‘No,’ she said.
‘I need to know more about the man who threatened her and your boys.’
‘She has two babies of her own now. She’s hiding but she’s also living.’
‘I need to talk to her.’
Felicia Bronson pushed her dogs away from the front door and opened it.
But I pushed it closed again. I said, ‘The man who killed Steven and Duane also killed two other boys – down near Bostwick.’
Her hands trembled.
I said, ‘That man, or someone connected to him, just killed Rick Melsyn and your son’s old friend, Darrell Nesbit. Lynn Melsyn can help.’
She closed her flat eyes, as if to make me go away, then opened them again. Her whole body shook. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Who will be next? Can you carry that weight too?’
Again she closed her eyes. Again she opened them. ‘I’ll call her,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll ask if she’ll talk to you.’
I knew I would get no more than that. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
She shuddered, and the dogs quieted around her as if they sensed her distress. She said,
‘I’ll tell her I think she shouldn’t talk. She should keep her mouth shut and live.’
That afternoon, as thunderclouds stacked over the river, I went back to Dr Patel’s office. I sat on his couch, and he sat on his chair, and I asked, ‘What do you know about mercury poisoning?’
‘Are you thinking of trading in the box cutter?’ he said.
‘What are the symptoms?’
He set down his notepad. ‘Do you know about mad hatters?’
‘In Alice in Wonderland?’
‘No, the real story. Back when Lewis Carroll was writing, hat makers often went insane. True story. They used mercury to make felt for hats. It gave them muscle spasms. Caused brain damage. They hallucinated, had mood swings. They stopped sleeping.’
I thought about Steven and Duane Bronson driving through the city night after night in their mom’s car.
‘Probably good for business at first,’ he said. ‘They worked while others slept, but that just meant putting more mercury into their systems and a faster decline. Before hat makers, alchemists used mercury when they tried to turn lead into gold. Instead, they turned their brains into paste. Psychiatric journals are full of case studies reaching back more than three thousand years.’ He picked up the notebook again and readied his pen. ‘Why the interest?’
I gave him a short version of what I’d learned about Jeremy Ballat, Luis Gonzalez, and the Bronson brothers. I left out the connection to Judge Skooner but mentioned Tomhanson Mill.
‘A place like that could do a lot of damage,’ he said. ‘The most famous case happened in Japan in the nineteen-fifties. A fertilizer company pumped mercury waste into a bay near a fishing village. More than a thousand people died.’
After we finished talking about ways that chemicals could wreck the mind and body, he taught me a slow breathing technique that, he said, might stop my head from buzzing and my skin from crawling. Each time I breathed in, I should ask myself if the source of my tension was real. Then, as I emptied my lungs, I should assure myself that it was an illusion.
‘But what if the source is real?’ I asked.
‘Breathe some more until you convince yourself it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Never underestimate the power of false belief. If it keeps you on the right side of sanity, go for it.’
A hard rain fell as I drove out of the Medical Services Building parking garage. The tires hissed on the wet pavement as if practicing Dr Patel’s technique. When I passed Sahara Sandwiches, the black hooker was sitting outside at one of the picnic tables, letting the rain drench her. Maybe she was denying that the source of her misery was real.
At the Cardinal Motel, I pulled into the spot by my room. Sheltered from the rain by the overhang, a new mattress, wrapped in clear plastic, leaned against the outside wall. Next to the mattress, my old running coach Ernie Kagen also leaned against the wall. He wore exercise shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt, and flip-flops. He looked almost as wet as the hooker.
‘Hey,’ he said with a nervous smile as I got out.
‘Hey,’ I said.
I unlocked my door, and he stepped inside, his odor swelling around him.
As he stood by the TV, I lugged the mattress inside and dropped it on the bedframe.
‘I told you a lie when you came to my house,’ he said. ‘At least, I was less than honest.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘The truth is you scared me, showing up like that. I should have been prepared.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
He stepped toward me, then stopped. ‘I haven’t been well,’ he said.
‘Sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘I should’ve lived different,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ve been a hypocrite.’
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘It won’t help. But I want to come clean with you. Of all people.’
‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘Not to me.’
But he said, ‘That kid on the track team in Gainesville? I did it. It was a one-time thing. An accident. But I wanted to tell you the whole truth.’
The whole truth. I could’ve pressed him about his arrest for soliciting a kid in New Orleans. I could’ve told him that in my eight years in prison, I’d never met a one-time abuser. I could’ve told him to get the hell out of my room. I said, ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You have nothing to be sorry to me for,’ I said. ‘Your visits did me good when I was inside.’
‘Yeah, but what I was thinking about you when I came – you know what I wanted.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
He stepped toward me again. He smelled like old milk. I wondered if desire could curdle like that.
‘It’s time for you to go home,’ I said.
He screwed up his lips, as if he would beg me, or curse me, or weep.
But he said nothing.
He went out through the door into the rain. I watched as he got into his car and started it. He pulled on to Philips Highway – slowly, so slowly it seemed he must think that when he reached his home he would find the windows covered with bars.
I locked the door. I pulled the window shade closed. I stripped the plastic wrap from the mattress, and the smell of new fabric tangled with Kagen’s odor. I stripped off my clothes and lay naked on the mattress.
I breathed in deep, sucking the smells into my lungs.
I breathed out, denying the world’s evil.
I breathed in, thinking, Is every person – my dad in his drunkenness, Jared in his selfishness, Bill Higby in his self-righteous injustice, Felicia Bronson in her confused despair, Coach Kagen in his rot – a disease?
I breathed out. No, Cynthia is fire-hardened and beautiful, and there are others like her – Thelma Friedman, Deborah Holt maybe, Hank and Jane at their best.
I breathed in. Can I vent the badness from inside me with a box cutter? Can I shoot it out from between my ears with a pistol?
I breathed out and started laughing. I laughed at Coach Kagen, at all the abused boys and girls, at my father, at Felicia Bronson, and at Bill Higby. I laughed at myself. I punched the new mattress with my fists and elbows and laughed. My neighbors, Jimmy and Susan, pounded on the wall separating our rooms and yelled at me to Shutthefuckup.
So I dug my fingers into my arms and held the laughter in until tears streamed from my eyes. I looked through the tears to see if I was cracking from the inside out. Who needed a box cutter? Who needed a pistol in the ear? Insects ripped free of their shells. Birds molted. Snakes shed their skins. Why shouldn’t I?
When I stopped crying, I had sweated a stain into the new mattress.
I got up and walked around my room, looking at the TV and furniture as if they were objects new to the world, or I was new and seeing the world for the first time. I showered
then and put on pants. I turned on the TV and lay back down and waited for the five o’clock news. When it came on, the follow-up to the story of Jane’s plea for a delay on Thomas LaFlora’s execution got only thirty seconds. The reporter said the State Attorney and the Governor’s Office believed the execution should go forward as scheduled. The reporter also had tried to contact Randall Haussen for a comment on Jane’s insinuations, but Haussen hadn’t returned phone calls. The story ended with a clip of an assistant state attorney for the Fourth Judicial District saying, ‘The time for delay was twenty-five years ago, when Thomas LaFlora shot his victims to death. His execution is long overdue.’
The news ended with a teaser. On the eleven o’clock broadcast, the anchor promised, they would give fresh details about the shooting deaths of Rick Melsyn and Darrell Nesbit.
I turned off the TV. I had five and a half hours until the news came on again and six and a half hours until midnight, when I’d told Cynthia I would pick her up.
Time – my enemy and friend.
I finished dressing, grabbed my keys, and went out through the rain to my car, thinking that, if nothing else, I would get dinner. Then my phone rang. Caller ID said Felicia Bronson was calling.
When I answered, she said, ‘Lynn Melsyn will talk to you.’
TWENTY-SIX
Lynn Melsyn – now married and named Lynn Pritchard – lived in an enormous house near the ocean in the suburb of Ponte Vedra. People in Jacksonville moved to Ponte Vedra for the schools, the golf courses, and the private beach clubs. The houses were newer than in the city, the lawns greener, the streets cleaner, the nights quieter. Outside of Lynn Pritchard’s house, the air smelled of rain and the fertilizer and mulch that a landscaping crew had spread around the palm trees and on the gardens.
We stood in a two-story foyer, a cut-glass chandelier above us, polished, white, marble tiles under our feet. An antique wooden table with an arrangement of flowers stood in the middle of the entryway. In a room visible through an open double doorway, a nanny talked in a babyish voice to twin girls in side-by-side cribs.
Lynn Pritchard wore a red dress that stretched to her thighs. Her black hair fell halfway down her back. Her skin was pale, and her fingernail polish matched her dress. She wore bright red lipstick like a mask. It was the kind that still looks wet hours after a woman puts it on.
‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ I said.
‘The police said you found him and Darrell,’ she said.
I nodded.
She glanced at the flowers on the table, as if my presence pained her, and said, ‘I heard they put you in the hospital afterward.’
‘For a while.’
She looked at me again, said, ‘Let’s sit,’ and led me into a hallway that took us away from her daughters.
I guessed that, like Duane Bronson and me, she came from a poor part of town, but she looked comfortable in wealth. We went through a large living room with a white carpet, draped windows, and a brass-screened fireplace, and crossed into a sitting room. Tinted glass doors looked out at a screened-in pool, lighted by flood lamps from above and submerged lighting below.
She gestured at an upholstered chair and said, ‘Please.’
I sat, and she settled on to a matching couch, slipping off her shoes and tucking her legs under her. I looked at bookshelves lined with glass figurines, a little fireplace that matched the big one in the other room, and all the fine furniture.
I said, ‘Do you mind if I ask—’
Apparently used to such questions, she said, ‘The man I married – a year and a half ago, when I got pregnant – owned car dealerships in Alabama before retiring here. I thought he would try to pay me to get rid of the twins. Instead, he asked me to marry him.’ She stared at me. ‘Is that more than you were asking?’
‘No – that was fine.’
She frowned and smoothed her dress over her thighs. ‘I can already tell that you ask a lot. Probably too much.’
‘For eight years, I had very little,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t have much beforehand. I lost what I had.’
‘Others lost more.’
‘Duane and Steven,’ I said.
‘They lost the most.’
‘And you went into hiding.’
She nodded.
So I said, ‘Tell me what you’re scared of.’
She frowned again. ‘I’m scared of the man who killed my brother,’ she said. ‘I’m scared of the man who killed Duane. I’m scared that the police said they’d worked out Duane’s murder eight years ago, but I knew they hadn’t. The man who killed him could get to me and no one would stop him. I’m scared that before my brother died he might have told the man where to find me.’
I said, ‘Tell me about him.’
She moved a strand of hair from her cheek. ‘He sat next to me during your trial. He said I had something of his and he wanted it back. He said Duane must have given it to me.’
‘Did he tell you what it was?’
She hesitated. ‘A briefcase. Papers. But I told him, if Duane stole papers, he would have thrown them away or burned them. If it didn’t shine, Duane didn’t want it.’
‘If it didn’t shine?’
She allowed herself a little smile. ‘Duane was kind of crazy. He broke into houses for the thrill and because of the way they shined – that was his word. He didn’t care about the money so much, and he only got in trouble when he tried to sell the things he stole. But he liked fancy houses. He liked to pretend he belonged in them.’ She looked out toward the pool. ‘He always said he would live in a house like this someday. That was his dream. The closest he got was breaking into them. If he took a briefcase from the man, he took it to carry the things he found in the house.’
‘How about Steven?’
‘He did what Duane told him to do.’
‘Do you have the jewelry that Duane’s mom gave you?’
She shook her head. ‘I threw it out a long time ago. I only kept this’ – she pulled a chained pendant from inside the top of her dress. It was a golden star with a diamond chip at each of its points. ‘It’s stolen, but everything about Duane broke the rules, so it’s a good remembrance.’ She stared at me. ‘You’re scared too.’
Instead of answering, I said, ‘What did the man look like?’
But she said, ‘I’m alone with my girls most of the time. Sometimes I have Jen – their nanny. She’s sweet. It’s like having a third baby to watch over.’
‘Where’s your husband?’ I asked.
‘He goes places with his friends. Hunting. Rafting in Argentina. Drinking and cigar trips. He travels with guys he’s known since high school.’
‘You say he’s retired?’
‘He’s sixty-four.’
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I love him as much as I love anyone. Ever since Duane, I’ve had a hard time loving. I lost something too.’
‘Tell me about the man who came to you at my trial. How often did you see him after that?’
‘As I said, you ask a lot.’
‘You agreed to talk with me.’
‘Because I wanted to ask you questions.’
Across the house, one of her babies started crying.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Ask anything.’
She untucked her legs, crossed them, and uncrossed them. ‘When you found my brother in his apartment,’ she said, ‘what did he look like?’
‘The police didn’t tell you?’
‘They only showed me a picture of his face.’
‘Then you saw. The killer shot him in the forehead.’
‘What else?’ Her eyes were steely but I heard the fear.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘What did he look like?’ she said.
‘He looked like Duane when he died. The killer bit him. On the legs. Around—’
‘Exactly like Duane? No difference?’
‘Little differences,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’ She looked incapable of aski
ng, so I told her. ‘The killer ripped away part of his chest. One of his nipples. That didn’t happen to Duane.’
Pinpoints of sweat broke from her pale skin. She said, ‘That’s what he said he would do to me if I talked. So I hid. My aunt lives in Orlando. I finished high school there. When I moved back, I used my mother’s maiden name. Then I met my husband.’
‘Who’s the man who threatened you?’ I said.
She shook her head – unwilling, unable.
‘But you know who he is?’ I asked. ‘You know his name?’
Still she shook her head. She said, ‘For eight years, I hid. I was safe. Then you got out and went to see my brother, and now he’s dead.’
‘What did you tell him about the man?’
‘You’ve asked enough,’ she said.
‘If he got to him, he can get to you.’
‘Not if I keep my promise,’ she said.
‘Your brother kept his promise. He told me nothing. Now he’s dead.’
She shook her head.
If she could identify Judge Skooner, I wanted her to do it on her own, without my naming him. But I gave her as much as I could. ‘If this man has power – if he has the kind of connections that got him to your brother – he’ll get to you.’
‘I told the police,’ she said. ‘Eight years ago. They did nothing.’
‘Who did you tell?’
‘The detective who investigated Duane and Steve’s deaths.’
‘Bill Higby?’ I could hardly breathe.
‘He called me a liar. He said he knew who killed them. You.’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘Did Eric Skooner threaten you,’ I asked. ‘The judge?’
‘I’ll disappear,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave—’
I knew the danger of dictating someone else’s story, insisting on the details of another person’s experience. But I said, ‘I need to hear you say it. Did the judge threaten you?’
‘I’m here alone,’ she said.
The baby cried more loudly now. But Lynn Pritchard didn’t seem to hear.
‘Tell me who threatened you.’
Monument Road Page 21
