Son of Destruction (23 page)

‘Oh, Bobby.’ When she raises her hand like that he thinks he can see light through it. ‘Don’t do me like that.’

‘No no, I mean, you’re doing so well. Al says you were great in Homosassa,’ he says, and the whole time his mind is racing after its quarry. ‘You’re getting strong.’

Her face clouds over. ‘You didn’t hear about the trouble. At the Dairy Queen.’

‘Even the best people have setbacks, Mag.’ Last night’s train wreck had common ingredients: Kalen. The kid. Pike. And . . .

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Eighteen months sober, remember?’ And the last element – Ionesco’s maid would be proud. The final ingredient is . . . ‘If somebody as lame as me can get my shit together, so can you!’

Margaret’s big problem is that in every respect, she’s too easy. Her eyes are brimming. ‘I’m so glad.’

The final ingredient is. Finally. Bobby knows. ‘I have to go out for a while, OK Mag? You’ll be fine.’

Performative utterance or self-fulfilling prophecy, she buys it. She says firmly, ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Hang in and tomorrow we’ll go out to lunch.’ Her face does that jerky, frightened thing. ‘Nowhere scary. Just the Pelican.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Pierce Point,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

It’s either hard to explain or hard to orchestrate, because Bobby is gearing up for a confrontation. He takes the long way because he and Pike haven’t spoken since that night Walker came to the house, OK, thirty years ago. They were never friends, although he suspects they’re a lot alike. Oh, God this is hard. He takes the oyster shell road that hugs the shore, making time to write the necessary speeches. For all the good that does. When he arrives at Walker Pike’s neat redwood house on the far side of Pierce Point, the only opening line he’s managed to come up with is, ‘You have something of mine.’

Like Florida beach houses in the 1920s, Walker’s place is built with a tin roof and wooden shutters that drop to protect the glass from storms. Even though it’s late spring, he has the shutters down. Except for running lights on the deck and the yellow bulb in the lantern above the door, no light shows. For all he knows, Walker is gone. He goes up on the deck and knocks, rehearsing his opening line
.

OK then. Knock again. Again. If nothing happens, walk away. Go on, admit it, it would be easier. Unless you think you can break in.

The door opens.

Everything Bobby lined up to say evaporates. ‘Hi.’
Weak, Chaplin. Fucking lame
.

Standing on bleached teakwood planks worn smooth as the deck of a square-rigger, Walker Pike regards him. Like silvered teak, he’s weathered well.

‘It’s me.’ Bobby adds foolishly, ‘Bob Chaplin, from school?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I had to see you.’

The face Walker has prepared for him is carefully assembled. Neutral. Handsome. He’s lost the hungry, vulpine look he had as a kid. ‘I don’t
do
drop-ins,’ he says in a level tone but he adds, to make clear that he is by no means hostile, ‘If you want to know the truth, I don’t do people.’

Write too many undelivered speeches and you write yourself backward, into cliché. Bobby blurts, ‘We need to talk.’

‘No we don’t.’

‘You have something of mine.’

‘No.’ Then Walker astounds him. ‘You have something of mine.’

Troublesome facts drop into place like tumblers, with an audible
snick.
Suppressing a groan, Bobby dips his head in acknowledgement. ‘I do.’

Walker snaps to attention. ‘I
thought
she’d sent it to you.’

‘Let me in?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘If I go home and get it, then will you let me in?’

‘No,’ Walker says, and that’s the last thing they’ll say about Lucy’s wedding ring.

Desperate, he tries, ‘Lorna.’ Walker’s face clangs shut, which makes Bobby babble on about her snobbery, that big old car, her outfits with matching gloves and shoes until he hits, ‘All she cared about was Precious. Fat as a toad. And
mean.
’

‘She loved that dog.’

Bobby does not have to add,
Probably the only thing she loved
.
‘Some expert came all the way from Tampa to do its hair.’
Walker speaks. I’m almost there!

But Walker ends it. ‘Precious was mostly bald.’

It’s weird. Bobby’s articulate by nature and by no means a stupid person but thirty years of pain and confusion, the bulk and weight of raw experience compressed, boil up and present as a single word. ‘Please!’

Walker stops Bobby with the flat of his hand and holds him in place. ‘Wait.’

‘It’s urgent.’

‘Not yet.’ The green eyes move faster than any scanner, assessing. His fingers tighten on Bobby’s arm as if he’s testing for vibrations. Fiber. Intent. Something inside Walker goes: Click. He says, ‘OK. You’re safe.’

Relief makes Bobby too bluff, too hearty, just one of the guys. ‘Shit yes I’m safe.’ What is the man, a walking metal detector? ‘I’m not here to rip you off.’

Walker says coldly, ‘Safe, as in, I can’t hurt you.’

‘I think you ripped me off,’ Bobby blurts. ‘
The
Swordfish.
’
Oh shit. Oh, shit!

Walker’s face changes, perhaps too fast. ‘That wasn’t me.’ He stands aside, revealing polished floors, teak furniture with clean lines, shelves filled with books by the thousands. ‘Come in.’

Exploding into the
Fort Jude Star
parking lot, Dan finds a note on his windshield. The oversized sheet of rag paper is neatly folded and tucked under the wiper blade. Whoever left it has an enviable printer; the heavy stock unfolds to poster size. The writer chose quality paper, 72 point type, to deliver a message that there is no mistaking:

Dan grunts. It’s like taking a blow to the heart – not fatal, but he feels it. The puzzle is not that somebody has been watching, or why the note. This is the mystery: the design, the quality of the stock. The message is the medium. He knows without being told that this is not a threat. Carefully matching the original fold lines, he zips the paper into his messenger bag. He locks it in the car and walks away, pacing the streets with no certain destination.

He has to think.

When he left Archambault’s this morning he came directly to the
Star
building, jittering and loaded for bear. His thinking has done a 360 since then, and it’s getting dark.

He went in to research the story he devised to justify his presence here. His projected in-depth story about Fort Jude’s spontaneous human combustions got him into the morgue, a.k.a. library. Three unexplained deaths by fire in the same city within thirty years – what a story! If he could find something new on them and get it right and sell it, Fort Jude’s incendiary women would jump-start his career. If he could force himself to go back into that terrible house.

It’s in the blood.

The librarian brought him everything he needed: photocopies of front pages and folders of individual stories, folders of cracked photos, city directory, tax records on the one burn site still standing police reports, personal data on the victims – everything he needed – but he could not bring himself to look at them.

In a miracle of avoidance, he cut to the chase.

He called for everything they had on Chaplin and the four names supplied by this guy Bellinger’s kid. The boys snapped in that Jeep on a prehistoric beach before he was imagined are middle-aged men now, but if his mother kept that snapshot she kept it for a reason, maybe as a message to him.

Maybe Lucy, who told him nothing, saved the big stuff for last so she wouldn’t have to sit through a painful Q. and A. Searches always begin in crazy hope and end in the usual way, but, hey. Maybe he can find and confront the guy.

Maybe she knew he’d use the photo to track the suspects to their lairs. She never said much but she loved him, she’d want him to get what he wants. What he wants? He wants to bag his biodad like a deer and take him home tied to his roof rack, antlers and all. Then the fight, the joyful reunion, whatever Dan Carteret really needs – an
explanation
– will follow. To hell with the story. He can get out of this town without going back to the Archambault house.

Meeting Bob Chaplin yesterday, Dan never would have guessed that the miserable, defeated guy he found weeding his sidewalk in Pine Vista used to be a big deal. Amazing, he’s front and center in a full-page spread in the Sports section, flanked by his main men Bellinger, Von Harten, Coleman, Kalen, holding their helmets like trophies – five guys with Seventies sideboards and toothpaste grins.

All but Chaplin stayed local. He moved north and rose fast in the food chain, up to a point. Eagle Scout, Harvard graduate, summa cum; Harvard combined law degree and M.B.A., Goldman Sachs; New York wedding, reception at the Metropolitan Club but no photo, wonder what happened with the wife; regular promotions. Then the stories stopped.

Scowling, Dan studied young Chaplin the way he used to study Burt Mixon’s blunt, mean face, convincing himself all over again:
It isn’t him
.

He thinks.

The others? Their lives continued, boring or not. The Bellinger kid’s father did well over the years, still is: high school fullback, University of Florida all the way, marriage to a local girl, partner in a leading law firm, officer in the Florida Bar Association, ecology activist, local tennis star, all good. There wasn’t much on Von Harten or Coleman; Jaycees, pillars of the community, printing company, car dealership, prizes for whatever they’re still doing, no big, but at least they’re still doing it. Possible. They’re all possible.

The thick Kalen file started with a sixth birthday party – carousel and pony rides, family must have a lot of jack; at six the kid had the same bulldog scowl as Chaplin’s beefy tackle. Dan scowled reflexively. Kalen smiled for his photo in suit and tie graduating from some jerkwater college,
couldn’t get in anywhere decent,
Dan thought;
could he be that stupid and be my dad?
Wedding photo: Kalen in a tux, strong-arming his cute, tiny bride with big boobs out of the Episcopal cathedral in a shower of rice, reception at the Fort Jude Club. There were mug shots with announcements of each new job –
Bradley J. Kalen, second V.P., Bradley J. Kalen, publicist, Bradley J. Kalen, representative
– about two a year until they stopped.
Bradley J. Kalen, unemployed?
Divorce notice buried in City Briefs: irreconcilable differences, one of those legal niceties constructed to protect the perp. Drunk driving arrests starting in high school, ongoing. Assault, probably bar fights, ongoing. Charges filed, charges dropped.
Oh, fuck. It better not be him.

Sitting there in the library, a.k.a. morgue of the
Star,
he could not have told you whether he came in to research the whole human torch thing because it was a good story or because of the newspaper photo that Lucy ripped out of his hands when he was five years old. It may be a message too.

Dan still doesn’t know why she kept it, but that’s not the worst thing he doesn’t know. What is it with that house? Yesterday something happened to him in the old woman’s stifling bedroom and for longer than he can say, life as he knows it stopped dead. Hallucination or fever dream? He doesn’t know. She came boiling into his head, ugly and raw and raging over something that he sure as hell didn’t do. Wherever she is in time, she smacked into him again today. While he was in the attic with Steffy, he was OK. He was OK talking to her boyfriend Carter. He was OK starting downstairs. Then outside her bedroom, she crashed into his head again roaring,
Not him. Never. Do you hear?
The words scorched, driving him out of the house a fraction of a second too late. There in the hallway, hot as a branding iron he can still feel, she marked him:

It’s in the blood.

Things we think of to say after the moment for that pissed-off, snappy comeback evaporates:
Chill, lady. You’re just a story. If that’s the way you feel about it, then fuck you.

In a day centered on searching, why did he save his mother for last? Achievement, achievement, achievement, high school P.R. boilerplate with a head shot of Lucy Carteret smiling like any pretty girl. Then, three grafs under a mug shot.
Local Girl Wins Radcliffe Scholarship
. Radcliffe?

One of those things about his mother that she never told. Lucy loved talking to him, she’d say anything, but when he asked her about her life before him, when he asked her about anything in it, she shut down. He always thought she was smarter than he was; he knew she’d dropped out of college. He never knew which one, or why she quit. A
Star
staffer wrote the scholarship story. It ended:

‘Daughter of the late Lorna Carteret of this city and the late William Carteret of Charleston, S.C., the FJHS senior lives with her grandmother, Mrs Lorna Archambault at 4343 Azalea Street.’

This is how Dan Carteret, a good reporter in normal times, ran head-on into the detail he did not know he was avoiding. Like a crash test dummy in a high-speed experiment, he hit the wall. Something inside him went
splat!

No wonder he couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. No wonder Lucy kept the tearsheet from the
Star
. No wonder he didn’t know – and after he knew, which he freely admits, now that he is up against it, he didn’t want to know. The ruined foot. The chair. Images long burned into his brain expanded and magnified until they filled the world. Directly related to him.

Fuck, she was his great-grandmother.
It’s in the blood.

All this unexplained fire and probable damnation is specific to him.

The discovery drove him boiling out into the twilight, to the rented Honda and the note on the windshield. A demon in his head is busy writing background music for what lies ahead: possible scoring for the Greek Recognition Scene.