Knock Out

17

LATER, HE THOUGHT, he’d visit that snake pit later. Ethan knew there was even more; he knew it. He had to keep her talking. Maybe all of it would come out at last.

“Are you ready to tell me where this happened? Where they live?”

“In a strange little town called Bricker’s Bowl. It’s near the Alabama border.”

“Bricker’s Bowl? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It really is more a bowl than a valley, curves up on both sides with houses marching right up the hills. I guess, from the air, what with the houses on the surrounding hills, it does indeed look like a bowl. Their family’s been there for generations, his mother told me.”

“Tell me about Ma.”

“She’s rich. She, Blessed, and Grace live in a huge Victorian mansion, filled with expensive antiques, mostly nineteenth-century English, and lots of manicured grounds. They have a six-car garage, although I never saw the cars inside, so I can’t tell you what they are They’ve got their own private cemetery.

“She’s very proud of their wealth. She loves to show you every antique in the place—and there are a lot of them, since there are maybe fifteen rooms. She told me this is all due to her husband’s talent.”

“Was the husband around?”

She shook her head. “He’s dead. When she first told me about him, I thought she was batty, but now I’m not so sure. She confided in me that Theodore had the most useful talent in the family. That’s what she called it—a useful talent.”

Ethan found himself sitting forward. “What could Theodore do?”

“She said he had this beautiful gift, discovered quite by accident when he was in Las Vegas once and played the slot machines. He won.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Evidently he won a great deal. Actually, she told me he never lost.”

“What? You’re telling me Theodore Backman was some sort of diviner?”

She had to grin, but it fell off her face fast enough. Ethan was staring at her, an eyebrow arched.

“As Shepherd explained it, where the reels stop is supposed to be random, but somehow Theodore could make the reels stop where he wished. She said he talked to the slots.”

“Oh, come on, Joanna. You mean he had this force field that reacted to the reels themselves? Or he had this internal magnet that brought the reels to a stop? What?”

“Look, I thought it was nuts too, even though Mrs. Backman told me he’d made them all rich.”

“It sounds like one of the crazy stories they’d tell us in the DEA as a cover for illegal income,” Ethan said. “It never flew in court. How’d he die?”

“Mrs. Backman told me he walked out of a casino in Reno and a mugger killed him. He hit the mugger with his cane, but the mug-get hit him on the head with a hammer and left him to die, which he did.”

“A cane? How old was Theodore when the mugger got him?”

“Mid-seventies.”

“How old is Blessed? Grace?”

“Blessed is in his fifties. Grace is a bit younger, late forties, maybe.”

“So you’re telling me Blessed and Grace and their mother—what’s her name?”

“Shepherd.”

“Like the guy on FOX News?”

“More like the guy who herds the sheep. She told me, all preening, thatt her husband gave her that name, the mother of his small flock. I wondered what her birth name was, but I was too freaked out to ask.”

“Okay, so these folk say they’re rich because of a man who could line up three cherries. Now the million-dollar question. How did you hook up with these people? If they’re your husband’s family, why did you only just meet them?”

When she remained silent, he said, “You might want to consider me the prince of bad, Joanna. I can handle just about anything.”

That made her laugh, then draw a deep breath. “All right. Martin, my husband, was the third and youngest brother. Autumn and I met them for the first time at his funeral.”

“But he couldn’t have been as old as Blessed or Grace, was he?”

“No, he was thirty-six when he died, much younger than both his brothers. Shepherd was in her forties when she birthed him.”

“Your husband died—a natural death?”

Her mouth seamed tight, but the words were pushing to get out. Why didn’t she want to tell him? Was she still grieving too much?

He pulled on a thread hanging down from the left sleeve of his sweatshirt. “An accident of some kind?”

She shook her head, looking hard at him pulling that thread, and the words came out in a burst, but lifeless and without fury or pain. “He died in prison,” she said, her eyes still on that gray thread.

He nearly fell off the sofa with surprise. He stared at her, unable not to. “Why was your husband in prison?”

She shook her head. All right, so she wasn’t ready to face that yet with him. He shifted gears. “So you found his family’s phone number—where?”

“The warden sent all Martin’s stuff to me. There was pitifully little, to be honest. There was this lone phone number in a small black notebook—no name, only an out-of-state phone number—and so I called it to see who it was he knew in Georgia. It was his family.

“I spoke to his mother and told her Martin was dead. She wept, Ethan. Then she begged me to have him buried with his family, not in cold Boston where he hadn’t known anyone except me and his daughter. Did we feel he had any deep foots there? ‘No, not really,’ I told her. Then please,’ she begged me, ‘please bring him home.’

“She begged me, Ethan, and she was crying again, so I said yes because she was right. I didn’t have family in Boston—no family anywhere, for that matter. And so after a memorial in Boston with all our friends, Autumn and I drove Martin’s urn from Boston to Georgia so his mother could bury it in the family cemetery.”

He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She sat there as if frozen, as if her words were stuck in her throat.

He said quietly, “Your husband never told you about his family, You never asked?”

“Yes, of course I was curious, but Martin refused to talk about them. They are not the sort of people you want to know, Jo. Neither do I. I ask you to accept that. I remember he once said unwittingly that he’d managed to escape them, that they didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know what he’d meant about escaping them, and he never told me. I suppose I thought it was a runaway-kid sort of thing.”

“He didn’t change his name? He kept Martin Backman?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why he didn’t change his name. With the Internet, you could probably find a missing pet. Didn’t he care if they found him? Bigger question—why didn’t they find him? They found you and Autumn, didn’t they? Real fast.”

She nodded. “They did find us fast, but I don’t understand how they did it.”

“You must have talked to them some about your own family. Did you mention Titusville?”

“I’m sure I didn’t, not directly. When I first met him, married him, I simply let it all go as not being important to me, important to us. I loved him, found him fascinating and funny. But now—it’s obvious I didn’t know him, didn’t know a big part of him at all. Who was the man I married? Believe me, I would really like to know.”

She lowered her face into her hands.

“I’m sorry, Joanna.”

She jerked up and Ethan saw sudden anger and pain radiating off her, like waves of heat laced with poison.