Only Love Can Break Your Heart (26 page)

24

IT TOOK ALL THREE
of us to subdue the Old Man. Paul and I dragged him back to the Royal Chamber, where my mother talked him down while we held him in his armchair. We spoke calmingly to him until the tension in his grip released. I stood and stepped back and worked the ache out of my palm where the Old Man had grasped it. Paul knelt at his side.

“It’s all right, Dad,” Paul said.

“I did it,” the Old Man mumbled.

“No, you didn’t, Dad,” said Paul.

“Yes, I did,” he moaned. “I did them both.”

“No, you didn’t, Dad,” Paul repeated.

The Old Man looked up at Paul with wet, pleading eyes.

“Run, boy,” he whispered. “While you still can!”

“I’m staying right here, Dad,” Paul said. “Right here with you.”

His voice was soothing; his eyes were warm and unworried. He stroked the leathery, liver-spotted skin of the Old Man’s hand, which was clutching his own.

RAYNER HAD GOTTEN
rid of Bobby Carwile. He handed my mother a business card.

“Here,” Rayner said. “If they come back, you call me right away.”

My mother held the card out in front of her as if it were stained with bird shit.

“Thank you, Rayner,” my mother said.

“Call anytime,” Rayner said. “Day or night.”

Paul left with Rayner to retrieve his truck, promising he’d be back in time to take me to rehearsal. But I didn’t really care. I wouldn’t have been angry at him if he’d never come back at all. Part of me hoped that he wouldn’t—that he would run, like the Old Man had begged him to.

Paul returned just in time for supper—boiled cabbage and kielbasa sautéed with onions. Only the Old Man seemed interested at all in food.

Paul pushed his chair back and stood.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re going to be late.”

As usual, I walked around to the driver’s side. Wordlessly I started the engine, shifted into first gear, and eased the car down the driveway, turning slowly onto Boone’s Ferry. We had turned onto Riverdale before Paul noticed it—or at least before he pointed it out to me.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the rearview mirror.

The police cruiser was unmarked but not inconspicuous, thanks to the searchlight mounted above the driver’s side-view mirror.

Paul took his pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coat and shook one up into his mouth, then replaced the pack and removed his Zippo and lit up.

“Where were you on Thursday, Paul?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said. “Over at Rayner’s.”

He took a long drag and exhaled slowly.

“And Leigh was with you?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said.

“And what about that call from Judge Bowman, Paul?” I asked. “What about the skinny-dipping?”

Paul chuckled dryly. Why was I even bothering to ask him these questions? What did I expect him to tell me?

“Coming over to pick you up, I saw her peddling down the road,” he said. “Her clothes and hair were soaking wet. She’d gone out for a ride after dinner on the path down by Hat Creek. She’d steered too close to the edge, she said, and had fallen in. Well, I couldn’t take her home all soaked and covered in creek mud. After her little climb up onto the roof at Twin Oaks, I figured old Prentiss was a hair away from having her shipped back to the loony bin. So I took her over to Rayner’s so she could clean up and throw her clothes in the dryer before I took her home. Rayner’s wife heard the shower running and woke up. When she saw Leigh come out of the bathroom wearing Rayner’s clothes, she jumped to the wrong conclusion, so we had to leave in a bit of a hurry.”

“I think I’d be a little scared of the woman who could get Rayner to kick his friends out of the house,” I said.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Paul said. “Anyway, I knew I was late to pick you up, so I came up with the skinny-dipping story. I told Leigh it’d be better for her if she just let the old bastard lay it on me.”

Leigh tumbling off her bicycle into an icy creek was more plausible, I supposed, than her collaborating with Paul to commit a heinous double murder. Wasn’t it?

“I guess that explains why you were acting so weird,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” I said. “When you picked us up. You were just acting weird, that’s all.”

Paul lit another cigarette and sighed angrily.

“Well, Rocky,” he said, “what can I tell you? Watching the love of your life fall to pieces right before your eyes might make you act a little
weird
. Knowing that you played a big part in her being so royally fucked up—yeah, you know, that might make you act a little
fucking
odd
. It might drive you out of your own
fucking mind
every now and then, don’t you think?”

By then we had reached the school. I pulled the truck to a stop at the curb in front of the loading dock.

“You never told me that before,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“That Leigh was the love of your life.”

“Christ,” Paul said, exasperated. “Do I have to say it?”

We sat alone in the darkness. Behind us, the police cruiser was at the far edge of the parking lot, presumably trying to look inconspicuous.

“If Leigh is the love of your life, Paul,” I asked quietly, “why’d you let her go off on her own? Why didn’t you come after her?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question for a long time,” he said. “But you know what, Rocky? You can’t change the past. You just have to find a way to live with it.”

I couldn’t help myself.

“Paul?” I said.

“What?” Paul asked.

“What shoes was Leigh wearing when you found her that night?” I asked.

Paul opened the door and stepped out. He flipped his cigarette into the grass behind him.

“Shit, Rocky,” he said. “If you really believe I had something to do with what happened to those people, surely you don’t think I’d have any trouble lying to
you
about it.”

25

TH
E NEXT DAY, AS
we sat under our tree at lunch, Cinnamon surprised me with an unexpected proposition.

“Hey,” she said. “I want to come over to your place today. After school.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To see the murder house,” she said.

I doubt I was very successful at concealing my excitement.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. OK.”

“Great,” she said.

“Paul can give us a ride back for rehearsal,” I said. “He lets me drive.”

Cinnamon nodded.

“Cool,” she said.

Idiot, I thought. Just shut up already. What did Paul say? Girls don’t like it when you act like you care.

“I can’t wait to meet your mom,” she said. “Do you think she’ll like me?”

“No,” I said.

A fluttering of voices rose up from the crowd at the end of the yard.

Cinnamon stood and trudged through the tall grass, me trailing after. We arrived at the fence just in time to see Leigh Bowman setting her bicycle with the wide seat and the basket on the handlebars into the bike rack in front of the annex before calmly walking inside.

“Maybe she’s going to read to them,” Cinnamon said.

Leigh’s surprising appearance at the annex somewhat dampened my excitement about taking Cinnamon home with me and showing her Twin Oaks. The rest of the afternoon, the halls were atwitter with the rumor that Leigh Bowman had turned herself in to the police. I overheard one voice say she’d had the murder weapon in her bicycle basket. Someone else claimed to know for a fact that her father was forcing Leigh to testify against Paul Askew. The word had already been circulating for days that Judge Bowman’s influence was the only reason Paul and Leigh hadn’t been arrested already. Everyone seemed to expect an announcement that the case had been solved on the five o’clock news.

By the time the bell at the end of eighth period rang and the herd flowed out from a dozen different doors and down to the buses and the cars in the student lot, Leigh’s bicycle was gone. When Paul’s truck pulled up to the curb in front of the loading dock, the rubberneckers shifted their attention, drawing away from the annex to form a line at the edge of the sidewalk, staring and pointing at Paul like he was one of the giant pandas at the National Zoo.

“What’s with them?” he said as Cinnamon and I climbed into the truck next to him.

“You don’t know?” I said.

We told him what we had seen that afternoon during lunch period.

“Shit,” Paul said. “I told her not to do that.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Leigh’s crazy, but she’s not ignorant,” Paul said. “She knows what people are saying. Somehow she got it in her head that she ought to just go down and introduce herself to the task force boys. Set the record straight, so to speak. I told her it was a bad idea. So did Rayner. And Miss Anita. And Judge Bowman. It might be the first time that old bastard and I ever agreed about anything.”

He lit a cigarette and reached across me to offer the light to Cinnamon.

“It’s probably fine,” he said. “You only need to talk to Leigh for about a minute to see how harmless she is.”

As we reached the midpoint of the driveway, Twin Oaks came into view at the top of the hill, rising up from the pasture. Even Cinnamon had to stop and stare speechlessly when she got her first full glimpse of the white columns across the long field, greener every day with the onset of spring. The yellow crime scene tape still encircled the house, but there was no sign of any vehicles or police presence in the driveway.

Paul parked and went in to check on the Old Man, leaving us alone at the fence looking up at Twin Oaks.

“Shall we?” I said.

When we reached the house, we stopped in front of the yellow tape, which fluttered in the light breeze. Cinnamon bent and deftly ducked under the sagging plastic as if it were electrified.

“Where do I look?” she whispered.

“Here,” I said.

I stepped up to the window first and peered through. The sight was the same—the sliver of space between the shades revealing the dark, almost black stains on the floor and the rusty characters on the wall. I stepped back so Cinnamon could take my place at the window.

“Wow,” she said. “This is heavy.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I should have been thinking about important things—the gruesomeness of what had happened on the other side of that door, whether Paul and Leigh were responsible for it, how they were going to get out from under the weight of the gossip and suspicion, and so forth. Instead I thought of whether Cinnamon was impressed—whether she genuinely liked me and whether the next time she kissed me it would be on the mouth instead of the cheek. So distracted was I by these thoughts that I had been staring at the sheriff’s department squad car coming up the road past our house and toward the driveway of Twin Oaks for at least five seconds or so without registering it. By the time I reacted, the patrol car was turning through the gate.

“Shit,” I said.

“What is it?” Cinnamon asked.

“Come on,” I said.

We dashed down to the end of the porch and dropped into the mulch of the flower beds. Ducking around the side of the house, we huddled against the wall and waited as the car pulled in and came to a stop. We heard the doors open and slam shut, followed by voices I recognized as they drew closer to our hiding place.

“I don’t suppose we can take down this dreadful yellow tape,” Patricia said.

“It won’t be long, ma’am,” Bobby Carwile said. “We’ll be finished here in another day or two. Then we’ll have a crew come out and take care of everything for you. I can recommend a good cleaning service also, when you’re ready.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Patricia replied. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Patricia,” said Charles Culver.

“It’s what Mummy would have wanted,” Patricia said.

“What Mummy would have wanted?” said Charles, derisively aping Patricia’s bogus accent.

“That’s right,” Patricia meekly replied.

“Please,” Charles said scornfully. “You sound like a fool.”

Cinnamon couldn’t resist peering around the corner for a look. There was no point in trying to stop her; besides, I wanted to have a look myself.

The three of them faced the door together, preparing to enter: Carwile in his usual navy blazer, tie, and chinos; Charles in a tan trench coat that hid his soft frame, making him look somehow more imposing than I remembered. Patricia wore a calf-length tweed skirt, a tan camel-hair blazer, and a patterned blouse buttoned to the neck. She’d cut her hair into a pageboy style that had the effect of making her look curiously sexless.

Poor Patricia, I thought. She was so dazed. All the pompous bluster had gone out of her, replaced by a faint hint of anguish.

The three of them stepped inside and shut the door behind them.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

We scampered over into the trees.

“Wow,” Cinnamon said. “That was freaky.”

The field between the two houses was bordered on one side by Boone’s Ferry Road and on the other side by woods that lined the path down to the barn. To avoid being seen from the windows of Twin Oaks, we walked through the trees, listening to the wind.

“So that was Patricia, huh?” Cinnamon asked.

“Yeah.”

“And the other man, besides the cop—that was her brother, Charles, right?”

I nodded.

“He seemed like kind of an asshole,” she said.

“I’ve never heard him talk to anyone like that before,” I said. “I haven’t hung around him much, but still. I’m sure they’re both pretty messed up about what happened. Paul says people grieve in different ways. Like, what’s the right way to act after your parents get murdered?”

“Maybe they did it,” she said.

I hadn’t given much thought to that possibility; I’d been too worried about whether Paul and Leigh were responsible to consider anyone else besides devil worshippers and Manson acolytes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

It couldn’t have been Charles, or Patricia, I thought. Both of their whereabouts at the time of the killings were well known. Charles had been out of the country on business. Patricia had been in Maryland with Nelson Waltrip, spending a long weekend going to the races at Pimlico and visiting friends in Annapolis. The police had to send someone out to the track to find her when the bodies were discovered.

We came out of the woods behind the stable, out of sight of the house. Looking up at the shuttered door of the hayloft, I remembered what Paul had found in the straw by the blankets. Was that the right way to act after your parents have been murdered? Maybe there wasn’t a better one. Maybe it wasn’t her idea—Nelson Waltrip might have begged or persuaded or even
forced
her to do it. Maybe it hadn’t been them at all—maybe it had been left by the killers, or even by Brad Culver himself, getting a little action on the side. Maybe that’s why it happened; maybe the killer was just a vengeful cuckold who had covered his tracks with the devil-worship stuff and the bullet in the leg.

Cinnamon reached into her bag for a cigarette and lit up.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

But I was thinking about a lot of things: About how frumpy and plain Patricia had looked back on the porch of Twin Oaks, and how the sight of her looking that way had made me both sad and a little embarrassed, as if I’d wanted her to look sexier so that Cinnamon would be impressed, or jealous, or even a little threatened. About everything that had happened in and around the stable, from the night I’d found Culver staggering drunk and helped him back up to the house, and what happened afterward with Patricia, to the day Leigh interrupted us and drove me off to make her confession. And I thought about Cinnamon—how much I wanted to be taken seriously by her, how I had hoped things would turn out that afternoon, and how differently they were going.

“Sorry,” I said. “This is a little weird.”

Cinnamon puffed out a bit of smoke and smiled. There we were—me and my Cinnamon Girl, alone in the woods with the whispering wind and sun-dappled ground beneath the spare shade of early spring leaves.

She stepped toward me. I reached tentatively for her hips.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I want you to.”

I kissed her—thanks to Patricia, I thought—less inexpertly than she might have expected.

It would be silly to say that we were in love. After all, I had only ever kissed one girl before—one woman, to be more precise. But the sensation that came over me in that moment was completely, overwhelmingly, sublimely
new
. And though Cinnamon was no innocent, nor was I, what passed between us there felt pure and good and true.

WHEN WE REACHED
the house, we found Leigh’s bicycle leaning against the front porch steps. Back in the Royal Chamber, we found the Old Man in his armchair, Leigh on the couch facing him, a book open on her lap. Paul sat next to her, one leg propped across his other knee, stroking his beard. They looked so natural together, as if they’d never been apart.

“This is Cinnamon,” I said.

“Cinnamon?” the Old Man asked. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Oh, hush, Mr. Askew,” Leigh said. “I think it’s lovely.”

To my surprise, Cinnamon blushed.

“We were just about to have tea,” Paul said. “Would you care for some?”

“Sure, I’ll have some
tea
,” Cinnamon said, sniggering slightly, as if taking tea in the afternoon was a ritual unique to the Boone’s Ferry bourgeoisie.

Paul went to the kitchen. Leigh closed her book and placed it on the coffee table. She looked different. She had on makeup—nothing garish, just a touch of blush and eyeliner and pink lip gloss. She’d spent a little more time on her hair, which was still short but had grown enough to look less severe. She wore a navy V-neck sweater and a pair of new jeans. I wondered whether someone had advised that she try to look more normal.

“What are we reading?” I asked.

“
Rebecca Recalls
,” Leigh said.

“I’ve heard of that book,” Cinnamon said. “People have been passing it around at school. It’s supposed to be pretty twisted.”

“It’s a true story,” Leigh said.

“Do you mind?” the Old Man said. “It was just getting good.”

“Sure, Mr. Askew,” Leigh said.

The Old Man crossed his arms and nodded. Leigh resumed her reading.

Rebecca Recalls
was the true story of how the author, Dr. Susan Gregory, was treating a patient named Rebecca for depression after the stillbirth of her baby. Using hypnotherapy, Dr. Gregory helps Rebecca recover lost memories of years of ritual abuse at the hands of a satanic cult, which she’d been brainwashed to forget. Through hypnotherapy, Rebecca recollects that her own mother—a closet devil worshipper—had offered her up years earlier as a pawn to the cult, which included numerous highly placed members of the local community. According to the text, these putative civic pillars regularly participated in child rape and sacrifice for the pleasure of the Evil One. To hide their activities, the cult members brainwashed their sex slaves and performed their human sacrifices with babies stolen from the maternity ward at the local hospital. There, numerous doctors and nurses who were also secret cult members manipulated indigent single mothers into believing that their babies had died of natural causes; in some cases they were able to seduce the mothers themselves into joining the cult. Dr. Gregory teaches young Rebecca about the love of Jesus and helps her to be “born again.” With God’s help, doctor and patient do battle against the nefarious cult, ultimately taking on the devil himself. It would all have seemed ridiculous were it not so effectively unnerving.

Paul had returned with the tea tray and sat down as Leigh read. The Old Man drifted off and began to snore. Leigh folded the book shut, and the four of us rose quietly and retreated up the stairs to Paul’s room. Paul took his chair by the window and lit up; Leigh sat on the floor next to him, where she could reach up to steal the occasional drag from his cigarette. I sat on the bed next to Cinnamon, who fired up one of her own, tipping her ashes into a saucer on the bedside table.