The Color of Blood (38 page)

Jonathan looked to his mother one last time; she seemed to be fading before our eyes, like a plant wilting for lack of water and light; she shook her head at him and turned away. He attempted a laugh, but it didn’t catch. His eyes burned with hatred; he looked like a trapped and wounded animal.

“I did my best for us,” he said. “But the only other person who gave a damn was Denis, and he should never have been allowed across the door. Now you can all go to hell.”

He bolted across the room and out the door. I thought Shane Howard might try and stop him, but he didn’t. Neither did I. I put the gun back in my pocket and called Dave Donnelly and told him what had happened and who I thought was responsible and where to come.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, EMILY HOWARD AND JERRY
Dalton appeared. Emily had the dollhouse under her arm and an excited, urgent look in her eye. She made straight for me but Denis Finnegan’s body brought her to a halt; she screamed at the sight of the dead man and shook her head in disbelief. I led her to a sofa and calmed her down and filled her in quickly on what had taken place. I left her sitting very still with the dollhouse on her lap and tears in her eyes, whatever she had been about to tell me lost to shock.

Sandra stared at Jerry Dalton blankly; when Shane and Emily explained who he was, she nodded. “Welcome to the family,” she said, with a dark smile on her face that failed to leaven the curse. I wanted to spare her any more pain. But we weren’t done yet.

“Jessica’s parents have arrived in the country. They’re staying at the Radisson,” I said to Sandra. “Her father, the one who isn’t a dead alcoholic actor, and her mother, who didn’t die of ovarian cancer.”

She looked at me as if she had hoped I’d let her off this, at least, as if what we’d been to each other should count for something. It did, but I couldn’t let her see that. Not until it was all finished. Maybe not even then. She winced, as if I had hit her, then nodded, walked from the fireplace to the nearest window and began to open the heavy green velvet curtains.

“Shut out the lights,” she said.

Jerry Dalton went around the room and turned all the lamps off. A cold light spilled in from outside, the deep blue before dawn on a clear day, the first for a long time. There were smears of pink in the sky; the three towers loomed ahead; below them, the dark city, asleep by the bay.

“I was first,” Sandra said. “And that made me feel important. I was thirteen, and he came to my room not long after I’d started my periods. It was exciting… we’d go for drives, and secret walks, and he’d always take me to rugby matches, and of course it was very exciting having secrets from everyone, Mother especially… I felt the others were such babies then… I don’t remember what I thought about the sex… it was messy, I remember thinking, and it seemed silly too, and then frightening when Father got so serious and intense about it all… but I can’t remember actually
feeling
anything, or rather I felt so many different things… love, fear, disloyalty, the thrill of the forbidden… that it was hard to unravel them from each other. I suppose that’s why it’s been an issue for me later… not that I didn’t enjoy it, I liked lots of things about it, but I don’t think I really
felt
anything, or enough… except with Stephen. Even if he was seventeen, we shouldn’t have been together. That was so intense. But maybe it was because it was forbidden, because I knew deep down it was wrong…

“Anyway, it ended with Father after two years. It got awful fairly quickly. I thought at first we might run away, that he might be mine, not Mother’s. But of course, when you realize… when I realized what it was… all it could ever be… well, then it just became disgusting. At first he’d bring me presents, new clothes, books, records… but then it became more about Mother not finding out than anything else… so after a while, he just left money under the pillow… I wasn’t even sure what a whore was yet, but I felt like one… so I just wouldn’t let him anymore. Well, that was all right, he didn’t force me… and then one night… Shane, I’m going to talk about this, is that okay?”

“Just keep going,” Shane Howard said.

“I heard screams from Shane’s room. I ran in, and there he was, trying to do Shane… from behind, you know. I just… I screamed and flung myself at him and beat him and clawed and scratched until he ran off… and I stayed with Shane until morning. And that went on for months. Nothing sexual, we never… I… and I know, Shane, I know you thought I was protecting you, and maybe that was part of it. But honestly, I was jealous, if he wasn’t going to have me, he shouldn’t have you… I felt I had been slighted, that when I sent him away, he should have come back with a better offer, he should have taken me off on a white charger… I know that didn’t make any sense… it probably wasn’t even fair… but he started it… Then Marian, who was precocious even by nowadays standards, had breasts and her first period at eleven… and… and I was fifteen… and I just pretended nothing was happening… even though it was obvious, an eleven-year-old wearing makeup, eye shadow, lipstick… and yet she was still such a child, in thrall to the whole princess story, the sleeping beauty, the kiss from a prince… but I
knew
…”

“I knew too,” Shane said.

“And we did nothing. I don’t know what I thought. Or maybe a part of me thought, I had to put up with it, why shouldn’t she? Maybe that’s what a very cold, cruel part of me thought.”

I looked around the room. Emily’s face was a blizzard of tears. Jerry Dalton knelt by her, holding her hand. Shane had gone back to staring at the floor.

“And then Marian was suddenly, mysteriously ‘ill’… except she wasn’t. We knew she wasn’t, we all knew she was pregnant. We knew it from the way Mother was so unhappy, the way she’d cry herself to sleep at night… the way she couldn’t look at Father anymore, and the way he couldn’t look at anyone… the way no one was allowed to see Marian, or if we were, she wasn’t allowed to say anything to us… we knew she was pregnant and we… and I was jealous… and I blamed her… and it seemed like such a special fuss was being made of her, I wished it was me. We never… well, I never saw the baby… I don’t even know what happened, it was never spoken of… was it stillborn?”

“Eileen Casey thought she heard a baby cry one night,” I said.

“Did she?” Sandra said. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? For a baby to have been born into the world… into this house… and for there to be no trace of it left… it’s about as bad as it could be… and we never spoke of it…
never
… who knows, did they give it away, or murder it, or what? We never knew.”

“They gave it away,” Shane said. “That’s what I always reckoned, to one of the adoption agencies, or to a home, or some such. That’s why Marian… that’s why she couldn’t…”

“That must be right,” Sandra said. “That’s why she…
because
she couldn’t. She couldn’t face life without the baby, so she walked into the pool in her nightdress holding the heaviest rock she could find, and laid the rock on her chest, and lay down in the water and couldn’t get up… at least that’s how she was when I found her, that’s how I imagined she did it… Oh God forgive us, she was just a little girl, and we did
nothing
…”

Sandra began to cry then. Great, wrenching, ugly-sounding sobs filled the room. She made a harsh “mmmm” sound in her throat and in her mouth to make herself stop.

“Keep going, to the end. The only thing we did… Mother gathered Shane and me together, on the day of the funeral, and said, ‘Marian’s room is to be kept like it was the day she left us. It will be cleaned, but it must never be altered, as long as you live in this house. Do you understand?’ And so it never has been, not a jot has been changed or taken from it to this day.

“So what I did then, I completely denied everything that had happened. I think it took me a few years. I think teaching was my way of not following in my father’s footsteps. But I helped to nurse him…”

“Along with Eileen Casey.”

“That’s right.”

“She told me he didn’t rape her.”

“Well, that makes everything all right then,” Sandra said. “After his death… and maybe it was in getting to know Dr. Rock… in seeing, for the first time, a future… I don’t know, it was as if I decided everything had been the opposite of what it was, everything had been perfectly fine… if not for our sake, for the sake of the children we had, that they would never know about it, or be affected by it… but I suppose all I was doing was living a lie, and making them live one too, crippling them under the weight of it. God, what have I done to my little boy?”

She wept again. I wanted to go to her, to hold her, to tell her what I didn’t believe, that it would be all right, that we could be together. I took a step in her direction, and she turned from the window and looked at me, looked through me, and I knew that what we had had, whatever we had had, was gone, gone and best forgotten. I hadn’t been straight with her, and she couldn’t be straight with me; now she looked right through me and I looked right back, and she passed along to where her brother was sitting. She sat on the floor between his outstretched knees, and he slid down off the couch and cradled her in his great arms, just as she had done with him the night Emily was found, the night David Brady and Jessica Howard were murdered, just as she had been doing with him for years; now the years seemed to fall away until they were like children again in their haunted house, waiting out the dark.

Outside, the pink was filling up the sky, slices of grapefruit and salmon frothing one against the other. The sun rose over the bay like a fat blood orange. At long last, after a long long night, on All Souls’ Day, some light.

THE FIRST PETROL BOMB CAME THROUGH THE DOOR AND
shattered golden against the piano. The second was smashed by hand on the inside of the door, which was then slammed shut from the outside. I could hear something being dragged against the door out in the corridor, but it wasn’t necessary; the flames had shot up against the door handle, making it impossible to get out.

At the other end of the room, the drapes by the corner window Sandra had been standing at went up like tinder. Shane drew the curtains on the far window and tried to open it but it had been nailed shut, and the glass was reinforced. It might have been worse; as a ground-floor window, it might have been barred. The fire was spreading fast, and the thick smoke made it difficult to see, and to breathe. We tried to break the glass with tables and chairs, but the furniture was old and flimsier than it looked, and ended up shattering. I wondered about trying to launch the piano through the window, but it was too heavy, and now it too was engulfed in flames. Finally, Shane Howard, Jerry Dalton and I hoisted the heaviest sofa in the room and, using it as a battering ram, together we ran it at the window and shattered the panes below the sash. This let air in, making it easier to breathe, but it also fed the flames with oxygen. It took us a while to extract the sofa from the shattered windowpanes, and then it was a case of kicking out the remaining shards of glass and wood. Below us there was a drop of about eight feet to a concrete path about four feet wide; beyond the path, the lawn rose in a steep incline to our knee level and then swept off down the hill.

The flames reached the drapes on the second window, framing the dawn on one side in golden fire. I shooed Emily toward the open window and beckoned Jerry Dalton.

“You first, come on.”

“I’m not parting with this,” Emily said, hugging her dollhouse to her.

I nodded, then grabbed it out of her arms and tossed it out the window. It bounced on the lawn unharmed.

“Now, go,” I said.

Emily hung from the window and dropped to the ground below. Jerry Dalton held back, waiting for Sandra to get to safety; she was huddled near the empty grate of the fireplace.

“Sandra, come on, we don’t have much time,” I cried. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

I took her by the wrist, and she grabbed my arm hard and looked into my eyes and shook her head.

“I don’t want any more time, Ed,” she said. “I can never leave this house.”

I released her at once, by reflex, as you might recoil from the dead.

She smiled then, and clasped the bloodstone around her neck tight in her hand and turned and vanished into the flames. I never saw her again.

I went to the window and helped Jerry Dalton down. When I turned back to the room, it was an inferno. Whatever stuffing was in the furniture and cushions was highly inflammable; there was a circus of flame across the center of the room. Shane had his back to me; he looked like he was trying to find a way through the blaze. I clapped him on the back.

“Where’s Sandra?” Shane said.

“She was by the fireplace,” I said.

Shane tried to head that way, but the flames were impassable; his trouser leg caught fire, and I dragged him back and beat the flames off.

“I can’t go without her,” he shouted.

“Maybe she got out the door.”

“I have to go back for her.”

“Shane,” I yelled. “Think of Emily. We can double around and try to get in some other way. But if we stay here, we’re dead men.”

Shane looked me briefly in the face, his great scowl blackened with smoke. He shook his head.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“I think I do understand,” I said. “I know you killed Jessica. I don’t know why. But you would have known there would be little blood when she was stabbed through the heart. So when you rang and told me she was dead and asked where all the blood was, you were feigning some kind of shock you didn’t really feel. Your wife was dead because you had killed her yourself, hours earlier.”

Shane looked at me and, for the last time, the planes of his great face shifted into a grotesque smile.

“I just couldn’t take any more,” he said. “When I saw the photographs of Emily, I blamed myself, but I blamed Jessica more. A whore breeds nothing but whores.”

The fumes were choking me now, like acid in my throat; my eyes felt like they were bleeding; the foulness of Shane Howard’s words clung to the smoke like a chemical taint.