SIXTY-SIX
Donna
raised the canister to within six inches of Phyllis’ startled face and let loose. The spray, which took my breath away when she sprayed it too close to me in the house, completely clouded Phyllis’ mouth and nose and eyes.
She screamed, then gasped for air.
The gun was coming up, but before she could aim it anywhere, I was on my feet, grabbing her right forearm with both hands and slamming it against the windowsill.
Phyllis held on to the gun. I slammed her wrist again, much harder this time, against the sill, and the gun clattered out of her hand. Donna was still spraying. It was like her hand had gone into spasm, was frozen into position.
Phyllis coughed and hacked and clawed at her face with both her hands. But once her fingers touched her cheeks, they became adhered to them, and she struggled to pull them away.
I went for Donna’s arm, steered it away from Phyllis’ face. “It’s okay,” I said. “Nice going.”
She threw the can to the floor and put her arms around my neck. “Oh God oh God.”
As much as I wanted to hold her, I broke free to get Phyllis’ gun before she dropped down and started patting around to find it. Something she might have been inclined to try the moment she got her hands unstuck from her face.
Phyllis was screeching.
Donna had moved to the window. “Cal,” she said. “Ricky’s coming.”
I bolted out the front door, grabbing my Glock from the table in the hall along the way. The moment I was outside I glanced up the street.
Even if he couldn’t make out exactly what he was seeing from where he was parked, Ricky must have noticed some commotion in the window as I struggled with his mother. Now he was out of the truck, coming our way, gun in hand.
The front door to the house that was closest to his truck flew open and Augie charged out.
“Haines!” he bellowed. “Haines!”
Ricky glanced back, saw Augie, but kept on going. “Freeze!” Augie shouted, but Ricky was not about to follow orders from his chief right now.
There was the sense that all hell was breaking loose.
Feeling exposed, I charged toward Phyllis’ car for cover. I dropped to the ground near the rear bumper, my knee just missing the puddle that I now had little doubt was blood.
I had a pretty good idea what—who—was in that trunk.
There was screaming coming from the front door of my house. I glanced that way, saw Phyllis Pearce stumble out. Her hands were free but her face was streaked with blood where her fingers had pulled away skin. Donna appeared in the doorway behind her, still holding the gun, but raising her arm in a gesture of futility, as if to say, “I couldn’t shoot her.”
Ricky was nearly to Phyllis’ car. Still on one knee, I raised my weapon over the trunk and yelled at him: “Stop!”
Ricky raised his gun and fired.
I dropped down behind the car. There was another shot. I couldn’t be sure, but I guessed it was Augie, trying to stop Ricky.
Haines ran past the end of the car, turned the gun in my direction, fired wildly, missing me. Then he stopped, pivoted, aimed the gun back at Augie. I raised my head, saw my brother-in-law running this way.
Raised the Glock, aimed for the center of Ricky’s body, and pulled the trigger.
Once.
Twice.
Ricky staggered back as though he’d been hit with an invisible sandbag. He dropped left, put out an arm to break his fall, but by the time his palm hit pavement it offered no resistance. He crumpled into a heap.
Augie was on him a second later, stomping on the hand that still clung to the gun. Haines didn’t move.
Phyllis ran past me, screaming, fell to her knees at her son’s side, threw her arms around him and began to weep. Augie bent over, pried the gun from Haines’ dead fingers, and started to walk toward me.
He had a sudden look of alarm on his face. He was looking past me.
I spun around.
Donna was standing ten feet away, looking down, her hand pressed to her stomach, where there was a growing dark blotch.
Donna eyes met mine as she said, “Something’s wrong, Cal. I think something’s wrong.”
TWO
WEEKS
LATER
SIXTY-SEVEN
Phyllis
Pearce lived, and the story came out. About how one night her son had cracked a chair across Harry Pearce’s back, then thrown him down the stairs. How they had covered up the crime, faked his death, and looked after him for seven years.
The rest we more or less knew.
Phyllis faced a raft of charges, including the unlawful confinement and murder of her husband, Harry Pearce. Even though she hadn’t actually strangled Hanna Rodomski, or shot Dennis Mullavey, she was charged as an accessory in those crimes, too.
Patchett’s was up for sale.
Augustus Perry submitted his resignation as Griffon’s chief of police, and Bert Sanders accepted it. Augie believed the actions of Officer Ricky Haines reflected so badly on his own leadership that he had no moral authority to continue leading the department. He was talking about moving to Florida with Beryl.
He wanted to put Griffon behind him as much as I did. We both carried a heavy burden from this place.
We were damaged men.
Haines wasn’t going to be facing a trial, of course. When they brought him into Emergency he had no vital signs. I think he may have been dead before he hit the pavement.
I’d never wanted to kill a man, but I was having a hard time working up any sense of remorse for what I’d done. First of all, I did it because Haines was firing at my brother-in-law.
So it was, as they say, justifiable.
But there was something else going through my head in the initial moments after I’d pulled the trigger twice.
This is for Scott
.
What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t for another few seconds, was that it was for Donna, too.
It was that one wild round Haines got off when he ran past the end of the car. The bullet had ripped past me, past Phyllis Pearce, and found a home in Donna’s stomach.
I’d told her to stay in the house.
I’d told her.
Things had been looking so good, minutes earlier. I thought Phyllis had done something to Donna’s wrist, but she’d been holding it to keep the fixative from sliding out of the sleeve of my sweater.
Clever.
There have been some who’ve suggested, as horrible as it was, that maybe I should find some small comfort in the fact that Donna went quickly.
People say a lot of astonishingly stupid things when they’re trying to console you, and it can be hard to accept that they mean well. I suppose they think, in the overall scheme of things, in the course of a lifetime, that five minutes is quick.
It’s not.
Not when you are easing your wife gently down to the ground, rolling up your jacket to put under her head for a pillow, applying pressure to the wound, telling her that things are going to be okay, waiting to hear the siren of an approaching ambulance, wondering what’s taking it so long to get here, getting down on your knees and touching her hair and her face and telling her you love her and that she just has to hang in, that help is coming soon, putting your head close to her mouth so you can hear her whisper that she loves you, too, that she is scared, that she wants to know what it is you wanted to tell her, and you say you can’t wait to ride the cable cars, that as soon as she’s okay we’re going to go away, and she says that sounds nice, but she still doesn’t have anything to wear, and also doesn’t feel too good, and you tell her she’s going to be okay, that the ambulance is almost here even though you still don’t hear it, and she finds the strength to raise one hand and touch it to your cheek, and she says now it doesn’t even hurt that much, and that she’s not all that scared after all, that things really are going to be okay, and you tell her again to be quiet, to just hang in, and her hand comes away from your cheek and falls to her breast and her eyes go glassy and you finally hear the ambulance coming but it doesn’t matter anymore.
Five minutes. Long time.
SIXTY-EIGHT
More
people turned out for the funeral than I might have expected. At least a hundred. Donna was more loved by her colleagues, and the entire Griffon Police Service, than she ever would have imagined.
I knew Augie would show up—it was his sister, after all—but I was still surprised when I saw him walk into the church with Beryl. I wasn’t surprised by his attendance, but by how quickly the events of the past few days had worn on him. His wife was a sapling next to Augie’s oaklike stature, but she seemed to be propping him up as they made their way to a pew.
It was blame and guilt eating us all up, like a cancer. Mayor Bert Sanders was feeling it, too. He had to be asking himself why he hadn’t kept a closer eye on Claire, why he’d been so easily duped when she’d said she was going to see her mother in Canada.
Annette Ravelson showed up, too, along with her husband, Kent. She made a point of not sitting anywhere near Mayor Bert Sanders.
I was relieved when Sanders offered to say a few words about Donna. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together, and when I’d asked Augie if he wanted to say anything, he could only shake his head.
“Darkness has visited our town,” he said. “It has touched us all, but it has touched some more than others, and we mourn for them.” He was speaking, of course, about Hanna as well.
But not Ricky.
Instead of offering up one of those “insert name here” kind of eulogies, Sanders had asked around about Donna, particularly among her coworkers, and pulled together a brief, touching portrait of a woman who had already lost so much.
Besides the minister, there was one other speaker: a woman Donna’d kept in touch with over the years, and who’d gone all through public and high school with her. She uttered some nice platitudes. At least, I’m told they were nice. I’d stopped listening by that point. I was imagining being someplace else. Someplace with Donna and Scott. How I ached, sitting in that church, to believe in the tenets that had led to its construction. I had little expectation that I would find myself reunited with them one day.
The Skillings came. Sean, of course, had been released from jail, within twenty-four hours of Donna’s death. His parents were threatening a massive lawsuit that included the town of Griffon and Augie personally. I was betting the Rodomskis would get in on that.
They’d do what they had to do.
Then the service was over, and people were filing out of church, offering their condolences.
I was surprised to see Fritz Brott, owner of the butcher shop. He took my hand in his and squeezed.
“Read about this in the paper,” he said. “So sorry about your loss.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to call you. I made a promise to someone a few days ago.”
“Tony,” Fritz said.
“That’s right. Tony Fisk. I found myself in a situation . . . and he helped me out. I promised him I’d speak to you, ask you to maybe reconsider, give him another chance. I didn’t promise him I’d be successful, but that I’d at least make the pitch.”
Fritz nodded knowingly. “He came to see me.”
“He did?”
“Came in, maybe the day after you saw him. Said you were going to come talk to me, that you were going to make me give him his job back.”
“No,” I said. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“I figured, and told him so. And then he took out a gun and started waving it around and called me a bunch of names and for a second there I thought he was going to shoot me.”
I felt my heart sinking. “No.”
“After he left, I called the police. He’s been arrested. Tony’s in jail right now.”
You don’t think you can feel any sadder. But you can.
Fritz moved on, and a few more people stopped and shook hands, but I couldn’t tell you who they were or what they said. I believed Tony Fisk had some good in him, but not enough to keep him from being a hothead.
Then Sean stopped, along with his parents. They all shook hands with me, said the things people are supposed to say at a time like that, and moved on. But then Sean held back.
“Could I talk to you for a minute?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean, private like?”
I put my hand on his shoulder and steered him back into the church, which was now empty.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“Well, first, I just want say thanks again,” he said. “For getting me out of jail.”
“It wasn’t really me,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I guess, but it was you, finding Claire and everything, that made it happen.”
I waited to hear what it was he really wanted to tell me. He was looking at his shoes, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit pants. The jacket was tight around his shoulders. The suit probably fit him six months ago, but he was at that age where he was having his final growth spurts.
“There’s something I gotta say,” he said.
“Something you don’t want to tell me in front of your parents.”
“Yeah, I guess. But maybe you’re going to tell them anyway, and if you do, I guess I have to live with that. But you’ve been good to me, and I think I owe you the truth.”
“What is it, Sean?”
He licked his lips, then lifted up his head to look me in the eye. “It was me. I did it.”
I leaned my head in closer to him and put a hand on each shoulder, as much to steady myself as anything. What the hell was he talking about? There was no doubt Haines had killed Hanna, that he’d planted Hanna’s clothes in Sean’s truck. Phyllis Pearce had confirmed those details since her arrest.
So what was Sean talking about?
“Sean, what are you saying? You killed Hanna?”
He shook his head violently and his eyes went wide. “God, no, I didn’t do that. No way. I loved Hanna. I just wish I’d gotten there in time, picked her up before . . .” He shook his head sadly and looked down again.
“Then what are you—”
And then it hit me.
“Scott,” I said, dropping my hands from his shoulders.
He lifted his head slowly and nodded. Tears were welling up in his eyes. “A couple of days before he, you know, I had some X. Sometimes, when Hanna and I would go around delivering beer and collecting money for it, you’d get the odd asshole who didn’t have the cash. This one guy, he wanted to pay Hanna with a couple of tabs, and she let him, and got back in the car with the X, and I told her she was an idiot, that Roman wasn’t going to take anything except cash and we were going to have to make up the difference, and I thought of Scott, because I knew it was his thing, and I got hold of him and he said, yeah, he’d take them off my hands.”
Sean looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I was too numbed by the day to offer one.
So he continued, “I don’t even know if he was on the stuff I sold him when he jumped. I wasn’t the only guy he got it from. But I know it’s possible it was me.” A tear ran down each of his cheeks. “I’m so sorry. If you want to hit me or something, like, I’m okay with that. I’ll tell my parents why you had to do it. I’ve got it coming. But I’m sorry, Mr. Weaver. God, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not going to hit you,” I said.
“I just—I just, I don’t know why I did it.” He sobbed quietly. “I could have just made up the difference with my own money, you know? And thrown the shit out. I should have flushed it or something. But I was thinking . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.”
His shoulders began to shake. I raised my arms tentatively, then put them around him and pulled the boy to me. I held him close, tightened my arms around him as he wept into my chest.
I felt Donna watching me as I did. Felt it was what she would want me to do.
“Everyone’s done some pretty dumb things lately,” I said.
I felt him slip his arms around my back. “I hate myself,” Scott said. “I hate myself so much.”
We all hated ourselves these days.
Holding Sean, this boy about the same age and size as Scott, I could almost imagine he was my own. I remembered the feeling of taking him into my arms, of the father-son hugs we once shared.
If I forgave Sean, would I be forgiving Scott, too, for what he’d put us through? And wasn’t there less to forgive Scott for, anyway, than what I’d once believed?
“It’s okay,” I whispered again. “It’s okay.”
Because I no longer believed Scott jumped. I knew, in my heart, he was pushed.
Thrown.
And there was one person I was now ready to talk to, in hopes that she might be able to shed some light on what happened that night.
* * *
Her
name was Rhonda McIntyre.
I’d first heard it when I got a ride home with Annette Ravelson the night I’d found her in Bert Sanders’ bedroom. Annette said she’d been one of the mayor’s other flings, and she’d also been seeing a Griffon cop who didn’t know she had a thing going on with Bert. I remembered Annette saying Rhonda had broken it off with the cop, that she’d found him kind of “freaky.”
That cop had turned out to be Ricky Haines. Her name had come up as the Griffon police did a full investigation into his background. They’d found her e-mail address on his home computer, and in his phone.
When she broke things off with Haines, which was around the time she’d also stopped seeing the mayor, she quit her job at Ravelson and moved back in with her family in Erie.
I wanted to talk to her.
So I drove to Erie. I did the trip in just under an hour and a half. I’d gone back to Cayuga Lake one day, turned in my rented Subaru, and gotten my Honda back from the cottage where Dennis and Claire had been hiding out.
Rhonda McIntyre was living with her parents in a beautiful lakeside house on Saybrook Place, just west of the industrial city’s downtown. I didn’t call first. I had no idea whether she would want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to disappear.
I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping Haines might have told her something, if not actually confided in her, some of the details surrounding Scott’s plunge off the roof of Ravelson Furniture.
Maybe, I thought, if she had some idea of what he’d done, it was the reason she’d broken things off with him and gone back to the safety of her family.
I found the house behind a tall, well-manicured hedge that shielded the McIntyres from the prying eyes of passersby. I drove up the long, paved drive and parked within steps of the front door.
A handsome woman in her fifties answered. “Mrs. McIntyre?” I said. When she nodded, I told her who I was, and that I was here to speak with Rhonda.
“About all this sordid mess,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“It might be easier talking to me than the police,” I said. An implied threat that sometimes worked.
This time, it did the trick.
She led me through the house to a sunroom at the back that looked out over Lake Erie. The sky was overcast, and there was a north wind raising whitecaps. I could feel cold drafts of air sneaking their way around the windows.
“I’ll get Rhonda,” she said.
Moments later, a small, wispy woman of twenty-five entered the room anxiously, her mother right behind her.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Rhonda,” I said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot your name,” the mother said.
“Weaver,” I said. “Cal Weaver.”
Rhonda blinked. Her anxiety level appeared to have taken a jump. I thought it would be easier for her to talk to me without her mother present.
“Mrs. McIntyre, would you mind if your daughter and I spoke privately?”
“Well, I think I need to be here if—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Rhonda said. “I’ll be okay.”
The woman withdrew reluctantly. Rhonda and I sat in white wicker chairs with puffy yellow-flowered cushions.
“You should have called ahead,” she said.
“Rhonda, we know an awful lot now about Ricky, and his mother, and what they’d been up to for more than a decade. But there are still a few gaps in what we know—in what I would like to know—and I know that for a while there you were going out with Ricky.”
She became defensive. “We went out a few times, but I could never . . . I was never really all that serious. There were things not right with him.”
I waited.
“First of all, this relationship with his mom, it was kind of sick, you know? He was always trying to please her, always rushing over to the house. Of course, I sort of get now why he was always there, because he was helping his mom look after his stepdad, in the basement there. I mean, that kind of explained a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d never take me to his mother’s house. I mean, he wanted me to meet his mother once, but we did it at a coffee shop. We never went out to her place. One time, I was going by there and saw Ricky’s pickup in the driveway, so I turned in and knocked on the door, just figuring I’d say hello, and he came out on the porch and went crazy on me.”
“They couldn’t take a chance of anyone going inside,” I said.
“No kidding. But there was more. He was like two people. He could pretend to be all nice when it suited him, but underneath, he didn’t really feel anything. Except maybe anger. Sometimes you could tell it was just simmering under the surface. I don’t think he ever understood what it meant to be someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, to be in someone else’s shoes. He had no, you know, empathy. Everything was about how it felt to him. He didn’t care if he hurt you—like, your feelings, mostly—because he didn’t feel the hurt himself. Except where his crazy mother was concerned. She could hurt him. Like I said, he was always worried about pleasing her.”
Rhonda looked out over Lake Erie.
“I really don’t see how I can help you,” she said. “That’s really all I have to say.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not really here about any of that. I’m here about a more personal matter.”
Her head moved ever so slightly in my direction. “What sort of personal matter?”
“My son. I had a son named Scott. A couple of months ago, he died. Maybe you heard about that.”
Rhonda nodded. “Of course. I was still working at Ravelson Furniture then. Everybody felt just awful about it. He was a nice boy.”