Crimes Against My Brother (55 page)

Sometimes he wondered about that fur hat, and what had happened to it, and whose life it influenced. But then he forgot about it once again.

“Yer mill has betrayed you!” young Spenser Rogue said when he came into the tavern later, after his grandfather’s funeral.

“We’ll see about that,” Rueben answered.

In the next five to ten days, as more layoffs came, strikers arrived and milled about in increasing numbers and frustration. The men called for support from other mills across the province, then set up a barricade and started a protest.

And as Fension would tell his wife, Linky, who was packing to go back to her summer villa in Norway, Rueben Sores did not “give a hell’s bells” and “all those idiots will follow him.”

Harold Dew made sure the boy Liam made his confirmation—and his good qualities in fact supported his claim that he was concerned for the child and his welfare. That is, he wanted to do better and so he did. And
“the poor little fella” whose mom was sick and whose dad had abandoned him was the object of his greatest concern. And it was a great concern—more than just what I might call a pawnshop concern. For Harold still believed the child was his son.

So on one certain evening when Liam went to Harold to get pills for his mom, Harold reminded him about his confirmation.

“Aw, come on—I don’t want to do that,” Liam said. He was trying to act like the man who was now influencing him, Harold Dew, just as Harold himself had been influenced by Lonnie Sullivan thirty years before.

But Harold said this wouldn’t do. He was astonished that Liam did not understand how important this was. “Your mom is sick and you are going to be confirmed if I have to take you by the scruff of the neck and haul you up there myself.”

“But you don’t believe in that superstitious stuff!”

“Believe in it? Why, I stake my life on it—on Jesus Christ—so don’t you think for one minute you are getting out of this.”

So Liam had to attend confirmation classes and write a letter to the priest explaining why he wished to confirm his faith within the church. Harold helped him draft a letter to the very angels who would protect him. Read the final draft, hummed and hawed over it a bit—said it needed some punctuation or the archangel Michael might have a bone to pick—and finally said it was ready.

“Is your mom coming to the confirmation?”

“I don’t know,” Liam answered.

“Well, poor thing—that is really too bad.” And Harold for those next few days spoke very highly of the church, of confirmation and of going to mass, and of all the saints who had lived a life of denial and trust in God. He began to take stock of himself and the world around him. He wondered if all things, down to the minutest detail, were happening in some ethereal transmutation of human consciousness. Well, you might think he did not think this way, but Harold did, in this one question: why—and with why he asked, why was there water, why was there earth—why day and night and why the sun, why stars, galaxies,
and why beyond that the void? Why did the void exist—and what was beyond the void? What measure defined the millions and billions? He, like Ian and Evan, who since their moment of blood brotherhood had all asked the same questions, came to no conclusion, but then Harold became fascinated about this transformation in the other direction—that is, why plants and photosynthesis and then animals and bone, and blood and molecules and atoms crashing crazily inside the wicker chairs that he wanted to sell, in a way in a universe of their own that was perhaps exactly like the universe we ourselves lived in? Yet still he could come to no conclusion. So taking the Host, saying the Our Father, was a way to structure this dynamic, and to see the dynamic in terms of spiritual nobility that overcame all powers and portents.

But more foreboding was this: he had just found out that Evan was the main suspect in the death of Lonnie Sullivan.

Now Harold could tell himself he did not want this—but how in the world could he stop it, for just as Annette and Ian had progressed from innocence to destruction, so he himself had done the same. And he could not go back now to say he had done what he had done, for he would lose Liam and Ethel if he confessed. Nor did he mean harm to Sullivan—he was only protecting himself. But no one would believe this if he told them, so he must be silent about it. Also, the reason he had been at Sullivan’s was to steal a pregnancy test in order to blackmail Liam’s mother about Liam himself.

So then he too, Harold, had begun to pray—like millions and billions of others who say they do not believe.

“Perhaps Evan will not do any time and the case will be forgotten,” he decided. “Or perhaps this has come to pass because he allowed Glen to climb with him that day! I did not ask anyone to be arrested. So it’s not my fault.”

This is what he told both Ethel and Liam one night while staring at them both mysteriously so they did not know exactly what it was he was saying.

“I did not mean to do the crimes I did—like most people,” That is, like everyone else he was not a moralist; he was a humanist. He did not crave or hypocritically assume his moral stance until he saw the disaster of his actions. Then he tried to cling to something else in his soul.

But Harold had made one mistake.

Amazingly, after all this time, the wrench was still in his possession. And up until this time he had thought no one would ever know it existed. He had at first taken the wrench and hidden it upstairs in the attic. Now and again he would even use it out on his tractor or to tighten or loosen the big bolts on the high end of the shed. But then he hid it again. Forgot about it really.

One day just recently, Ethel went into the attic to find some clothes. So he took it again into the shed, and near where the old muskrat pelt hung like a ghost on a nail, he buried it in the dirt under a board.

He had never known what to do with it. That is, Harold, like all of us, simply wanted the past to go away.

The priest had come forward after the rekindled investigation into Lonnie Sullivan’s death to speak of his concerns and his guilt that he may have spurred Evan on to committing the crime.

So the police could do nothing less than take Evan in.

The problem was this: Evan had no memory of that night—except seeing the body.

He had a black bruise on his head close to that time. This was remembered by five or six people. So this too seemed to indicate that he had been in a struggle. That is, out of all the snow and sleet and darkness of that long-ago night the bruise was remembered by people who saw him walking along the road toward home. In fact, two youngsters had asked him if he had been in a fight.

How would any jury in the world believe he had gone to Lonnie
Sullivan’s without intending to do what had actually happened? Like a man dropping back to walk with his fiancée’s best friend.

“Is that when you became religious?” John Delano asked.

“It is,” Evan said bluntly. “Yes, it is, was, or whatever. I go to communion now four or five times a month. Maybe I am trying to atone for everything, for wanting that money so bad—that Joyce Fitzroy gave to Ian Preston—that I couldn’t handle life.”

But then he told the police how he had been seconds away from taking his own life. Could he then have taken someone else’s?

“Is that what happened?”

It became common knowledge all over town that the murder of Lonnie Sullivan so long, long ago had been solved. Reporters took pictures of him in his cell, and because of the case, the idea that it had not been resolved before, he was refused bail.

Sara had come back from Rwanda and had found love—or so she thought. Worse, Evan did not deny the charge against him. He could not because he did not know. And this is what he continued to tell her: “I cannot deny it because I do not know.”

“A human tragedy,” Harold would say to Ethel, and Ethel would start to cry. Harold would weep as well—that is, have tears rushing down his cheeks.

For Sara, it meant ruin. Harold knew this as well.

“Yes,” he said. “That poor little woman—that bodice of human dearity, who tried to be nice to an old curmudgeon like me.”

More peculiar is what was now being discussed. Lonnie had told the Wizard boy, the night before the boy found him dead, that he was keeping something grand and that Ian was going to pay him a large amount of money to get it back.

“Tonight I will get my UI” is how he had said it.

The Wizard boy had, in fact, told this to the town police five years before. The Wizard boy, now in his late thirties, became very well known for a little while. People reflected that he had no reason to lie, and he was a Wizard boy, and he was going bald.

Annette Brideau was called into police headquarters and asked about her past. Not only was this terrifying to her—not only did she not know Ian had done this magnanimous act on her behalf—but she herself swore it was not the reason she had married Ian.

The hilarity over all of this, and about all of them, was unending that summer. All of it seemed frozen in time, and their faces became the faces of those intertwined in disgrace.

Here was Sara Robb’s choice: to hand the blood sample she had kept for years preserved in her fridge to the detectives, or to throw it away. For if it was Evan’s blood, she was in fact condemning her own fiancé. Perhaps she could convince herself it was too corrupted to be of use. Perhaps she could convince herself that it had nothing to do with anything. But worse, if it was the blood of someone else—say, one of her patients—then she would be laughed at, called a conniver who was trying to frame someone else for the murder her fiancé had committed. And she had every man from Bonny Joyce as her patient—she had her hand on every man’s chest and every man’s penis, had taken every man’s blood. Who would now believe anything she had to say about a blood sample that might exonerate her fiancé that came from her own office, or condemn the one who had betrayed her? That is, if it was not Evan who had murdered Sullivan, then it must be Ian.

If Evan had nothing to do with Lonnie Sullivan’s death, this blood sample would exonerate him. And she held this little sample in her hand many nights thinking this. But if it was him—if it was—then she would have been twice fooled by two former friends. Worse was her plight—that is, her moral plight. It could not be Ian’s blood—it could not be!—but what if it was? How she would be looked upon!

Sara Robb was silent. In this silence her whole life seemed a great trick played out against her.

For many days she did not know what to do at all.

Then one night, just after the report came out that Evan was to be charged, she sat straight up in bed, long after midnight, listening to the tick of the clock down the hall. In a half-slumbering state she was thinking of three years before, parting Harold Dew’s hair.

So there was one other scenario now, one that was equally bad. That is, what if it was the blood of Harold Dew? She had in fact drawn his blood four times in the last two years.

Sara went to work, depressed and gloomy. She stared at the vial and began to write a note to the chief provincial coroner.

But then she tossed her pen down and sat staring into nothing.

To send the vial away was to condemn either Evan or Harold, or implicate Ian. But if it was Harold’s blood, people would say she had taken this blood just to condemn him and ruin her sister’s life. It would be every bit as bad as condemning Ian, who, they would say, she had a clear motive to seek revenge against.