Not that Clethra had noticed one bit of it. She hadn’t spoken a word to me the rest of the evening. Just sat there by the marsh smoking cigarette after cigarette and staring numbly out at the darkness. No doubt she would have stayed out there all night in the cold rain if I hadn’t fetched her and toweled her off and put her to bed in the chapel.
“Oh, thank God it’s you, darling!” Merilee cried when I got through to her. “Pam and I were just sitting here watching the late news when they said—”
“You’ve heard about Ruth then.”
“When will this end, Hoagy?” Merilee wondered, her voice heavy with sorrow.
“Soon, I hope.”
She was silent a moment. “You sound funny, darling.”
“Funny ha-ha?”
“Funny weird.”
“It’s this bed.”
“What about it?”
“It’s awfully cold in here.”
“That’s because you don’t have me there to keep you warm.”
“Have I told you recently I’m nuts about you? Both of you?”
“Not in ages and ages,” she answered solemnly. “And if by ‘both of you’ you’re referring to Tracy the answer is never. As in not ever. Have you been drinking tequila? You know what that does to you.”
“No, I haven’t, Merilee.”
“What about Lulu?”
“She hasn’t been drinking tequila either.”
“I meant, sir, how does she feel about Tracy?”
“She’s accepting the fact that she can’t go back, only forward, and that if she’ll just give Tracy a chance she’ll find her enriching her life, rather than intruding upon it.”
“Mighty complex ruminations for a gal with a brain the size of a garbanzo bean,” Merilee said tartly. “… Hoagy?”
“Yes, Merilee?”
“You’re not doing something reckless and foolhardy, are you?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It seemed to work for Very. “Of course not. Why would you say that?”
“Because I know you, that’s why. Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“When can I come home? I miss my garden somethin’ arful.”
“Tomorrow, Merilee. Just …”
“Yes, darling?”
“Just don’t make it too early.”
“That’ll be perfect. They want to talk to me at ten about doing Gilligan: The Musical.”
“Oh, no …”
“Oh, yes.”
“Would you be Ginger or Mary Ann?”
“Actually, they’re offering me the title role.”
“But—”
“It’s a feminist interpretation, darling. I’d be Gilligan. Chita Rivera has already signed to play the Skipper. And they’re talking to the Cassidy brothers, David and Shaun, for Ginger and Mary Ann.”
“I don’t even want to know who’s going to play Thurston Howell.”
“Sandra Bernhard.”
“I told you, I didn’t want to know. Merilee, you’re not actually considering this, are you?”
“I miss the action, darling,” she confessed. “I hate to admit it, but it’s the truth. I’ve been realizing it ever since I’ve been back here. And a play is ideal. Tracy can be with me all through rehearsal, and then once our run starts I can be home with her all day. Okay, so it’s not Sondheim. But—well, it is a stretch.”
“That’s certainly one word for it.”
“But what am I dithering on about?” she said, shifting gears. “You don’t want to hear about my silly career right now.”
“Yes, I do. More than you can possibly imagine. Hurry home, Merilee. I love you.”
“I love you, too, darling. Goodnight.”
I hung up the phone and stared at it, my heart starting to pound.
Everything was in place. Everyone was ready. Now it was my play. A high-risk play, no question. But the only play. No question there either.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number. When I got the voice I wanted to hear I said: “I love Clethra and Clethra loves me. We’ve been sleeping together ever since Merilee went to New York. We have sex every night. Incredible sex, the best sex she’s ever had. Now that Ruth is gone there’s no one who can keep us apart. We’re running away in the morning to start a brand-new life together. You’ll never see her again. She’s mine, do you hear me? She’s mine!”
Then I slammed down the phone.
And lay there, tensed, watching the patterns of the fire dance on the wall of the darkened room. I lay there and waited, the rain pounding on the roof, the lightning flashing, the wind howling. I thought about Merilee and Tracy. I thought about that last conversation I’d had with Mother out in the parking lot at Exit Meadows. I thought about Father and that creak on the stairs in the night. I thought about Thor and Ruth and that kid Tyler, who got himself strangled in his dorm room for being greedy and stupid. I thought about how I was lying there alone and that I didn’t enjoy being alone as much as I used to. I thought about a lot of things. A high-risk play will do that to you. I thought about everything except sleep. Sleep was out of the question. I waited, Lulu snoring softly next to me.
It was nearly one when I heard it.
At first I wasn’t really sure I had because of the rain. But I had—the soft crunch of footsteps in the gravel driveway out by the back porch. The kitchen door opening with a squeak. I’d left it unlocked, like we always did. Someone rattling around in the kitchen. Drawers being pulled open, a cupboard door smacking shut. Footsteps. The creak of a floorboard down below in the parlor. Lulu stirred and opened one eye, a growl coming from deep in her throat. I shushed her. Reached down under the bed and hit the on switch, then dove back down under the covers, waiting … A creak on the stairs now, footsteps climbing quickly …. Stopping at the top of the stairs, hesitating, starting down the hall toward me. Arriving outside my bedroom door. Slowly, the door swung open, its hinges squeaking. They could use some WD-40. Every hinge in the house needed some after the summer. I’d have to take care of that when I had a chance … One step toward me, the floorboard groaning … Another step … Nearing the foot of the bed … Closer … Still closer …
Until I sat right up and flicked on the bedside lamp, freezing him there with the kitchen knife clutched tightly in his powerful hand.
“Greetings, Dwayne,” I said. “What took you so damned long?”
Eleven
DWAYNE STOOD THERE BLINKING furiously at the light, his tongue flicking at his lips. He was shivering. His clothes were soaked through, his hair dripping wet, the drops plopping softly on the hooked rug at his feet.
“I had to hike through the woods to get here, Mr. H. Didn’t want nobody to hear me coming. There’s that trooper stationed down by the …” He stopped short, his eyes darting around the room in confusion. “She’s not here. Where is she?”
“In the chapel, Dwayne,” I replied, my own eyes on the knife. So were Lulu’s. “That’s where she sleeps, generally. She and I aren’t running away together, or having incredible sex, or ordinary sex, or any kind of sex at all. I’m afraid I tricked you. Had to. It was the only way I could get you to show your hand.” I sat back in the bed and crossed my arms, trying to look relaxed. Which I wasn’t. It was a big knife, ideal for chopping vegetables and assorted limbs. It was a sharp knife. I knew this. I’d sharpened it myself. “What were you planning to do when you found us here together? Kill us both?”
Dwayne shook a damp, crumpled cigarette loose from the pack in the pocket of his flannel shirt and managed to light it, tossing the match in the fireplace. “No way, man. Not Clethra. Never Clethra. I love her. More than I’ve ever loved any girl. More than I ever will. I-I was gonna show her how much. Prove it to her.”
“By killing me,” I said. “Just as you killed Thor and Tyler and Ruth.”
Dwayne fingered his stringy moustache, squinting at me over his cigarette. “By taking what I want, no matter who don’t like it. Just like Mr. Gibbs said.”
<
br /> I stared at him. “Christ, Dwayne, is that what this is all about? Thor’s teachings?”
“Man is a conqueror,” Dwayne recited, his voice hushed and reverent. “If he sees what he wants he must take it. He must be true to himself. No matter what other people think. No matter if they get hurt. No matter if—”
“They get dead?”
“Someone like Clethra,” he went on, glancing down at the knife in his hand, “someone so beautiful, so smart, so sweet, she’s always gonna belong to somebody else. I didn’t have to tell him that. He knew it. Just like he knew it’s another man’s right, another man’s destiny, to come along and take her away from him. Which is what I tried to tell him, man to man, as someone I-I looked up to, as someone I-I …”
A log fell in the fireplace grate. He jumped. All three of us did.
“Go on, Dwayne. Tell me what happened that morning.”
He stood there a moment, his eyes narrow and vulpine, his chest rising and falling. “I knew you all were going to Essex. Clethra told me. She told me he’d be here all alone. So I came here, like a man, to tell him straight up I loved her and wanted her to be mine.”
“And what did he say when you told him?”
“He laughed at me,” Dwayne answered bitterly. “He fucking laughed in my face.”
“He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
Dwayne nodded. “Sitting there by the woodpile, nasty drunk like he was that day at Slim Jim’s. Calling me dickless. Telling me I was just some lousy Lost Boy, and what right did I have thinking I could ever offer Clethra anything.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said,” Dwayne recalled angrily, “I sure as hell could give her one thing he couldn’t—a good straight fucking.”
“She’d told you they hadn’t had sex?”
He sniffled, swiping at his nose with the back of his hand. “No, not exactly.”
“You overheard it, didn’t you?” I suggested. “That night I came back late from the city, when she was out there waiting for me on the Land Rover, all sweaty and itchy. She’d been with you, hadn’t she? That’s what she was doing out there. She’d slipped out on Thor to be with you. And you were there listening that whole time we talked, weren’t you? In the carriage barn. I heard a noise in there, but I figured it was Sadie stalking a mouse, since Lulu didn’t bark. But she wouldn’t bark—not at you. She knows you.”
“That was our second date,” Dwayne recalled, a look of utter rapture on his scarred, stitched face. “Our first was that night you and Mr. Gibbs went away camping. She ducked out for some munchies, least that’s what she told Miss Nash. I met her there at the general store. We parked in the woods. Drank some beer and talked. Just kicking it, until she had to get back on account of Miss Nash would think she cracked up the Land Rover or something. All we did was talk, Mr. H. But we just … I just … Damn, she treated me like a person, not like some townie retardo whose old man’s in jail. She listened to what I had to say. She really listened. You know what that feels like? When someone that smart, that pretty …” He trailed off, shaking his head in awe. “Man, I just knew she was the one for me. For life. Have you ever met someone and known? Just like that?”
“Yes, Dwayne. I have.”
“That second date,” he went on, “we made for late, after Mr. Gibbs passed out, which she said he almost always did from drinking so much and being so old.”
“I’ll have to remember that for the future,” I reflected.
“I left my truck down in the woods and hiked up to your place so nobody’d get wise to us—I figured you wouldn’t be too happy if you found out. And I knew he wouldn’t be. We sat out there in the backseat of your Woody, making out like crazy. She was on fire that night, man. And so was I. Our flesh burned.”
“I’ll never be able to drive that car again,” I muttered. “Did the two of you … ?”
“We would have if you hadn’t pulled up when you did,” he assured me. “I had her naked, man. Her juices were streaming down my fingers like hot soup.”
“I’ll never be able to eat hot soup again either.”
Lulu, she’d had just about enough of this whole thing. She jumped down to the floor with a huff and started primly for the door.
“Where’s she going?” Dwayne’s knuckles tightened around the gleaming knife.
“Ask her yourself.”
“Tell her to stay!”
“Tell her yourself.”
Not necessary. She halted in the doorway, knowing better than to make things any worse, then sidled over to the rocker by the fireplace, where she curled up and eyed him with withering disapproval.
Dwayne tossed his cigarette butt in the fire and lit another, dragging on it deeply. “I was there in the barn listening to you two the whole time, like you said. Heard her tell you how she and Thor had never even done it.”
“What exactly had she told you?”
“Just that it was all a mistake, her running off with him. That she was sorry she done it. That he was too old for her. That he was …” He trailed off, his eyes on the fire. I thought about making a dive for the knife. I didn’t do it, but I thought about it. “When I heard her tell you that, man, that’s when I knew it was for real, her and me. Because she wasn’t his, y’know? He wasn’t really possessing her. Me knowing that, well, that’s what give me the nerve to tell him about us Sunday morning. I showed up here like I was gonna do some work. Y’know, like it was just an accident us getting to talk. I even pulled a couple of rotten sills, full of rusty nails.”
“Which explains why you had your gloves on,” I said.
“He laughed at me, Mr. H,” Dwayne said angrily. “He laughed in my face, the mean fucking bastard. Called me names. Shoved me. And kept on shoving me. I-I don’t like to be pushed, man. I really, really don’t like it. So I grabbed the nearest thing …”
“The sledge.”
“And I popped him with it—two, three times. I-I lost my head. But he drove me to it, man. Brought it on himself. I mean, he was just so completely full of shit. All that stuff he wrote, that stuff he said a man oughta do. And I believed him. I thought … I thought he meant what he said. I thought he cared. But he was full of shit, just like everyone else. Everyone.” He paused, breathing heavily. “I did what he’d said to do, man. And when I did it, when I fucking grabbed for it … he fucking laughed at me!”
“Why did you Bobbitt him?”
“To make it look like his wife maybe done it,” he replied simply. “Idea just came to me.”
“Shrewd. Only why toss the shears in the pond but leave the sledge right there for anyone to find?”
Lulu harrumphed indignantly at this. It hadn’t been “anyone” who’d found the sledge. It had been her.
“I was gonna hide the shears and the sledge both,” Dwayne answered. “Y’know, like bury ‘em somewhere maybe. Only I started to freak out about time. Plus there was his body to take care of. I mean, I had to get rid of him. I was afraid to cart him away in my truck in broad daylight. Figured I’d get spotted dumping him somewhere. Lot of guys out hunting now, or laying in firewood for winter. So I weighed him down and dumped him in the pond. Figured the water’d be getting deeper from all this rain, and then in a few weeks it’d freeze right over. Be ages before anyone found him.” He scratched his head ruefully. “I didn’t figure on Lulu taking a swim soon as she got home.”
“One never does. Her unpredictability is one of her most endearing traits. In fact, it’s her only endearing trait.”
She harrumphed at this, too. She was doing a lot of harrumphing. I would pay for this later. If there was a later.
“Still, you were plenty careful, Dwayne. You didn’t have to worry about the mud around the edge of the pond. There were a million footprints there, and no reason why your own would set off any alarm bells. You’ve been working here for weeks. But the driveway was another matter.”
He nodded. “It was raining. Just a drizzle really, but the driveway was wet. And when I sta
rted backing out I realized I was leaving a dry patch there in the gravel where my truck had been. Anybody came back soon and saw that dry patch I’d be smoked for sure. All they’d have to do is measure it and they’d know it was my truck—I got custom bumpers. So I jumped out and hosed it down real fast. And then I got the hell out of here.”
“Where did you go?”
“Straight home. Told my mom if anyone asked her I was around the house all morning helping her out.”
“Did she ask you why?”
Dwayne snorted. “In my family, it’s not smart to ask why.”
“And you’re nothing if not smart, Dwayne,” I told him. “You sure fooled me. All along I was wrong. I thought for sure it had to be one of the family. It had to be Ruth. Or Arvin. Or Barry—with or without help from Marco. After all, they were the ones who hated Thor the most. And loved Clethra the most. After all, Thor’s killing took place when they were all out here at Barry’s place. And when Tyler Kampmann was murdered they were all back in New York. It had to be one of them. It just had to be. Only it wasn’t. None of them were involved, except as victims. I was wrong all along,” I confessed, tugging at my ear. “And Lulu, it turns out, was right.”
She sat up in the rocker, tail thumping expectantly.
“How so?” Dwayne demanded, scowling at her.
“When we got to Barry’s house after Thor was murdered she sniffed everyone’s shoes, one by one, to see if any of them had traces of our pond mud on them. Marco started acting really panicky—I later found out because he was afraid she’d sniff marijuana on him and get him in trouble with Slawski. But it was mud Lulu was after, and the bottom line was that she discovered none, just as she discovered none on the wheels of their cars. I didn’t know what to make of the cars, but with the shoes I figured, okay, the killer had time to change them before we got there. A simple, plausible explanation. And totally wrong. Because the simple truth is that Thor’s killer wasn’t there at all. Because Thor’s killer was you … After you told your mom to cover for you you went out and helped your neighbor Billy in his yard. When Billy got the call to come tow Thor’s body out of the pond you followed him up here, pretending to be greatly distraught. You even jumped in yourself and hooked up Thor’s body to the winch. Pretty weird behavior, considering you’d just put him there.”
The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy Page 24
