Prayers for Rain (37 page)

“Mr. Kenzie,” Wesley said when I found him down by the pond at the back of his father’s property, “what a pleasure to see you.”

“Did you push her?” I asked.

“What? Who?”

“Naomi,” I said.

He jerked his head back, gave me a confused smile. “What are you talking about?”

“She chased a ball out onto this pond,” I said. “That was the story, right? But how’d the ball get out there? Did you throw it, Wes?”

He gave me a small, strange smile, pained, I think, lonely. He turned his head and looked out at the pond. His gaze grew distant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back slightly, his shoulders tightening, thin body rippling with a slow shudder.

“Naomi threw the ball,” he said softly. “I don’t know why. I’d walked on ahead.” He tilted his head to the right. “Up that way. Lost in thought, I suppose, though I can’t remember what I was thinking about.” He shrugged. “I walked on, and my sister threw the ball and it got ahead of her. Maybe it took an odd bounce off a rock. Maybe she threw it out onto the ice to see what would happen. It doesn’t really matter why. The ball went out on the ice, and she followed it. I heard her footsteps on the ice, all of a sudden, as if someone had, on a
whim, flicked on a sound track. One moment I was locked in my fucked-up head as usual, the next I could hear a squirrel pawing the frozen grass twenty yards away. I could hear snow melt. I could hear Naomi’s feet on the ice. And I turned my head in time to see the ice break under her. It was so
quiet
, that sound.” He turned back to me, cocked an eyebrow. “You’d think not, wouldn’t you? But it sounded as if you were crumpling tinfoil in your hand. And she,” he smiled, “she had this look on her face of utter
joy
. What a new experience this was going to be! She never made a noise. Didn’t cry out. She just dropped. And she was gone.”

He shrugged again, then picked a rock up off the ground and threw it high above the pond. I watched it plummet through the hard autumn air and then make a tiny splash in the center of the pond.

“So, no,” he said, “I didn’t kill my sister, Mr. Kenzie. I simply failed to keep adequate watch on her.” He placed his hands back in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, gave me another flash of that pained smile.

“But they blamed you,” I said, and looked back across the lawn to the porch where Christopher and Carrie Dawe sat with their afternoon tea and sections of the Sunday paper. “Didn’t they, Wesley?”

He pursed his lips, nodded at his shoes. “Oh, sure. Sure.”

He turned to his right and we began to walk slowly along the pond in the midafternoon glow of a late October Sunday. His steps seemed uncertain, and then I realized it was more an awkwardness in the roll of his right hip. I looked at his shoes, saw that the sole of the right was two inches thicker than that of the left, and I remembered Christopher Dawe telling us Wesley had been born with one leg shorter than the other.

“Bet it didn’t feel good,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Being blamed for your baby stepsister’s death when you hadn’t truly been responsible for it.”

He kept his head down, but a wry smile curled up his
weak lips. “You have an odd gift for understating the obvious, Mr. Kenzie.”

“We all need our talents, Wes.”

“When I was thirteen,” he said, “I vomited up a pint of blood. A pint. Nothing wrong with me. It was simply ‘nerves.’ At fifteen, I had a peptic ulcer. When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with manic depression and low-grade schizophrenia. It embarrassed my father. Humiliated him. He was sure if he just toughened me up—tortured me enough with his mental games and constant put-downs—I’d one day wake up made of firmer stuff.” He chuckled softly. “Fathers. Did you have a positive relationship with yours?”

“Not by a long shot, Wesley.”

“Forced you to live up to his expectations, maybe? Called you ‘useless’ so many times you started to believe it?”

“He held me down and burned me with an iron.”

Wesley stopped in the trees, looked at me. “You’re serious?”

I nodded. “He also hospitalized me twice and reminded me on a weekly basis that I’d never amount to shit. He was as close to evil as I’ve ever come, Wesley.”

“My God.”

“I didn’t drive my sister to her death to get back at him, though.”

“What?” He threw his head back, chuckled. “Come on now.”

“Here’s what I think happened.” I snapped a twig off the branch in front of me, tapped it against my outer thigh as we walked along the tip of the pond, then started back down the other side. “I think your father blamed you for Naomi’s death and you—some poor fucking basket case back then, I’m guessing—you were this close to cracking up when you stumbled on the medical records, discovered Naomi had been switched for another child. And for the first time in your life, you had a way to play payback with your father.”

He nodded. He glanced down at his right hand, at the small nub of flesh that was all that remained of his index finger, and then he dropped the hand by his side. “Guilty as charged. But you’ve known that for months. I don’t see how you—”

“I think ten years ago?” I said. “You were just a sad, fucked-up freak with a medicine cabinet full of pills and a scrambled, genius brain. And you came up with this easy ploy to get a good allowance out of Daddy, and for a while that was good enough. But then Pearse came along.”

He gave me that studious nod of his, half contemplative, half contemptous. “Maybe. And I fell under his—”

“Bullshit. He fell under
your
spell, Wes. You were behind this the whole time,” I said. “Behind Pearse, behind Diane Bourne, behind Karen’s death—”

“Whoa, whoa. Hold up.” He held out his hands.

“You killed Siobhan. It had to be you. Pearse was accounted for and neither of the women in that house could have lifted her.”

“Siobhan?” He shook his head. “Siobhan who?”

“You knew we’d come into that house sooner or later. That’s why you drew us in with the five hundred grand. I always thought it was a small amount. I mean, why should Pearse settle? But he did. Because you told him to. Because sooner or later, when it all got messy and difficult, you realized the only thing better than getting the money you felt you were the proper heir to would be
becoming
the proper heir again. You reinvented yourself, Wes, as the victim.”

His confused smile widened and he stopped at the edge of the pond, glanced over at the back porch. “I really don’t know where you get your ideas, Mr. Kenzie. They’re quite fanciful.”

“When we came in that room, the electrical tape was at your feet, Wesley. That means someone had either been about to bind your feet and forgot, which I find unlikely, or you—you, Wesley—heard us come through the door, popped the racquetball in your mouth,
considered
binding
your feet, but then figured you might not have time and went for the rope on
one
wrist instead. Only one of your wrists was bound, Wesley. And why? Because a man can’t tie both his wrists to opposite arms of a chair.”

He studied our reflections in the pond. “Are you done?”

“Pearse said I couldn’t see the whole chessboard, and he was right. I’m slow on the uptake sometimes. But I see it all now, Wesley, and it was you pulling strings from the get-go.”

He tossed a pebble at my reflection, turned my face into ripples.

“Ah,” he said, “you make it sound so Machiavellian. Things are rarely that way.”

“What way?”

“Smooth.” He tossed another pebble in the pond. “Let me tell you a story. A fairy tale, if you will.” He scooped up a handful of small stones and began to throw them, one by one, out into the center of the pond. “A bad king of haunted lineage and barren heart lived in his palace with his trophy queen and imperfect son and imperfect stepdaughter. It was a cold place. But then—oh
then
, Mr. Kenzie—the king and his trophy queen had a third child. And she was a rare creature. A beauty. Stolen, actually, from a peasant family, but otherwise without flaws. The king, the queen, the older princess, even the weak prince—my God, they all loved that child. And for a few brief, spectacular years, that kingdom
glowed
. And love filled every room. Sins were forgotten, weaknesses overlooked, anger buried. It was golden.” His voice trailed off and he stared out over the pond and eventually shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then, on a walk with the prince—who loved her, who
adored
her—the baby princess followed a sprite into a dragon’s lair. And she died. And the prince, at first, blamed himself, though it was clear there was truly little he could have done. But that didn’t stop the king! Oh, no. He blamed the prince. So did the queen. They tortured the prince with their silences, days of it, followed by sudden malevolent glances. They blamed him. It was plain. And
who did the prince have to turn to in
his
grief? Why, his stepsister, of course. But she…she…rebuffed him. She
blamed
him. Oh, she didn’t say so, but in her blissfully ignorant way—neither condemning nor forgiving—she drove a stake far deeper than the king or queen had. The princess, you see, had balls to attend, galas. She wrapped herself in ignorance and fantasy to block out her sister’s death, and in doing so, blocked out the prince and left him alone, crippled by his loss, his guilt, by the physical shortcoming that kept him from reaching the dragon’s lair quickly enough.”

“Gee,” I said, “tough story, but I hate costume dramas.”

He ignored me. “The prince wandered in exile a long time, at the end of which his secret lover, a shaman in his father’s court, introduced him to a band of rebels who wished to topple the king. Their plans were flawed. The prince knew this. But he went along while his fragile psyche began to heal. He made contingency plans. Many, many contingency plans.” He threw the last of his stones into the water, looked up at me as he bent for more. “And the prince grew strong, Mr. Kenzie. He grew very strong.”

“Strong enough to cut off his own finger?”

Wesley smiled. “It’s a fairy tale, Mr. Kenzie. Don’t get weighed down with specifics.”

“How will the prince feel when someone strong cuts off his head, Wesley?”

“I’m home now,” he said. “Back where I belong. I’ve matured. I’m with my loving father and loving stepmother. I’m happy. Are you happy, Patrick?”

I said nothing.

“I hope so. Hold on to that happiness. It’s rare. It can break any time. Were you to run about making wild accusations you couldn’t prove, it could affect your happiness. You’d get wiped out in court by a few good attorneys with acute knowledge of slander laws.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He turned to me, gave me his weak smile. “Run home, Patrick. Be a good boy. Protect your vulnerabilities, your
loved ones, and gird yourself for tragedy.” He tossed another pebble at my reflection. “It befalls us all.”

I glanced back at the porch where Christopher Dawe sat reading the paper and Carrie Dawe sat reading a book.

“They’ve paid enough,” I said. “I won’t hurt them to get at you.”

“Considerate,” he said. “I’ve heard that about you.”

“But, Wesley?”

“Yes, Patrick.”

“They won’t live forever.”

“No.”

“Think about that. They’re all that shields you from me.”

Something caught in his face for just a moment, the tiniest of tics, a glimmer of fear.

And then it vanished.

“Stay away,” he whispered. “Stay away, Patrick.”

“Sooner or later, you’ll be an orphan.” I turned away from the pond. “And that’s the day the bloodline ends.”

I left him there and walked back across the great lawn toward the expansive porch.

It was a gorgeous fall day. The trees erupted. The earth smelled like harvest.

The sun was beginning to fade, though, and the air—slightly chilled as it slid through the trees—carried with it just the barest hint of rain.

Thanks to Dr. Keith Ablow, for answering my questions about psychiatry; Tom Corcoran, for setting me straight on the ’68 Shelby; Chris and Julie Gleason, for helping out with English lit. questions I’m embarrassed I had to ask; Detective Michael Lawn of the Watertown Police Department, for explaining accident-scene procedures; Dr. Laura Need, for providing the heart condition; Emily Sperling of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association; Paul and Maureen Welch, for leading me to Plymouth; and MM, for clarifying U.S. Postal Service procedures.

Thanks also to Jessica Baumgardner, Eleanor Cox, Michael Murphy, Sharyn Rosenblum, and my brother Gerry for propping me up during the New York trips.

And finally, as always, my deepest gratitude to Claire Wachtel, Ann Rittenberg, and Sheila for reading the drafts, pulling no punches, and keeping me honest.