“It’s circumstantial evidence,” said Trish. “If Donovan were on trial, a good lawyer could poke holes in the case. That’s what Scott thinks. The neighbor left his apartment in between all these goings-on to do his laundry down in the basement. Any number of people could have come and gone in the meantime. The bat was bound to have Donovan’s prints on it since he used it all the time. Someone else could have used it wearing gloves. And Al had some unsavory friends.”
Bee nodded. “There was a girlfriend, Kali.”
“Yeah. But she’d left a couple of weeks earlier, according to Rolly. He hadn’t seen her around anyway. Her clothes — her stuff — were all gone from the closet. She had moved back to the country, up near Perth. They contacted her. She said she was at home that night. She had an alibi and she had no car, either. And apparently Rolly was wrong; she’d been gone for almost a month.”
“So . . . ?”
Trish sighed. “So, yeah. It’s pretty damning evidence but not conclusive.”
Bee thought about what Scott had told Trish. A good lawyer could pick it apart — prove that the evidence was circumstantial, et cetera, if Donovan were on trial. But he wasn’t going to get a chance to be on trial. “They’re going to find him guilty so they can close the case,” said Bee.
“They’re still looking,” said Trish.
Bee knew that was marginally true. They wanted her journal, for one thing. But she was pretty certain that all Stills wanted it for was further proof of Donovan’s guilt. And the words in the journal . . . well, you could take them any way you wanted to. But the words “killed him” and “Dad” were right there. That would probably ice the cake.
“What are you thinking about, my lovely Beatrice?”
She came out of her thoughts. Was this a good thing to do? Would it only hurt Trish more? No, Trish wanted what Bee wanted. She wanted to know that her son had not done this thing. “I want to show you something,” she said. And from her ever-present bag she pulled the journal and opened it to where the ribbon was. Her finger moved down the page and pointed to a particular word. “Does the name Jilly mean anything to you?”
“Jilly?” said Trish. Her forehead creased. “This is weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s a name from a long time ago.” Trish cleaned her fingers on her napkin and took the Moleskine from Bee’s hand. “What is this?” she said.
Bee looked at her scribbled words. “He was trying to talk. There was a lot of other stuff. Mostly it was just garbled, but I started writing anyway and put down anything that sounded like actual words.”
Trish looked at her with a kind of marvel in her eyes. Then she scanned the other words on the page and flipped back to the first page of the hospital papers and her face clouded over. She looked at Bee again. “This doesn’t look good.”
“Yeah, he said ‘killed him,’ but he didn’t say who did it. Anyway, I won’t let Stills see this.”
“She knows about it?”
“The ‘Winters of Our Discontent’ told her about it.”
“That must have been around the time she was threatening you with arrest.”
Bee nodded, with no pride in her audacity. It had been a horrible scene — dragged out by orderlies like some crazy woman. Well, that’s what she was. She shook the experience away. “I guess I must have looked pretty guilty when Stills asked me about it, and so she’s really pressing now. Says she’s going to get an injunction or whatever.” Her eyes appealed to Trish. “What am I going to do?”
Trish stared at the book. Bee wondered if she was hearing Donovan saying these words — hearing his voice. She flipped back to where the entry began. There was a time registered there: 3:04 a.m., Saturday, April 16. Then she flipped farther back before Bee could stop her, but as soon as she saw that what came before was written in prose, she discreetly handed the journal back to Bee. Bee wondered if Inspector Callista Stills would feel the same compunction to resist reading what was clearly personal.
“Do you think the injunction is just a threat?” said Trish.
“I don’t know. She’s into power games.”
Trish nodded. “If she gets an injunction for real, then failing to comply would be reason to press charges. Do you want to go to jail over it?”
Bee shook her head. “It’s not just the words — his words, I mean. In the journal there’s a lot of stuff about Donovan. About us.” She glanced at Trish and then looked away quickly, blushing despite herself. “Not what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything, Bee. And it wouldn’t matter anyway.”
“But it does, that’s the problem.” She had closed the book on her finger. Now she opened it again and flipped back several pages. “Like, for instance, this,” she said, and handed the journal back to Trish.
I just wish Al would die. I mean surely his liver is wrecked. Maybe we could get him super drunk and then pour vodka down his throat. Oh God! What am I saying!!! I hate this. I hate that Al bloody McGeary makes me feel like this. And if I feel like this, what must Turn feel!?
She could see that Trish had finished reading the excerpt. She reached out and took it back. “I mean, I guess I could take a razor blade to that page and just take it out. But there’s more.”
Trish shook her head. “Stills isn’t stupid.”
“I know. But it’s so wrong. I mean it’s my journal. I can say anything in here. Anything! And it’s nobody else’s business.”
“You’re right,” said Trish. “I’m sure your mother would have something to say about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if in her practice she’s run into situations where a person who is in her care has kept a diary that would be revealing in a very prejudicial way were it called into question for any reason.”
Bee made a wry expression. “You mean if the person was, like, mentally ill, right?”
Trish patted her arm. “Not exactly.” Then she smiled wryly. “Well, maybe temporarily mentally ill. But no, I mean that we are entitled to our privacy. A lawyer could probably block the police from getting hold of it.”
Lawyers, thought Bee. Was it going to come to that? Not if she could help it. She flipped the book to the last page she’d written on.
“Jilly,” she said. “Who is she?”
Trish’s expression turned pensive. “Jilly Green was the woman Al left me for.”
“Oh.”
Trish frowned. “Which is odd, because, as far as I know, Donovan hadn’t seen her since he was nine.”
Scott came home. Bee made as if to go but he insisted she stay, and Bee phoned her folks to tell them where she was and soon the three of them were all in the cozy front room with a fire on and glasses of wine for Scott and Trish and tea for Bee. The fire wasn’t exactly blazing, but it threw up enough light to make the wine look radiant. Bee didn’t dare have a drink. She wasn’t sure that if she started drinking she’d ever stop. And she was glad she was sober when Trish got around to explaining about Jilly Green.
The more-or-less happy McGeary family, Al and Trish and six-year-old Donovan, had taken a cottage up the valley, near Perth. It was a modest place on a sylvan river. That was how Trish remembered it: sylvan. And Bee pictured a river of greeny-gold with the sun through the trees glinting on it. They met people there, fun people. A lot of back-to-the-landers who lived nearby in a place called Sugar Valley. Folks who lived in handmade houses and threw wonderful kitchen parties and potluck suppers.
“There was a school they built there that doubled as a social center. Sometimes there were dances. We came again the next summer. We looked forward to it all winter,” said Trish. She shook her head slowly, contemplatively, and Bee almost thought she could see the sun-splashed river water reflecting in her eyes. “I guess I didn’t notice just how much Al was looking forward to it.”
Trish was sitting cross-legged on the couch. She leaned into Scott. He knew the story. “The whole sordid thing,” he said.
They used to get milk from a local farmer: unpasteurized milk and eggs and homemade jam — all sorts of good stuff. Al would go off foraging, as he called it, and come back with baskets full of goodies. For a long time Trish pictured some round-cheeked farmer’s wife dressed in gingham, with strong arms from churning butter and an ample backside that would have spilled over the edges of her milking stool. She laughed at the image she was painting. And Bee sensed that she was exaggerating for the sake of the story, because it wasn’t hard to see what was coming.
The farmer’s wife turned out to be Jilly Green, who was twenty-three when she hooked up with Al. Ten years younger than Trish. “Jilly was married to an awful man,” said Trish. “They weren’t any old-timey farm family, but a couple of hippies who had more than they could handle taking over her parents’ farm. Jilly’s brother, Mervin, had joined them to help out, which probably didn’t help the marriage any, though it might have saved Jilly’s life.”
“What do you mean?”
“The husband was abusive.” Trish looked down. “I can’t remember his name right now. It’ll come to me.”
“Rory,” said Scott. “Rory Tulk.”
Trish looked at him with surprise. “How do you remember his name? You weren’t even around.”
“No, but I listen when you tell me stories,” he said. “I am a card-carrying member of that small organization called MWLWTWTTT.”
“Which is?”
“Men Who Listen When Their Wives Talk to Them.”
Trish laughed and batted him with her free hand and he turned his shoulder to her, protecting his drink. Bee watched with satisfaction: they were both smiling. So was she, she realized. It was possible.
“It’s funny,” said Trish, “as soon as I met them, Jilly and Rory Tulk, I thought this is a young woman in a bad relationship. I liked her. I thought about getting closer to her so that I could be there for her if she wanted to talk, wanted help. Lend her some of my ‘big-city smarts.’ For some reason, it never occurred to me that my husband was thinking the same kind of thoughts. Well, not exactly the same kind of thoughts.
“So, jump forward to the second week of August 2006. We pack up the car to go home, back to the city, and suddenly Al steps away from the trunk he’s just loaded, turns to me, and says he’s not coming.”
“You’re kidding.”
Trish shook her head. “Completely out of the blue. Apparently, Jilly was leaving Rory.”
Trish stared at the fire. Scott reached for the bottle of wine on the side table and Trish held out her glass. Bee waited, watching Trish, seeing the memory play out on her face. A trace of a grin found its way to her lips, her eyes, and Bee could only ascribe it to the passage of time and what she had made of herself and her life. That and finding the man who was presently filling her wineglass.
“I can’t imagine what Donovan must have thought of that ride home,” she said. She shook her head, took a sip of her wine. “Mommy had to pretend everything was fine and Daddy would be coming along later.”
“Bastard!” said Scott.
Trish patted his leg. “Oh, it’s all so long ago.”
“I don’t think I would even be able to drive,” said Bee.
“When there’s a child involved, you’d be amazed what you find the strength to do. That said, I don’t exactly remember the drive home. I can’t remember, you know, changing gears or anything. Probably drove the whole way in first.”
“And then?”
“What’s there to say? I guess I tried to get him back. Probably did a good number of those self-destroying things a woman does in such a situation, but he was gone. And, I don’t know, one day I woke up and realized that the world had not ended. Not only that, with the passing weeks I kind of liked that it was just Dono and me. I found a good job and I had a fabulous son and really . . . There were reasons to be thankful for having Al taken off my hands.”
“And then I came along,” said Scott.
“Exactly!” said Trish, and clinked glasses with him. Then she held up her glass in a toast to the fire. “Thank you belatedly, Jilly Green!”
Bee joined in the toast with the dregs of her citron oolong. It was lukewarm by now and bitter because she’d let it steep too long, but she liked being here and for some reason felt better than she had for days.
“So anyway, to get back to the story —” Trish stopped abruptly. “Do you want me to go on?”
“Absolutely,” said Bee.
“Okay, so I decided I was glad to be rid of Al. I mean I was well rid of him. There was no decision to have to make. There was just that grudging acceptance that has more to do with pride than anything else — I’d lost him to another girl. And when I realized I was cautiously happy in my new life, even before meeting this charming environmental lawyer here, I filed for divorce. Al was thrilled. He’d wanted a divorce right away, so I got no argument from him. And while we were deciding all that, we made the arrangements for him to see his son. We didn’t want to get embroiled in some horrible custody battle and, mercifully, we settled easily on Donovan going out there to the valley one weekend a month: Friday after school to Sunday afternoon, home in time for dinner. It worked for me. And, like I said, I had nothing against Jilly — well, other than the obvious. She seemed like an okay person. A little screwed up — as demonstrated by both her choices of partners — but then who isn’t? A little screwed up, I mean.” She paused as if she were remembering something else. “No, let me take that back.”
“She was really screwed up?” asked Bee.
“No,” said Trish. “Although Al sure didn’t help in that regard. No, what I mean is that she was more than okay. I think she had some kind of magic to her.”
Bee stared at Trish. Scott did, too. “I remember you telling me that once,” he said. “I thought you must be about the most tolerant and charitable person I’d ever met, as well as being bonkers.”
“It wasn’t charity. She was . . . something else.”
“Magic?” said Bee.
Trish seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh, I don’t know. I wanted to hate her, but she seemed, how can I say it, wiser than her years. As if she’d seen things the rest of us couldn’t see.” Trish took another swig of her wine.
“Well, she couldn’t have been all that wise to have married Al,” said Scott.
“She didn’t. They lived together. He wanted marriage. She was recovering from her first awful marriage, I guess, and waiting to see what would happen.”
“To cut to the chase,” said Scott, “Al took care of the rest.”
“What do you mean?” said Bee.
“Let me see if I’ve got the order right,” said Scott. “Al lost his job at the Citizen — maybe it was the commute into the city, but there were days he just didn’t make it; he started missing assignments. So he took up freelancing, made drinking his full-time occupation. And within a year, she chucked him out on his ass.”
Trish snorted. “It wasn’t quite like that. They made it through two years before she, as you say, chucked him out. And the only sad thing about that, as far as I was concerned, was that Donovan liked her a lot.”
“Really?” Bee was surprised. “He never mentioned her to me, I don’t think.”
“He loved going out to that farm. Loved being in the country. I guess I was hurt by that. Ha! I know I was.”
“But I appeared on my white charger,” said Scott. “Actually, my white Toyota Prius, and suddenly you didn’t have time to be hurt.”
“True enough. Anyway, because Al was involved, the whole thing went pear-shaped, so there I was, consoling little Donovan again.”
Bee leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. The movement took her closer to the fire and she felt its warmth on her skin. “So he hadn’t seen Jilly since . . .” She counted on her fingers. “Since 2008, like, eight years ago?”
“Not that I know of. And I can’t imagine he’d keep it from me.”
“So why would he hav
e been thinking of her now?”
“The mind’s a funny place,” said Scott. “He’d suffered a concussion. Who knows where his thoughts were taking him?”
The room grew quiet. There was just the crackling of the wood in the fire, the ticking of the house. Bee glanced at Trish and wondered if she was thinking the same thing that Bee was: Donovan had not mentioned Trish, his mother, in his dying words. But then, if Bee was right, his dying words were not good-byes; they were clues, which is exactly what Inspector Stills suspected.
“She wrote me,” said Trish, suddenly breaking into Bee’s thoughts.
“Who, Jilly?”
“Yeah. Later. It was a really sweet letter.”
“Like a letter letter?”
“Uh-huh, snail mail with a stamp and everything. Her spelling wasn’t all that good —”
“Which — admit it — made you feel smug,” said Scott.
“A little.”
“Way smug,” said Scott.
“What did she say?” said Bee. “Was she, like, apologizing for breaking up your marriage?”
“Yeah, sort of, I guess. But mostly she wanted to thank me for . . .” She paused, sucked in her lips.
“Take a deep breath,” said Scott quietly after a moment, and rubbed Trish’s back in big circles. She pushed against his palm, letting him dig out some of the misery that was in her. “Mostly she wanted to thank me for Dono. How much she’d enjoyed having him around.” She stopped, allowed the tears to come, didn’t fight them. Bee found it hard to hold in her own tears. Her throat hurt like she’d swallowed glass. Trish sniffed and rubbed her nose on her shirtsleeve. “Sorry,” she said. “She told me she hoped one day to have a child of her own, and if he was anything like Donovan, she’d be happy.”
The Ruinous Sweep Page 19
