All the Things You Are (38 page)

Mr Wilson pats the left side pocket of his navy gabardine blazer, feels the reassuring lightweight heft of the Ruger Compact .38 revolver Carl Brenner acquired for him. He has never shot anyone before, but doesn't feel it's going to be too arduous a task. Carl kindly provided a former Navy Seal to give him some elementary training in the use of firearms. All he has to do is present Charlie with the money, which the Irishman always insists on counting, and that will give Mr Wilson enough time to draw his weapon. And that will be that.

From his right side pocket, he takes the letter he received this morning. It's from a woman who claims she's his sister, Claire Bradberry, the only child to have survived the fire in his family home in Madison all those years ago. She alludes to having known Mr Wilson's most recent client, and is insistent that they should meet. She seems to believe that the coincidence of their common blood has some importance, and merits further elaboration.

Mr Wilson shakes his head, and screws the paper into a ball and clenches it in his fist. What kind of country does she think she's living in? A country where the accident of one's birth has any significance? It has taken him all the momentum and will he was capable of summoning to become the man he is now. Why would he want to jeopardize that now with even a backward glance?

Mr Wilson has nothing to do with who he was. He is all about who he is about to become. He knows that's the only person worth being. It's what the country was founded upon, for God's sake.

He puts the ‘Prelude' to Wagner's
Parsifal
on the Bose CD player, turns up the volume, sits back, and waits for Charlie T to arrive.

Millamant:
And d'ye hear, I won't be called names after I'm married; positively I won't be called names.

Mirabell:
Names?

Millamant:
Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweet-heart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar – I shall never bear that. Good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis; nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and whispers, and then never be seen there together again, as if we were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us be very strange and well-bred. Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

William Congreve –
The Way of the World

Christmas Eve

T
he cold days and weeks trudged by until they were deep into the bleak Madison midwinter. The Brogan children were shaken by their ordeal, and each dealt with it differently: Irene explicitly, with a lot of crying and talking and clinging; Barbara internally, her already-evident mood swings swelling and darkening. Some days, she'd still seem her ingenuous, sweet-natured, bubbly self; others, it was as if she'd become possessed by a nineteen-year-old runaway who'd seen too much too soon, and had lost her faith in human nature, in the future, in life itself. They were both attending counselors and psychologists, and were thought to be progressing as well as could be expected. And of course, everyone spoiled them within an inch of their lives, until Danny and Claire worried alternately that they would emerge permanently scarred by their ordeal, and that they'd morph into some unholy simulacrum of the Kardashian sisters.

There were the funerals to get through: Ralph Cowley's, and Jeff Torrance's, and Officer Colby's, and of course, Donna Brogan's, the only one the girls attended. Apart, that is, from Mr Smith's. Mr Smith was buried in the backyard of the burnt ruin on Arboretum Avenue that was no longer theirs, the afternoon before the first heavy snowfall, and there was a week or two afterward when no one in the Brogan family could be guaranteed to get through the day without breaking down in tears, as if the trauma of everything that had been done to them rested in one small dog's carcass. They would get a new dog in the spring, and at least that was something everyone could look forward to.

The insurance company came to a settlement over the house on Arboretum Avenue. This just about enabled Danny to pay off the mortgage he had taken out when he thought he deserved to be rich. For now, they're all living above the store, in the few cramped rooms over Brogan's Bar and Grill. They're starting again. It's not easy, but it's never dull.

The police investigations were complicated. Nora Fox worked patiently with Barbara and Irene to create a photofit picture of the man who murdered Donna Brogan, while Danny and Claire were able to identify his accent as Irish. It was only a matter of time before the FBI got involved, and they soon had a new addition to their Top Ten Most Wanted: Charles Toland, an undocumented alien from Belfast in Ireland, understood to be a former member of the Provisional IRA. DNA smears on the girls' wrists, swabbed the night of the fire, matched with skin particles found on the Sabatier knife used to kill Ralph Cowley, and with a hair coiled around the Miraculous Medal Nora Fox found at the scene. When this DNA profile was added to the Bureau's CODIS database, it matched material discovered at a crime scene in a riverside apartment in Chicago. The body of a man in his fifties by the name of Wilson had been found after an anonymous tip-off, having apparently shot himself in the head with a Ruger .38. CPD forensic investigators quickly became suspicious of the quantity and nature of liquid discharge on the corpse's face. It soon emerged that a third party's saliva was present. This saliva was Charles Toland's, and was consistent with his having murdered Mr Wilson and spat in his face.

For a while, it looked like the Madison captain of police wanted to re-open the Bradberry fire inquiry and press charges against Danny and Gene for conspiracy, but the district attorney's office decided there wasn't enough there to make a case – too much time had elapsed, for one thing. And given Dave's evident psychosis, it would be fruitless attempting to link him with such blameless and productive citizens as Gene Peterson and Danny Brogan. Gene and Danny were voluble in their regret for having been involved in a Halloween prank that had gone so tragically wrong, but it was felt that any kind of prosecution would not only be impractical but unjust and would probably open more wounds than it would heal. And who wants to persecute someone for something they did when they were eleven? That might fly in Texas, but it's not how it works in Madison.

And of course, the press (and with its macabre Halloween theme, it was a story that went national, and international, went
viral
) very quickly settled on a narrative that dovetailed with the decisions of the police and DA's departments: Dave Ricks, the artistic psycho; Ralph Cowley, the mild mannered failure whose unpublished novel revealed at least the partial truth; Danny Brogan and Gene Peterson, the blameless survivors of bullying and blackmail.

There were retrospective photo spreads of the Bradberry funerals, and the briefest of accounts of the two brothers, amounting to a factual assertion that they had existed. There was much focus on Dee St Clair, formerly Claire Bradberry: one strand of opinion branded her a femme fatale and a woman scorned; another defended her as a victim-survivor. She has joined Charles Toland on the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list. Although no relationship existed between them, they are invariably discussed as a couple, a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde. The FBI receives multiple daily sightings of the pair together, from every state in the union. A rap song and three heavy metal tracks have been written about them. They are the most Googled people in the United States.

The scores of paintings Dave Ricks had made over the years of the Bradberry children trapped in their burning house were subjected to endless analysis by forensic psychiatrists, university fine-art professors and that brand of pop psychologist known as the newspaper columnist.

Yet Dave's motives remain opaque. Danny worked it over and over in his mind, what he had done and what he had failed to do to be the object of Dave's obsession. In the end he couldn't get much further than Gene Peterson's verdict, delivered in Gene's blunt, square-jawed, Mid-Western manner: ‘You know what, Dan? There was just something wrong with that guy.'

There's a guilt that Danny should never have had to feel, but the truth remains: it had been his idea to prank the Bradberry house, his idea to set the fires. Even if the press and the justice system think otherwise, he knows he bears a share of the responsibility for those deaths. He still wakes up in the middle of the night with the vision of Barbara and Irene in the window, a vision that telescopes back through time to the Bradberry house. He knows the paintings Dave made speak to his guilt, but that wasn't the whole story. Dave had caused the fire, but that didn't absolve Danny of blame, and it never would: he will carry it to his grave.

Danny and Claire remain haunted by Dee St Clair: Claire, by the friend who wasn't really a friend, but who she misses as if she had been; Danny, because who knows how little Claire Bradberry might have turned out if it hadn't been for him? They are exhausted with themselves and with each other; quick to tears and to anger and to recrimination; often unable to decide, or even to remember, what had happened for real and what was invented, concocted to lay them low. Claire sometimes feels as if she
is
Claire Bradberry, so insidious was the deception, and that Danny had betrayed her all along.

And then gradually, as the saying goes, gradually, as the days wear on, and then suddenly, as hand brushes hand and eye catches eye, and at last, a kiss becomes something more than just a kiss, and Danny and Claire start to remember who they are, and what they saw in each other, and in the future, and in love.

(It's not perfect, of course. She still feels as if he is hiding something; he still thinks she is making do with him. Sometimes he just won't look her in the eye, and she feels desolate; sometimes she can't look him in the eye, and he fears the worst. It's not perfect. It never is.)

And here they are, these two people, on Christmas Eve in Brogan's Bar and Grill. Just the two of them, because Danny has closed the bar until five o'clock today, so the staff can go Christmas shopping, he said, but in truth, it's so he can sit here with his girl like he used to do when the world was young, and fix her a drink, and spin her a line, and see how it goes. He's in a suit, but then he always is, because you don't know what might happen if you start to let things go, the charcoal-gray wool, no vest, and she's wearing a dark red and racing green plaid, her Christmas dress, she says, and he says he's never seen it before, and she says that's because it hasn't been Christmas before.

She sits, and he makes them a drink, a martini, and he's playing the music,
Tone Poems of Color,
the music that was playing when they met
,
and it's all very shaky. Look at them, they're so nervous, it's as if they barely know each other. But Danny has a plan. He usually does. And Claire sort of expects it, and sort of dreads it. Danny takes some pages from his pocket and hands them to Claire.

‘It's the scene from
The Way of the World
,' he says. ‘Where they exchange their informal wedding vows. I thought we could read it together.'

And Claire can see he thinks it's an idea she would like, and even though she can't imagine anything more laborious and clunky, she can't say that.

‘Does that mean you want to marry me?' she says.

‘It certainly does,' he says.

‘Well. Ask me then.'

‘Really?'

‘Of course.'

Danny gets ready to go down on one knee, and Claire stops him.

‘Music's too film noiry. What's the one we like again?'

‘I know that one,' Danny says, and goes behind the bar and switches the music. ‘“Black” by Victor Young.'

‘And you don't need to go down on one knee.'

‘Well. You don't need to be so bossy.'

‘And you don't need to be my dad, always being noble and looking after me like I'm a wayward child.'

‘Then stop being such a princess, sighing as if things haven't gone your way and it must be my fault.'

They're both hot, cheeks smarting, as if they'd been slapped, but excited with it. It's as if they've been tiptoeing around each other for weeks, always with a chaperone, and now at last they get to be alone.

‘You're a cocky bastard now you know you didn't burn my family to death.'

‘You're a sexy bitch now you're not saving it up for some guy in Chicago who wasn't all that much in the first place.'

‘Not as much as you,' Claire says.

‘No one's as much as me. Except you.'

‘Lucky I'm here then.'

‘Will you marry me?'

‘You'll have to kiss me first.'

‘Modern girls. No values.'

And they kiss for a long time, as if they've just fallen in love again. Which in a way, they have. The music plays: old-fashioned, string-drenched, absurdly dramatic music. It helps them feel they are the leading characters in their own story. They haven't felt like that in a long, long time. The shadows in the room are breached by low winter sun through shutters partly open, red and green and gold shafts off stained glass, the glitter of white Christmas balls. The light, the way it catches Claire's auburn hair, Danny's silvering brown locks. The smell of gin, and olives, and Chanel Cristalle,
and a cinnamon and clove scent that clings to Claire from three days of baking.
Tone Poems of Color.

All the sounds and sights, the scents and spices that blend together to make a marriage the living, breathing thing it is. Even if they aren't married yet.

All the things they are.