“I can’t offer much regarding Thad”—I broke into a broad smile—“but I’ve got several significant wrinkles regarding Suzanne’s murder.”
“Oh?” He pulled out his notebook.
I gestured that we should sit opposite each other at the desk. Leaning over the suede blotter, propped up by my elbows, I gave him a detailed account of Hazel’s midnight revelations, Parker’s “brother from the grave” theory, and Joey’s inquisitive veteran credit manager.
“Well now”—Pierce poked a period on his pad—“this ought to keep Harley Kaiser off your tail for a while. It certainly warrants continued investigation. Do you have time to brainstorm a couple of loose ends with me?”
“Sure, Doug.” Then I had a thought. It was about one in the afternoon. “Have you eaten yet? We’ve got a casual lunch going in the kitchen—everyone’s out there. Why don’t you join us? We can all put our heads together.”
While Pierce had turned down my invitation for the previous evening, he showed no reluctance in accepting this one. Maybe he was hungry. So I led him to the kitchen, where everyone looked up from their soup and sandwiches to greet him, save Joey, who had forged onward to his dessert, piling a plate with frosted brownies, a variety of cookies, and a huge gob of leftover creme fraîche. “This stuff isn’t bad if you put enough sugar on it,” he told us. Then, noticing the new arrival, he added, “Oh, hi, Sheriff Pierce.”
“Hi, Joey,” Pierce answered brightly. Eyeing the plateload of sweets that Joey was wolfing, he offered a good-natured warning: “Go easy on that, Joey. You could get a serious buzz.”
We all laughed, except Joey, who appeared baffled by the comment, shrugged, and took an enormous chomp out of another brownie, smearing frosting on his unshaven cheek. The sight of his mouth devouring the chocolate made my own teeth tingle, but the overload of sugar didn’t seem to bother Joey in the least. Presumably, the buzz felt way better than his hangover.
I asked Pierce, “What can I fix you, Doug?”
Noticing an abandoned plate on the counter with a half-eaten sandwich that he presumed to be mine, he told me, “Go ahead and finish your lunch, Mark. I’ll put something together myself.” And he made himself at home among us.
Retrieving my sandwich, adding a folded slice of cheese to it, I told the others, “Doug is intrigued by our ‘brother from the grave’ angle, and he’d like to brainstorm a couple of points with all of us.”
“Ooo”—Roxanne rubbed her hands together—“I love parlor games.”
Neil laughed. Carl and I shot her a behave-yourself glance. Parker told Pierce, “We’d be happy to help. What’s on your mind?”
Pierce neatly sliced his sandwich with a serrated knife, not on the diagonal, I noted, but squarely in half, top to bottom. He told us, “By now, we should be able to focus this investigation on a key suspect or two, but, instead, our list is growing. The mystery of Suzanne’s murder has been dogging us, I think, because the case has too many loose ends. So let’s try concentrating on one detail at a time.”
Carl nodded. “A sound approach, Sheriff. What don’t we know?”
“For starters,” Pierce told him, “we’re baffled with regard to the weapon. What was it, and where is it?”
I explained to both Carl and Roxanne, “The coroner finally issued his report on Thursday, just two days ago. He determined that the blunt instrument that killed Suzanne was something like a baseball bat, as her wound contained traces of both hardwood and varnish.”
“So,” said Roxanne, flipping her hands, “let’s find the baseball bat. Of the known suspects, who would be most likely to have one?” Answering her own question, she asked, “Have you searched Thad’s room?”
I waved her off—she was on the wrong trail. “First, Thad’s not into sports. I doubt if he owns a bat. Second, and far more important, the coroner said that the weapon was merely something like a baseball bat, because he also found that there was a curious pattern of smaller indentations in the fatal wound, which would be inconsistent with the smooth design of a bat.”
Even as I explained the coroner’s ambiguous findings, I had the sense that I was missing something, that there was something just beyond reach…
“Hey!” said Joey, springing up from his dessert. With a wild look in his eyes—had the sugar kicked in?—he suggested, “What about one of those king-things?”
“My God,” I said. “Of course.”
“King-things?” someone asked. “What on earth?” asked another. Through a half-laugh, Pierce said, “What are you talking about, Mark?”
“The artichoke finials,” I told everyone. “The finials decorating the banister at the top of the stairs.”
Neil looked at me as if I’d lost it. “Sure, Mark. The killer dragged Suzanne over to the stairway, banged her head against an artichoke, then dragged her body back across the room to the fireplace. What’s wrong with this picture?”
“No,” I told him, all of them, impatiently. “The finials aren’t fixed to the railing. They’re mounted on dowels about so long”—I measured two feet of air—“that simply slip into the newel posts beneath the banister. They slide right out. When we were kids playing upstairs, Joey liked to parade around with one of them, hoisting it like a scepter, a king-thing. Any of those finials would make a handy, heavy club.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Pierce, pushing his sandwich aside.
Joey didn’t need to be asked for a demonstration, though. He was already headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. The rest of us—Pierce, Parker, Roxanne, Carl, Neil, and I—raced to follow him.
Arriving in the attic great room, we clumped at the top of the stairs, watching Joey as he slipped one of the white-ash finials out of its newel, exactly as I had described it. He raised it high over his head and began his old king routine, strutting around the room majestically.
Turning my attention from Joey’s performance to the eight or ten finials remaining on the banister, I noticed that, sure enough, one of them was missing—the one from the far corner, next to the wall. “Look,” I told the others, pointing to the vacant spot. We crossed en masse to it, huddling to peer at the empty hole.
“Don’t touch any of them,” Pierce told us. “The killer may have used a finial from a more convenient spot, then rearranged them so that the absence of the weapon would be less conspicuous. With any luck, he—or she—may have left some fingerprints. But somehow, I doubt it.” Somehow, I suspected Pierce was right.
Joey’s imaginary procession had by now wended its way to the far side of the room. When he reached the bare stretch of floor in front of the fireplace, where the rug bloodied by Suzanne had been removed, Joey underwent an instantaneous change of mood and demeanor. Until that point, he had played the role of a happy if stately King Joey, hoisting his pretend scepter and waving to the throngs of admiring subjects seen only by him. Now, though, standing on the spot where his sister was killed, Joey was suddenly energized, and he began swooshing his king-thing menacingly, working himself into a frenzy. His actions resembled something of a ninja routine, replete with whoops and grunts as he bashed some hapless opponent with repeated blows of the finial.
Aghast, we watched this eerie performance, inching across the room to observe him at closer range. Silently, we exchanged a round of astonished glances as he yelped at the victim he bludgeoned on the floor. Fearing that he might soon wreak damage to the room’s furnishings, I was tempted to step in and restrain him.
At that moment, though, he snapped out of it. “See?” he told us, panting, sweating, smiling. “You could bop someone real good with a king-thing.”
Was Joey’s bizarre behavior merely the harmless, playful consequence of a brownie-induced sugar high? Or was he venting a facet of his character previously unknown to us? Did Joey harbor wild and potentially violent impulses that could bubble to the surface without warning? Was he capable of shattering his own sister’s skull? What could motivate such brutality from such a benign, simpleminded soul as Joey?<
br />
Could it possibly be that the identity of Suzanne’s murderer was not nearly so convoluted and mysterious as Parker’s “brother from the grave” theory? Could it possibly be that he stood right there in our midst, weapon in hand?
I did not, of course, voice these thoughts. There was no need to. We were all wondering the same thing—our shared suspicions were both obvious and palpable. Sheriff Pierce had witnessed the whole outburst and was capable of drawing his own conclusions. Besides, discussion of this tantalizing new wrinkle would only further spook Joey. If he was the guilty party, we would need to coax proof from him with the velvet gloves of wheedling, not confrontation.
Pierce sat on one of the leather sofas under the chandelier in the center of the room, encouraging everyone else to be seated as well. He took out his notebook, wrote a few words, and told us, “Assuming we’ve identified a plausible weapon, let’s focus on something else. What exactly was Suzanne doing up here when she was attacked?”
I told him, “She said she wanted to see if she could ‘find something.’ She had been sitting in the dining room before dinner, talking with us. I was there when she left, along with Parker, Roxanne, and Carl. Right?”
“Right,” said Roxanne. “And it struck me as odd, or at least abrupt, when she excused herself. I had no idea what she had in mind—it didn’t seem to follow from our discussion. We were talking about the hate mail Mark got that weekend, and I made a few cracks about Miriam Westerman, not knowing that she and Suzanne had shared a tumultuous past. I didn’t get the impression that Suzanne was annoyed with me. She just seemed to be on another wavelength.”
“Ohhh,” said Parker, enlightened. He told Roxanne, “I was fussing with the fireplace and Mark was helping set the table when you and Carl came into the room. Joey had just been there talking about some toys he’d found, and Hazel wondered if he’d run across the Quatrain children’s baby books, which the house’s previous owners had set aside somewhere. After that, I, too, noticed that Suzanne seemed preoccupied, or, in your words, Roxanne, ‘on another wavelength.’ When Suzanne then said that she wanted to look for something, my assumption was that she meant the baby books.”
“That makes sense,” I told Parker, Pierce, everyone. “There are lots of books up here”—I gestured toward the bookcases flanking the huge fireplace—“and that whole end of the room was littered with books when Suzanne was attacked. Maybe she figured that since the Tawkins had left the baby books somewhere, it was logical to start looking up here.”
“Why, though?” asked Roxanne. “We’ve all just learned that Suzanne had been raped in this very room by her own brother on a long-ago Christmas morning. To overcome such demons and return to this room alone, on Christmas, her search must have been motivated by more than schmaltzy sentiment or idle curiosity. But what?” Roxanne crossed her arms.
“Good question,” I conceded.
Neil mused, “What if there was something of great value in the baby books?”
Carl shrugged. “Suzanne was already wealthy.” He closed his eyes in thought.
Parker rose, strolling to the bookcases for a closer look.
Pierce wrote more notes.
Joey fiddled with his king-thing.
Sunday morning, Neil and I awoke shortly after sunrise. Something told us that not a creature was stirring, not yet, save us. Something told us that the cold snap had waned some with the setting of the moon. Something told us that we had both slept well for a change, that we were rested, untroubled by our dreams. In short, something told us that the mood, at last, was right for sex.
The decision was mutual and spontaneous, requiring no discussion. A good-morning hug, a kiss that lingered, tongues exploring each other’s teeth—these were the signals that our dance of the dawn had begun. The first few steps were slow and romantic, a full-body caress, a contorted snuggle beneath the down-filled comforter. But soon the pace quickened, with bedding kicked to the floor as our moves became more energetic. Leading and following, demanding and submitting, we traded active and passive roles with the blink of an eye, the probe of a finger, a lick. We moved to the beat as one—linked, to be sure, in the most literal and physical sense, but also in the depths of our brains, where we celebrated a communion of intellect, a shared past, a future fantasy. Together, we whirled to a crescendo that said the dance would end soon, very soon, reaching for that moment of climax. Tensing then, my partner came. In the next beat, so did I. And the music stopped.
“I love you,” we said. “We needed that,” we agreed. “It’s been too long.”
It was good—not the stuff of dreams, not the sublime rapture of a first night, but it was decent, solid sex, a much-needed physical release. And we had shared it.
Neil laughed quietly, tracing a finger around my ear, looking into my eyes and through me. “There’s been way too much going on in our lives lately.”
“That’s an understatement.” I rolled onto my side to face him, planting an elbow in the pillow, propping my head in my hand. With my free hand, I patted his chin, felt his stubble. “I keep telling myself that once the takeover of the Register is behind me, everything else will just fall into place. But that’s not the half of it. There’s all the uncertainty about the future of our ‘arrangement,’ to say nothing of Suzanne’s murder.” I plopped back onto my pillow, staring at the ceiling.
“To say nothing,” Neil reminded me, “of Suzanne’s son. There’s still the whole Thad issue to deal with.” He pulled the bedclothes up from the floor, covered us both, then moved in close, his arm around me. “You’ve had a week now to mull this. Where do you think we’re headed with Thad?”
“That depends on Miriam Westerman and the courts,” I told him, “but more important, it depends on you. If I take responsibility for Thad, ‘we’ no longer means ‘you and I,’ but ‘the three of us,’ at least for a few years.” I turned to face him. “Do you have any interest in being part of a little ‘family’?”
“I could handle it,” he assured me. “And the truth is, I think we’d make excellent parents. But the bigger question is this: Could Thad ever adjust to the stigma of having ‘two daddies’? At his age, that’s asking a lot.”
“Do you realize,” I asked Neil, “that there was a poll a while back showing that most adolescents would rather die—literally—than be known as gay. ‘Faggot’ is universally recognized among kids as the worst possible slur.”
“I don’t care for the word myself,” Neil reminded me, “but for us, it’s more than a put-down. It’s hate.”
“Thad’s come a long way in the last week—he no longer reacts to me with the knee-jerk revulsion that he’s learned from his peers—but I’m sure it would still be a major leap for him to adjust to the notion of having us for parents. Could he do it? I have my doubts.”
Neil sat up in bed to ask me, “Have you talked to him about it, point-blank?”
“No, not yet.” I thought of something and sat up next to Neil. “Friday night I invited Thad to join us for a run this weekend. He sounded game for it, if not overly enthused. If it warms up today, maybe we should try it, and if the chemistry seems right, we could all have a heart-to-heart talk.”
“Sure,” said Neil, getting out of bed, donning a heavy flannel robe. Cinching it, he turned to me, adding, “After we get that tree down.”
Ugh. I flopped onto my back, whining, “Do we have to?”
He stepped to the bed and ripped back the covers, exposing my body to the cold air of the room. “You’re the one who laid down the law: ‘If we’re going to fart around with a damn tree, I want it down the weekend after New Year’s.’”
I laughed, hugging myself for warmth. “I doubt if I used exactly those terms.”
“Maybe not,” he conceded, “but that was the gist of it. Anyway, today’s the day. Tomorrow is Suzanne’s funeral—we won’t be in any mood for it then.”
He was right. I’d never been able to stomach Christmas decorations after New Year’s, and as dreary as the ritu
al of detrimming the tree might be, it was the price one must pay to cleanse the house of the holidays. Dry, denuded, and browner than green, our twelve-foot spruce would spend the following night at the curb.
The project began late that morning, with the entire household reluctantly pitching in—even Roxanne packed away two or three of the hundreds of ornaments, between prolonged trips to the kitchen for more coffee. Hazel took charge of making sure everything was sorted into appropriate cartons. Neil and I handled most of the ornaments. Carl and Thad helped Parker with the lights. Finally, in a spray of needles, Parker and Carl hauled the corpse to the street. Then Hazel revved up the Hoover, sending the rest of us upstairs for refuge.
In the hallway, I nabbed Thad. “Hey,” I suggested, as if the thought had just come to me, “why don’t we go for that run we talked about? Neil can join us.”
“Now?” he asked, as if he were ready to go back to bed. It was noon.
“Why not? The day’s as warm as it’ll get. The dirty work’s out of the way. Besides, we can talk.”
He knew what that meant. “Okay,” he agreed, not thrilled. “Give me a few minutes to change, okay?”
So a few minutes later, Neil, Thad, and I set out through the front door and down the front walk, turning onto the street that led to the park. Neil and I wore our usual cold-weather running clothes—no shorts for me—it was now January, after all. Thad wore a ratty school sweat suit with his beat-up tennies—basketball shoes, actually, so I knew at once that his claim of inexperience was no exaggeration.
We started out at a leisurely jog, adjusting to each other’s company as well as to the outdoor air, engaged in some small talk about how far we intended to go. None of the previous week’s light snow remained on the ground—it had evaporated in the weekend’s bitter cold. And although it was somewhat warmer now, the temperature had barely nudged above zero, so our outing, while sunny, was anything but balmy.
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