Mortal Memory

THIRTEEN

REBECCA RETURNED to Old Salsbury the following day just as she’d said she would. It was a Saturday, but I wasn’t at home when she called. Neither was Marie. It was Peter who answered, then later gave me the message.

“A woman called,” he said. “She asked for you. She left her name and number.”

He’d written it down on a small square of white paper, which he handed to me dutifully.

I glanced at the paper, pretending that I didn’t recognize the name he’d written in large block letters beside the number: REBECCA.

“Did she say what she wanted?” I asked casually.

Peter shook his head. “She just wanted you to call her back, I guess.” He shrugged and darted away.

A few seconds later, as I sat at my desk, dialing Rebecca’s number, I saw his lean body as it darted across the backyard and disappeared around a tall, nearly leafless tree.

She answered immediately.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Yes, hi,” Rebecca said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’d gotten back to town.”

“Was it a worthwhile trip?”

“Yes.” Her voice seemed to tighten somewhat. “There were some new developments.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. I thought you already knew everything.”

“Sometimes it’s just a question of one thing leading to another.”

“Well, what did you …”

“Not now,” Rebecca interrupted quickly. “We’d planned to meet today. Can you make it in the evening? Say, around seven?”

“All right.”

“Okay, see you then,” Rebecca said as she hung up.

I held the receiver for a moment, almost as if it were her hand. I felt it cool, then let it go, and walked out into the backyard and stood beside the covered pool.

Peter was poised on the other side. He smiled a moment, then lifted his arms until his fingers touched. He held himself suspended in that position for a moment, pretending he was about to dive onto the broad black tarpaulin that stretched across the now empty pool.

“Good form,” I said. “You look like a real pro.”

He seemed pleased by my attention. “They’re teaching us at school,” he said. Then he ran over to me, his blond head bobbing left and right.

“What if there were water in the pool,” he said, “and one time I started to drown?”

“I’d come in after you.”

“What if there were sharks in the water?”

“I’d come in after you,” I repeated.

He smiled broadly, then dashed away again, this time around the far corner of the house.

Marie returned an hour later. She looked tired as she got out of the car and headed toward the house. From my place in the den, I could see her move wearily up the stairs that led to the kitchen and disappear inside the house. I expected her to join me, but she never did, and so, after a time, I went to look for her. She was not in her office, so I went upstairs.

I found her in our bedroom, lying faceup on her side of the bed, her arms folded neatly over her chest. She’d kicked off her shoes, but otherwise she remained in the same formal business clothes she’d worn to New Haven earlier in the day. A bright shaft of light fell over her from the parted curtains, and I could see small bits of dust floating weightlessly in the flooding light.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

She did not open her eyes. “Not great. They didn’t like some of the designs.”

“They never like them in the beginning,” I told her. “They have to be critical at the first presentation; otherwise they feel like they’re being led by the nose.”

Marie took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m tired,” she said.

“It was a long day,” I said, “the drive alone, you know?”

She opened her eyes and gazed at me softly. “Let’s go out to dinner tonight, Steve,” she said, almost plaintively, as if asking a favor, “just you and me.” She smiled. “We could use a night out, don’t you think?”

It was a simple request, not much asked nor expected, and yet I couldn’t grant it. Rebecca would be waiting for me at her cottage. It was to her that I had to go.

I shook my head. “I can’t, Marie,” I said. “I have to go into the office.”

Her eyes narrowed. “On a Saturday night?”

“It’s the final meeting on that library,” I said. “I have to finish the designs.”

She looked at me doubtfully. “On a Saturday night?” she said again.

“I’m supposed to be at the office by seven,” I told her. “Wally’s coming in, along with a few guys from the drafting department. We’re going to work through the night if we have to.”

Her eyes lingered on me a moment, then she turned away and closed them again. “You’d better start getting ready then,” she said. “It’s almost six.”

I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. “I have a little time,” I said.

She didn’t answer, but only continued to lie stiffly beside me.

I touched her cheek with the side of my hand.

She drew her face away instantly. “No, no,” she said, a little brusquely, “I want to rest.”

I stood up and walked into the adjoining bathroom. Once there, I showered and dressed myself. Marie was still lying on the bed when I came back into the bedroom. She didn’t stir as I left her, didn’t so much as open her eyes.

Peter was in the family room when I got downstairs.

“Why are you all dressed up?” he asked, as I stepped in to say good-bye.

“I have to go into the office,” I said.

“When will you be back?”

“Not until late. There’s a lot to do.”

He smiled jokingly. “So I guess I shouldn’t wait up for you, huh?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.” I waved good-bye, then headed outside.

I’d already backed the car nearly halfway toward the street when I glanced back toward the house. I could see the gray eye of the television as it glowed dimly toward me from the shaded window of the family room. It gave me the eerie sense of being watched, and so I let my eyes retreat from it, drifting upward, along a wall of brick and mortar, until our bedroom came into view and I saw Marie standing at the window, watching me from afar. For a single, delicate moment, we stared mutely at each other, two faces peering outward, it seemed to me, from two different worlds. Then, her eyes still gazing at me with the same penetrating force, she lifted her arms very gracefully, like the wingspread of a great bird, grasped the separate edges of the bedroom curtains, and slowly drew them together. They were still weaving slightly as I let the car drift on down the driveway and out into the street.

“Hi, Steve,” Rebecca said as she opened the door. She stepped aside to let me pass.

I took a chair not far from the window. Outside, I could see the still gray surface of the lake. It looked like a sheet of slate.

Rebecca took the chair opposite me, so that we faced each other directly, as if we were about to begin some kind of intensely demanding game.

“We’re close to the end, I think.”

Something in my face must have puzzled her, because for a moment she stopped and regarded me closely. “We’ve gone through each member of your family,” she explained, “and their relationships.”

I nodded but said nothing.

“There are things I’ll never know, of course,” she added. “Your father still seems very mysterious to me.”

“My father,” I repeated softly. Curiously, I suddenly thought of him almost as a rival for her attention, a dark, majestic figure whose profound experience of life and death utterly dwarfed the humdrum banality of my own.

I felt the need to bring him down. “Are you sure he’s worth knowing any more than you already do?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But you’re sure he fits your criteria, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re sure that Nellie Grimes, for example, had nothing to do with the murders.”

She nodded. “Yes, I’m sure of that,” she answered.

“You found her, didn’t you?” I said. “You found Nellie.”

She shook her head. “Not exactly. Nellie Grimes died eight years ago. But I found her daughter, May. She lives not far from Somerset.”

“How did you find her?”

“Through Swenson.”

“I thought he hadn’t known anything about Nellie.”

“He’s never mentioned her to me, that’s true,” Rebecca told me, “but only because he’d never thought of her as actually connected to the case.” She paused a moment, then went on. “After the murders, Swenson talked to a lot of people who’d known your father. He was trying to get some idea of where he might have gone after the murders. One of the people he talked to was Grimes.” She reached into her briefcase and handed me a picture of a woman standing on a small wooden porch. “She was living in Hoboken,” she went on. “Swenson remembered seeing May playing in the backyard despite the drizzle. He said her dress was muddy, and that her hair was wet and stringy, but that Nellie didn’t seem to care.”

It was hard to imagine May in such a state, or her mother’s indifference to it. In all my other memories of them, they’d been dressed as well as they could afford to be, always neat and clean, as if waiting to be put upon display.

“Nellie Grimes was not doing very well at that point,” Rebecca added.

“What did she say about my father?”

“She said that he’d always been very kind to her,” Rebecca answered, “and that he’d given her some money when she’d left Somerset.”

In my mind I saw the envelope pass from my father’s hand to Nellie’s.

“She also told Swenson that she didn’t believe your father had killed his family,” Rebecca added.

“Then who did?”

Rebecca shrugged. “She only said that she was sure it was someone else,” she said. Then Swenson asked her directly if your father might have been involved with another woman, and she said absolutely not. She told him that she knew for a fact that your father was not that kind of man.”

I remembered the way Nellie’s face had lifted toward my father that day in the train station, and I suspected that it had lifted toward him in just that same tempting way many times before. In isolated places, no doubt, where no one could have seen him answer to the intensity of such a call, but he’d drawn back on those occasions, too, resolutely, with his own unfathomable pride.

Rebecca looked at me as if she expected me to contradict her, then added. “May also had a very high opinion of your father.”

“But she was just a child,” I said. “What could she have known about him?”

“Actually, she remembered him quite well,” Rebecca said. “Very clearly, even down to the gray work clothes he always wore.”

For a moment it struck me as intimate knowledge, and I felt a strange resentment toward May Grimes, as if she’d usurped my place as the sole surviving witness.

“How would she have known anything about my father?” I asked.

“May evidently spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” Rebecca continued. There was no place for her to go after school, so she played in the back room. Sometimes your father would come back there and try to entertain her a little.” She smiled. “May remembered that he bought her a Chinese checkers set and that they used to sit on the floor and play together.”

I could not bring the image to mind very easily, my father sitting on the bare cement floor with a little girl, playing Chinese checkers, trying to help her pass the long boring hours of a winter afternoon.

“She remembered something else,” Rebecca said, the tone of her voice changing. They were playing together one afternoon. May thinks it was just a few weeks before the day your father took her and her mother to the train station.” She paused a moment, as if hesitant to go on. They were alone in the back room,” she continued finally. “May had been staring at the board, making her next move. When she finished it, she looked up and noticed your father staring at her. She said he looked different, very sad. She asked him if there was anything wrong. He didn’t answer exactly. He only said, This is all I want.’“

I felt my skin tighten, but said nothing.

Rebecca watched me cautiously, gauging my mood. “I remembered you telling me that he’d said the same thing to you.”

“In exactly the same words.” I shook my head helplessly, my father’s mystery still as dense as it had ever been. “What was going on in him?” I asked, though very softly, a question directed toward myself as much as toward Rebecca.

Rebecca, however, actually offered an answer. “At that point, when he said that to you in the basement,” she said, “he was probably very depressed.”

I could see that she was leading into something.

“Depressed about what?”

“Well, he’d finalized his plan by then, of course,” she said. “He’d canceled the two plane tickets, for example.” She looked at me significantly. “He did that on October 10.”

I knew then that the “new developments” she’d mentioned on the phone earlier had to do with those two mysterious plane tickets. She’d tracked down their enigmatic meaning and was about to lay her findings before me like a parting gift.

“Why did he cancel those tickets?” I asked. “You know, don’t you?”

Rebecca leaned forward, settling her eyes on me with a deep, probing gaze. “You remember the night before you came home from the Cape? You saw your father and mother talking together, and he had his arm around her.”

“That’s right.”

“And the next night, the night the family got back to Somerset, you saw your father and Laura beside the fence in the backyard.” I nodded.

“You said that they looked as if they were engaged in a very serious conversation,” Rebecca went on. “Then later, you saw them come up the stairs, and it was at that point that you heard a few words pass between them.”

“That’s right.”

Rebecca drew her black notebook from the briefcase. “I want to be sure I have this exactly right.” She flipped through the notebook until she found the page she wanted. This is what you heard,” she said. Then she quoted it: “Your father: ‘Tomorrow.’ Laura: ‘So soon?’ Your father: ‘Yes.’“ She looked up. The ‘tomorrow’ that your father mentioned would have been September 3.”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you again: do you remember anything about that morning?” Rebecca asked.

I tried to recall it, but it remained a blur of activity. My mother had prepared the usual breakfast of cereal and toast, and after eating, Laura, Jamie, and I had all gone back upstairs to finish getting ready for school. The only thing that seemed different was the fact that my father had still been at home when we’d all left the house about a half hour later.

“My father stayed home that morning,” I said to Rebecca. “He usually left before we did, but that morning, he didn’t.” I drifted back to that day again, but only far enough to regain one last, minuscule detail. “He was sitting at the kitchen table as I passed,” I added. “I was racing for the door, you know, excited to be going back to school, but he shot his hand out, grabbed my arm, and stopped me. ‘Kiss your mother good-bye, Stevie,’ he said. And so I did.”

Rebecca looked as if I’d just confirmed something that had only been a conjecture before.

“He’d never asked me to do that before.”

“And then you went to school just like always?” Rebecca asked.

I nodded. “Yes, we all went together. Well, at least Laura and I did. Jamie always went ahead of us.”

“Did you and Laura talk about anything in particular that morning?”

“No,” I said. “We just walked to school like always. She left me at my school, then walked on to hers, about three blocks down the road.”

“When did you see Laura again?”

“She was waiting at the corner for me right after school,” I said. “She always did that.”

For a moment, as I remembered her standing on the corner waiting for me that afternoon, her books in her arms, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, I felt her loss again, but this time with a piercing depth, as if all the conversations I might have had with her in life, all the good and comforting times we might have had together, had suddenly swept over me in a great wave of imagined days. I saw us share all that we had not been allowed to share, the keenest experiences of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, the approach of middle age, all that my father had abruptly and mysteriously canceled as surely as he’d canceled those two plane tickets to Mexico.

“I loved my sister,” I said, though barely above a whisper. “And I think she loved me.”

Rebecca’s next question came at me like a slap in the face. “And Jamie,” she asked, “did you love him?”

I answered without hesitation. “No.”

“Did anyone in the family love him?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “He always seemed alone.”

Alone in his bunk, alone at his desk, alone beneath the tree in the backyard, always alone.

“So Jamie never waited for you after school?” Rebecca asked.

“No, only Laura did that,” I answered. “She was always there, waiting on the corner, just like she was that first day of school.”

Despite the warmth of the weather, as I recalled then, the first leaves of autumn had already begun to drift down upon us. I saw them fall slowly, but thickly, as Laura and I made our way down Ontario Street, and I felt a great sadness settle upon me, like the leaves.

“The leaves were falling,” I said to Rebecca. “They were very red.”

But they could not have been red, I realized. I was not thinking of leaves. I was thinking of my sister’s death, and Jamie’s and my mother’s. I was thinking of their thickly falling blood.

“Did you and your sister talk much on the way home that afternoon?” Rebecca asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“You walked silently, all the way home?”

Something came back vaguely, a tiny detail. “No, I don’t think we walked all the way home together that day,” I said slowly, unsure. “I think she went into Oscar’s, that little convenience store on the corner.”

Rebecca looked at me doubtfully. “Why would you remember that?” she asked.

“Because it was so unusual,” I answered. “But I do remember it now.”

I saw Laura turn to me, felt her hand release mine. “Go on home, Stevie,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Then she walked away, moving slowly toward the convenience store, and finally disappearing inside of it. As I headed home, I saw her standing by the window, her eyes fixed on me, as if she were waiting for me to leave.

“So you walked the rest of the way home by yourself?” Rebecca asked.

I nodded. “Laura told me to go on home without her, and so I did.”

“Was Jamie home when you got there?” Rebecca asked.

“No,” I said. I could feel it returning to me slowly, a picture of that afternoon. “No one was home,” I added, “not even my mother.”

It had never occurred to me before, but for the first and only time I could remember, my mother had not been at home when I arrived from school. I had returned to an empty house.

“I was alone in the house for a while,” I said, “then Laura arrived, and Jamie a few minutes after that.”

Jamie had gone directly to our room, but Laura had walked into the solarium instead. Later, when I’d approached her, skipping jauntily across the living room carpet, she’d looked up at me fiercely, and snapped, “Stop it, Stevie.” Then she’d turned away, letting her eyes drift out toward the empty street.

“Laura was not in a very good mood that afternoon,” I told Rebecca. “I could tell that something was bothering her.”

Rebecca glanced down at her notebook. “When did your mother get home?”

“Soon after the rest of us, I guess,” I told her. Then I remembered something else. “My father brought her. They came home in his van.”

Once again an odd certainty swept into Rebecca’s face. She leaned forward and began to dig through the briefcase, finally withdrawing several sheets of paper. It looked like a report of some kind, very official, with all the pages stapled together in the left-hand corner.

“This is the autopsy report on your mother,” she said. “I had never read it because the cause of her death was so obvious.” She flipped back the first two pages. “But while I was with Swenson yesterday, he made an aside about your mother being ‘doomed anyway.’“ She lifted the report toward me. “When I asked him what he meant, he gave me this.”

She’d already turned to the page that mattered. She’d even underlined the relevant passage. I read it, then handed the report back to her, dazed.

“She had a brain tumor,” I said, astonished. “Is that why she tried to kill herself?”

Rebecca nodded. “Probably.”

I saw my mother as I’d seen her that night, trudging wearily down the stairs, shoulders bowed, head down, a single shaky hand gripping the wooden banister. How alone she must have felt at that moment, how sealed within a black solitude.

“Your mother’s doctor told Swenson that your mother had come in for an X-ray examination on September 3, and that your father had come with her,” Rebecca said.

“September 3,” I said, laboring to make those connections I was certain Rebecca had already made. “So when my father and Laura had that conversation by the fence the night we got back from the Cape, he was telling her that my mother was sick, and that she was going for an examination the next day?”

“Probably,” Rebecca said. She looked back down at her notebook, read a few pages to herself, then glanced back up at me. “The doctor said that your mother arrived on schedule for her appointment. He remembered that your father brought her in, and that later, when the examination was over, he came to pick her up.”

“Yes, he brought her home that afternoon,” I told her.

Rebecca seemed hardly to hear me. “Over the next few weeks the doctor had several conversations with your father,” she went on. The kind of conversations male doctors had with men in those days.”

“What do you mean?”

Rebecca seemed surprised by the question, as if any further explanation should have been unnecessary. “Well, in certain cases a doctor and the husband of a female patient would get together to decide just how much a wife should know.”

“And so this doctor, he talked to my father about my mother’s illness, but not to her?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “According to Swenson’s case notes, the doctor told your father that your mother’s tumor was inoperable, and after that, they discussed quite a few alternatives. The doctor called several specialists in the field. He got back answers that weren’t very encouraging.”

“I see.”

“And finally, on October 10, the doctor told your father that there was nothing that could be done,” Rebecca said, “that your mother was going to die.” Her eyes drifted down to her notebook, then back up to me. “The two tickets to Mexico City were canceled that same afternoon.”

The realization swept over me like a lifting breeze. “So the second ticket was for my mother,” I said. “He’d planned to take her away at some point, a surprise vacation, something like that.”

“Rebecca nodded. There was no other woman, Steve.”

For a brief interval, I thought it all over again, everything Rebecca had just revealed. There was still something that didn’t fit, and after a moment, I realized what it was.

“But when we were unloading the car the night we got back from Cape Cod, and Laura started complaining about my mother, my father snapped at her, remember? He said, ‘You should know.’”

Rebecca looked at me without expression.

“And Laura went up to my mother’s room and sat down on the bed beside her and put her arm around her.”

Rebecca nodded.

“Well, my father couldn’t have meant that Laura should know about my mother’s illness,” I said, “because Laura couldn’t have known about it that night. She hadn’t been told yet.”

“Probably not,” Rebecca admitted.

“But she went up to my mother’s room anyway,” I added. “So she must have known something.”

Rebecca glanced down at her notes, as if expecting to find an answer there.

“And if my mother was already dying, why did my father bother to kill her?” I asked.

Rebecca sighed. “There’s still something missing, isn’t there? Swenson thought so, too. He never thought it all added up. He never found a motive.”

“A reason for my father to have done it, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what you’re still looking for, isn’t it?”

Rebecca stared at me in earnest. “I know what it was in all these other men,” she said, “but I’m still not sure about your father.”

I said nothing, but only looked past her, out toward the lake. Night had nearly fallen by then, but beyond the water, I could still make out a dark line of thunderclouds as they rumbled in from the west.

“Motive is everything,” Rebecca said, though only to herself. “There’s no question that your father did it. His fingerprints were all over the shotgun. There were no other fingerprints.” She thought a moment longer, then glanced toward me. “The only question is why?”

I continued to watch the wall of dark gray clouds as it closed in upon us. My father’s face swam into my mind, then dissolved almost instantly, a figment, an enigma.

“It may rain tonight,” I said softly, as if to avoid any further inquiry into the foggy labyrinth of his mind.

Rebecca nodded. “It was raining that day in November,” she said thoughtfully. Her mind seemed to latch on to an unexpected possibility. “Maybe something happened that day in particular. Maybe something happened that brought it all together.”

“And sent my father over the edge, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I remembered the changing faces of my father, those features that slowly descended from the joy of his wedding day to the bleakness with which he’d stared toward my mother from the smoke-filled cab of the old brown van.

“I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “I don’t think something just happened that day, something out of the blue, that caused my father to pick up that shotgun.”

Rebecca nodded. “No, probably not,” she said. Then she pulled a single sheet of yellow paper from her briefcase. “All right,” she said, “let’s start again. Let’s start from October 10, the day your father learned that your mother was dying. We’ll go from there to the end.”

I said nothing, but merely waited for her to guide me back toward that day, as I knew she’d always planned to do.

“Your mother was dying,” Rebecca began. “How did things change in the family because of that?”

“I never knew she was dying,” I told her. “No one ever told me. And I don’t think Jamie knew, either.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he was the same old Jamie up until the moment my father murdered him,” I said. “He was always up in his room, always alone. Nothing changed with Jamie.”

“So you don’t think he ever found out about your mother?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He certainly never changed in his attitude toward her.”

“What was his attitude?”

“That she was a maid,” I said, “someone who washed clothes, cooked meals, vacuumed up that gray grime that my father was always tracking up from the basement.”

“That’s the only way Jamie saw your mother?”

“More or less. I don’t think he gave her much thought.”

Rebecca wrote my observations down in her notebook, then glanced up again. “Do you think Laura ever knew just how serious your mother’s illness was?”

“Oh, yes, of course she did,” I said.

I saw my sister in the solarium once again, sitting sullenly in the wicker chair as she had that September afternoon, snapping at me to “stop it,” without adding what must have been the final, unsaid portion of that sentence: “Don’t you know your mother’s sick, don’t you know she may be dying!”

“Laura looked quite upset the afternoon before my mother came home,” I told Rebecca. “And after that, for the next few days, she looked very strange.” I shrugged. “At the time, I couldn’t have known what was bothering her, but I did notice that she seemed …” I stopped, searching for the right word. “She seemed dazed,” I said finally, “like she couldn’t quite figure out what to do, how to handle it.”

“Did she treat your mother differently after that?”

“Yes,” I said. “For a time, she treated her much more gently.”

Rebecca’s eyes narrowed questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘for a time’?”

Even though it had been my own phrase, it struck me as being almost purposely vague, just as it had clearly struck Rebecca as being so.

“Well, for the first few weeks, Laura was very gentle and helpful,” I explained.

It was easy for me to recall all the little gestures of kindness my sister had made toward my mother during that brief time. She’d helped her in the kitchen, gone shopping with her on Saturday afternoons, and had been generally more tender toward her than she’d ever been.

“But that kindness didn’t continue?” Rebecca asked.

“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It lasted for a few weeks, more or less until my mother tried to kill herself.”

“How did it change after that?”

“Laura seemed to withdraw from her,” I said. “From my father, too. At about the same time.”

“That would have been around the middle of October, then?”

I nodded.

“Jamie was the only one who stayed the same during all those weeks,” I added, then thought a bit more of it, remembering how often he’d begun to bait my mother, too, as if one target were no longer enough for his steadily building spitefulness and anger. “Actually, I think he got a little worse,” I said. “He was sharp with my mother during those last weeks, but he also began to pull away entirely. From all of us, I mean. It was as if he couldn’t stand being in the same house with us anymore.”

Growing more sullen with each day, bitter in what must have been a terrible, homebound loneliness, I remembered that Jamie had begun to absent himself almost entirely from the family during the last weeks of our time on McDonald Drive. He’d never joined us in the little den anymore, or even gone on those rare family outings to the drive-in movies. Instead, he’d sealed himself in his room, remaining there for hours at a time, coming down only to eat quickly, and after that, trudging up the stairs again.

“Toward the end,” I told Rebecca, “Jamie was just a face in the hallway or on the other side of the dinner table. My mother didn’t like to be around him. Neither did I. And, of course, Laura hated him.”

“You left out your father,” Rebecca reminded me. “What did he think of Jamie during this time?”

Once again I recalled the moment years before when all three of us, Laura and Jamie and myself, had erupted into noisy battle in the backyard. My father had stepped out onto the second-floor patio and stared down silently, bringing the conflict to an immediate end. Even from that distance, I could tell that his eyes had swept smoothly from my upturned face to Laura’s, then back to mine, leaving out the third point in what should have been the triangle of his assembled children. Even in that moment of disciplinary concern, his eyes had not once moved toward Jamie. The following years, it struck me now, had only widened the abyss which separated them.

“I think that toward the end, my father just gave up on Jamie.”

“In what way?”

“Gave up trying to love him, to be a father to him.”

“Do you think Jamie felt that ‘giving up’?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” I said.

And for the first time, I saw Jamie captured in the deep well of his isolation. Not really his father’s son, yet unaware of that dreadful fact, he had been kept outside the circle of our kinship, a prodigal and an outcast. To have killed him in so lonely and bereft a state, the only one among us who had never loved nor been loved by another, struck me as the single, saddest aspect of my father’s crime.

A wave of empty, helpless grief must have passed over me at that moment, because when I looked back toward Rebecca, she appeared almost frightened by what she saw in my face.

“We don’t have to finish everything tonight,” she said.

Finish everything. Those were the words she used. And so I knew that within hours, perhaps minutes, I would be returned to that dreadful state of “back to normal” to which Marie had seemed to look forward with such anxious anticipation. I felt a pall descend, the atmosphere thickening and congealing around me. My destiny was being sealed. I was being buried alive. It was almost more than I could bear.

“Do you want to stop for the night, Steve?” Rebecca asked.

I lifted my head. “No, let’s finish it tonight,” I told her, now anxious to finish everything, to leave Rebecca behind, to go on to whatever it was that awaited me, and to do it quickly, cleanly, without ever looking back.

She nodded, glanced down at her notes, let Jamie slip back into his long oblivion, and renewed her focus upon Laura.

“You said that Laura treated your mother very gently for a time,” she began.

“It was just a brief change,” I said quickly, already pushing toward the next question, driving forward relentlessly, almost a man in flight.

“And after that how did Laura treat her?”

“She went back to the same attitude she’d always had toward her,” I answered. “She seemed resentful of her. She avoided her most of the time, but once in a while, she would say something rather harsh.”

“Harsh? Like what?”

“I can’t remember any specific word,” I told her crisply, almost curtly, urging her on at a steadily accelerating pace.

“You don’t remember any particular episode of harsh treatment?” Rebecca asked.

“No.”

“Did Laura act this way in your father’s presence?”

“No. Never.”

“And you said that this change occurred about a month or so after you got back from Cape Cod?”

“Yes.”

“In early October then?”

I nodded.

Rebecca wrote the date down in her notebook. “But your father didn’t change, is that right?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Do you recall any particular incident between them? Some special act of kindness?”

“No.”

Rebecca continued to pursue the point. “Did anything at all strike you as different in your family during this time?”

“No.”

“So as far as you know, nothing at all changed in the family during the month before the murders?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

And yet, as I sat there, responding to Rebecca’s questions with clipped, one-word answers, I could nonetheless feel the slowly building sense of doom that had begun to invade those final days. A heaviness had descended upon us, as if the house at 417 McDonald Drive had been filled with a thick, transparent gelatin through which Laura, Jamie, my mother, and even my father moved slowly and trudgingly, like weary, exhausted creatures, struggling to draw what were their final breaths. One by one, each of them isolated from the other, I saw them all a final time: Jamie, embittered by successive waves of rejection, entombed behind the closed door of his room; Laura slouched sullenly in the wicker chair of the solarium; my mother in her bed behind the tightly drawn floral curtains, a bomb already lit inside her brain; and finally my father, alone now in the basement, bereft, solitary and morose, slowly turning forward the thin black wheel. They had all been dying during those last weeks, I realized, like flowers past their season.

It began to rain, and Rebecca rose and closed the window. “And so everything remained the same up until the last day?” she asked as she returned to her seat.

“The last day,” I repeated, remembering it now as fully as I thought I ever would.

“It was raining,” I said.

It was raining, and had been raining for days. The lawns along McDonald Drive were brown and soggy. Rain battered against the windowpanes of our rooms and thumped down loudly against the mock Tudor gables. The white cords of the basketball net hung limply in a gray, sodden web. The day before, my mother had hung our laundry beneath a bright mid-morning sun, but now, drenched and rain-beaten, it drooped heavily toward the saturated ground. Alone among all our clothes, only my sister’s bra had been set free by a sudden burst of wind. It lay in a mangled, mud-spattered pile beneath a line of bathroom towels.

“Did everything seem normal that morning?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, everything seemed ‘normal,’” I said evenly, almost choking on the word. “We were all back to normal on that last day,” I said bitterly, my voice coming through nearly clenched teeth. “Maybe that’s what my father couldn’t bear.”

I saw Rebecca’s face stiffen. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe that’s why he killed them,” I said coldly. “Because the kind of life they represented made him sick.”

Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of life are you talking about, Steve?” she asked, but warily, as if she were closing in on a dangerous animal she’d studied and knew well.

“A pinched, little life,” I said, brutally, the raw edge of my own vast discontent piercing through the mask behind which I’d hidden so long. “A dull, stupid life, with nothing in it that lifted him, that gave him hope, that had some possibility of escape.”

Rebecca’s face filled with recognition. “Escape from what?” she asked.

“From them” I blurted. “From the way they were killing him before he decided to take it by the balls … and kill them instead.”

The words seemed to hit her like bullets. She drew away from me, her eyes glaring fiercely. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she closed her notebook with an abrupt finality.

“I think we can end it here,” she said, in a steely voice, her tone beyond any feeble gesture I might make at either apology or explanation.

I started to speak, but she rose instantly, walked to the door, and jerked it open. “I’ll send you all the materials I’ve collected on the case,” she said tensely.

I remained in my chair, my own last words washing over me like a hot wave.

“Rebecca, I …”

She remained at the door, her body rigid. “I’ll also send you a copy of the book,” she added.

I knew that all she might have felt for me before that moment—respect, esteem, perhaps even some affection—had been reduced to this single, brutal and explosive kernel. She’d seen the face of “these men” in my face, and there was no way for me to creep back into my former self.

And so I nodded to her as I passed, saw her eyes dart away, then stepped out into the rain.