Blind Pursuit

41

Her ruminations on Oliver’s epilepsy reminded Erin of the Tegretol.

Briefly she worried that he had taken the bottle of pills when he’d cleaned out the room. But no, there it was, among the foodstuffs in the cardboard box.

She washed down one tablet with a handful of water from the sillcock. Though she had missed her morning dose, a single lapse would do her no harm. Her doctor had assured her that she could go as long as twenty-four hours before withdrawal effects would develop.

It occurred to her that she must be hungry, though she hadn’t noticed. She peeled and ate a banana, then a few slices of bread. For protein she scooped her fingers into the peanut butter jar and licked them clean.

Her stomach, aroused, demanded more. She went on eating from the jar as she returned to her questions about Oliver Ryan Connor.

Oliver had been eighteen in 1968; he must be forty-six now. Sixteen years older than Erin and Annie-a wide age difference between cousins, but then, there had been a similar gap between their mothers.

Lydia had been born in 1931, in the fourth year of Rose and Joseph Morgan’s marriage. Maureen, their only other child, had made a much belated appearance in 1944, when Rose Morgan was thirty-nine, relatively old to be giving birth in those days. Erin had always assumed that her mother had come as a surprise.

In consequence of the disparity in ages, Lydia had been forty-two when she adopted her nieces, while Maureen, in that same year, had been only twenty-nine.

Twenty-nine. The realization was startling. She paused with a new scoop of peanut butter halfway to her lips.

Maureen had been Erin’s age when she had died. Younger, in fact. Erin was thirty. Maureen had never made it that far.

Dim memories of her mother had established her ineradicably as an authority figure, connoting age and wisdom. It was somehow shocking to confront the fact that Maureen Reilly had spent fewer years on this earth than her daughters had.

She dwelled on that reality a moment longer, then pushed it away. No good letting herself get sidetracked. It was Oliver who mattered now.

In their first session he’d admitted that his mother was blue-eyed, red-haired, and Irish Catholic, a description that fit Lydia exactly. He’d made it plain that he despised the Catholic faith for its opposition to abortion; well, the Morgans had always been strict in their beliefs, almost as strict as her own father.

Her father.

Erin lifted her head, struck by a new thought.

You’ll bur n, Albert Reilly had promised, and the next night he’d set out to fulfill his prophesy.

Oliver, despite his denials, was almost certainly fixated on his mother. And his mother’s sister had died in a gasoline fire. A fire set by a man who once had loved her.

The logic of the subconscious was the logic of a dream. Identities melded; one sister blended with another; the death of an aunt could become the death of the loved and hated mother.

In the confusion of a subconscious association, had Oliver conflated Maureen with Lydia? Was that why he’d chosen burning as the method of death for the three symbolic Lydias he’d killed?

That had to be it. But why would he want Lydia dead, symbolically or literally? Why had he run away in the first place… and why had he killed Lincoln?

Lydia might have known the answers to some or all of those questions, but only rarely had she spoken of her past. The subject had been tacitly understood to be taboo in her household while Erin and Annie were growing up.

The two girls had been curious, though. Thumbing through old photo albums, they’d come upon more than pictures of the ranch. There had been photos of Oliver as well.

Erin closed her eyes and tried to summon up a memory of the face captured in those faded Kodachromes. A vague recollection swam into partial focus. It was a snapshot of Oliver, roughly seventeen, posed with his father at a lakeside dock.

Lincoln had been smiling, a tall, wiry man with a baseball cap tipped forward on his forehead, the bill throwing his eyes into shadow.

Oliver had worn neither a cap nor a smile. He, too, was tall, as tall as his father, but broad-shouldered and thick-limbed. His hair was blondish and long, pulled back by a tie-dyed headband; a stubble of beard salted his face.

Erin and Annie had studied that photo for a long time, staring into their foster brother’s blue eyes, trying to glimpse his soul. But there was no soul to see. His gaze was blank, his features smoothed into an expressionless mask-and what made it worse was the peculiar certainty that it was no mask, that nothing lay underneath to conceal.

In that assumption, however, they’d been wrong, or partly wrong. At times, no doubt, Oliver had been as dead inside as his outward appearance would suggest. But at other moments anger must have risen in him, the blind, furious, seething anger that had driven him finally to lash out and kill. To kill the man standing beside him with his arm thrown casually over his son’s shoulder, the man in the baseball cap, laughing at the day.

Anger at what-and for what? If Lydia had ever known or suspected the dark whirlpool swirling below her son’s placid surface, she hadn’t spoken of it.

Yet possibly she had known more than she let on. Too much, perhaps, for her peace of mind. Certainly she behaved like a woman carrying a heavy burden of anxiety.

More than anxiety. Fear.

Erin nodded. Yes. Fear, along with the unconditional love she had shown toward her two young nieces, had been the dominant motif of Lydia’s personality.

She was always edgy and restless and afraid. Addicted to sleeping pills and tranquilizers, forever obtaining new prescriptions from new doctors. The variety of her nervous habits was almost amusing-her tuneless humming, her obsessive need to check and double-check every lock, the fretful attentiveness that made her look in on the girls every night, sometimes waking them inadvertently.

At the time the twins had attributed her eccentricities to the double tragedy that had scarred her life. She had lost a husband and son in the worst imaginable way; had lost a sister also, in another act of insane violence.

All that was left to her were her two nieces, and so maybe it was unsurprising how she doted on them, fanatically overprotective, touchingly proud. I can’t believe how simply wonderful you girls are, she would often say. How perfect you turned out, how smart and beautiful and strong. You two mean more to me than you’ll ever know.

She loved them, and cared for them, and worriedly monitored their safety. But possibly her concern was prompted by more than a generalized fear of suffering a final, irrevocable loss.

She might have known that Oliver was still alive. Might have known that he killed Lincoln, and that he could return one day for her-and her young charges.

Erin hugged herself as a chill shivered through her.

Us, she thought. That’s what kept her awake at night. Not fear for her own safety. She was afraid for us. Afraid of what Oliver might do.

They had taken his place, after all. She and Annie had been raised, in effect, as Lydia’s children. And Oliver, his memory expunged, had never been mentioned or acknowledged around the house.

In the van, while she lay blindfolded, feigning unconsciousness, Oliver had stroked her hair, her face, and breathed one word: Filth.

He hated her. Must hate Annie also. Because they had replaced him in Lydia’s heart.

Yes, Erin thought slowly. He must have hated us for years.

If Lydia had known her son was alive, then she’d been right to be afraid. He could have come after them at any time.

And now, at last, he had.