Low Pressure

Chapter 7

I was the first,” Dent said, repeating it with emphasis.

He held Bellamy’s stare for several moments, then, muttering an expletive, got up and moved restlessly around the kitchen. He bumped his fist against the crate of small appliances she hadn’t yet unpacked and eventually went to stand at the sink. He slid his hands, palms out, into the seat pockets of his jeans and stared through the window into her backyard.

“There’s a broken flowerpot on the steps,” he said. “I found it last night.”

“That must’ve been awful for you.”

“Naw, it was just a flowerpot. I got over it.”

“I was talking about being considered a suspect.”

He turned his head and spoke to her from over his shoulder. “I got over it.”

“Did you?”

Hearing the doubt behind the question, he turned back to the window, pulled his hands from his pockets, and placed them on the edge of the sink, leaning into it. “Have you ever been questioned by the police?”

“Other than being stopped for speeding, no.”

“It makes you feel guilty, even though you’re not. It’s the loneliest, most isolating feeling in the world.”

“Your father—”

“Couldn’t be bothered to go with me to the police station.”

“You had Gall Hathaway in your corner.”

“The police questioned us separately. He wasn’t in on those initial interrogations.”

“If I recall correctly, he retained a lawyer for you.”

“Not right away. We didn’t think a lawyer would be necessary. During those first couple of shakedowns I was all alone.”

“They came down hard on you.”

“You could say, yeah. He thought for sure I’d killed your sister.”

“The detective, you mean?”

“Moody. You called him Monroe in your book, but his name was Dale Moody. Soon as he got my name from your folks—who also thought I was the culprit—he came to my house, woke up me and my old man, asked if he could talk to me about Susan. But he didn’t exactly put it in the form of a polite request. Till then I didn’t even know that she’d been murdered. I learned that from him when he started trying to strong-arm a confession out of me.”

“What was that like, being pressured to make a confession?”

He left the window and went to the fridge, took out the pitcher of tea and brought it back to the table. She shook her head no when he held the pitcher above her glass, so he poured himself a refill, then resumed his seat across from her. However, instead of taking a drink, he placed the fingers of both hands against the glass and rubbed them up and down.

“Dent?”

“What?”

“I asked you a question.”

“I heard you.”

“Well, how did you feel?”

“How do you think? I felt like shit. Enough said.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m inviting you to vent your anger, and I think you want to.”

“After all this time? It’s a little late.”

“Yesterday you said it hadn’t been long enough.”

He removed his hands from around the glass and rubbed his wet fingertips on the legs of his jeans. He frowned irritably at Bellamy, but she kept her expression calm and inquisitive.

He mouthed another curse, then said, “The girl I’d been making out with two days earlier was on a slab in the county morgue. Something like that sorta messes with your mind, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, I would.”

“I was trying to wrap my brain around Susan being killed by the tornado, when this Law & Order wannabe shows up and starts asking me what we’d argued about, when I’d last seen her, where was I when she was being choked to death.” Noticing Bellamy’s grimace, he pointed at her face. “Yeah. Like that. That’s how I felt.”

“I tried to capture those conflicting emotions in my book.”

“You described the scene real well, even down to leaving my old man out of it.”

“I omitted him because I didn’t have a sense of him.”

Dent barked a laugh. “Join the club. I lived with him, and I didn’t have a sense of him, either. For all practical purposes, the man was a fucking ghost.”

That struck her as odd phraseology. “Explain what you mean by that.”

“Why? Are you plotting another book?”

She slapped the tabletop as she came quickly to her feet. “Okay, don’t explain it. You’re the one who proposed we take this trudge down memory lane, not me. You can see yourself out.”

As she went past him, his arm shot out and encircled her waist, bringing her up short and close to him.

The contact startled her, making her breath catch. They held that pose for several moments, neither of them moving, then he relaxed his arm, dragging it away from her slowly, trailing his fingers over her rib cage. Softly he said, “Sit down.”

She swallowed and resumed breathing. “Are you going to act like a jerk?”

“Probably. But you wanted to hear this.” He nodded her toward the chair.

She returned to it, placed her hands primly in her lap, and looked at him expectantly. But after several seconds, he shrugged. “Well? Ask away.”

“I have to pull it out of you? You’re not going to volunteer anything?”

“What do you want to know?”

“What happened to your mother?”

The question caught him off guard, and she was glad it was he who seemed unbalanced for a moment. He looked away, shifted his position in the chair, rolled his shoulders in a defensive gesture. “I was told she died when I was a baby.”

She continued watching him, dozens of follow-up questions implied.

Finally, he said, “I never saw a death certificate. My old man never took me to visit a grave. We never commemorated her birthday or the day she died. There were no maternal grandparents. None of that. I don’t even know what she looked like because I was never shown a picture of her. It was like she’d never existed. So what I figure, she left me with him. Split. Vamoosed. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me.”

“Maybe he never came to terms with it himself.”

“I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. Anytime I bugged him for information about her, he would say, ‘She died.’ End of discussion.”

“So it was just the two of you?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it cozy.”

“You speak of him in the past tense. He’s no longer living?”

“No.” Then, bitterly, “Not that you could call what he did ‘living.’”

“He was a ghost,” she said, using the word he’d used earlier to describe the man.

“You know, on second thought, that’s not an apt description. Because he did take up space. He wasn’t invisible. He just wasn’t there. He provided for me. Roof over my head, food on the table, clothes on my back. He saw that I got to school every day.”

His moss-colored eyes turned hard. “But he never attended a single school event. He never met a friend. Never watched me play a sport, and I played them all. I signed my own report cards. He functioned. That’s all. He wasn’t into sports, women, religion, gardening, stamp collecting, basket weaving. Nothing. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke.

“His conversations consisted of maybe three sentences, including the ones he had with me. He went to work every day, came home, served our supper, turned on the TV for a couple of hours, then went to his bedroom and shut the door. We never took a vacation. Never went anywhere. Not to the movies, ball games, pool halls, the city dump.” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “We did nothing together.

“I’d misbehave, do something really bad, just to see if I could get a rise out of him or, at the very least, cause a change in his facial expression. My bad behavior didn’t faze him. But nothing good I did fazed him, either. He didn’t care one way or the other.

“He was a consistent SoB, I’ll say that for him. He died a puzzle I never solved and had lost interest in a long time before. All I know about him is that whatever it was that shut him down permanently shut out the rest of the world.”

“Including you.”

He raised a shoulder. “No matter.”

Bellamy didn’t believe he was as indifferent to the parental neglect as he pretended, but, for the time being, she let it go. “When did you first meet Mr. Hathaway?”

“He would hate you calling him that.”

“All right, when did you first meet Gall?”

“I was twelve, thirteen. Thereabout. One day after school I didn’t want to go home, so I struck off on my bike. No destination. Just wanting to put miles between me and my house. When I got pretty far out, I spotted this small airplane swooping down and disappearing for a few seconds, then soaring up over the horizon again. I rode toward it and wound up out at Gall’s airfield, where he was instructing a student. They were doing touch-and-goes. Man, I envied them. I wanted to be in that airplane so bad.”

“Love at first sight?”

He fired a finger pistol at her. “Right on target, A.k.a. You’re a writer, after all.”

“You fell in love with flying that day.”

“Head over freakin’ heels. I stayed there watching until they landed. The guy taking the lesson left. Gall had noticed me lurking, waved me into the hangar. I figured he was going to tell me that I was trespassing and to get lost.

“Instead, he offered me a Dr Pepper. He asked if I liked airplanes, and I told him yes—although until that afternoon, I didn’t know it. He motioned me out to the airplane they’d been flying and asked if I’d ever been up in a single-engine. I hadn’t been up in anything, but I lied and told him I had.

“He pointed out all the parts and told me what they were called. He let me sit in the pilot’s seat, and gave me a rundown on what all the gauges were for. I asked if it was hard to fly one. He looked at me and laughed. ‘If it was hard, could I do it?’

“Then he asked if I wanted to go up. I nearly wet myself. He asked if my folks would care, and I told him no. Which was the truth. So we switched seats, and he took off, flying directly into the sunset. We made a wide sweep and were back on the ground in under five minutes, but it was the best time of my life up to then.”

He was smiling at the memory and remained lost in thought for several moments before resuming. “Gall let me help him secure the plane. By the time we’d finished, it had grown dark. When I got on my bike, he asked me where I lived, and when I told him the general vicinity, he said, ‘That far? Jesus, kid, you don’t even have a light on your bike. How are you going to see to get home?’ I came back with something like, ‘I got out here okay, didn’t I?’

“He called me a damn-fool kid and a smart-ass to boot, got in his truck, and drove along behind me so I could see my way by his headlights. That was the first time—” He broke off, leaving the thought unspoken.

“The first time what?”

He averted his gaze and mumbled, “The first time anybody had ever been worried about me.”

Bellamy reasoned that he had fallen in love with more than flying that day. He had started loving Gall, who had paid attention to him, talked to him, been protective of him. But she knew the man the neglected teenage boy had become would rebuff any discussion of that, so she returned to their original topic.

“Detective Moody raked you over the coals.”

Emerging from the nostalgic recollections, he frowned. “Several times. I told him over and over again that Gall and I had been test-flying a plane, that I wasn’t at the barbecue, and that I didn’t get to the park until after the tornado.”

“Why did you come to the park at all?”

“There were thunderstorms around that forced Gall and me to return ahead of schedule, so I figured I had just as well try to smooth things over with Susan. Given a choice, though, I’d have stayed in the air. Every minute I spent in a plane was better than being on the ground.”

“Better even than the time you spent with Susan?”

He grinned. “Tough choice.”

“She was as good as all that? As exhilarating as flying?”

“Susan, no. Sex… hmm. It’s the only thing that comes close.”

“What time did you get to the state park?”

“Hold on a sec.” He folded his arms on the table and leaned across it toward her. “Let’s explore this some.”

“Explore what?”

“Sex and flying. Sex and anything. Sex and, say… writing.” He narrowed his focus on her mouth. “Given a choice right now, which would you rather be doing?”

“Are you flirting with me?”

“What do you think?”

She thought her cheeks were growing so warm he probably detected her blush. His grin was unrepentantly suggestive and made her feel twelve years old again. “It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Because even if I was open to comparing sex to my lifework, I wouldn’t want to be compared to my late sister.”

His grin faded, and his eyes reconnected with hers. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes you would.”

“No I wouldn’t. In any case, I don’t even remember how it was with her.”

“Because there have been so many since?”

“I’m a bachelor with a basic sexual appetite. I make it clear to the women I sleep with that there are no strings attached to my bed. We fine-tune the hormone levels, then go our separate ways, nobody gets hurt.”

“Are you sure? Have you ever asked?”

He gradually eased himself back into the chair. After a moment, he said, “Tell you what. I’ll elaborate on my sex life after you tell me what went wrong with your marriage.”

Refusing to be baited, she said, “What time did you arrive at the state park?”

He snuffled a soft laugh. “Figured.” Then, “What time did I get to the park? I don’t know. I never could nail down a time for Moody, either, which he saw as an implicating factor. On my way there, I saw the funnel cloud. I realized the park lay in its path. I was minutes behind it, and when I got there, all hell had broken loose.

“It looked like—well, you know what it looked like. People were screaming. A lot of them were bloody and broken. Hysteria. Panic. Shock. Next to war, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You were in war?”

“Air force. Iraq. Our base took some rocket fire and the bastards got lucky with their aim. Left those of us who survived it with a… a lot to clean up.” His expression turned introspective. “War looks different from several miles up than when you’re scooping up red mush that used to be your wing man.”

He reached for his glass of tea and took a drink. They didn’t look at each other and neither said anything for a time, then she asked what else he remembered seeing in the wake of the tornado.

“Your dad. He was running around like a crazy man, his hands cupped around his mouth, calling your names. Steven appeared first, looking like a zombie, acting like one. Howard shook him, trying to snap him out of his daze. Then Olivia appeared.

“She was… well, that’s the only time I’ve seen any real emotion from the woman. She grabbed Steven and wrapped her arms around him like she was never going to let him go. Your dad was embracing both of them. He and Olivia were crying with relief over finding each other unharmed. But the group hug didn’t last long because you and Susan were still unaccounted for.

“When they saw me, Olivia ran over. Had I been with Susan? Had I seen her? Where was she? She was yelling in my face, making little sense, ranting at me for breaking my date with Susan, making it my fault that she was missing, accusing me of causing trouble as always.”

“She must have been out of her mind with worry.”

Dent fell silent and stared into near space for a moment, then said, “Yeah, but later, after Susan’s body was discovered, I thought about what she’d said. And in a way she was right. If I’d been with Susan that day as planned, she wouldn’t have been in the woods with Allen Strickland. She might have been injured or even killed by the twister, but as least she wouldn’t have been choked to death.”

“I suppose both of us suffer a bit of survivors’ guilt.”

“I guess. But I never let on to Moody about it. He would have misread it. It was bad enough that I was within thirty, forty yards of Susan’s body when the fireman found it. I’d been searching the woods with them. So were a dozen other men, but none of the rest became suspects. Only me. Later, Moody said it was like I had returned to the scene of the crime, as killers do. Bullshit like that,” he added in a mutter.

“Anyhow, when I realized that Susan was dead, not just unconscious, I threw up. Then I went to find your parents, but when I did, I chickened out. I couldn’t tell them. I just pointed them in the direction of where she’d been found.”

He stopped talking and, when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to continue, Bellamy prodded him. “And then what?”

“Then nothing. I was upset that my girlfriend was dead, but I knew that your folks wouldn’t welcome any condolences from me and wouldn’t want me hanging around like a member of the family. So I went home, went to bed.

“The following morning, Moody came calling. You know the rest. He’d talked to your parents and had made up his mind that I’d done it. He didn’t have any physical evidence against me, but I was treated like a felon. For weeks my name was the one in all the papers and on the news every night. I was the ‘suspect in the Susan Lyston slaying.’

“Hell, I couldn’t even go to her funeral for fear of being attacked by a lynch mob.” He formed a tight fist with one hand and tapped it against the tabletop. “The hell of it is, it didn’t stop, not after Allen Strickland was taken into custody, not even after he was convicted,” he said with raw resentment.

“See, A.k.a., the way it works? Even if you’re officially cleared of all suspicion, the taint of having been a suspect stays with you. It’s like a bad odor that clings to you. People have to accept that you’re innocent, but there’s a lingering doubt that you’re entirely clean.

“I learned that during the NTSB investigation. Somebody got hold of those old headlines, plastered them all over the damn place. After that, the airline was ashamed to claim me. It’s seriously bad PR to have an alleged murderer on your payroll.”

She grew uncomfortable under his glare and felt compelled to acknowledge that, sadly, he was right. “I’m sorry, Dent.”

“Can you be more specific? What exactly are you sorry for? For the dung heap I had to wrestle through then, or the fresh one I’m having to wrestle through now? Are you apologizing in advance for what will happen when Van Durbin’s newspaper hits the stands tomorrow and all that speculation starts whirling around me again?”

“Why should it?”

“You have to ask? Before Van Durbin files that story, you can bet he’ll want to identify ‘the cowboy.’ He’ll probably crap himself when he learns I’m none other than the ‘first person of interest.’”

“Who was vindicated.”

“Maybe in your book, but not in real life.”

“Gall provided you with an alibi that cleared you.”

“Moody figured that Gall was lying.”

“He had no case against you.”

“Right. The only thing that saved me was that I wasn’t found with Susan’s panties.”