The Guardian (10 page)

Ross downshifted to third around the next corner and floored the car, letting the back end knock out in a power skid.

Mile five passed.

“Ross, listen… .” Greg’s voice was barely audible over the wind.

Ross didn’t want to hear what his brother was saying.

He told Greg to shut up again, said he needed to concentrate on the driving.

But his brother talked anyway.

By the time they reached the ramp for Route 128 Ross had to decide if he would do what Greg had asked or not. And do it without any further discussion, without a chance to work out what came next, without any possibility of convincing Greg that he was asking the impossible.

Because, by then, Greg had died.

Chapter 15

Janine was cold.

They had the windows down in the car, and she was between the man and woman. The man had yelled at the woman for a while to keep going faster, and once Janine thought they were going to crash, but the man had reached over and grabbed the wheel. Then they’d reached the highway, and he’d told the woman to get on and off twice.

Once they were on a back road again, the man had pulled his mask off. The woman said, “Why are you doing that? Put it on!”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

“Put it on!” The woman tried to cover Janine’s eyes, but the man slapped her hand away.

“I said it doesn’t matter anymore.” The man’s face was sharp and mean-looking.

Janine stared at him directly. And though he was close, she felt as if she were far away.

Not that she wasn’t scared. A part of her could feel how her body was still shaking, that her shoulders would hitch as she tried to get in air.

That she tasted her own tears.

When she closed her eyes, there was the flash of gunfire. The flash showing her father making a face she’d never seen.

She opened her eyes and stared again at the man.

He noticed. “What’re you looking at?”

“Did you kill my daddy?”

“He went for the gun, little chick. That’s the way it goes.” He snapped his fingers at the woman. “Pull over at that phone booth over there.”

He took Janine by the hand. “Let’s go talk to Mommy.”

Janine had lost count of the various turns, stops, and starts. But she knew she was in Boston. They walked her up the stairs of an old factory building. The stairs looked the same as the place they’d taken her before.

In the apartment, Janine recognized the old linoleum floor, saw the hamburger bags in the big plastic trash can in the kitchen. The place was bigger than she’d imagined, with wide green shades pulled down in front of the windows. It didn’t look like any apartment she’d ever been to. More like a place to do work.

“Go ahead, take off that idiot mask,” the man said to the woman.

Janine could see the woman looking between the man and her, and finally she, too, pulled off the ski mask. Her hair was different than Janine had imagined, sort of blond. She glanced at Janine quickly, then turned away.

The place stunk of a smell Janine remembered, a chemical smell for cockroaches. The stuff didn’t seem to be working; bugs scattered across the table when the man put the shotgun and the pistol down.

The two of them were silent now. The woman finally looked over at Janine and put her finger to her lips. Janine remembered her mother doing that in the store, back when all of this started. She closed her eyes. She tried to bring back her mother’s voice, but there was no comfort there, because less than an hour ago she’d had to tell her mother that her father was dead.

Her mother had been so happy to hear Janine’s voice at first that she hadn’t seemed to hear it when Janine told her that Daddy was dead. She’d kept saying, “Put Daddy on, put Daddy on,” and then the man had yanked the phone away and said the words again.

Janine couldn’t shake the feeling it was her fault. She thought about how she’d helped the man pick out her father’s car. The idea of it scared her so bad she couldn’t breathe.

She saw the flash of yellow fire again, her father’s face.

That’s the way it goes.

She opened her eyes. Stared at the man, then at the woman. The man kicked the big armchair suddenly, spun it so it faced the center of the room. He grabbed Janine by the arm, and before she knew it, he’d flung her into the chair. She bounced half out but grabbed the arms and pulled herself back.

She didn’t make a sound.

“Please,” the woman said. “Leave Leanne—”

“This isn’t Leanne,” the man said. He bent down so his face was inches from Janine’s. “All right, little chick. Who was he? The guy in the bushes, the guy who did this?” The man pointed to the blood on his shirt.

For the first time she realized he was bleeding. There was a tear in his shirt, soaked in red.

Good,
she thought. She didn’t say anything. Just stared back at him.

Behind him, the woman was trying to get her attention. Janine ignored her, felt mad at the woman. Janine knew she was getting in worse trouble, but she just didn’t care.

“Who?” The man hit her on the side of the head, jarred her vision. “You think it’s bad now, kid, it can get worse. Now who was he?”

The woman turned away. Janine felt her face get all hot, knew she was about to cry. She thought again of her father driving by in the car and her telling the man, and suddenly the tears started pouring out, scalding hot. The smash of the big car into her dad’s … she knew she hadn’t wanted it to happen, but somehow it seemed like she’d been on the man’s side, she’d been helping him hurt her father.

That’s the way it goes
.

The man chucked her under the chin. “Cut the shit. Or I’ll give you reason to cry. C’mon. Who was he?”

She drew herself up and screamed it in his face. “Uncle Ross is going to kill you!”

“Yeah?” He hit her with two fingers again. “Your uncle, huh? He thinks he’s some sort of tough guy?”

Janine bit him. She grabbed his hand and got her teeth into his thumb.

“Shit!” The man half dragged her out of the chair and hit her so hard that she relaxed her bite. But she bore back down and tried to tear his thumb right off.

He hit her again, in the side. It knocked the breath out of her, and she fell away from him. Her head hit the floor, and from the great distance up, she saw the man draw his boot up.

And she knew from the look on his face he wasn’t going to stop.

Chapter 16

Ross left the hand brake down and stepped away from the car. The BMW rolled down the hill, going maybe twenty or so, then disappeared. He got to the edge of the cliff just as the car sank from view in the moonlight.

He knew the cove was deep enough to hide the car well. The entire cove was exceptionally deep. Right up against the cliff wall it was over forty feet.

Even though the Sands was no longer theirs, it had seemed like the best place to go to hide the car, and to bury his brother. To keep the police out of it like he’d insisted, right up until he died.

When Ross had driven back to the truck with Greg’s body, the phone had been ringing. Beth had been on the line, hysterical. She’d just heard from Janine and the kidnapper, and was it true? Was it true Greg was dead? Ross had told her it was. He had her put Allie on the phone.

Allie said, “How did it go so wrong?” Her own voice was shaking, but she seemed in control of herself. “Ross, how?”

“What’d he say?”

“He told her he was going to give us another chance, and to not call the police.”

“We’re going to take that chance. That’s what Greg told me he wanted.”

She had wanted to talk further, but he had closed the conversation, knowing that if he was to do as Greg had asked, he would have to move fast, or he would never do it at all.

When it came right down to it, Ross thought maybe he had waited too long after all. He was sitting on the knoll overlooking the cove. His brother was wrapped in the tarp he’d taken from the garage. The knoll was where they’d set the tent, the nights they needed to keep away from their father. Their mother had taken them there for picnics before that. The oak tree behind him still held the weathered frame of their tree house.

Ross started digging. As the shovel sank into the soft dirt, Ross could almost hear their voices coming from the tree house, from days when their mother was alive. Greg’s voice good-natured, a little on the bossy side. His own a bit cocky, but still looking for his older brother’s approval. Other scenes and times came to life inside his head in a random shuffle. Greg’s wedding reception held there overlooking the cove; Greg and Beth taking vows they’d written themselves; Janine, as a toddler, standing at the foot of the tree with her father, excitedly babbling up as her Uncle Ross walked along a tree limb.

And Ross thought about five years ago, the day before he was to hear his verdict on the drug charge. He had been out on bail. He and Greg had sat under the tree and shared a beer. Greg had reminded him that the place had been in their family for over a hundred years and that it and the people who cared about Ross would still be there even if the jury came in against him. “It’ll all be here for you when you get back,” Greg had said. “All of us.”

Afterward, Ross went back to the garage and strapped the case of money onto Greg’s old Honda motorcycle. It took almost a dozen kicks to get the bike running.

But, out on the road, the bike revved easily, and Ross had to fight the urge to use screaming power of the engine to chase away the images of what he’d just done.

Back at the truck, he changed the front tire and ran the bike up on the plank he kept in the bed. He threw the case of money alongside.

He checked his watch and he saw it was just after midnight. Nothing to hold him from going back to Greg’s house now. He’d kept himself locked into the logistics, the horrific steps involved in burying his brother. Somehow he’d managed that, but he didn’t know how he was going to do with the words, with the explanation to Beth why he’d come home with the money, but not her husband or daughter.

Chapter 17

Ross told them everything from the moment he began following Greg.

“You started the shooting?” Allie said. “Are you crazy?”

Beth tuned out. The enormity of it was too much. Her mind could barely touch it. Greg dead, buried up at the Sands.

Insanity. Her life, in little more than a day, everything gone. Yesterday, she and Greg had been discussing things like how they could save money. Discussing possibility of bankruptcy. That’d kept both of them awake nights, and oh God, for one of those nights now. To think losing your house was the worst thing that could happen to you.

Beth bit her the knuckle of her forefinger, sank her teeth down so she tasted blood. Trying to wake herself up from the nightmare.

Janine, her little girl, still gone.

Her husband dead. Buried by his own brother. She had a sudden image of Greg, the day they’d met at Amherst, the day he knocked on her door holding one of the cards her former roommate had put up around campus. He needed a tutor in French. She remembered his double take, and the way her shyness suddenly just didn’t exist. And she’d lied and told him she’d taken over from the roommate, and she’d be delighted to take him on as a student. Thinking that with a little time, she could convince him he needed an art history tutor. But it hadn’t felt like a lie; it’d felt like they’d always known each other and her lie was just a dance step she had to take for them to be together.

Could the two of them have known somehow it could end like this?

Allie was still hammering hard at Ross. Her face was flushed, and Beth was dreamily aware that this was what they paid Allie for. She was their advocate, their fighter. She was saying, “What did he look like?”

“Both of them were wearing ski masks.”

“License number?”

“I didn’t see it. The bulb was gone over the plates. And there was too much going on for me to get a closer look.”

“Too much going on? Christ!” Allie was pacing back in forth across the kitchen. “I begged you not to go. What was it? Some sort of macho convict bullshit? You couldn’t let him rip you off?”

“He was going to kill them both. He was working himself up to it.”

“Why would he do that?” Beth could see Allie was near tears herself. “Greg was going to give him the money!”

“Apparently the woman said his name in front of Janine.”

Allie hesitated. “You know his name?”

“No. Janine said she hadn’t heard it. But he said the woman’s name: Nat.”

“Like ‘Natalie’?”

“I suppose.” Beth realized that Ross was looking at her. His tone with Allie was weary. Beth recognized he was in the same place she was, a kind of drugged state. Where her heart, her whole chest, had turned into wood. She knew that it wouldn’t last long, that anesthesia.