbag—although he'd just come damned close with Mrs. Dewsbury.

  In the meantime, Quinn was approaching the house of Olivia's uncle with dread. His mind had locked onto three scenarios, all of them involving Bennetts. In one of them, Rupert Bennett impregnated his daughter and later murdered her. In another, Rand got her pregnant and Rupert murdered her. In the third, Rand did both. It was like juggling three hand grenades with the pins pulled out.

  The house where Rupert Bennett lived, like his brother Owen's, was not visible from the road, but that was all that the two houses had in common. Rupert lived in a simple saltbox Colonial that dated from maybe the early 1800s. It had a classic, uncluttered look to it that appealed to Quinn; if he were to settle down in the east, such a house would be his choice.

  It was built on a clearing in the middle of a second-growth forest. Someone had once farmed the land, but not for a generation or two. It wasn't hard to see the writing on the wall. The land around the house would be sold off, if it hadn't been already, for a shot of income. Evidence of poverty—more likely, of a money-sucking habit—was staring Quinn in the face. Rupert's house was as shabby as his brother's mansion was pristine.

  Simply put, the Colonial structure was falling down in place. The roof was sagging, shingles were missing, the leaky wood gutters were doing much more harm than good. The windows needed glazing, the foundation needed tucking, and as for the sills... Quinn could almost hear the powder-post beetles munching away as he drove up. The craftsman in Quinn wanted to buy out the Bennetts then and there and save the house, but that was not why he had come.

  The winding, rutted drive continued on behind the house, but Quinn took the spur and parked his truck directly astride the front door, which apparently was little used. He stepped out of the truck and—because the weather was mild—right into mud. He should have known better than to approach through the formal entrance, but he didn't want the Bennetts to feel that he had presumed by driving around to the back.

  Would Rupert be in? Quinn almost hoped not. Betty Bennett didn't sound like the type of woman to say boo without her husband's permission. On the other hand, it was Rupert whose measure Quinn wanted to take. If he seemed nervous or panicky or anything other than predictably hostile, then that would be significant.

  Quinn cleaned the mud fro
m his workboots on a metal bootscraper set into a chunk of concrete, then gave a rusted hand-cranked doorbell a turn or two. Its loud, shrill ring was enough to wake up the dead. In a sense, it was what Quinn had come to do.

  Eventually the door was opened by a churchmouse. Betty Bennett was a hundred pounds of fearful impulse bundled in gray sweats. Under a wisp of graying hair, her eyes, washed by too many tears to the color of faded jeans, seemed incapable of returning his direct gaze. A quick, scared glance was all he got from her. He felt like Godzilla trying to sell Girl Scout cookies.

  "Mrs. Bennett?" he said gently as he took off his baseball cap. "You probably don't remember me—I'm Quinn Leary. I wonder if I might have just a moment of your time."

  To his amazement, she said, "Yes, all right," and opened the door wide.

  Well, hell, that was easy enough, Quinn thought, stepping over the threshold. He followed her across wide-planked floors through a neat, cozily furnished parlor and then through a fireplaced keeping room, all the while wondering whether she wasn't leading him straight into an ambush. It didn't help his morale that a rifle seemed to be missing from an otherwise well-stocked gun case that they passed along the way.

  The expected ambush took place in the kitchen: Olivia Bennett, wearing olive silk and a fancy bandanna and looking wildly sophisticated in the austere pilgrim setting, was sitting demurely at a big pine table by a massive hearth with a cup of tea and a giant muffin set in front of her.

  Son of a bitch. Now what? Son of a bitch.

  He looked at the niece. He looked at the aunt. He looked at the niece again.

  "Now why am I surprised by this?"

  ****

  "I can't imagine," Olivia said, forcing herself to seem offhand. "Didn't I mention that I might be stopping by my aunt's? I thought I had."

  Quinn had arrived before Olivia had had a chance to prepare her aunt for his request. She'd barely got out the heads-up that Quinn Leary was going to be stopping by when they heard the crank on the bell. Her aunt, predictably, wanted to run and hide under the couch; Olivia had to reassure her that she would stay by her side and give her moral support. And meanwhile, Olivia's Uncle Rupert was due back from town at any moment.

  Betty Bennett didn't know what to do with Quinn, that was plain to see, so Olivia took over as hostess. "Can I get your ... something?" she asked, stumbling over the sentence. God, he had a look. Even she was nervous.

  "I'm all right," he said in a perfectly even tone.

  That tone. It spoke volumes.

  He turned to Olivia's aunt and said in a much more gentle way, "I know it's distressing for you to see me after all these years, Mrs. Bennett. You suffered a terrible tragedy, and I'm a reminder of that time. I know that. I wish I could be someone else right now. I wish I could be someone you knew and trusted—but there's no one else who can make this request of you except me."

  He added softly, "I'm here because no one else cares enough about my father to prove that he had nothing to do with your loss of Alison."

  Once he put it that way, Olivia understood things much more clearly. He was right. She had no business being there. This was between him and Alison's parents. He was right. And so was her mother. What on earth had she been thinking?

  Something about Quinn's soft, sympathetic tone made her Aunt Betty murmur, "Please. Sit down."

  She pulled out a chair for herself so meekly, it broke Olivia's heart to watch her. Here was a woman as fragile as the butterflies she had raised in her greenhouse before a storm knocked it down. It seemed cruel that sweet Aunt Betty had had to suffer the loss even of a single butterfly. But to have her only child murdered, and then to have no one with whom to share her grief except a brooding, remote husband—that was unbearably cruel.

  Quinn hooked his jacket over the back of the ladderback chair and sat down. For a big man with solid biceps and a tough-looking haircut, he seemed amazingly unthreatening. Olivia knew how tender he could be in bed; that had a lot to do with her impression. But there was more to it than that. Women responded to Quinn because he empathized with them. Because he was gentle and tough and kind and interesting and curious and chivalrous and, okay, super-confident, not to mention because he made pies. You could trust such a man. All you had to do was look into his eyes and listen to his voice.

  And her aunt was doing just that. Perched almost primly on the rush-seated chair, Betty Bennett folded her hands in her lap and listened intently to Quinn as he presented the reasons that his father had fled in the night so very long ago.

  "My father was a shy man, and gentle," Quinn said, without making it sound like a character flaw. "He was appalled at the thought of having to fight to defend himself. He was even more appalled at the threat of being locked in prison, away from his gardens. All my father ever wanted to do was to nurture growing things. He lived very simply. He didn't want money; he didn't need fame. But he needed—truly needed—to be taking care of things."

  Quinn might have been describing the woman who was listening to him so raptly. Olivia watched as her aunt nodded sympathetically at one statement after another that Quinn was laying out before her. It occurred to Olivia, really for the first time, that Quinn's father and Betty Bennett would have been a match made in heaven.

  How sad, she thought. What a waste of love. She let her gaze wander around the well-kept kitchen. From the gleaming finish of the pine table to the homey, hand-braided rug that her aunt had made from fabric scraps, everything around them spoke of nurturing impulses that had nowhere to go.

  How truly sad.

  "I'm not sure how familiar you are with forensic science, Mrs. Bennett," Quinn said, easing into his painful request, "but nowadays there are methods to prove someone's innocence that weren't around seventeen years ago."

  "What kind of methods?"

  "Well... have you heard of DNA testing?" he asked her softly.

  "I do have some idea, yes, from watching news about the O. J. Simpson trial. But I didn't watch the trial itself," she added with a troubled shake of her head. "It was too awful to see."

  "You were better off," Quinn agreed with a sympathetic smile.

  Olivia began a major project of rearranging crumbs into a circle around the edge of her plate and didn't look up during the painful pause that followed.

  "A DNA test means that they would take just a few cells of tissue to determine the genetic makeup of the ... unborn child," Quinn explained while Olivia held her breath. "And they would compare them to a DNA profile which they would get from analyzing strands of my father's hair. The two won't match, you see, and that will clear my—"

  "Oh! Your father wants to return to Keepsake, then?"

  Her aunt did not want to understand the implications of what Quinn was saying; Olivia was sure of it. She was rerouting her attention from her dead daughter and unborn grandchild to Quinn's father and where he should live. That, she could handle.

  Quinn said softly, "My father died just before Thanksgiving."

  "Oh, I'm ... sorry."

  Olivia glanced at Quinn and then at her aunt. They were sharing a moment of hurt, an awareness of loss, that drove home how wrong it was for her to be sitting at the table with them. She'd give anything to be able to leave them alone. But she couldn't just stand up and go; she'd be trampling all over their fragile connection. She went back to arranging her crumbs with renewed intensity, as though the fate of the free world depended on having a perfect crumb wreath on the rim of her cake plate.

  "The thing is, Mrs. Bennett, he was a really good man and he deserves to have his good name back. I've never known anyone more steadfast ... more loyal ... more heroic."

  "Heroic?"

  Olivia was curious about that, too. It was the second time that Quinn had referred to his father that way. She saw color rise on Quinn's neck as he said, "After he left Keepsake, my father did some good things."

  "So you want to do this DNA test and clear his name," Betty said. "I can't blame you, Mr. Leary, but ... well ... I'm not sure. I t
hink it would be very"—she took a deep breath and blew it out—"hard."

  Catching a lock of hair at the back of her neck, she tugged at it nervously as she stared at the clean-swept hearth. "Hard on my husband, you see. People would—they'd start talking again. Rumors ... they can be so hurtful."

  She returned her hands to her lap and forced herself to look Quinn in the eye. It didn't last long. She dropped her gaze and studied the butter crock on the table instead. She said apologetically, "I think maybe we should just leave things be. I don't think my husband will agree to this at all."

  Olivia looked from her aunt to Quinn. She expected to see his jaw set the way it did when he was opposed. Instead he said softly, "Those rumors have already surfaced, ma'am. There's only one way to lay them to rest now."

  Olivia blinked. What rumors? They weren't talking about Francis Leary any longer. What rumors?

  Her aunt had turned as pale as the whitewashed walls of her kitchen. She stood up and seemed to shake herself free of Quinn's spell, like a child who's lingered too long in the park and knows she's going to catch hell at home. "You really should go now. My husband could be back anytime. I'm sorry we can't help you. I'm sorry," she said with something like urgency. "Your father sounds like a nice man."

  But she was too late. They all heard the door to the mud shed slam loudly, and they all turned at the same time to behold Olivia's Uncle Rupert letting himself through it to the kitchen. Olivia hadn't seen him in over half a year. When she stopped by for her Aunt Betty's birthday in August he'd been asleep, and when she dropped off her Christmas presents in December he hadn't been home.

  He looked much the same: lean and leathery and dour.

  He sneered at Quinn and said, "Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in." He didn't seem surprised, and Olivia wanted to know why. Would he really know Quinn's truck?

  Olivia had wanted to be invisible, and apparently she'd got her wish: her uncle didn't seem to be aware of her at all. "Hello, Uncle Rupert," she said rather loudly, as if he were not only blind but hard of hearing. "I haven't seen you for a while. How are you?"