The Night Remembers

39

My first impression was that he was dead, George Pennyfeather. He had been lashed to a straight-back chair with plastic-covered clothesline, and the side of his head smashed in with something of reasonable size and heft. As I bent down to untie his hands, I saw tossed away by the coffee table a piece of alloy that was probably a decorator paperweight of some kind. One corner of it was a gelatinous red, with hair covering the mucus-like blood.

As the clothesline came off, he groaned a few words that were unintelligible. His eyes rolled white and then closed again.

A small man, he was easy enough to get to the couch, where I helped him lie down. From the sink I grabbed a towel that I soaked in warm water, placing it carefully across his forehead. In one of the kitchen cabinets I found a half-filled fifth of Old Grand-Dad. I poured him a strong shot of it and brought it back to him.

Swallowing, he coughed, and when he coughed you could see the effects of the pain work like lightning across his head. He cursed, which I’d never heard him do before, and he stared at me with what seemed to be a mixture of gratitude and anger.

“Paul’s dead,” I said. “Somebody shot him.”

I’d fixed him so finally in my mind as this weak, soft-spoken little man that his anger was all the more startling. “I should have known what happened and shot him myself a long time ago,” he said. His fury gave him momentary strength.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He tried to sit up. The pain from his head wound paralyzed him at midpoint, just after he’d tried to put his feet down on the floor. “Sonofabitch,” he said.

“Just sit back. I’ll get you some more whiskey.”

He watched me for a long moment, as if trying to literally read my mind, and then he said, in the soft, almost plaintive voice I usually associated with him, “Maybe he’ll come back and kill me, too. I deserve it.”

“Who’ll come back and kill you?”

“My son, David.”

“David killed Paul?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“Because they all knew what had happened and nobody did anything about.”

“The child pornography, you mean?”

“That and what Paul had done to him.”

“I still don’t understand.”

He waved his empty glass at me. I stepped over to the cupboard and got him more whiskey. Some of it spilled on my hand. The tart, inviting smell made me want some. I knew I’d better put it off till later.

After taking a long drink, he said, “Do you remember Lisa and me telling you that Paul — our good family friend — used to take David on fishing trips up here?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t get to the real subject, at first. He was more interested in punishing himself. “You know, I should never have had a son. I had nothing to teach a son. I was just this mousy little man who was fortunate enough to inherit a small amount of money and to marry into an even larger amount of money.” He stared over at the fireplace. It was dead inside and smelled of ashes. “He told me what happened. That’s why he insisted I drive out here with him. So he could tell me everything. I went berserk and he tied me up.”

“You’re talking about Paul?”

“Yes. He came over to the house this morning. He looked almost crazy. I guess all these years finally wore him down.”

“Why did he want to come out here?”

“Because this is where it happened, I suppose.”

“Where what happened?”

His jaw set. His fingers tightened on the glass until his knuckles were white. “Where he molested David when David was ten years old. Paul said he couldn’t take the guilt any longer. And he said he knows who the killer is. He feels responsible for that, too.”

He started crying. They were quiet tears, nothing dramatic, but you could tell the toll they took by the way the glass dropped from his hand, as if he had no more strength to hold it. “I didn’t know till this morning,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

I went over and poured a drink for myself in a coffee cup. It tasted much better than I’d wanted it to. I had a second.

Pennyfeather held the towel to his wound. His eyes were closed. He didn’t open them when he spoke. “Looking back now, I can see all the hints David tried to give me over the years. How angry he’d get about Paul for no reason. How he’d tell me that he hated Paul and wished I’d get another job. And so he paid us back, starting with Jankov.”

“Why Jankov?”

“Because when Jankov found out what Paul had done, he started blackmailing Paul. David decided to kill everybody who knew but who did nothing about it. There’s this great — rage — over what happened to him.”

“He let you go to prison.”

He opened his eyes. “He was punishing me. And I deserved it. He’d reached out to me for help and I hadn’t been bright enough to read the signs.”

“So everybody who died knew what Paul had done to David?”

“Yes. We were all — in one way or another, we were all accomplices. Jankov and Stella Czmek tried to cash in on what had happened to David — and Paul and Richard had tried to cover it up.” He drank some more whiskey. “He’s never gotten over it. I know that now. It — changed him forever. He was always so worried about being manly and now I know why.” He gazed off in the direction where Paul Heckart lay in the snow. “I only wish I’d had the chance to kill Paul myself. I would have done it.” He looked back at me. “I really would have. If I’d known.”

“I believe you.”

“Now we’d better find David.”

I took the last of my whiskey so reverently you would have thought it was altar wine. “I’m going alone.”

“He’s my son.”

“He’s apt to be calmer if I’m alone.”

“I don’t want him to die.”

“I don’t either.”

“You think you can convince him to give himself up?”

“I can try.”

He started crying again, those soft tears of failure and regret that burn like acid inside the mind forever.

I buttoned my coat, tugged on my gloves, put my .38 in my right hand, and set off.