Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 41

“ Damn, I hate to miss that,” Deputy Daniels whines for the third time, watching his rearview mirror as the cruiser rumbles up the slick highway. “You get something like that once in maybe ten years around here.”

“There’s nobody in the house,” I tell him, holding Drewe tight against me.

“How do you know that?”

“Too many ways he could have gotten out. He had a good chance to kill both of us, and he didn’t. Same with Billy and Jimmy. If he was ever there at all.”

“He shot Billy, didn’t he?”

“Billy’s partner shot Billy.”

“What?”

“That’s what Billy said, and I think he’s right.”

Daniels looks around in his seat, bug-eyed with excitement. “I’ll be goddamned. That sounds just like Jimmy. I don’t know how many illegal does he’s shot. Too damn quick on the trigger.”

Drewe is tugging at my sleeve. I look down into her face, startled by the intensity in her eyes. “What was Erin doing at our house?” she asks quietly. “Did you bring her there?”

I motion for her to wait, but she knows we’ll be separated in twenty minutes, and she means to have answers. I lean forward in the seat. “Deputy, you think you could hit the siren and the gas? My wife’s feeling sick. She really needs to get home.”

“Hey, the sooner we get there, the sooner I get back.” He reaches up and switches on his red flashers, then gooses the gas pedal.

“No siren?”

“Hell, we don’t need it out here in the wide open, do we?”

“We get a lot of loose cows out this way. Deer too.”

He snorts at my cautiousness, but all the same he hits the siren and accelerates still faster.

The car has already outrun the rain. I slide down in the seat with Drewe, as if to rest more comfortably, and begin speaking below the howl of the siren. “I don’t know why she was there. She told your mother she was coming to talk to you.”

“I know. But why? You drove to Jackson and saw her like I asked you to?”

“I told you I did.”

“I hardly remember you coming in. I don’t remember what you said. What happened when you saw Erin?”

I hesitate. “She told me she was fine.”

“And you believed her?”

“What could I do?”

“You just left? After I’d told you what I was afraid of?”

“She wasn’t going to hurt herself, Drewe. I could see that much. I was going to call you about it, but when I got home two detectives were waiting to arrest me. Erin obviously drove over sometime after that.”

She looks away with her lips drawn tight. “It doesn’t make sense. What are you keeping from me, Harper?”

You never want to know.

“First Erin didn’t want to see me, then she drives eighty miles to talk to me? I can’t make that work.”

“Drewe….”

She looks back at me with glittering eyes. “My sister is dead, Harper. Any promise you made to her about keeping secrets is meaningless now. You’ve got to help me understand this.”

“I didn’t want to tell you this.”

She pulls away far enough to give me a level gaze. She’s obviously been expecting some dark revelation for a while, and she braces against it like a defendant awaiting sentence.

“Patrick isn’t Holly’s father.”

She blinks three times fast, processing the information as she would some rare medical symptom, trying to fit it into her known information and compute a differential diagnosis. With a shiver I realize that if Erin were not dead, I would not be able to stop at this point. I would have to tell the whole tragic story and watch Drewe’s world blown apart.

“No wonder Erin wouldn’t use me as her obstetrician,” she says finally. “All that b.s. about how doctors shouldn’t treat family members. That wasn’t Erin at all. I knew she was probably pregnant, with the unannounced wedding and everything, but I just assumed it was by Patrick. And she was doing so well… nobody wanted to question it.”

“Well, now you know.”

“She told you this this afternoon?”

I nod.

Drewe shakes her head in disbelief. “Does Patrick know?”

“Yes. That’s the problem. Before they got married, Erin told him she was pregnant, but she made him swear never to ask who the father was. I guess Patrick was okay with it for a while. But then he became obsessed with finding out.”

“Finally,” she says, letting out a long sigh. “Finally it all makes sense.” She looks away, out the window into the dark. “Why didn’t Erin just tell him who the father was? Surely that would have been better than what they were going through?”

Just let it go, would you?“ I don’t know. Maybe….” Suddenly, without any thought at all, damning and damnable words flow effortlessly out of my mouth. “Maybe Erin didn’t know herself. Who the father was, I mean. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that to Patrick.”

While I sit shocked at my own words, some part of me gauges their effect. It is profound. Drewe believes. She can accept the idea that Erin slept with so many men in New York that she lost count. She can accept that Erin-in her convert’s zeal to get married-would keep this from Patrick. And, most important, she can accept-without imputing treacherous motives to me-that I would want to keep this from her.

“Why didn’t she just lie?” she asks. “Make up some fictitious father?”

The truth comes to my rescue. “A lie wouldn’t have worked in the end. Patrick would have tried to make sure. I think he was bent on some dramatic gesture.”

Drewe’s eyes probe mine as though she were peering through the barrels of a binocular microscope. “She told you all of this today?”

No, three months ago. She told me I’m the father of the three-year-old angel Patrick puts to bed every night, who calls me Uncle Harp and begs me to sing Barney and play old Beatles songs to her on the guitar like I’m some friendly pied piper and not the very source of her existence-

“Yes.”

“I told you she would.” Drewe folds her arms over her chest. “Why couldn’t she tell me, damn it? Why?”

The deputy slows the cruiser for a curve and switches off the siren. Yazoo City is a bluish cloud of light high in the distance. Soon we will swing onto Highway 3, which leads to Bob’s estate.

“Harper?”

“What?”

“Where is Erin right now?”

“I don’t know. You want me to ask the deputy?”

She shakes her head. In Drewe’s family, you don’t ask a stranger such a question. You don’t let anyone outside the clan know you need them for anything.

As the lights of town drift closer, a wave of self-disgust washes through me. I just slandered a woman who can’t defend herself because she is dead-

“What did Daddy sound like when you talked to him?” Drewe asks, her voice like a shout in my ear.

“Calm. I know that sounds stupid.”

“No, it sounds just like him. This will kill him, though. He worshiped Erin.”

“He’s still got you.”

She closes her eyes.

We’re passing outlying homes now, lighted by the moon and by the odd window or Mercury Vapor lamp. Ranch-style houses set far back from the road, and in the distance, the green and white flash of the new airport beacon. Bob’s mansion isn’t far from here, and yet it’s a world away. It may be a world away from me now too. The lies I told a few moments ago may save my marriage, but they will do nothing to assuage Bob’s anger. Even if Drewe finds a way to forgive me, Bob will expel me from the family. Not in any official way, but his disapproval will have the effect of a papal bull.

Will Drewe forgive me? She’s in shock now, of course. But she’ll recover quickly, particularly once she is called upon to steady the rest of the family. Will she accept what I’ve said tonight as easily then? Already I sense an emotional distance that seems unrelated to the trauma of Erin’s death. Could she, as I have often wondered, know more than she allows herself to admit? Of course, says a voice so clear I perceive it as a whisper beside me. She’s known for weeks. Months even. That’s why she asked if you were sleeping with Erin. She doesn’t know specifics, but she knows what women always know. That something isn’t right. I’ve been like a junkie, I realize, thinking I could live with my habit, that it wasn’t really affecting my life. But it is.

It’s destroying me.

“It’s just up ahead,” Drewe says to the deputy. “Third driveway up.”

“I got it,” Daniels replies.

Why do I lie? Did I inherit the tendency from my father, a man scrupulously honest in every area of his life but one? Even entering our marriage I had secrets. They seem trivial now, but if they were, why didn’t I confess them before I married Drewe? Like a child unwilling to endure the pain of vaccination to gain immunity from a disease, I was afraid to watch her carefully tended trust waver yet again, or possibly even shatter.

As the deputy pulls into Bob’s long, curving drive, I feel dislocated in time, as though Erin and Drewe might step arm in arm from beneath the brick entrance arch as I saw them do hundreds of times in my life. Two wet little girls in bathing suits. Teenagers wearing prom dresses and million-dollar smiles. Bride and bridesmaid before Erin’s rehearsal dinner-

The cruiser stops with a harsh squeal of brakes.

Drewe looks out at the floodlit mansion. The ivy that covers the entrance arch still glistens from the rain, more black than green in the artificial light. Leaning toward her, I smell her wet hair, as tangible as the touch of her hand. She turns and hugs me, then kisses me lightly on the cheek and grips the door handle.

“Deputy,” I say, swallowing hard, “I need to talk to my wife in private for a minute. Can I get out with her?”

Drewe looks at me, not sure what’s happening. I still feel the press of her lips upon mine, a phantom touch of Erin’s last kiss. With that sensation comes something more chilling, an echo of Erin’s final words: I know what the little death is now. It’s the way we’ve been living… pretending things are fine, every day having to pile one more lie on top of all the others to keep the house of cards from falling on top of us. That’s death. Dying a little each day -

“I don’t think the sheriff would like it,” Daniels says.

“Well, how about you getting out? Just for a minute.”

His shaved neck stiffens. He turns in the seat and looks at Drewe. “That okay with you, ma’am?”

Drewe watches me, still not understanding. “Yes… please.”

“Okay. I’m gonna leave my door open, but I’ll step away and have me a smoke.”

“Thanks.”

When he’s gone, I take Drewe’s hands in mine. But when our eyes meet, she pulls her hands away and folds them in her lap. She doesn’t ask what I have to tell her. She watches me warily, her back braced against the door, chin turned slightly downward as if to ward off a blow. I remember this posture from high school, when I first admitted that rumors she had heard about me and a friend of hers were true. A thousand reasons not to speak constrict the muscles of my throat. I hear the voices of her girlfriends, of her mother, telling her that people don’t change, that betrayal is a habit, that I’m not the kind of man who can remain faithful to any woman.

“Drewe, I have to tell you something.”

Her eyes look away for an instant, then back, and in that brief slice of time much of their translucence dies, replaced by a protective opacity. I hear the metallic patter of the rain beginning again.

“I know who Holly’s father is.”

She presses harder against the door, and I realize my hesitancy is only making things worse. “Drewe-”

“No,” she says, her lower lip quivering. “No.” One shaking hand rises to her mouth, pauses uncertainly, then covers her eyes.

Even as my nerve fails I say, “Drewe, it’s me.”

Like liquid diamonds, tears fall from behind her hand into her lap. My worst fear is that she will run, simply bolt from the car and leave me stuck with a trigger-happy deputy. I spit out my excuses in a panicked flood. “I didn’t know until three months ago, Drewe. I had no idea! Erin showed up in Chicago before you and I were married, before we were engaged really, she stayed for three days, that’s all it ever was. Drewe, she never told me a thing after that and she came straight back here and married Patrick! I never knew she was pregnant and I never touched her before or since! Drewe? Drewe! Say something!”

When she takes her hand away from her eyes, a redness in the shape of butterfly wings stains her pale cheeks.

“Drewe?”

Nothing.

I start to take her outstretched hand, then realize she is reaching for her clothes bag. As her fingers grasp it, her other hand gropes backward for the door handle.

“Drewe, wait. Please… we need to talk.”

The door opens with a screech, silhouetting the back of her head against the lighted entrance. “Drewe, wait!” I plead, taking hold of the arm that holds the bag.

“Don’t touch me!” She jerks away as though my hand were on fire and scrambles out of the car.

Lunging across the seat, I try to block the closing door, but Drewe throws her body against it with enough force to slam my arm and shoulder back into the car.

“Drewe, wait! DREWE!”

Just as I get my hand on the door handle, a decisive snick reverberates through the car. I jerk the handle hard but nothing happens.

“Ease up, ace!” Deputy Daniels says from the front seat.

“I’ve got to talk to her!” I yell, yanking the handle again and again.

“Looks like the lady don’t want to talk to you.”

I smash my fists against the wire mesh in blind rage.

“Break ’em if you want, champ,” Daniels says lazily. “I seen it lots of times.”

Outside, Drewe has paused in the rain-beaded brilliance of the floodlights. She stands like a refugee, looking back at the car with her bag in her left hand and her right raised to shield her eyes. I press my hands to the window as if to bridge the gulf between us by force of will. Her face is a ghostly decoupage of fragmented emotion: trust shattered, love blasted into confusion, unity into terrible apartness. She waits a moment longer, then backs slowly away from the car, away from me, toward the house of her parents, and of her childhood. The cruiser is moving now, backing quickly down the drive. I fight to keep her in sight. With my fingers locked in the wire screen, I watch her melt through the silver wall of rain.