Repair to Her Grave (34 page)

The sound wouldn’t carry far, but inside the house it was like the
crack!
of a pistol being fired. Again. And again.

Bob pounded. “Jill! Hear me now, girl, I want you to open this door!” He rattled the knob, gave the door a solid kick, and another. “Jill!”

No answer, and he was too late anyway. I cursed myself for trying to be tactful, trying to save Lillian's feelings instead of just laying it on her: that her daughter was a killer.

Jill had gotten about six shots off from the nail gun. The door was effectively barricaded now, until someone went after it with a crowbar. I pushed the glass paperweights aside, grabbed the thing I’d seen tucked behind the old books: a camera.

And not some cheap, quick-print item, either: this was the camera Sam and Maggie had been yearning for, that put the visual images onto a disk to be loaded into a computer. It was a digital camera like the one Winston Cartwright had explained to me.

Then I had it:
electronics.
And remembered again the rest of what the unidentified man had been carrying with him as he walked out onto the bluffs. Camera equipment.

At the same time I heard the creak of another door upstairs. And knew what it meant.

Another time, another set of circumstances: no moon, maybe, or the scent of wood smoke not floating quite so poignantly in the air, though the evening was warm. The tide was coming in; below the big windows, foam showed like lacy trimmings around the slick black rocks.

Any other time I might not have understood. But now as I ran out into the darkness, searching for the outside stairway to the second-floor balcony with its awe-inspiring view of the drop over the cliffs, the truth flashed over me, the one fact that no one else understood about the pirate girl Jane Whitelaw:

That when she went over the cliffs to perish in the ice-cold waters, she did it in the dark. It was why they saw her torch as she ran; why men built bonfires on rafts they towed behind their boats, to light their way when they went searching for her.

And the dark of night was a very strange time to search for a hidden treasure, carrying an unfamiliar map.

Jane hadn’t fallen accidentally from that cliff, as we’d surmised from the dangerousness of the crumbling edge. And she hadn’t been
kilt,
as Hecky Wilmot and — Winston Cartwright believed.

And it hadn’t been the first time she’d gone there, I was willing to bet. She’d been there before, searching, figured out that Hayes had given her a fake map, and understood: without him, she would never find the treasure she lusted furiously for.

But she’d already killed him, hadn’t she? She was a girl with an eye for the main chance, and now it was gone because she had destroyed it herself. So Jane Whitelaw had jumped.

From grief, or guilt, or fury that her scheme hadn’t worked? To that question I would probably never have a certain answer, but as I found the outside stairs and began scrambling up, I knew Jill was about to do it again.

“Stay where you are.” Her voice quavered at me from above.

I stopped, trying to catch my breath. Inside, Bob still tried to break the door down, slamming himself against it.

“Hey.” I managed a weak laugh. “Guess he's not going to get very far, is he?”

No answer. My eyes began adjusting; when they did, I wished they hadn’t. She was perched on the railing, looking out into a yawning space of nothing. I forced myself to keep my eyes on her.

“Jill? Listen, I know it must seem—”

“No, you don’t. You don’t know how it seems at all.” Her voice was oddly patient, as if I were the child. The nail gun lay on the deck by her feet.

“Anyway, I know you hate me. Because you think I’m not good enough for Sam. And now you’ve got another reason.”

“Jill, I don’t—”

“That I killed my own father.”

And there it was, as pretty a confession as I’d ever heard. I sat on the steps with the camera in my lap. She hadn’t seen it; I hadn’t brought it out here for any particular reason. I’d had it in my hands and never thought to put it down, that was all.

“I don’t hate you,” I said. She made a skeptical face.

Truth time: “Or not the way you mean, anyway. But there's something I don’t understand. Your mother still has her gun, she says. So …”

The gun business just didn’t compute. “So what did you use to get Charmian down those cliffs and into the cave?” I gestured toward her feet. “Not the nail gun. You didn’t bring anything back up the cliffs with you, but here it is.”

She looked at me, her surprise genuine. “Mom has a gun? Oh, that's funny. That's a real scream. I never even knew it. So I never needed … but Uncle Wilbur has lots of guns,” she explained. “And ammunition. Everything I needed.”

She stayed with my brother awhile,
Lillian had remarked.

“I never meant to hurt him. I just went out there to get one of the guns, to use to make Charmian show me where the gold was on the map she found. I wouldn’t have hurt her with it, either,” she added earnestly. “I tried to get her to go back
out
of the cave when the water was rising. But she wouldn’t.”

“I see.” Charmian hadn’t agreed with Jill's assessment of her own harmlessness, apparently. Nor did I. But I was beginning to feel differently about this girl, nevertheless.

“Uncle Wilbur came around the corner of the trailer and surprised me, that's all. The gun went off, I thought I’d killed him. Then I got scared.”

“So you ran.” Instead of calling help for him; Charmian had been right. Jill wasn’t harmless.

Still, as I sat there I got less of the sense of the malignant criminal I’d thought Jill must be, and more the impression of a sad, screwed-up sixteen-year-old mess.

“I don’t know what's wrong with me,” Jill said from the high railing, her tone conversational. “All my life I was more like my dad, that's all. Bad, like he was. Wanting it all. Not like Mom, I mean. She's got a lot on the ball, actually.”

I looked down at the camera in my lap. Anything I said could be the wrong thing. “But you were in the middle. Between them.”

She glanced gratefully at me. “Right. When he hit her, when she screamed at him for it. When he cut her, that time. Gave her that scar. I had to pull them apart, call the cops.”

Suddenly I felt like the world's biggest jerk, because all at once I realized that I’d had it all wrong. “So is that why you wanted to go back to Boston? To keep him from coming up here?”

She nodded minutely. “It was the only thing that ever worked to keep him away from her; me being there. Even if he didn’t want me there, it kept him focused on something but her.”

“But … why didn’t you just say so?”

“To who?” she demanded, suddenly angry. “I tried to tell it all at the custody hearing. But nobody ever listens to me.”

And it wouldn’t have gone over well, anyway:
Judge, I’ve got to live with my repeat-offender father, so that he won’t slice my mom up with a box-cutter again.

Oh, sure. “So you went out to North End that morning. Your mother followed, I saw her go. And …”

And what? It was the next part I couldn’t quite picture. Had Lillian's ex attacked her, and Jill intervened?

I didn’t have to ask why Jill had made a point of telling Lillian where she was going, whom she would meet. I already knew that now; it was because Lillian's reaction was so important to Jill. The way mine was to Sam.

The pounding on the door stopped.

“Tell him if he comes out here, I’ll jump right away,” Jill said.

I shouted to Bob. Lillian's face showed in the darkness behind him, at the foot of the outside stairway.

“Jill,” she said pleadingly, “I—”

“Say one more word and I’m going right this minute,” Jill threatened, her voice wavering near tears suddenly. “I mean it, Mom. There's nothing you can do. Because I’m up here, I’m calling the shots, so you just keep your mouth shut.”

About what? Because sure, she was a real mess, and considering what she’d been through in her sixteen years, I had to admit I didn’t think a lot of it was her fault.

But there was more in her voice now than the guilt-ridden, hysterical bossiness of a seriously distraught kid. Something … as if they both, Jill and Lillian, knew something I didn’t.

“Jill,” I said, “Sam's going to feel very bad about this. He really cared a lot about you, you know. There must be at least something good about you, for him to feel like that. Some part of you that deserves another chance.”

But this was the wrong tactic, too. “Yeah, his good opinion of me just lights up my life,” she sneered.

In the moonlight, her swaying body cast a thin shadow on the cedar decking. “You listen to me. You know what I’m like? I’m like a picture somebody's drawing, they wreck it, and they should tear it up and start over. If Sam liked me, he's stupider than I thought, got it?”

A little flicker of intuition seized me; I glanced down at Lillian.
Swinging like a loose sail,
Ellie had said of Sam, and Jill was nearly the same age as he was. “Unlike your mother, who is worth saving? Don’t you want to be around to help?”

No answer. I looked at the camera. Why had Jill put it in the bookcase, I wondered, instead of taking it upstairs with her? It was, I thought, a sort of keepsake to her: something that had belonged to her father. But why hide it?

“Jill, why are you telling me all this? If there's nothing I can do, I mean. If you’re going to just end it?”

“I wanted someone to know, that's all.” Her tone remained stubborn; hanging on to the little, proud part of herself that she had left. “I just wanted someone to know.”

“Yeah.” I could understand that. Sitting there trying to come up with something to say in reply, I pressed a button on the camera in my lap. Not for a reason; just fiddling with the thing.

A two-inch video display lit up on the back of the device.

And suddenly everything was different yet again. “Jill?”

“What?” Distantly, as if for all but the very most practical purposes—pulse, a blood pressure—she was already gone.

I stared at the picture on the display, not believing it: a small, extremely sharp color photograph. A dateline in the corner of the screen told me when it had been taken: date and time.

Then Jill saw it. “No!” she shrieked, lost her balance for an instant, and swayed. “Give me that! Give it to me, you—”

It was a picture of Lillian. Rapidly, I clicked through all the images on the disk: her face, getting closer and closer. The scar all down one side of her face, ruddy with emotion, and the pictures one after another, like a mean joke.

He must have known she hated it and you could practically hear the guy laughing as he took the shots, firing it at her as if it were a weapon.

But she had the last laugh because in the final picture, the nail gun was in her hand. You couldn’t see his face, but you could imagine the look on it as he realized what she could do.

And then she’d done it. She must have grabbed the camera as he staggered, in case it should be found with his body, tell the truth of how he’d died.

And at whose hand. “Jill, I see that you mean to sacrifice yourself. You feel like you’ve done so many bad things. So why not confess to this one, too, and then die—so your mom can have a life, right? Presto, everything taken care of.”

But I still couldn’t figure out why Lillian kept the camera and the disk with the damning photographs on it.

Until I remembered: Lillian was like me. Low-tech, out of the stream of electronic progress. The two of us were a couple of stones on the banks of the river of progress as it went rushing by. Which meant:

She didn’t know how the camera worked any more than I had, and what she’d needed was to be
sure
those images were absolutely unrecoverable. And maybe—just maybe—she had wanted to gloat over them, too.

But finally she’d come to the only truly reliable solution: she’d started the woodstove though the night was warm, and gotten it blazing.

All the high-tech in the world wouldn’t survive the inside of that woodstove. Then Bob and I had arrived, whereupon she hadn’t had much time to hide the camera, so she’d simply shoved it behind the old books and put her game face on:

Thank God you’ve come.
We would give Jill a talk-ing-to, she must have thought, and then she could finish what she’d started.

But Jill didn’t know Lillian had the camera at all. And with our arrival she had come to a decision of her own.

“I thought it went over with him,” she said, staring at the camera. “But everything happened so fast, and I was crying, and I didn’t see it. I kept thinking that his body would wash up and then they would find the pictures. I was so scared. But she had it all along, didn’t she?”

“Yes. And eventually you decided she was safe, didn’t you? Until we drove up here tonight. You thought we were after her.”

She nodded. Suddenly I wanted to put this whole evening on rewind and start over, but of course I couldn’t do that, either.

“What I’ve got here is proof of who really killed him, Jill. And you know it. Your mother was going to burn the camera, but we showed up, so she didn’t get the chance. Still …”

Under the circumstances I thought this could still turn out all right, I was about to say. A history of abuse, violence, and criminality: I felt sure a good lawyer could help Lillian Frey out of the trouble she was in.

But Jill didn’t give me a chance to say any of that. “Give it to me,” she wheedled. Her voice turned threatening. “Or I’ll tell you something you’ll really wish you didn’t know.”

“Wow, Jill. Way to win me over.”

You had to hand it to the kid: even teetering on the edge of a railing, pitiful and wretched as she was, she could still make you want to give her a push.

But I hadn’t spent all those years of my life dealing with another monster of emotional arm-twisting for nothing. “You’re going to tell me that you slept with Sam's father. You’re going to say that was how you really got his wristwatch. Right?”

Rage twisted her face. And pain; humiliation. Seeing it made me stop, put the film on rewind at last.

Made me say the one thing I should have said to her in the first place: “Ever since Sam met you, Jill, I’ve treated you like a thing, like an obstacle in my way, nothing more. I never really saw you as a person at all. And I’m sorry. So very sorry.”