Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  Then she came back and asked him if he’d like anything to eat.

  While he ate his sandwich and drank his milk, she sat across the table from him, holding her hands against her meager bosom. She didn’t speak until he was finished.

  “What do you know about my daughter?” she asked finally.

  Stephen might have seemed to be considering his answer, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even thinking about that. Instead, he felt a great wave of pity for this woman. It was almost as if he could feel her distress as well as see it. Then he shrugged.

  “Very little, really. She disappeared when I was seven. One day she just wasn’t there.”

  “Then tell me about your father.”

  “His name was—is—Walter Rayne. He travels around a lot. He can do just about any kind of work. He’s tall and he has light brown hair. Like mine. He has a purplish birthmark on the back of his right hand.”

  “That’s him. That’s the man Betty ran off with.”

  “Is that what you called her? Betty?”

  “Yes.”

  She never took her eyes from his face. Sometimes she would squint slightly, the way some people do when they are trying to bring an object into focus.

  “How did you know where to find us?”

  “There was a suitcase. I found an old driver’s license in her wallet. It had this address on it.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “Some clothes and a wedding ring.”

  “Then he did marry her?”

  “I guess.”

  A few minutes later Stephen heard a car drive up and stop, then a man came in through the outside door to the kitchen. He was wearing a canvas hat and a heavy Windbreaker with a plaid pattern. He wore rimless glasses and was just at the threshold of being old.

  Stephen got to his feet.

  The man stood beside Mrs. Dabney and put his hand on her shoulder, which took away any doubt about his identity. Then he held out his hand to Stephen, and Stephen took it.

  “I’m Phil Dabney,” he said, giving Stephen’s hand a vigorous shake. He didn’t really seem that friendly. “My wife tells me you claim to be our daughter Betty’s boy.”

  “He is Betty’s boy,” Mrs. Dabney broke in. “He knows too much to be anybody else. Besides, Phil, look at his eyes. Those are Betty’s eyes.”

  Phil Dabney stared into Stephen’s face, and then, suddenly, he seemed to be afraid of what he saw there.

  “By God,” he said, with a kind of awe, “so they are.”

  The three of them sat around the kitchen table talking until it began to grow dark outside. Then Mrs. Dabney, whose first name Stephen still didn’t know, got up and started her preparations for supper. When she was away from the table, Phil Dabney leaned forward and, in a low voice, asked the question that must have been preying on his mind ever since he came through the door.

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “She’s dead,” Stephen answered. “My father killed her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that’s what he does. He kills women.”

  * * *

  Dinner was largely ignored. No one wanted to eat while Stephen told the story of the dead woman he had found in his father’s van. No one was hungry after that, since something of the sort must have been Betty’s fate.

  But for Mr. and Mrs. Dabney there was a consolation prize for learning what had happened to their long-missing daughter. Finally Mrs. Dabney reached out and took Stephen’s hand.

  “I’m your grandmother,” she said. “My name is Wilma Dabney.”

  Stephen looked from her to her husband and back again, his eyes filling with tears.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “It’s impossible to believe anything else,” Phil Dabney said, taking his grandson’s other hand in his own. “I guess you’ll live with us now.”

  He looked at his wife as if asking her permission.

  “He can have Betty’s old room,” Mrs. Dabney said.

  And from that night, for the next four years, Stephen lived with his grandparents, whom he called Gramps and Gram and, collectively “the folks,” which seemed to suit them. For four years he got to know normal life.

  * * *

  It is not always true that familiarity breeds contempt. The more Stephen came to know his grandparents, the more they became his exemplars.

  And he quickly came to understand that he needed exemplars. It didn’t take him long to figure out how strange had been life as he knew it with his father.

  I’ve been living on Mars, he thought to himself one day, about a month after he arrived in Circleville. I don’t know the customs here on Earth.

  So he set about learning, in a way analogous to how he was eventually to learn foreign languages. He acquired the grammar and vocabulary by studying his grandparents, and then he went out and tried to put it together into sentences. Perhaps he would never acquire quite the right accent, but he would achieve a certain fluency and that might be enough.

  Phil Dabney, his grandson quickly discovered, was an intelligent man whose moral world had little room for ambiguities. He lived according to his own notion of what constituted a gentleman, an idea defined entirely by conduct. A gentleman did not lie, cheat, steal or resort to violence. A gentleman treated other people with sympathy and respect. A gentleman did not use bad language.

  Stephen had grown up in a household where other standards applied. The first time he used a curse word, his grandfather took him aside and explained to him, calmly and with great kindness, that that sort of language simply would not do. “I’m glad your grandmother wasn’t here,” he said. “She’s a lady and it would have distressed her. The best thing would be if you dropped such expressions altogether.”

  Stephen tried. He never again swore in his grandparents’ house. Later, after he had joined the Navy, it was more of a struggle, but he persevered.

  His grandmother taught him to be human. He watched her deal with his grandfather, with her friends and neighbors, with tradesmen and strangers, and gradually he began picking up the skills of ordinary life.

  She taught him table manners, with which he was little familiar, and, quite unconsciously, she taught him how to recognize the humanity of other people. She taught him how to open himself to life.

  And she talked to him about his mother—enough to fill in the gaps in his memories and make her real.

  “She was a smart girl, good in school, but too innocent,” his grandmother told him. “She believed everyone was good. She saw everyone just the way they wanted to be seen. I never liked your father—I just didn’t think he fit together right. But your mother thought he was an angel from heaven. And one day she was just gone. She didn’t even leave a note.”

  Stephen had watched his grandmother struggling with her grief. She got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting, and went over to open a cabinet above the stove. There was nothing inside she wanted. It was just something to do, to give herself a tiny respite from her memories.

  “And now she’s in heaven.”

  * * *

  And then there was education of a more formal kind.

  At first he went to the middle school, but after six months, when his teachers decided he had exhausted their resources, he was promoted to the high school. There he was a prize student, except that his mathematics teachers didn’t know what to do with him. So it was arranged that, twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, his grandmother would drive him into Columbus, to Ohio State University, to receive instruction in the mathematics department there. She would drop him off at the corner of North High and East Seventeenth and then go shopping for three hours. On the drive home, for fear of boring her, he talked about everything but math.

  Not, probably, that he would have bored her, for his grandparents seemed interested in everything he did or said or thought. At dinner they would have real, actual conversations. For the first time since his mother’s disappearance, Stephen knew wha
t it was to be cared about.

  By the time he was fourteen Stephen was doing independent work in mathematics, and at fifteen he wrote a paper on probability theory that his advisor at Ohio State encouraged him to submit for publication. A month later the paper appeared on the Internet.

  Two months after that his advisor, Professor Aland, called Stephen in for a talk.

  “Your paper has caused quite a stir,” he said. “You should start thinking about the next step.”

  Professor Aland was about thirty, a tall, bony man with a black beard and eyes that suggested some permanent dissatisfaction with life.

  “Well, I’m writing another paper…”

  But with a languid wave of his hand, Aland indicated that he meant something else.

  “I mean, what should be the next step in your education. You’re wasting your time here.”

  Stephen’s first thought was that he must have done something wrong. He probably looked stricken, because Aland smiled.

  “Steve, you should be in graduate school.”

  “Graduate school—I haven’t even finished high school.”

  Stephen’s chair was against a bookcase, at an angle that permitted a glimpse out of the room’s only window. It was winter term and snow was falling in gray drifts. The world suddenly appeared very bleak.

  “I remember high school as somewhere between a gulag and a revival meeting,” Aland told him. “I should think you’d be glad to escape.”

  He let his gaze wander up to the ceiling, happily oblivious to Stephen’s reaction.

  “In any case, high school is a trivial obstacle. Universities have all the same courses—except, perhaps, home ec and auto shop.”

  He smiled again, to indicate he had made a little joke.

  “Where would I go? Here?”

  His advisor shot him a glance suggesting his question was in the worst possible taste.

  “Oh God, no. Stanford, perhaps, although MIT would be better.”

  “I was just thinking a state school would be cheaper.”

  “Steve, I went to MIT, and my father was a bookkeeper. Two days ago the chairman of the math department, who just happens to be my old dissertation advisor, phoned me about you. I don’t think there’ll be any problem about money. And you’ll have Harvard just up the street if you want to dabble in the arts. In my day, we used to refer to Harvard as ‘the Charm School.’”

  Another joke—another little smile.

  “I’ll have to talk to my folks about this.”

  “Fair enough.”

  That evening, after dinner, the Dabneys held a council of war. Stephen explained the offer, as far as he understood it. A combined BS/MS program, full tuition, access to Harvard courses in the humanities.

  “So what’s the problem?” his grandfather asked. He shook his head as if mystified.

  “The problem is, I don’t want it. I’m fifteen—nobody’s going to have anything to do with me. My friends are all here, taking American history in high school. At MIT I’d be a freak.”

  “Then say no.”

  “How do I do that?” Stephen laughed in pure exasperation. “How do I say no to something like this? How do I shut that door?”

  “We could say no for you.” His grandmother said, as if the idea had struck her with the force of revelation. “Your grandfather could phone this professor … whatever his name is…”

  “Aland.”

  “Aland, then. He can phone this Professor Aland and tell him we think you’re too young. You’re not yet mature enough. We’re afraid those college boys might lead you astray.”

  “Gram, you’re a genius.”

  * * *

  There was school, there was his family and there was the public library. He brought books home all the time, starting with Klem’s History of Mathematics. He read ancient history and nineteenth-century novels, books about philosophy and archaeology and, perhaps not surprisingly, criminology. His grandparents never tired of reminding him of the first question he asked when he understood that he would be staying with them: “Can I have a library card?”

  For the rest, he was happy. Circleville wasn’t a bad place to grow up. He lived under the name of Steve Dabney and he had friends whom he was allowed to invite home. He was even popular with the girls. What more was there to ask for?

  But all of this ended abruptly on a June evening when Stephen was sixteen.

  He was not present for the beginning of that particular tragedy. He could only piece together what must have happened. All he knew for certain was that his father came back into his life, with catastrophic results.

  How did Dad find him? He didn’t know—he might never know. Had he been looking for his son all this time, or had he just stumbled back into central Ohio and decided to see how things were going with his late wife’s family? Stephen was never in a position to ask.

  What he knew for certain was that, around seven-fifteen that night in June, his grandfather went to answer the doorbell and was stabbed to death the instant he opened the door. He might never even have recognized his murderer. Stephen could only hope he had not.

  What his grandmother must have suffered he was glad not to know.

  The school year had just ended and Stephen and a group of his friends were celebrating their release. They had somehow obtained a case of beer, which they drank in somebody’s backyard with more bravado than pleasure. One of the girls threatened to do a striptease, but, to everyone’s intense disappointment, by the time she was down to her underwear she lost her nerve. She spent most of what remained of the evening sitting next to Stephen, describing the frightful immoralities she planned to commit when finally she escaped to college.

  About nine-thirty, their host’s parents came home and told everyone to leave.

  It was a half-hour walk back to his grandparents’ house and Stephen wasn’t in a hurry. It was a lovely night and tomorrow he could sleep late and Gram would make him French toast for breakfast.

  As they always were when he came back at night, the lights were on over the front door. The unusual thing was the light streaming out through the living room window. Gram was a great believer that respectable people kept their blinds drawn, but they were open tonight.

  Stephen’s hand was in his pocket, fishing for the door key, before he looked down and noticed a dark patch on the welcome mat. Whatever it was, there was more of it spattered on the side of one of the planters and even on the leaves of the ferns.

  He knelt down to see what it was, rubbing his fingers against the spot on the welcome mat. They came up red.

  It was blood, not completely dried.

  He experienced a moment of panic during which he wanted to break down the front door, but then he remembered the light from the living room window. All he had to do was to step back and walk across ten feet of lawn to look straight in.

  It was like a stage set. Every lamp in the room was turned on. And, sitting on the sofa, blood staining the front of her dress, was Stephen’s grandmother. She was leaning a little to one side, and she was obviously dead.

  On the floor at her feet, lying on his back, was Gramps. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything.

  It was like an invitation, Stephen thought to himself. Somebody was inviting him to come rushing into that house.

  He didn’t have to wonder who that someone might be.

  So, instead of going through the front door, or any door, he went across the street to a neighbor and used his phone to call the police, telling them to send an ambulance.

  A patrol car was there within three minutes. An officer opened the car door and came out onto the sidewalk. Stephen pointed to the illuminated front window and told him what he would see through it. A minute later the ambulance arrived.

  “I think somebody better go in there,” the officer said. “You got a key, kid?”

  Stephen handed him the key.

  “If the man who did this is still inside,” he said, his voice shaking, “he’ll be waiting.”
/>
  “Stay out of it, kid. Go sit in the car.”

  The medics were taking things out of the back of the ambulance when the police officer turned the key in the front door lock. He pushed open the door and instantly there was an explosion. A flash of light and a sudden roar, followed by black smoke. Even inside the patrol car, Stephen could feel the concussion.

  The police officer must have been killed instantly.

  14

  Stephen Tregear, sitting in his rented apartment in San Francisco, held out a second glass of wine he had poured for Inspector Ellen Ridley. He was quite calm, and that night of horror was many years in the past.

  “It was a booby trap, of course,” he said. “There wasn’t much of a fire. The explosion blew most of it out, and the front room wasn’t touched at all. They got my grandparents out, but of course they had both been dead for some hours.

  “At first the police thought that I’d probably done it, but I had an alibi going back to the early afternoon. Even then, I don’t think they took very seriously the story I told them about my father.

  “I’ve often wondered if the police might have believed me back in Arkansas, when I could have taken them to my father’s garage and shown them that woman’s body. In a sense, perhaps my grandparents’ blood—and all the blood since—is on my head because all I could think to do was run away and save my own life.”

  “You were twelve years old,” Ellen told him. It seemed excuse enough.

  “There is that.”

  Tregear made a little dismissive gesture with his right hand. He wasn’t looking for any excuses.

  Ellen would have liked to touch him, perhaps just to have patted him on the knee and given him the comfort of a little ordinary sympathy, but it seemed impossible. She was a cop, after all, listening to evidence about a series of murders, but that wasn’t the real reason she couldn’t bring herself to do it. At that moment he seemed so remote, as if in his own eyes he stood already condemned, beyond the reach of any human gesture.

  And then he smiled and shook his head.

  “Anyway, I knew I had to disappear again or I would die too. My father is a tenacious man. So as soon as my grandparents were buried I got on a bus to Columbus. From there I went to Chicago, where I burned my social security card and driver’s license and enlisted in the Navy as Stephen Tregear. I was underage but tall. So when I told them I was eighteen they didn’t question it.”