“Shall we move on?” she murmured.
“Sure,” I said. “Give me a moment.”
I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trousers, threw it down on the ground, and stamped it into shards.
“It would be easier to kill him,” Juliet said at my shoulder.
“Why bother if there’s no need?” I countered. “He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s satanists are a lot more forgiving than the homegrown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.”
I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before. But either Juliet bought my reasoning or she couldn’t be bothered to have an argument about it. She appeared at my elbow a moment later and walked on past me at a fast clip.
“You’re too sentimental,” she snapped back over her shoulder.
“I know. I’m all about puppy dogs and scented letters.”
We got back into our spavined car, and I turned it around with difficulty. It was hard to control with two tires out, and the grinding noise I was hearing was probably the front axle doing something it shouldn’t. But it stayed on the road, just about, and what the hell, it was all covered on the insurance.
We bumped and ground our way to the tiny hamlet of Caldwell, and out of it again on a road that made the previous dirt track look like a superhighway.
“Someone told those guys we were coming,” I said to Juliet.
“I know.”
“The same someone who put a tickler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here, back in England.”
She nodded without answering. She was looking out the window at the rolling fields, her expression distant and cold.
The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun-bleached sacking protruded like a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time. But catching a glimpse of the farmhouse through a gap in the foliage, I wrestled the uncooperative car off the road and parked it a few yards away from an iron cattle gate whose white paint was two thirds flaked away.
“This must be the place,” I said. “At least there’s sod all else out here. Want to go take a look?”
Juliet glanced at me, her expression suggesting that wasn’t a question in need of an answer. We got out and approached the gate. The heavy chain and rusting padlock made it clear that the gate wasn’t in daily use. Juliet climbed over without preamble, and I followed more slowly, leaning out past the overgrown hedge to get a better look at the house.
It was in as bad a state of repair as the gate, the wood of the boards warped and dry, the shingled roof settled into a lazy concave bowl. An old mattress lay flopped over the porch rail like a heaving drunk, next to a wooden swing that looked as though it had seen better centuries. Hard to believe that anyone still lived here.
It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds. Somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet was already striding ahead, so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea, in theory, but Juliet seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly narrow for a grown woman. I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch, I was torn and disheveled and in a fairly uneven temper.
There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned 360 degrees, surveying the devastation. From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky, along with the farmhouse, into the merry, merry land of Oz.
I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left and turned.
It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots. Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and she had a frown deeply etched into her face.
“Who are you people?” she said. Her voice had the broadest southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.
“Miss Seaforth?” I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could. I held out my hand. “My name is Felix Castor, and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about your sister.”
I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down abruptly on the porch swing, making it shudder and creak.
“Oh Lord,” she said, staring at me as though I were a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. “Oh…” Words seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.
Juliet went and sat down next to her. “We didn’t mean to startle you,” she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her eyes off me. “We’ve come from London,” Juliet said. “A man was murdered there, in the way your sister, Myriam, used to murder people. That’s why we’ve come.”
Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s gentle assistance, got to her feet again. She blinked three or four times. Probably not blinking away tears, but that was what it looked like.
“I haven’t seen my sister since she died,” she said. In other circumstances, it might have seemed an odd thing to announce, but as it was, I was grateful to have that clarified.
“We have,” Juliet said. “We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.” She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and it was just as well, because at that point Ruth buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders to support her until the moment passed.
“You saw her?”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “We did. She—looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her all the same.”
Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence, she said, “Would you like some cookies and lemonade?”
The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged, an odd combination that, along with the fact that there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy. The floorboards were warped and shrunken, as they were out on the porch, but a peach-colored rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the room, where it didn’t stretch. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family—presumably the Seaforths—posed awkwardly for a cameraman they clearly didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.
&nb
sp; “Please sit down,” Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.
Three teenage boys, then, forming the middle row. All much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.
Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The expression in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: “Help, I am stranded on a desert island, and I need to be rescued.” They were dressed in identical blue crinolines—Sunday best. They looked like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.
Juliet had sat down on the three piece’s sofa. I went and joined her on it. “Feeling any better?” I asked.
She gave me a sour look. “Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel, I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.”
“I’m left-handed,” I pointed out.
“I need to be able to escalate for repeat offenses.”
Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits, and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade, and then sat down in one of the chairs. “Help yourselves,” she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.
I picked up a biscuit, took a bite—it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla—and washed it down with a sip of lemonade that was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat.
Juliet ignored both food and drink. “It must have been devastating,” she said, “when they returned the verdict on Myriam. The death sentence.”
I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. “It was hardest for my father,” she said. “He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently, as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him. He said”—she hesitated and shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them—“he said that it would have been better if she’d never been born.”
“That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,” Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d ever had one herself. After all, if she was somebody’s sister, then presumably, she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet was a scary thing to contemplate.
“Yes,” Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. “It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was a very cold man.”
I stepped in on cue. “Some men are cold to strangers, but to their family, they’re entirely different.”
Ruth smiled a pained smile. She bent down to pick up a biscuit, but her eyes remained locked on mine. “My father was very cordial with strangers,” she said. “It was to his wife and his children that he was—hard.”
“Does it hurt you to talk about this?” Juliet asked, as direct as ever.
Ruth shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said. “No. It used to hurt when he and my brothers were still alive. Now that I’m the only one left—now that I know all of this is going to die with me—it doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’d like to know, though, why you need to find out these things. And I’d like to know where you saw Myriam.”
I told her the story of Doug and Janine Hunter, or at least the parts that were fit to print. I went very light on the forensic details. Ruth Seaforth sighed a lot as she listened and after I was done.
“It sounds like her,” she said, seeming not the slightest bit surprised to hear about her sister’s return from the dead. “I mean—the violence sounds like her. You have to understand, Mr.— I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”
“Castor. Felix Castor.”
“Mr. Castor. I don’t believe that violence was something she was born with. I think it was my father’s gift to her.” After a pause, she added, “To us all.”
“You don’t strike me as a violent woman, Miss Seaforth,” I demurred.
“Don’t I?” She dabbed her mouth on a lace-edged napkin. “No, maybe not. But that’s mainly because I’m old, isn’t it? Old people always seem harmless. I guess because they move slowly and look a little vague sometimes. It doesn’t mean there’s any less fire inside. It just means you don’t get to do so much about it.”
There was a bitterness in her voice that surprised me. I tried to get the conversation back on track. “So would it be fair to say that you and Myriam had an unhappy childhood?” I asked. “I mean, did you feel that—”
Juliet cut right through my measured and mealymouthed phrases. “Did your father abuse you?”
Ruth folded the napkin three times with excessive care before putting it back down on the plate. “Yes,” she said. “He did.”
“Sexually? Or did he just beat you?”
“The one shaded into the other. I was happy when he died, because he was the fountainhead of violence in this house. It all flowed from him. To our brothers, Zack, Paul, and Tyler. To Myriam. And to me.”
“How did he die?” I asked.
Ruth seemed to consult her memory—or at least she paused, looking into the depths of her lemonade, before she answered. “Well,” she said almost dreamily, “he slipped and fell off the roof of the barn when he was fixing it for winter. I wrote to Myriam to tell her, and she wrote back that she’d already heard. She said she was happy he hadn’t died in his bed, but sorry it wasn’t slower.”
“And your brothers?” Juliet asked.
Another pause. “Tyler died first,” Ruth said. “Some men from out of town came into the Pit Stop bar in Caldwell. A blond man in a white suit, they said, and two others. They picked a fight with him, and they took it outside. Beat him to death, more or less, though he lived a couple of days on a machine.
“Zack got himself drowned in some mud over by Caldwell Creek. There’s a wallow there that’s very deep, and he fell into it and didn’t come out. Perhaps he was drunk. It’s not that difficult to climb out if you’re sober.
“And Paul died from a heroin overdose. That was a big scandal, as you can imagine. Nobody even knew you could get heroin around here back in those days. The doctor said it had to be the first time Paul had ever tried it, because there were no needle marks anywhere on his body. So I guess he didn’t know how strong the dose was, and he took more than he could handle. I gather that’s easy to do.”
When she finished this litany of disasters, nobody spoke for a moment or two.
“How long ago did these things happen, exactly?” I asked, breaking the strained silence.
“A long time,” said Ruth. She met my gaze and stared me out.
“While Myriam was still alive?”
“Yes. That long ago.”
“So is it possible—” I left the question hanging. Ruth put her glass back down on the tray, hard. It hit the side of the jug, and the ringing sound hung in the air for a second. She tensed, seeming to be about to stand, but the impulse spent itself in a sort of tremor that passed through her. Still she didn’t avoid our eyes. She seemed to me to have made a decision at some point in her life not to duck or flinch from anything.
“God works in mysterious ways,” she said, her voice very low. “Or so we’re told. But he doesn’t have a monopoly on that, does he, Mr. Castor? It was an awful thing. Of course it was. But it spared me. All those deaths—spared me. I was twenty years old, and I was hoping to escape this house by getting married, but my father wouldn’t let me out, and he wouldn’t let any boys come by. He said he’d had one daughter go wild on him, and he wasn’t going to have another go the same way. So I stayed here with him. And with my brothers. All the day and all the night.” She looked at her hands, spr
eading the fingers slowly as if examining them for scars or imperfections. “Somebody had to come and save me. And somebody did.”
She paused, but she didn’t seem to have finished speaking, and neither I nor Juliet jumped into the gap. After a few moments Ruth took up again in a different tone, softer and more wistful. “She only came back to visit a couple of times, and it was always in secret, because she was afraid they’d hold her for Tucker’s murder. But she used to write me letters. About Chicago. About the things she was doing there. They were full of lies—but nice lies. Lies that would make me happy for her. And it did make me happy to think that she was free of this place.”
“Why do you stay here?” Juliet asked. There was no indication in her voice of what she was feeling, but I recognized the look on her face. All things considered, it was probably a lucky break for Lucas Seaforth and his three sons that they were dead already.
Ruth’s eyebrows rose and fell again. “It’s my home,” she said. “It’s the only place I know, really. And it’s the only place she’d ever be able to find me if she wanted to come and see me again. And I’m too old to start over anywhere. I could move if I wanted to. Insurance paid off a lot when my father died, and it all came to me when there was no one else left to lay claim to it. But I don’t really have any use for money. And I don’t really have any use for travel. I’m happy where I am.”
The last sentence was belied by the tears that sprang up in her eyes and overflowed down her cheeks. Water in a dry place. She blinked it away almost angrily, but it kept right on coming.
“You’ll have to go now,” she said, her voice perfectly clear despite the rain of tears.
“I’m sorry, Miss Seaforth,” I said, meaning it. “We didn’t want to upset you. But there’s one more thing we’d really like to do while we’re here. If you could just point us to where Myriam’s grave is, with your permission, we’ll visit it before we leave.”
Ruth stood up and folded her arms with brittle ferocity. “No,” she said.
“No?”
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