Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake - Страница 29

I opened the door. A little masked boy dressed up as Zorro pointed a gun at me. His sister was an angel — a small white bathrobe, cardboard wings, and a halo of silver tinsel. A calamitous-faced man in a brown raincoat stood behind them, holding an umbrella — Walter. Why are you —

"Give me candy or I’ll shootcha," John David said. The four-year-old’s blond hair poked out from under the black bandanna. His mask was crooked, so that he could see through only one of the eye-holes, but he maintained the disguise. "I’ll shootcha," he warned again, and before I could speak, he pulled the trigger. As the plastic hammer clicked again and again, I cringed with the impact of each bullet. Stumbling back into the foyer, I dropped to my knees.

"Why, John David, why?" I gasped, holding my belly as I crumpled down onto the floor, careful that my Glock didn’t fall out. John David giggled.

"Look, Dad, I got him. I’m a go see if he’s dead."

"No, J.D.," Walter said as I resurrected. "Don’t go in the house."

I walked back to the door, caught Walter’s eyes, and looked down at the seven-year-old angel.

"You look beautiful, Jenna," I said. "Did you make your costume?"

"At school today I did," she said. "You like my wand?" She held up a long pixie stick with a glittery cardboard star glued to the end.

"Take a walk with us," Walter said. "I left the car by the mailbox."

"Let me see if I can find some candy for —"

He rustled the trash bag in his right hand. "They’ve got plenty of candy. Come on." I put on a pair of boots, grabbed a jacket and an umbrella from the coat closet, and locked the door behind me as I stepped outside.

The four of us walked down the sidewalk, and when we reached the driveway, Walter handed his umbrella to Jenna. "Sweetie, I want you and J.D. to walk a little ahead of us, okay?"

"Why, Daddy?"

"I have to talk to Uncle Andy."

She took the umbrella. "You have to come with me, J.D.," she said, bossing her brother.

"Nooooo!"

"Go with her, son. We’ll be right behind you." Jenna rushed on ahead, and John David ran after her and ducked under the umbrella. They laughed, their small buoyant voices filling the woods. His toy gun fired three times.

Walter stepped under my umbrella, and we started up the drive, the tall loblollies on either side of us. I waited for him to speak as the rain drummed on the canopy. The night smelled of wet pine.

"Beth’s packing," he whispered. "She’s taking the kids away."

"Where?"

"I told her not to tell me."

"She knows about —"

"No. She knows the children are in danger. That’s all she needs to know."

"Stoppit!" John David yelled at his sister.

"Kids!" Walter shouted gruffly. "Behave."

"Dad, Jenna —"

"I don’t wanna hear it, son."

I wondered where Walter’s anger toward me had gone.

"Do you really know where he is, Andy?" he whispered.

"I’ve got a possible alias in New England. Now, I can’t be sure until I get there, but I think it’s him."

"So you’re definitely going?"

"Yeah."

He stopped and faced me. "You’re going there to kill him? To put him in a hole somewhere, where no one’s ever gonna find him?"

"That’s the plan."

"And you have no compunctions about killing your own brother?"

"None."

We started walking again. I had an awful premonition.

"You’ve called the police, haven’t you?" I said.

"What?"

"You told them about Orson."

"No, Andy."

"But you’re going to."

He shook his head.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Come here, Jenna!" Walter hollered. His children turned around and ran back to us, their umbrella so low, I couldn’t see them. Walter took his umbrella from Jenna and lifted it up.

"Jenna, show Uncle Andy the tattoo you got at school."

"Oh yeah!" she said, remembering. "Look, Andy, isn’t it cool?"

Jenna raised the sleeve of her robe and held up the delicate underside of her right forearm. My knees weakened. In pink Magic Marker, scribbled from her elbow to her tiny wrist:

W – Shhhhh. O

I looked up at Walter. His eyes flooded.

"All right, kids." He smiled through it. "Here. Go on ahead now. Let us talk." Jenna took the umbrella and she and John David ran ahead as we continued on, the mailbox not far ahead.

"She had it when she came home from school," Walter said. "Beth noticed it when they were putting on her costume. Fuckin’ teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jenna said a nice man was drawing tattoos on all the kids at their Halloween carnival. She hadn’t seen him before."

"Jesus, Walter. I am —"

"I don’t want your apologies or your pity," he whispered. "I’m going with you. That’s what I came to tell you. We’re gonna bury Orson together."

The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. "So when are you leaving?" he asked.

"A day or two. I’ve gotta go before my mother’s discovered."

His eyes softened. "Andy, I want you to know that I am s —"

"And I don’t need your pity," I said. "It won’t help either of us do what we have to do."

He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.

21

THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he’d designed a collage out of photographs, all taken in the sickly orange light of his shed. There was a head shot of Shirley Tanner’s boot-bruised face; a full body shot of Jeff in a hole in the desert; Wilbur on red plastic from the waist up — inside out.

Below the colorful collage, scrawled in Orson’s unmistakable hand: "What do you get for the guy who has it all?" On the inside he’d written, "Not a goddamn thing. A big happy birthday from Shirley and the Gang."

Woodside is a foothill community in midwestern Vermont, isolated from the major cities of the North by the Green Mountains in the east and New York’s Adirondacks in the west. On an autumn day, it’s quintessential American countryside, breathtaking in its open vistas of rolling hills, endless mountain chains, and a quaint college town tucked into a vale.

According to the gas station attendant, we were three weeks late. Then the forests had been burning with the brightest color in thirty years. Now, the leaves brown and dead, few remained on the trees, and the blue sky gleamed awkwardly against the winter bleakness of the countryside. Vermont in November smacked of the same stiff beauty as dolling up a corpse for its wake.

Beyond the outskirts of Woodside, on the fringe of the Green Mountains, Walter and I approached the inn. Heading up a long, curving driveway, I saw a large white house perched halfway up the mountain. There was movement on its wraparound porch — empty rocking chairs swaying in a raw breeze.

Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson’s town. We’d almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.