Distant Blood

16

We'd each been banished to our rooms as Lieutenant Mendez and Judge Yarbrough continued their investigation and interviews. I could only imagine what game plan their minds had concocted after hearing such poisonous talk. Accusations, counteraccusations, slander, grief, hatred-we all needed to be flown to the nearest tabloid talk show and unleashed on the audience. They wouldn't know what the hell hit them. Or perhaps we could become sponsors for a lozenge company as we screamed our throats raw at each other.

At least Mendez had seen fit to begin his interrogations with Philip, everyone's most likely suspect. I stood against the window, watching the sun begin its decline toward the sea. Clouds surged above the ocean, as dark and foreboding as the fear in my heart. It was as if the weather reflected our moods. The light no longer dappled the waves; the air smelled sour with the rank odors of the sea. The sky, so unsullied earlier, had shrouded itself with heavy black thun-derheads. Rumbles, growing closer, made the wood beneath my feet shiver. If you don't like the weather in Texas- especially on the coast-wait five minutes, because it's sure to change. The Gulf is a cauldron for sudden, harsh storms. I watched as a flurry of boats hurried toward Port Lavaca and Port O'Connor.

The smudge that marked land's end, across Matagorda Bay, beckoned. I wanted to leave and I could not. Yarbrough had declared a quarantine on travel and none of us were daring to break it. Her words had made it clear that while no one was getting their Miranda rights read, no one was above suspicion. And what would flight suggest aside from guilt? Anyone who knew truth in this sordid matter would do well to come forward and not hide it. I wondered if a family as sundered as this one seemed could still cloak each other. The Goertz family huddled together against truth like it was a cold, driving rain.

I felt a sharp tang of fear for Bob Don. He wasn't going to trust me with his secrets; he wasn't going to let me help him.

A knock sounded at my door, softly. “Come in,” I called.

Gretchen entered, shutting the door firmly behind her. “I wanted to see if you're okay,” she said.

“You surprised me. Lying like you did to protect me.”

She didn't answer at first. She sat on the corner of my bed, curling her legs beneath her like a cat. “You and I have to stick together, Jordan. We're the outsiders here.”

“Outsiders?”

She smiled a half smile of shaky resolve. “We're Goertzes, all right, but we're not quite up to snuff. Didn't you hear how hard Lolly was on everyone at dinner? And those are the real family. How do you think you and I ranked in her eyes-the family drunk and the unexpected illegitimate child?” She ran a hand through her permed, graying hair. “We're distant blood-not quite part of the family, but still there.”

“When Lolly was ragging on Aubrey about his book- about the various characters he could discuss-she said the family slut, and she looked right at you.” I sat down next to her on the soft quilt. “Why is that?”

“Jordan, I-” she started, then stopped. “I've caused a lot of grief to this family. I'm sure most of them wished I'd never come along.”

“I'm sure that's not true,” I offered. “Deborah and Sass obviously care about you.”

“Do they? I marry a Goertz and leave him for his brother. I drove a wedge between two men who should have been the closest of friends but who became the most bitter of enemies. I destroyed Paul's life, and Lolly could never forgive me for it. She was always hateful toward me. She told me once it was fitting I was a drunk. I deserved it.”

“You can't feel guilty about leaving Paul. You had to do what was right for you.” I touched her shoulder, and she didn't flinch away. “No one can begrudge you your happiness.”

“Happiness? I've given little joy to myself or to anyone else.” She massaged her forehead, a tired expression furrowing her brow. “Do you know what guilt is, Jordy? Real guilt, the kind that never lets you sleep or eat or think for a long stretch of time. It hovers near your shoulder, like a little devil whispering in your ear.”

I attempted comfort. “You said you didn't give happiness to people. But you made me happy today. When you stuck up for me.”

Gretchen Goeitz looked hard into my eyes. All the old discord between us seemed to have happened a century ago as we sat together on the bed listening to the wind crescendo around us and the first patters of hard rain slammed against the windows.

She took my hand, for the very first time, and her palm felt cold against mine. A thin sheen of damp covered her fingers and they trembled in my grasp.

“You must know. You must know how much he loves you.” Her voice sounded small, like a child's whisper.

“He doesn't want me here. He won't trust me-”

“He's so afraid of losing you. He knows now, what with Lolly's threats against you, her death-he should never have brought you here. He doesn't want you to pay for our sins.”

“Sins?” I leaned in closer to her, our noses and mouths nearly touching. Our voices were mere murmurs.

“Do you love your father, Jordan? Do you?”

I took a long, shuddery breath. “I'm still not used to thinking of him as my father-”

She stilled my talk with her cold fingertips. “Enough analysis. Enough posturing. Enough denial. Push has come to shove. His life may depend on this. Tell me. Do you love him?”

His life may depend on this. Her fingers felt icy against my lips, her palm smooth against my jaw. I pressed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth. “Yes,” I managed to croak. “Yes, I love him.”

Gretchen closed her hand around my face and for one moment I thought she would kiss me. Her eyes were half-closed and she breathed slowly, her mouth open, her breath smelling of mint gum.

“I want to help him, but he won't let me. Why?” I whispered.

She pressed her lips together and regarded me again with surprising frankness.

“I was afraid-because I'd been such a bitch-you could never love him. Could never accept him. I used to want that, I wanted you never to want him as your daddy. But no more.” She clasped both my hands in hers. “You've got to help me, Jordan. Help me protect him. I don't think I can do it alone.”

“Tell me.”

“You have to promise me. You'll help protect Bob Don. Please.”

I wavered for a moment. “Just what did he do?”

“Promise me!” she insisted.

“I promise. I'll do everything I can to protect him.” I kept my words barely louder than a soft breath. “He and I aren't distant blood, right?”

She shuddered. “Blood again. This has been a place of needless death ever since those sailors were butchered on the beach. I want to leave here and never come back.”

“Tell me.” I squeezed her hands.

Long silences-the ones that last years and graft themselves into your very bones-are the hardest to break. She tensed, like steel had hardened in her arms and legs, and she didn't look at me for minutes. I held her and waited. The outside squall roared and the rain went from drops to solid sheets, enveloping the house in rattles and hums.

“Paul. He killed Paul.” She forced the words out like a dying cough.

“But Paul committed suicide,” I whispered. “That's what Deborah said…”

“Ruled suicide. The body was never recovered.” Now that she'd made the dreaded admission, the words came a little easier. Tears dribbled from the corner of her eyes and she smeared them across her face with the back of her hand.

“Deborah said Paul left a suicide note-left it on the front door. Said he walked into the ocean because he couldn't live with the guilt of shooting Nora. But Deborah's sure her father didn't kill her mother.”

“I am,” Gretchen said. “Oh, I am. Because after Paul killed Nora, he came here to kill me.”

Down the hall, a door slammed, and I heard a sharply angry Deborah bickering with Aubrey that he had to go talk to Mendez next. Aubrey sounded reluctant and morose. Deborah urged him along, and shortly their voices faded down the stairs. Lightning flashed its hard light in my window, and I oddly imagined God taking a snapshot of Gretchen and me clutching each other's hands.

Her tongue flicked over her lips. “There's a taint in every family, something in the blood that can warp any poor soul that gets too much of the bad ingredient. In mine it's loving booze. My brother was a drunk, too. And our grandmother before us, although no one ever wanted to admit it.”

“Yeah. In my family it's being sharp-tongued and nosy,” I whispered back.

She laughed then, briefly, and I felt the first true connection between us take shaky life. I watched her wipe away another tear.

“So what's the taint of the Goertz blood?”

“Silence. And a horrible, horrible pride. The kind of pride that forces an entire family to its knees in its service. A pride that leads to insanity because it shackles you so. Paul suffered from it, and Lolly did, too. That's why they're dead.”

“Tell me what happened.”

She spoke now without hesitation, relieved to have her needed ally. “Paul was an artist, a gifted sculptor. When I left him he quit working. He became terribly depressed.

Mutt and Lolly insisted-Lolly and Paul were always close, they were cut from the same cheap bolt of cloth-that he go into treatment. He met Nora when he started work again; she was his favorite model. They married soon after.” She paused. “Deborah's so like her mother-trusting, kind-hearted, smart, but maybe too book smart. And Nora was sweet. It would have been easy for her to hate me, considering what I'd done to Paul. But she never did. At least she didn't ever show me anything but kindness. I loved her, too, and she didn't deserve such a terrible death.” A sob broke her words and I stayed quiet while she composed herself.

“We all thought Paul was finally happy. Deborah and Brian were born in fairly quick order and he seemed to settle down. He and Bob Don didn't speak-the resentment, the hatred between them went too deep. They'd loved each other once, but no more. My fault.”

“No, not your fault. Their choice,” I said.

She ignored my attempt at consolation. “It wasn't over. Paul started sending me these.” She pulled from her pocket a creased and yellowed envelope, worn with handling. She offered it to me and I carefully removed a card.

It was an old-style greeting, discolored with years. The paper felt coarse but fragile beneath my fingers and smelled of a dusty closet. The cover of the card showed a huge round yellow smiling face, the eternal grin of the 1970s. No text was written on the front, but when I opened the card, I saw the preprinted greeting: YOU MAKE ME SMILE. Scored in faded words beneath the kindliness was an ugly intimation:

ESPECIALLY WHEN I THINK OF YOU DYING.

I handed her back the card, feeling sick. She slipped it back into the envelope quickly and wiggled her fingers, as if dusting some foulness off her hands.

“My God. Just like the cards I received.”

She swallowed. “It was Paul's sick joke. He sent me others, but I had them destroyed. I never told Bob Don. I knew he'd go after Paul. I just wanted to forget Paul existed. I never thought-” She covered her face with her hands. “I'm so ashamed, I was so foolish.”

“You couldn't know, it's not your fault.” I squeezed her hands. How odd life is. A year ago this woman was my mortal enemy, and now we sat trying to muddle together through a dark and torturous past, united by the love we felt for the same man. Family makes strange bedfellows.

“I know. Hindsight is hell. But whatever was wrong with Paul, Nora couldn't fix. He killed her, shot her in the face.”

“Deborah claims her father, since he was an artist who had sculpted Nora so often, wouldn't kill her the way he did.”

Gretchen shook her head. “Deborah clings to hope. No one wants to believe her daddy could kill her mom. I knew her father better than she did. Blasting away Nora's face makes perfect sense for Paul. Did Deborah tell you he marred or destroyed all the sculptures in his studio after he killed Nora?” The expression on my face answered for me. “Of course she didn't, Jordan. That fact won't support her theory of her father as the wronged victim.”

Another round of thunder rumbled above the roof, but fell faint quickly, and the rain began to ease against the windows. The band of the storm seemed to be passing us.

“Paul vanished after Nora died. The police searched for him. The family gathered here; Deborah and Brian were of course terribly traumatized. Mutt was worried sick about them. I felt terrible guilt, as if I'd robbed those children of their mother. I can't say why. It makes no sense. But guilt and grief don't always have rhyme and reason, do they?”

“No, they don't.” I'd lashed out at Bob Don out of guilt and grief-guilt that I could think so little of my mother, grief that my life wasn't the perfect picture I'd imagined it to be. No sense required.

“He came in the night.” Gretchen's expression went slack as she brought forth the memory, and her hands felt boneless in mine. “I was asleep, thanks to a generous serving of whiskey. I wasn't drinking so hard then”-her voice quavered-”but it was the start of the beginning. Bob Don couldn't sleep, sickened over what had happened. And how the family was reacting. Lolly was nasty to the children, hardly kind at all. Everyone seemed so ashamed of what Paul had done. As though it reflected on the rest of us. How terrible for us to have a murderer on the family tree. No one-except her children, of course, and Bob Don and I- seemed broken over what had happened to poor Nora. She was the victim, not us. As a family, the Goertzes couldn't understand that.”

“You said he came in the night,” I prompted.

“Bob Don couldn't sleep. He had thought if he'd reached out to his brother, mended fences, tried to reconnect with him-well, Nora's terrible murder could have been averted. Isn't that just like Bob Don?”

“Yes.” My throat felt constricted.

“Your father-he went out to walk. Restless, he was. I don't know for certain, but I believe he went to Nora's grave. We'd buried her here. She had no family of her own. Her children were all the blood relations she had in the world. Paul was there-at the cemetery. They fought and Bob Don killed him.”

Coldness fingered my spine. I repressed a shudder. No. I couldn't imagine Bob Don a killer, much less a slayer on the scale of Cain. “No. No.”

“Yes, Jordan. I woke up, feeling sick and needing to throw up. I heard them talking downstairs, heard Bob Don crying over what he'd done. He was hysterical. Paul had a gun, told Bob Don he was going to kill him, then me, for ruining his life. They fought for it, Bob Don shot him through the heart.” She looked away from me. “I wanted to go to him, but I was so frightened. I didn't want to believe it was true. So I went back to bed.”

“You said 'them talking.' What themV

She swallowed again. “Mutt. Jake. Sass. Lolly. They all knew what Bob Don'd done. They all knew Paul was dead, by his own brother's hand.”

“My God. It was self-defense, right? Why didn't they just call the police?”

She shook her head again. “Not this family. Not the Goertzes. Mutt said the shame of Paul being a murderer was bad enough without one brother striking down another self-defense aside. Best, he said, for Paul to have taken his own life. Cleaner that way. The others-had to convince Lolly. She loved Paul so. But even she finally agreed that protecting Bob Don was more important.” Gretchen shivered. “Oh, I've wanted to tell this for so long. And I couldn't. Not even Bob Don knows that I know. I never told him. And he never told me. I guess he was afraid I'd turn away.” She cried then, long, racking sobs, and I held her close, feeling her pain begin a slow drain in the cleansing of confession.

After a few minutes had passed, she eased her breathing and I pulled away from her, to look her square in the face. “So what did they do with Paul's body?”

“I don't know. Buried it somewhere on the island, I guess. Or dumped it out in the Gulf.” Her tears formed curving roads on her cheeks. Her eyes were so red they appeared on the verge of bleeding.

“And no one else knew?” I asked.

“No. The twins were here, and Aubrey, and Deborah and Brian. But they didn't know.”

Did they? It occurred to me if Gretchen could overhear the older Goertzes covering up Paul's death, so could the younger ones.

“Please don't hate your father,” Gretchen implored. “He's not really a killer. He was just trying to save himself-”

“Of course I don't hate him. But I don't understand why the Goertzes did what they did.”

“Their pride. It's their fatal taint. That's why Lolly was so bitter about Aubrey's book at dinner. And why she was so terrible to Deborah and Brian. And why she was so hard on everyone-that damnable pride no one could live up to. At least I never could. Eventually I gave up trying.”

“So why”-I gestured at the hateful envelope Gretchen had produced-”did she send me cards like those? And how could she know that Paul had sent you such threats?”

“I'd shown them to her. After Nora died. She took them from me and said she'd destroy them. And afterward I wanted them gone, I didn't want the police to find any reason for Bob Don to have killed Paul.”

“But you kept one.”

“I kept one.” Her voice was hollow and distant. “Anytime I doubted Bob Don, doubted my love for him-and when you drink you often think you don't need anyone-I have that card to remind me of the price he paid to protect me. I bring it with me, whenever we come to Sangre. So I never, never forget.”

She didn't look at me again, and I sensed that her story wasn't complete-that a final coda to all this misery was missing. I turned her chin back toward me. “Gretchen. What else?”

“Nothing. Isn't that enough?” After a moment's hesitation she regarded me. “Now you see why we've got to protect him. Because we hid the truth, if the investigation into Lolly's death reveals what Bob Don did-there's no statute of limitations on murder.”

“But it was self-defense.”

“Maybe the courts won't see it that way. Regardless, they all hid the truth. They covered up Paul's death and forged a suicide note. Isn't that a crime?”

I cupped my head in my hands. A slow throb coursed from my temples through my head. “God. And you think Lolly's death has to do with this cover-up.”

“I don't know. Yes, probably. Maybe she was going to tell on the family, after all these years, and someone decided to stop her.”

“Why would she tell? She'd be implicating herself as well.” I leaned my forehead against hers. Maybe she truly was going crazy, losing her reason. And crazy people talk. “What else is there to know, Gretchen?”

“I've told you the whole story. You've got to help me protect Bob Don.” She tightened her grip on my arm.

“If Lolly was going to blow the whistle on the rest of the family, why would she attempt to scare me off-using the same method Paul used to terrorize you?”

“I don't know. Maybe she thought it was shameful for Bob Don, who'd already created enough trouble for the family, to have a… bastard. I'm sorry she treated you badly.”

“It seems odd,” I mused. “Why strike at me that particular way?”

“Never mind her, she's dead, she can't hurt us now. But you got to help me come up with a way to protect Bob Don.”

“Gretchen,” I said gently. “I don't know what we can do to protect him. If any of this family conspiracy is connected to Lolly's death, the whole house of cards might tumble down. I'll stand by him all the way, but I'm not sure what you want me to do.”

She blinked. “You're smart. You solve crimes. Surely you can concoct some way to keep Bob Don from getting in trouble.”

I stood, listening to the fading hiss of the ebbing rain. Darkness was falling now and the setting sun was barely a molten hump above the horizon. Clouds formed a shroud across the sky, obscuring the comfort of the stars.

“I'll think of something.” But inspiration seemed as fleeting as the afternoon light.

“Well, what?” she demanded.

“I don't know yet. Give me some time. I can't manufacture a plot out of thin air.”

She swallowed and silently accepted my answer. “I'm glad I told you this, Jordy. I-I knew you loved him. I knew I could depend on you.” She stood. “I got to get back to my room. Bob Don'll wonder what mischief I'm up to.” She surprised me with a quick kiss on my cheek. And then she turned and left, leaving me alone. The open door of my room loomed like a portal to a world of murder and secrets, all the open domain of this terrible house. A feeling of death and guilt thrummed through the air, almost palpable.

And I was supposed to rescue my father from the sins of his past. I sank down on the bed, feeling crushed by the sudden weight of responsibility. Find a murderer and save my father.

I lay on my bed, thinking, staring at the ceiling, trying to slowly piece together a plan.

Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house. -Proverbs 17:13