I stared at him. “Christ, Dwayne, is that what this is all about? Thor’s teachings?”
“Man is a conqueror,” Dwayne recited, his voice hushed and reverent. “If he sees what he wants he must take it. He must be true to himself. No matter what other people think. No matter if they get hurt. No matter if—”
“They get dead?”
“Someone like Clethra,” he went on, glancing down at the knife in his hand, “someone so beautiful, so smart, so sweet, she’s always gonna belong to somebody else. I didn’t have to tell him that. He
knew
it. Just like he knew it’s another man’s right, another man’s
destiny,
to come along and take her away from him. Which is what I tried to tell him, man to man, as someone I-I looked up to, as someone I-I …”
A log fell in the fireplace grate. He jumped. All three of us did.
“Go on, Dwayne. Tell me what happened that morning.”
He stood there a moment, his eyes narrow and vulpine, his chest rising and falling. “I knew you all were going to Essex. Clethra told me. She told me he’d be here all alone. So I came here, like a man, to tell him straight up I loved her and wanted her to be mine.”
“And what did he say when you told him?”
“He laughed at me,” Dwayne answered bitterly. “He fucking laughed in my face.”
“He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
Dwayne nodded. “Sitting there by the woodpile, nasty drunk like he was that day at Slim Jim’s. Calling me dickless. Telling me I was just some lousy Lost Boy, and what right did I have thinking I could ever offer Clethra anything.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said,” Dwayne recalled angrily, “I sure as hell could give her one thing he couldn’t—a good straight fucking.”
“She’d told you they hadn’t had sex?”
He sniffled, swiping at his nose with the back of his hand. “No, not exactly.”
“You overheard it, didn’t you?” I suggested. “That night I came back late from the city, when she was out there waiting for me on the Land Rover, all sweaty and itchy. She’d been with you, hadn’t she? That’s what she was doing out there. She’d slipped out on Thor to be with you. And you were there listening that whole time we talked, weren’t you? In the carriage barn. I heard a noise in there, but I figured it was Sadie stalking a mouse, since Lulu didn’t bark. But she wouldn’t bark—not at you. She knows you.”
“That was our second date,” Dwayne recalled, a look of utter rapture on his scarred, stitched face. “Our first was that night you and Mr. Gibbs went away camping. She ducked out for some munchies, least that’s what she told Miss Nash. I met her there at the general store. We parked in the woods. Drank some beer and talked. Just kicking it, until she had to get back on account of Miss Nash would think she cracked up the Land Rover or something. All we did was talk, Mr. H. But we just … I just … Damn, she treated me like a
person,
not like some townie retardo whose old man’s in jail. She listened to what I had to say. She really listened. You know what that feels like? When someone that smart, that pretty …” He trailed off, shaking his head in awe. “Man, I just
knew
she was the one for me. For life. Have you ever met someone and
known?
Just like that?”
“Yes, Dwayne. I have.”
“That second date,” he went on, “we made for late, after Mr. Gibbs passed out, which she said he almost always did from drinking so much and being so old.”
“I’ll have to remember that for the future,” I reflected.
“I left my truck down in the woods and hiked up to your place so nobody’d get wise to us—I figured you wouldn’t be too happy if you found out. And I
knew
he wouldn’t be. We sat out there in the backseat of your Woody, making out like crazy. She was on fire that night, man. And so was I. Our flesh
burned
.”
“I’ll never be able to drive that car again,” I muttered. “Did the two of you … ?”
“We would have if you hadn’t pulled up when you did,” he assured me. “I had her
naked,
man. Her juices were streaming down my fingers like hot soup.”
“I’ll never be able to eat hot soup again either.”
Lulu, she’d had just about enough of this whole thing. She jumped down to the floor with a huff and started primly for the door.
“Where’s she going?” Dwayne’s knuckles tightened around the gleaming knife.
“Ask her yourself.”
“Tell her to stay!”
“Tell her yourself.”
Not necessary. She halted in the doorway, knowing better than to make things any worse, then sidled over to the rocker by the fireplace, where she curled up and eyed him with withering disapproval.
Dwayne tossed his cigarette butt in the fire and lit another, dragging on it deeply. “I was there in the barn listening to you two the whole time, like you said. Heard her tell you how she and Thor had never even done it.”
“What exactly had she told you?”
“Just that it was all a mistake, her running off with him. That she was sorry she done it. That he was too old for her. That he was …” He trailed off, his eyes on the fire. I thought about making a dive for the knife. I didn’t do it, but I thought about it. “When I heard her tell you that, man, that’s when I knew it was for real, her and me. Because she
wasn’t
his, y’know? He wasn’t really possessing her. Me knowing that, well, that’s what give me the nerve to tell him about us Sunday morning. I showed up here like I was gonna do some work. Y’know, like it was just an accident us getting to talk. I even pulled a couple of rotten sills, full of rusty nails.”
“Which explains why you had your gloves on,” I said.
“He laughed at me, Mr. H,” Dwayne said angrily. “He laughed in my face, the mean fucking bastard. Called me names. Shoved me. And kept on shoving me. I-I don’t like to be pushed, man. I really, really don’t like it. So I grabbed the nearest thing …”
“The sledge.”
“And I popped him with it—two, three times. I-I lost my head. But he drove me to it, man. Brought it on himself. I mean, he was just so completely full of shit. All that stuff he wrote, that stuff he said a man oughta do. And I
believed
him. I thought … I thought he
meant
what he said. I thought he
cared.
But he was full of shit, just like everyone else.
Everyone.”
He paused, breathing heavily. “I did what he’d said to do, man. And when I did it, when I fucking grabbed for it … he fucking
laughed
at me!”
“Why did you Bobbitt him?”
“To make it look like his wife maybe done it,” he replied simply. “Idea just came to me.”
“Shrewd. Only why toss the shears in the pond but leave the sledge right there for anyone to find?”
Lulu harrumphed indignantly at this. It hadn’t been “anyone” who’d found the sledge. It had been her.
“I was gonna hide the shears and the sledge both,” Dwayne answered. “Y’know, like bury ‘em somewhere maybe. Only I started to freak out about time. Plus there was his body to take care of. I mean, I had to get rid of
him.
I was afraid to cart him away in my truck in broad daylight. Figured I’d get spotted dumping him somewhere. Lot of guys out hunting now, or laying in firewood for winter. So I weighed him down and dumped him in the pond. Figured the water’d be getting deeper from all this rain, and then in a few weeks it’d freeze right over. Be ages before anyone found him.” He scratched his head ruefully. “I didn’t figure on Lulu taking a swim soon as she got home.”
“One never does. Her unpredictability is one of her most endearing traits. In fact, it’s her only endearing trait.”
She harrumphed at this, too. She was doing a lot of harrumphing. I would pay for this later. If there was a later.
“Still, you were plenty careful, Dwayne. You didn’t have to worry about the mud around the edge of the pond. There were a million footprints there, and no reason why your own would set off any alarm bells. You’ve been working here for weeks. But the driveway was another matter.”
He nodded. “It was raining. Just a drizzle really, but the driveway was wet. And when I started backing out I realized I was leaving a dry patch there in the gravel where my truck had been. Anybody came back soon and saw that dry patch I’d be smoked for sure. All they’d have to do is measure it and they’d know it was my truck—I got custom bumpers. So I jumped out and hosed it down real fast. And then I got the hell out of here.”
“Where did you go?”
“Straight home. Told my mom if anyone asked her I was around the house all morning helping her out.”
“Did she ask you why?”
Dwayne snorted. “In my family, it’s not smart to ask why.”
“And you’re nothing if not smart, Dwayne,” I told him. “You sure fooled me. All along I was wrong. I thought for sure it had to be one of the family. It had to be Ruth. Or Arvin. Or Barry—with or without help from Marco. After all, they were the ones who hated Thor the most. And loved Clethra the most. After all, Thor’s killing took place when they were all out here at Barry’s place. And when Tyler Kampmann was murdered they were all back in New York. It had to be one of them. It just had to be. Only it wasn’t. None of them were involved, except as victims. I was wrong all along,” I confessed, tugging at my ear. “And Lulu, it turns out, was right.”
She sat up in the rocker, tail thumping expectantly.
“How so?” Dwayne demanded, scowling at her.
“When we got to Barry’s house after Thor was murdered she sniffed everyone’s shoes, one by one, to see if any of them had traces of our pond mud on them. Marco started acting really panicky—I later found out because he was afraid she’d sniff marijuana on him and get him in trouble with Slawski. But it was mud Lulu was after, and the bottom line was that she discovered none, just as she discovered none on the wheels of their cars. I didn’t know what to make of the cars, but with the shoes I figured, okay, the killer had time to change them before we got there. A simple, plausible explanation. And totally wrong. Because the simple truth is that Thor’s killer wasn’t there at all. Because Thor’s killer was you … After you told your mom to cover for you you went out and helped your neighbor Billy in his yard. When Billy got the call to come tow Thor’s body out of the pond you followed him up here, pretending to be greatly distraught. You even jumped in yourself and hooked up Thor’s body to the winch. Pretty weird behavior, considering you’d just put him there.”
“It would have been weirder if I hadn’t come,” he argued. “Working for you folks the way I do and all. Besides, a guilty man would never come right back here and do that. At least, that’s how I figured it.”
“You figured it right,” I acknowledged. “It never occurred to me it could be you. Especially after Tyler got himself strangled in his dorm room at Columbia the next morning. I’d spoken to you myself that very morning. You’d phoned me to say you wouldn’t be showing up for work. You thought we’d want to be alone for the day, was what you said. Naturally, I assumed you were at home when you called me. You even yelled out something to your mom, something about how you’d be right with her. Exceedingly clever, Dwayne. Because the truth is you
weren’t
at home when you called. You were phoning me from Tyler Kampmann’s dorm room, where he lay dead on the floor right next to you after you strangled him. You’re smart, Dwayne. Smart enough to throw off suspicion by calling me that way. Smart enough to pretend to be Tyler when his neighbor pounded on the door on his way to a nine o’clock French class. You groaned something to him through the door about you weren’t feeling well—which has to be the understatement of the year. And the neighbor bought it. He and Tyler had been out celebrating the night before. And he
assumed
the voice he heard was Tyler’s. It didn’t occur to him it was someone else’s—that wouldn’t occur to anyone. In fact, Tyler had already been dead for an hour, which explains the discrepancy between the coroner’s estimated time, of death and the time when the neighbor said he spoke to him. Must have been real cozy, you and Tyler together there in that tiny room all that time.”
“I had no choice,” Dwayne insisted. “I couldn’t come out until everyone on the floor had gone to breakfast or class or whatever. Couldn’t take a chance of someone spotting me.” He sniffled. “I read some of his books. He had all kinds. History, art, philosophy …”
Lightning crackled across Whalebone Cove. He turned his face to the windows. It was an angry face at that moment. A proud face. I had never seen it proud before. But then, I’d never really known Dwayne before. Not really. I’d thought he was a good kid who’d had some bad breaks. But there was more to Dwayne Gobble than that. A lot more. And none of it was good.
Thunder rumbled, shaking the house down to its stone foundation. The wind and cold rain tore at the casement windows.
“How did you get in the dorm, by the way?”
“By looking like any other student,” Dwayne replied, sneering at me. “I’m the right age, I dress right—I just flashed the guard down in the lobby my fucking driver’s license, man, and he let me right on through. He didn’t give a fuck. Must have been the end of his shift or something. It was early in the morning, not even seven.”
“And Tyler let you into his room?”
“He was half asleep. Thought I was one of his friends.”
“Smart, Dwayne. Real smart. Me, I was real stupid. I figured Tyler died because of what Clethra had told him about her previous love life. Before she met him, I mean.”
Dwayne stiffened, his eyes narrowing to icy slits. “What previous love life?” he demanded, moving closer to me. Him and the big knife both.
“It did occur to me, of course, that the killer might be Clethra herself. I remembered how the phone was back on the hook when I returned from my walk that night she and I were alone together. I’d left it off the hook when I went out. Clearly, she’d used it. Only, who had she called? Had she called Tyler? Had she called Arvin?”
“She called
me
.” Dwayne thumped his chest with a clenched fist. “She called to tell me how bummed she was about everything and to ask me when she’d see me again. She called
me
.” He stood there glowering at me. “
What
previous love life?”
“Oh, that. Something rather damaging, actually, involving Clethra and another guy. She’d made the mistake of telling Tyler about it once, and it was reasonable to assume that if Tyler was willing to peddle her video striptease he’d be more than willing to peddle her deepest, darkest secret. I figured that was why he died—so the secret would die with him. Only, once again, I was wrong.”