Kendle was going through a change of life experience. She had had done to her what she had done to others, all without consent. She was melting from overheated poetic justice, and the oven was set a shade too high. Her face and breasts sagged in premature old age. Her expression of superiority slid off into a godawful mess. That Jeremy had planted a tracker on her van was an outrageous betrayal of trust, justice, and every other holy icon in her cupboard. Americans believe in the sanctity of secrets, the primary one being that nobody should have the right to know where you are except when you want them to. Probably 90% of Kendle's self-esteem was derived from violating the privacy of others, the natural consequence of being the exception to the rule. The remaining 10% was background noise, the minimal allotment of self-esteem needed to perform the banal script of staying alive. Jeremy had co-opted her reason for existence. It was sort of like copyright infringement.
"Jesus, Yvonne, don't take it so hard," said Jeremy, strangely like a father asking his daughter not to lose her innocence by basing her world view on appearances alone. "It's not like we've got anything to hide from each other."
Kendle shot me a visual plea which wasn't too hard to interpret. I wasn't exactly sympathetic, seeing as she had been playing two brothers off one another. Hell, maybe Todd too, although I suspected in some things he was more discriminating. This was a first impression, of course, and considering how I had faired with the rest of my family, it wasn't worth much.
The chemistry was skewed. Yvonne's reaction was not entirely due to the tracking business. I got the impression that she felt my brother had dropped out of character, that he wasn't playing his assigned role, and she didn't know how to redress the scene to match the rest of the play, a cross between Hamlet and Charlie's Aunt. I thought back on Jeremy's alternating personae, the oafish slob and streamlined geek. Should I include forger in the equation? Had he written the letters that had started all of this?
"Cm'on, Babs, give me a hug, at least." Jeremy held out his arms, leaving him wide open for a gut shot. Kendle couldn't pass up the opportunity. I grinned maliciously as Jeremy doubled over without enough wind for an 'oof!' I found myself wondering if this should be categorized as police brutality or domestic violence. Probably a bit of both.
"So what's going on?" I said, taking advantage of my brother's temporary absence from the conversation.
"Your brother here..." Kendle began.
"Yes?"
"He's nothing more than a rag-ass crook."
"Well, yeah," I said, shrugging off the obvious.
"He told me he knew where the Brinks money was...and he's been stringing me along ever since."
I noticed her posture improving. She was getting a grip on herself. I realized I was slumping and tried to stand straight.
"So now we know," I said.
She gauged me narrowly.
"You figured it out for yourself," I continued. "Skunk somehow got the money away from the Congreve brothers—all of it—and started a second family."
"In the same town?" said Kendle, giving me the ol' Devil's Advocate evil eye.
"He couldn't risk living with them. He would have stuck out like a sore thumb on River Road. But why go to the trouble of having a second family if it's not close by? There wasn't much chance of them running into each other. River Road shops at the mall. The people I grew up with bought their beer and chips from the local Korean store. I don't know about where the rich go for entertainment. Maybe they watch the groundskeepers mow the lawn." I watched Jeremy slowly rise from the parking lot tarmac, where he had been nursing his stomach. "Doubletalk was the weak link. He must have remembered where he spent his first six years. He had to have wondered why they dumped him on us, and what he missed out on."
"Oof," said Jeremy.
"And I can guess why they moved him to our house," I continued, on a roll. "If he treated Todd the same way he treated me and Sweet Tooth, the other mother probably wanted him out. Skunk must have thought a lot of her, letting her dump Doubletalk on us like that. Maybe that's why my mother killed herself."
Jeremy recovered enough wind for a brief protest. "Hold on!"
"I don't mean she killed herself because of you," I said. I would have treated the topic more seriously if I had known my mother better. I was eight when she chose luggage-free emigration to the sky. I guess my afterimage of her was vague. All young boys think about is how to dodge their mothers, and don't spend much time thinking about them as people. I didn't have enough memory to hang a coat on.
After waiting for me to elaborate, Yvonne said, "I think he means your mother killed herself because she couldn't stand Skunk giving all that money to someone he really loved."
"The other mother?" Jeremy was frowning mightily.
"Don't dwell on it," Yvonne said, for some reason bunching her fist.
"Oh, right," said Jeremy. Then his face twisted leerfully. "You've met Todd? Where? When?"
"I'll tell you later," Yvonne Kendle said gruffly.
"Bet that knocked the beans off your plate," he laughed. "Is he still as much a retard as when we were kids? Doubletwits!"
"Hey, who was my mother? Why would Todd be the golden child unless..." I gasped. Had I been kicked out of Heaven?
"You can't handle the truth," said my sub-moronic brother, using his precious wind to quote a movie trailer.
"Try me."
"Well, to tell you the truth...I don't know." Jeremy tried on a sheepish look. On him it looked like a goat. "Hell, Mute, I can't remember what I had for lunch let alone way back then."
"You didn't have lunch," Kendle reminded him. "That's why you didn't puke when I gutted you."
She said this with the malevolent relish of a hunter dressing her kill. Showing due caution, Jeremy retreated a few steps. He looked at me. "Don't dump on me. It was her idea to play along after we got the letters."
"We've reached the finger pointing stage?" I said. It seemed a little premature. The blame game doesn't usually begin until you know what the object of blame is being blamed for. But seeing as Yvonne Kendle wasn't exactly blameless about a number of things, I was already primed to believe him. "None of this makes sense. If you're sure about where the Brinks money went, why stir things up?"
Jeremy shifted from numbnuts to numbnoggin. I gave him a ruminating look. Or maybe I looked like a ruminant.
"So you grew up in the West End?" I demanded, righteously indignant.
"I told you I don't remember much about it," said Jeremy.
"And Todd is living in that big house on Ferncrest...with Mr. and Mrs. Neerson?"
"Give me a break." Jeremy hung his head. "I haven't been there in over twenty years. Right…?" He glanced at Yvonne, as though confirming his own life history. "For all I know, he lives by himself. Perfect setup. He can party whenever he wants."
He was summoning an image of party after party, and he had not been invited to any of them. Could my twin brother be my polar opposite? I could not remember the last time I had been to a party. I somehow missed the office Christmas shebang at the Science Museum. I didn't know if I was supposed to wait to be invited, or if I was just supposed to show up, so I skipped it.
"What if there's a will?" Jeremy continued.
"There is a will," I said. "Flint has it right now. Someone named Benjamin Neerson is leaving everything to his wife and kids. The address named in the will is the Ferncrest house."
Yvonne was even more perturbed than my brother by this news. "You know some Neerson guy?"
"Todd, yeah. But…" Jeremy shrugged.
"Even if there isn't a will," Yvonne continued a little breathlessly, "he should get his share."
This little sentence revealed a host of lies. Yvonne must have realized this, because she suddenly turned away. If she was concerned with Jeremy's portion, that could only mean it was to her benefit. And if it was to her benefit, she wasn't all that concerned with returning the loot to its proper owners.
"Are you really a cop?" I demanded.
"She's a security guard at Powhatan State Prison," said Jeremy defensively. "That's close enough."
"Close enough to what?" I said. "You gave me that story about losing your job if you didn't lose—"
"Right," Kendle said, cutting me off at 'weight'—a sore topic. "I work for the Department of Corrections, all right? I deal with cops all the time." She paused. "Okay, the weight part is true."
"How did you find out there was coke on the money we got at the farm? How did you trace it back to Whats-itz-land?"
"East Timor," she said. "I have friends on the force," she added, sounding like a knight out of Star Wars. She was a regular Opie One Canapé.
"Did you give your 'friends' the whole fifty thousand, or just a sample bill?" I asked.
She didn't answer. I gave Jeremy my deadliest glare, which should have at least induced a headache. Instead, my own head began to hurt. Jeremy had spent time at Powhatan, which was apparently where these two clowns had met. I had slept with a jailbird's lover, a jailbird who happened to be my brother, or half-brother, or maybe some drunken stork had dumped one or both of us in the wrong tree. My identity was fading fast. You might think I'm putting improper emphasis on the paper trail. An antique can still be beautiful without a trace of provenance. But try telling that to the guy who totes a treasured family heirloom to the Roadshow, and who is told on national television that his diamond-studded trunk is junk. In this case, junk DNA. My bloodstream rattled with discarded cans, broken bedsprings and other assorted refuse.
"I deal with morons all the time," I fumed. "That doesn't mean I'm one of them."
It was my way of saying a prison guard was as much of a cop as the man on the moon, but I regretted the tone, which placed me in the very group I was trashing. I was going to make amends with something more elevated, when I was stopped by the sour looks Jeremy and Yvonne were giving me. They assumed I was talking about them, which made sense, seeing as they were morons.
"Impersonating a cop is a big-time felony," I said, trying to assert the appearance of intelligent life within my skull. Maybe if I scared them they would treat me with more respect. I backed away when Kendle looked ready to slug me. Actually, Jeremy's fist was balled, too, but to get to me he had to pass close to her, and he wasn't ready for that.
"I showed you my ID," Kendle said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a plastic ID with an irresistibly unflattering photograph under the laminate. "I can't help it if you can't read."
I leaned forward for a closer look. It was a Department of Corrections ID. "That's not—"
"What?" Kendle said sharply, cutting me short.
This wasn't the simple business card she had shown me at the Science Museum. She probably had had a gross printed up at the Office Depot just to impress schmucks like me.
"So you sent those letters to me and Sweet Tooth, and pretended to get one yourself," I continued when all they could offer was threatening growls. "You got us all stirred up for no good reason. We never knew where the money was, and now we know it's gone. If you want me to help pay for a lawyer to contest a will, you're out of luck." I looked at Yvonne. "You've seen where I work. I make just enough to get by, and that's it." For good measure, I added: "I don't like the way you've made it look like Skunk has come back from the dead. You scared Sweet Tooth almost to death. Cm'on," I turned to Jeremy. "'Fess up!"
Jeremy clamped his mouth shut. Drawing the truth out of him was like sucking a hamster through a straw. What he said next had nothing to do with maintaining a secret or losing an advantage. It was a simple confession of ignorance, but it induced all sorts of constipated groans and spasms before he finally said:
"I didn't send the letters."
"We didn't send them," Yvonne amended.
"Well Todd sure as hell didn't send them," I reasoned. "He's the worm. He wouldn't want his can opened."
"Stop trying to be clever," Yvonne reprimanded.
"Okay," I sighed. "But you see what I mean. If it's not Todd and it's not you, it has to be...well, someone has been going to a lot of trouble to set us up. Where do Carl and Dog come in? Were they the ones who took a potshot at us on Route 6?"
For an instant, a Joker slipped out of Yvonne's poker face.
"You know who it was?" I said, in a voice that was almost demanding. I was pretty worked up. You have to take high-powered rifles seriously, even if the shooter isn't trying to hit you but only sending you a warning. You have to treat them dead-seriously if they don't know what they're doing, which for some reason I suspected was the case. Everything else had been half-assed, so why not the shooting?
"He's making it up," Jeremy said, scowling. "Or he's cracked under the strain. You should drop it, Mute. I was never shot at."
Once again, Kendle's placid face shifted, expanded and collapsed in a chubby stellar implosion. She only spoke because it looked as if Jeremy was going to add two cents to his chump change.
"If it didn't happen, it didn't happen." She chewed this morsel with her cud. "But if it did happen, it probably would have been one of the Congreve brothers."
"Oh shit," I said.
"Yeah."
"Oh shit," I said again, my wind going out with the words.
The Congreve brothers, the Sad Sacks who had dressed the part, played the part, and been condemned for their part in impersonating the Brinks guards, the pair who had held guns on the real guards.
"They're out?"
"They were released right after Skunk croaked," said Jeremy, wilting under his own tough guy act. "Ten to one the cops are following them, hoping they'll lead them to the money."
"Oh," I said, glaring at Yvonne. "Real cops?"
"I suppose," she said.
"And were the real cops watching when the Congreve brothers took a shot at us?"
"Or maybe it wasn't the Congreve brothers," said Kendle. "I told you I don't know, didn't I?"
None of this news was expected, but at least some things began falling into place. Unfortunately, an equal number began falling out of place.
"I thought Carl and Dog got involved because of Sweet Tooth," I confessed.
"Sort of yes and sort of no," Yvonne said, fidgeting. Either I knew too much of the wrong things, or I was close to learning, and prolonging the conversation would increase the risk.
"Problem is," said Jeremy, "we have another problem."
"Where did you guys get the cash that you used as bait?" I asked. Their blank expressions told me I needed to elaborate. "The money at the farm and at the old power plant?"
"That's the problem," said Jeremy.
"What, that Sweet Tooth has run off with it?" Then, looking at Yvonne, I amended, "Well, some of it?"
"The problem is that there was any money at all," she said, dodging my reference to the original fifty grand. "Jeremy does odd jobs—"
"Doubletalk works?" I gawked.
"And the salary of a DOC prison guard isn't fit for human life," Kendle concluded. "If it weren't for the state benefits, I'd—"
I wondered if she was about to say, "I'd walk the streets," then gave her the benefit of the doubt because imagining her strutting around in pink shorts and high pumps and a halter top permanently damaged my limbic system.
"And you're sure you didn't send those letters?" I prompted. "There wouldn't be much left after the house payments, taxes et cetera ad vomitum. Me, you, Sweet Tooth, Carl, Dog...Todd…Elizabeth J. Neerson and children...you're talking about pocket change, and that's if we're lucky."
"We wondered about that, too," Jeremy said. From a slight inflection I concluded sharing had been the last thing on their minds. "But when we found $50,000 at that farm..."
"That's what bait is for," said Kendle, a tacit admission that she had snapped at it.
"Did Todd know I existed?" I asked, giving Kendle a hard-boiled look that probably came across like a runny four-minute egg. "Carl and Dog seemed to have some kind of deal with him."
Jeremy went all edgy again and I guessed the answer. At some point, when he wa
s strapped for cash, he had gone to the River Road house and tried to tap Todd for his share.
"You told him, didn't you?" I went on. "He didn't believe you, right? Who would want a Skunk for a dad? He probably thinks his father is a bank president who died from gout. So you told him if he wanted proof, just go to Oregon Hill to see his twin. Right? So did he come? Did he see me?"
"He didn't act surprised when he saw you today, right?" Jeremy guessed.
"How did you know he saw me today?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Kendle, "tell us."
Abashed by his slip-up, he went on the offensive, which naturally led to a fall. "Why shouldn't he tell me?"
"'He' meaning who?" asked Kendle
Jeremy took this further demonstration of his own conspiratorial incompetence with all the grace of a seal in the desert. While he flopped around aimlessly, I put the story together. Some of it, at least.
"You're all in it together, but you're all trying to stab each other in the back, and the only reason I'm here is because of the letter you say you didn't send." I looked at the pieces before me and wondered where Kendle came into the picture. I couldn't believe Jeremy would share his booty with this one-girl grunge factory. Maybe she had done him the way she had done me, by falling on top and letting physics take over. They had probably met in prison, a classic jailbird and lovebird duo. To impress her with his prospects, or to force a pause for air, he had whispered 'Brinks' in her ear. I looked for traces of wax on his tongue. "Let's see...Doubletalk remembers his posh first years, but maybe not the address, so you work together to find that house. That leads you to Todd, who shows you the door. I guess you threatened Todd by telling him and his folks you would bring in the cops and they would lose everything unless they shared the money. Maybe convince them to sell the house and split the proceeds. To make the threat more threatening, you have Sweet Tooth bring in Carl, who has experience throwing his weight around. Sweet Tooth..." I paused, stumped.
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