Last to Die: A gripping psychological thriller not for the faint hearted

by Arlene Hunt

  ‘Don’t call him that. He hates being called Waldo.’

  ‘I don’t think much of that guy.’

  ‘You mean he’s not local.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You know I’m not local either,’ she reminded him.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  Mike shrugged. ‘It just is.’

  They got out of the truck. As they climbed the steps to the patio, Fay flung open the doors. ‘There you are! I was starting to think you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Hey, Mom, good to see you.’

  ‘Come in, come in. Oh for heaven’s sake, Mike, I’m glad you’re here, could you please go help your brother get that grill going some time this evening. I don’t know what is wrong with it.’

  ‘I’m sure Ace has it under control.’

  ‘Mike,’ Fay said, tilting her head.

  ‘I’ll go take a look.’ Mike stepped past his mother and into the main house. Fay gave Jessie an expansive hug.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here. The girls are inside. My, isn’t green just darling on you. Come on through, I sure hope you’re hungry.’

  Jessie allowed herself to be shepherded through the house. She spotted Walter by the fireplace in the living room, standing stiff and formal with a bottle of beer in his hand. He tipped the bottle to Jessie and she raised a hand in return. Jeb Orville, the husband of Penny, Mike’s other sister, was sprawled on Fay’s white sofa, pink-faced from sun, wearing a cream polo shirt and cargo pants. Jeb’s father, Vernon Orville, was one of the richest men in Rockville, owing to the timber trade. Jeb worked in the business as little as possible while drawing a considerable salary. He was not a person Jessie had a lot of time for.

  Jessie offered to help Fay in the kitchen but was refused, so she made small talk with Penny and Karen. After a while, she excused herself and drifted outside to where Fay had set up a long table under a green awning in the courtyard. Mike and Ace stood over the, now lit, barbeque. Ace turned drumsticks over the coals, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a beer in his other hand. He was deeply tanned and wearing clean jeans and a clean shirt. Jessie drew alongside them. Ace had a zoned-out look that Jessie guessed was from a certain level of self-medication. Well, if that’s what it took to get through these family reunions, who was she to judge?

  ‘Hey, Ace.’

  He turned to her and smiled shyly. ‘How you doin’, Jess?’

  ‘Fine, thank you. You?’

  ‘I have been a whole lot worse.’ His eyes drifted down to her empty hands. ‘Mike, your wife could probably do with a drink.’

  ‘Jess?’

  ‘I’d love a glass of white wine.’

  Mike went inside to fetch her drink while Jessie took a seat at the table, enjoying the warm air and the rich scent of the honeysuckle growing all around the courtyard walls. Ace cooked the rest of the chicken, and then placed several potatoes wrapped in foil over the coals. He hummed under his breath while he worked. The ash on his cigarettes grew perilously long between tips. Neither of them spoke, but the silence between them was natural and comfortable. Jessie always felt at ease around Ace and he around her. She knew he had his demons and thought they were none of her concern. She had long before decided it was not her place to judge people on how they lived their lives. Ace was his own man. That didn’t suit some folk in the Conway clan, but that wasn’t her concern either.

  The evening drew on and for the most part it was perfect: nothing but easy company and light conversation. For the first time in a long time some of the tension ebbed from Jessie’s body. That was until Jeb, brimming with scotch and entitlement, felt the need to pontificate on the subject of violence. Penny attempted to draw him away from the topic, but Jeb, standing under the awning gnawing sticky chicken wings, talked over his wife.

  ‘See, kids these days, they get too much handed to ’em,’ he said, sucking dark brown sauce from his thumb. ‘That’s why they go nuts.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Jeb,’ Penny said, with a mortified glance in Jessie’s direction. ‘Nobody needs to hear this.’

  ‘That’s the other problem,’ Jeb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We pretend like this shit don’t happen. Well it’s happening. Kids got no sense of … ethics. Why would they? Everything comes too easy to them.’

  Mike took a sip of his beer. ‘Unlike, say, how you struggled to find employment?’

  It went quiet for a long moment. Inside, Jessie heard Fay clattering around with the dessert plates.

  ‘My daddy built that mill from the ground up,’ Jeb said petulantly. ‘I know I was raised well; that’s not the point I was making.’

  Ace lit a cigarette and folded his arms across this chest, his expression neutral. ‘What was your point?’

  ‘Ace—’Penny hissed.

  ‘My point is we’re breeding a generation of fags and layabouts. Like them kids that shot up the school. Kids like them Columbine freaks in the trench coats and all the weird music and stuff. Back in my day, if you saw a kid wearing makeup you saw someone touched in the head. Now we’re all supposed to act like we don’t see ’em and pretend we’re okay with stuff we used to be proud to stand against.’

  ‘Jeb, honey, could you see if there’s some more coleslaw in the fridge?’ Karen said.

  ‘There’s some right there,’ Jeb pointed to a tub beside a stack of stripped ribs. ‘Now I know these days folk like to say it’s all, what ya call it … social conditioning or some shit – excuse me – some bullcrap like that, but it’s no such thing. We didn’t have no shootings in our day, did we Walter?’

  ‘I’m sure people got shot plenty in our day.’ Walter opened a bottle of beer and threw Karen a look. Karen shrugged, helpless.

  ‘Yeah I know, but not like now. We didn’t have kids going in and shooting up a place or bombing the heck out of schools. We didn’t have that sort of—’

  ‘Jeb, I’m not sure we need to talk about this right now,’ Penny said.

  Fay returned carrying ice cream. ‘I hope everyone kept room for some dessert?’

  ‘Well, see that right there is part of it,’ Jeb said, ignoring his mother-in-law. ‘If we don’t talk about these things … if we don’t face up to the peril this generation is suffering from, and I mean peril, a peril of the soul … see if we don’t face up to these things … they get swept under the carpet.’

  Fay frowned and glanced at her daughters, then to Jessie, who had grown still and pale. ‘Give it a rest, Jeb, would you?’ Mike said.

  ‘Now hold on here. That’s what happens. We duck and dive and bob and weave, but we know what’s out there and we need to face these fears, we need to face them head on, we need—’

  ‘I faced it head on,’ Jessie said.

  Jeb looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

  ‘I faced it head on, Jeb, and you know what I learned from it?’

  Jeb stared at her.

  ‘Absolutely nothing, that’s what I learned. Nothing.’

  Jessie stood and pushed her chair back from the table. Her face was alabaster pale, her eyes glittering and overbright. ‘Good night, Fay, it’s been a lovely evening and thank you for having me.’

  ‘Jessie, please don’t go.’

  Jessie grabbed her wrap and walked through the house. She walked straight out the door without stopping.

  Mike joined her after a few minutes, his face flushed with temper. He climbed into the cab and slammed the door. ‘There’s no cure for stupid, Jessie. You know Jeb, a few drinks down him and that man is stupid to the core.’

  ‘Can we go home?’

  Mike drove them home. When they pulled into the yard, Rudy got to his feet and stood in the headlights, yipping a delighted greeting.

  ‘You okay?’ Mike asked.

  Jessie stared out the windscreen at her home, at her dog standing in the beams of light. She realised then what it was that had been bothering her. She had spoken in anger, but, she reali
sed with shock, it had been the truth. Everything she had said back at Fay’s was true. Everything she had once believed had been swept away on a wave of screams and blood and pain. No insights into the universe had been revealed to her; she had learned nothing. She knew nothing. She felt nothing. She might as well be dead. She might as well have died in a hail of bullets on the cafeteria floor.

  Maybe that was the truth of it. Maybe there was nothing to be learned.

  Absolutely nothing.

  ‘Jessie?’

  ‘I can’t do this any more.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Any of it.’

  Mike took her hand in his. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  She pulled her hand away. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He didn’t mean it. Damn fool talks too much.’

  They sat for a while, saying nothing. Rudy plonked his rump down in the dust, bored from waiting.

  24

  Darla Levine was hot, tired and sticky. Worse than that, she felt perilously dull-witted from the enforced company of Chippy, who, when he wasn’t yapping at her, insisted on playing a Los Tigres del Norte CD, singing along at the top of his lungs for most of the trip.

  ‘How much longer?’

  ‘Should be right up ahead,’ Chippy said, peering through the dusty windscreen.

  ‘You’ve been saying that for ages.’

  They had been on the road since early that morning and were now deep in the highlands of Tennessee. Darla was sick to the back teeth of looking at trees.

  ‘Mira! There!’

  Before them the road snaked around to the right and set back from it, about one hundred feet away was Misty’s, a diner and rest stop for weary travellers. Chippy pulled across the highway and drove into the compact dirt lot.

  ‘Park behind the trucks.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want him to know I have a photographer with me.’

  ‘’Kay.’

  He parked near a row of dusty trees. ‘Man, I’m starving. You think they do tamales?’

  ‘Stay here, I won’t be long.’

  ‘Why you say I gotta stay all the time like a dog or some shit? I ain’t no dog.’

  ‘I need you to walk by the windows and make an identification. When he comes out I need you to take his picture. Don’t let him see you.’

  ‘But you said this was an assignment.’

  ‘I said you’re to take his picture. That’s all.’

  Chippy looked fleetingly puzzled, then his features crumpled. ‘Aw, Popeye don’t know about this one?’

  ‘Make sure you get a good clear shot of him.’

  ‘Aw, shit.’

  Darla gathered up her things, climbed out and moved towards the diner through rigs parked three-deep.

  It was a ramshackle affair. The original building was prefabricated, with a single-slope roof and two window walls overlooking the forecourt. Clearly, over time there had been a number of extensions added to the main structure; more than Darla guessed were legal. She figured that out this way building inspectors had to be as rare as liberals.

  Darla pushed the door open and stepped into a long room with double booths running the length of one wall, a bar at the other, and free-standing tables on the floor in the middle. The place was busy, wall to wall with road travellers, truckers, sales folk, small families with tired-looking faces and bored children picking at chips.

  Darla scanned the place and spotted her target within seconds. Though she had never met Clint Robinson in person, she recognised him from the photos Billy had managed to acquire. He was seated in the second to last booth near the restrooms. Darla made her way towards him, aware that many sets of eyes were following. At the booth she stopped walking and said, ‘Mr Robinson?’

  Clint Robinson looked up from his food. She put him in his late forties, but he might have been older. He was thin, with washed-out blue eyes, a week’s growth on his face and a busted nose. There was grease on his chin and oil on his shirt. He looked like a man who had been shit on by life so often he had learned to like the smell.

  ‘You Darly?’ His voice was high and nasal.

  ‘Darla. Yes, we spoke on the phone.’

  He let his eyes roam over her body, from her head to her toes, slowly, disrespectfully taking his time. ‘You sure do fit your clothes.’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Still a free country, ain’t it?’

  She slid into the booth opposite him and opened her bag. She took out a notebook and a digital recorder, which she placed on the table between them.

  ‘You want some food? This place does a mean steak.’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee.’

  He signalled to the waitress. She brought over a cup and laid it before Darla without exchanging a word. Darla wondered how the hell she had understood exactly what the hand gesture had meant. The waitress poured the coffee and left. Darla looked at her cup. The coffee was the colour of tar. She added milk and sugar and looked at it again. Now it was like lighter tar.

  ‘Mind if I eat? I got to get back out on the road.’

  ‘Please, carry on.’

  Robinson picked up his burger and took a huge bite. He chewed it for a while, looking at her across the top of it. Darla waited. She had met men like Clint before. He didn’t intimidate her in the slightest.

  When he had finished his food, he wiped his mouth, belched loudly and slid his coffee cup closer to his side of the table.

  ‘You got the money?’

  ‘I brought it.’

  ‘Well let’s see it.’

  Darla took an envelope from her bag. She opened it and let him see the wad of cash inside – one thousand dollars to be exact. Robinson’s eyes widened.

  ‘I guess I shoulda asked for more.’

  ‘We agreed a price,’ Darla said, beginning to put the envelope back in her bag. ‘If you don’t want to talk I am sure I can find someone else interested in—’

  ‘Aw now, hold your horses. I never said I weren’t interested. So whaddya want to know?’

  Darla pressed the ‘on’ button on her recorder.

  ‘Like I told you on the phone, I want to know everything you can tell me about Jessie Conway.’

  ‘Conway,’ he sniffed out a laugh. ‘When I knowed her she was Vedder, Jessica Vedder. Before she was Robinson, that is. Not that she kept that name long.’

  ‘You’ve known Jessie how long?

  ‘Long enough.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘Since she was in school. I shoulda known it was her when I saw them news pictures. She’s changed her hair. She used to wear it blonde.’

  ‘You said she was married to your brother, Doug was it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ his expression darkened. ‘You met her, right? Bet she still looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But that devious bitch killed my brother; shot him same as she shot them kids in that school. There ain’t nothin’ soft about that woman. You best believe it.’

  ‘How long were she and Doug married?’

  ‘Three years, thereabouts.’

  ‘When did she and your brother marry?’

  ‘Straight out of school, ’round, oh, late ’89. They were sweethearts, even though she made out she was better than him. Doug was sweet on that girl from the moment he met her. Back then Jessica Vedder didn’t have a pot to piss in. Doug wanted to provide for that woman, start a family of his own.’

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘Next? Nothing, they rented a place over in Rutherford. Doug had a job at the mill there and she worked a job at the market. Didn’t get to see much of ’em, but they seemed happy enough.’

  ‘Something must have happened between them.’

  ‘I told you, she had notions.’

  ‘Notions?’

  ‘Said she wanted to go to college.’

  ‘Hardly a notion.’

  His eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Maybe not to you, but who’d y’think was gonna pay for all that? Her daddy hadn’t two cents to rub together. He weren’
t gonna pay for it. He didn’t pay nuthin’ for them kids.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Her and her dumb brother.’

  ‘I didn’t realise Jessie had a brother. Is he still around?’

  ‘Dunno, ain’t seen him in years. Used to work down the valley with a road crew. Could be scattered to the winds by now.’

  ‘What about her folks?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Left the area?’

  ‘Naw, dead.’

  ‘They’re dead?’

  ‘Yep, fire took ’em out.’

  ‘What year was this?’

  ‘Oh, ’92 I’d say. Not long after Jessica and Doug split.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘Yeah, they reckon the old man had rigged up some kind of generator but it blew. Burned hot too. Don’t think there was enough of them to fill a matchbox when it was finished.’ He was watching Darla carefully as he spoke. She wondered if he was trying to shock her with his description. He had a mean streak, Darla could see that. She wondered if it ran in the family.

  ‘So, her parents were poor and she was married, broke, but ambitious.’

  ‘My brother worked hard for that woman, but like I say, she had notions. I told him, that woman ain’t for you, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen. Now, Doug is dead and buried and she’s supposed to be like some kinda fuckin’ hero. She ain’t no hero. What she is is one devious bitch.’

  ‘She’s a hero to a lot of people.’

  ‘My ass. You got witnesses to back up her version of events? ’Cause that woman likes to say things, she likes to paint a picture that makes her look like a peach, but Jessica Vedder, I can tell you right now, she ain’t no peach. That woman could fool a snake.’

  ‘Is that what happened with your brother? She fooled him?’

  Robinson looked at his plate, his brow furrowed deeply. ‘Everyone knew he was stupid over that woman, couldn’t nobody tell him nothing about her. Then she took up with this other bozo, but she wasn’t finished playing Doug. I knew it and everyone else knew it. Everyone except Doug.’

  Darla flipped through her notes. ‘Not long after they separated, Jessie filed a police report saying your brother was stalking her.’