The Last Kind Words (16 page)

I
drove home, went to my room, and listened to JFK’s powerful rhythmic breathing as he slept at the foot of my bed. I managed to shove him aside enough to crawl in under the blankets, and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed of Rebecca Clarke. When I awoke, my hands flashed out like I was trying to keep from falling. It spooked JFK and he barked once in my face.

I sat up and ran my hands through my hair. I needed to start taking sleeping pills, something that would put me out so I could wake up refreshed. Becky seemed so prevalent in my mind that I thought I should visit her, talk to her. Collie had been right. I’d always had extremely vivid dreams. I wondered if I’d sleep better or worse after my brother was dead.

The sun warmed my face. It was a little after dawn. I expected my mother to be up but she wasn’t. I slipped through the house, going room to room and checking on everyone. I stood before the bed of my parents and watched them sprawled but still hugging each other. Mal was out. I hoped he wasn’t scoring them at the Fifth Amendment. Grey slept like he always did, curled up in apparent great comfort as if he were spending the night at the Waldorf. His handsome face took on an even greater beauty in sleep—slack and innocent and genuine. Dale’s teen anger and exasperation were gone from her face, and there was almost a small smile on her lips.

I stopped in Gramp’s room and found him snoozing. It was a relief to see him that way. He looked like he’d just lain down after pulling a particularly exhausting grift. I had the intense urge to wake him up and talk with him. I had the irrational feeling that if I caught him at the right moment I might be able to sneak past his disease. Distract, divert, and
charm it. He’d yawn and look at me the way he used to and say,
Terry, we’ve got a good day ahead of us. A damn good day. Tight cooze and big coin
. He’d chuck me under the chin and give a wink. His hair would be mussed from a night of tossing and the hole in his skull would be on display, black and beckoning.
You with me?

I stepped into Collie’s room. It hadn’t been changed either. I wondered how difficult it was for my mother to come in here and dust and revisit his belongings. I looked around and tried to spot any sign of madness. I slid a finger across the spines of the books on his shelves. At least half of them were mine. I could almost feel Becky Clarke’s breath on my neck. I checked his caches. They were all empty.

I drove over to the address listed on the police report as the Clarke house. It had rained during the night and a mist rose off the streets in the growing morning heat. The family hadn’t moved from Brightwaters village. That surprised me. After a tragedy like the one they’d suffered through, I’d assumed they would have wanted to get as far off Long Island as possible. But they’d stuck it out. I wondered if they’d left Rebecca’s bedroom untouched the way I’d heard some families did when they lost their children too soon. The way my own parents hadn’t changed a thing in my room.

I parked up the road and watched the house. It was two-storied and gabled, painted a charming yellow.

The dream had begun to wear away. It felt distant and unknowable. I didn’t know why I was here. I was trying to reconnect to something I didn’t want to be connected to in the first place. But the only way to learn what might have been going through Collie’s mind, if he had smoked Becky, was to start with her. I wanted to look at home photos. I wanted to get a sense of her. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

“Jesus, what the fuck?”

I started my car. I felt like an idiot. I was about to pull away, when the mother came out of the house, followed by the father. Their names were in the file but I didn’t feel the need to check. They were both professionals, dressed in proper business suits, holding briefcases. He had on a power tie and she wore a skirt that emphasized her lovely legs. He
was eating a cruller and trying not to get any sugar on his lapel. She sipped coffee. He finished in three bites and popped the code into the garage keypad. The door slid up. Inside was a two-year-old Lexus. The Clarkes said a few words to each other and climbed into the car together. She was behind the wheel. The train station was ten minutes away. They probably both worked on Wall Street within a block of each other. They’d take the LIRR into the city and sit side by side doing the
Times
crossword puzzle or double-checking yesterday’s stock figures.

The front door slammed again. A nine- or ten-year-old girl carrying a backpack hopped off the tile stoop, followed by her teenage sister. Sixteen or seventeen and tall, nearly six foot. They walked over to the car and spoke to their parents but didn’t get in. Mom and Dad waved and pulled out. The garage door closed. The sisters started walking together toward the corner bus stop. The teenager had no book bag, which made me wonder if she was a troublemaker at school, sitting in the last row, popping gum and sneering. Her little sister ran ahead, and she put an extra step in her stride. They both had black hair, shoulder length when it wasn’t splayed and hooked by the breeze.

The Clarkes had a first-rate security system. I had the right tools for the job but it would take me a while to trip the system. It looked like I wouldn’t need them. The back door was ajar.

Even after losing one daughter, they left the door open. She might’ve been killed in a park but they should’ve learned something about safety precautions. I shook my head.

I moved fast through the house. For the first time in my life I felt like an intruder. Scoring a place was one thing, but nosing around, being a snoop, hunting through the belongings of the dead, it somehow felt more corrupt.

I hit the master bedroom. Clarke had a .45 in his nightstand drawer. It was loaded. I thought that was a good thing. He might not have time to unlock the piece from a safety box and snap in the clip if someone tried to take his other daughters from him. My respect for Mr. Clarke went up a hair, even if he was a stupid bastard for leaving the door open.

There were three other bedrooms in the home. One was clearly the little girl’s. It looked like a holdover nursery. There were block letters around the mirror, spelling out
SHARON
. Pink walls and white bookcases full of dolls. But she was getting old enough to assert herself. There were posters of the latest movie stars and a couple of boy bands. Beside her bed was a shelf full of paperbacks. She liked those ’tween vampire romances that I used to read to Dale. I recognized several of the titles.

Branching off from the end of the hall were the other two bedrooms. They were damn near identical. I couldn’t tell which was Rebecca’s and which was the other sister’s. The parents not only kept Becky’s room the same, they still dusted and sprayed air freshener.

Lots of prints of famous artwork on the walls. Looked like one or both of the sisters were interested in the likes of Manet, Jackson Pollock, Dali. I could check the dressers and become a fucking panty sniffer, see which one’s underwear smelled fresher, but I already felt too ashamed. When even a thief feels embarrassed, you know something is way out of line.

I started with the room on the left. There were no photos. I didn’t know what else I was looking for. Some connection between Rebecca and Collie? Between her and some boyfriend? Gilmore figured it was always the boyfriend.

The cops would’ve been through the place five years ago. They would’ve searched the drawers and found a diary or anything else that might’ve given them a lead. I stuck to the most likely places for a hidden cache. Most teens had one. A secret stash of cigarettes, joints, porn, boosted cash, self-taken nudie shots, or anything else they wanted to hide from their parents.

I checked the floor and ceiling of the closet. The air vent. The molding in the corners of the room. I pulled out drawers in case any of them had false bottoms or had been shortened to leave room behind them. I scored when I spotted a loose faceplate on one of the wall sockets.

The wiring had been disconnected. There was a cubbyhole about five inches deep. Inside was a dime bag of marijuana, half a bottle of
what looked like Oxycontin, and several other bottles of Valium, Xanax, and Zoloft. The shit was serious. There were also stolen sheets of empty scrips. I pocketed a couple of them. You never knew.

The pot was skunkweed but it was fresh. This was the seventeen-year-old’s room. She liked to mellow out and did what she had to do to follow her buzz and blunt her anxieties. After what she’d been through, I didn’t blame her. But she was overdoing the self-medication. Too many antidepressants could have opposite the intended effect.

I crossed the hall to Becky’s room, hating myself. I felt like a total fraud. Collie’s name was stuck in my teeth. I’d been in the house almost ten minutes. That was a lot of time to be inside. I scouted the likely hot spots, tried the outlets first just to see if the seventeen-year-old had picked up the trick from Becky. There was nothing anywhere.

“Who the fuck are you?”

I spun and the teenage girl was there in the doorway.

If someone comes in the door, you dive out the window. That was one of the basic tenets of being a thief.

Except that she had her father’s .45 trained on me.

They hadn’t been as careless as I’d thought. She was just walking her sister to the corner stop, waiting with her until the bus arrived. That’s why the door had been left open.

“Oh, hey there,” I said, propping a high-wattage smile in place. “I rang the bell. And knocked, but no one answered. The door was open. I’m Freddy of Freddy’s Fix-It. Seems like you’ve got some faulty wiring that your father wants me to check out.”

“The front door was locked. The back door was open.”

“Right,” I said. “See, I was calling out and I decided to come around the side of the house over there and—”

“Where’s your toolbox?”

“Oh, that’s in the truck.”

“So where’s your truck?”

“We didn’t have a flangella voltometer with us. Very important during electrical work, otherwise you can fry the frammistat. My partner left to go get—”

“Shove it. Who are you?”

“Everybody knows Freddy.”

She was pretty, or had been once. Now her face was thin and drawn, with dark steaming eyes and heavy frown lines across her brow and around her mouth. In ten or twenty years they’d be deep as knife tracks. At the top of her arm, the hint of a tattoo edged out from beneath her black T-shirt. She was underage too. I wondered who this prick was that kept inking all these little girls.

She reminded me more than a little of Dale. The gun never wavered. It was a heavy piece of hardware. She held it with a two-handed grip, and the muscles in her forearms were tense and sharply defined.

I winced and waited for the screaming. I thought, Now Gilmore is really going to tune up my ass in a holding cell.

“I know you,” she said.

“Everyone knows Freddy of Freddy’s Fix—”

“No, I
know
you, fucker!”

I didn’t like the way she said it. There was rage there as well as anguish and an undercurrent of vengeance. I never wanted to be around someone who sounded like that, much less someone pointing a large-caliber weapon at my heart. My back began to crawl with cold sweat. My breathing hitched.

“You’re one of them,” she continued. “One of those people. That family. Named after dogs.”

Christ. I wasn’t going to be able to cover the ground between us before she pulled the trigger. The window was closed and locked and there was a screen. I wasn’t going to be able to duck through it and run away. I could only hold my ground and pray I didn’t piss myself. I hoped she called the cops instead of taking her hate out on the wrong Rand.

“Which one are you?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“Terrier,” I admitted.

“You look like your brother.”

“Right, but I’m not him.”

“But you’re in my house.”

She had me there. “I found the piece in your father’s nightstand drawer. I removed the clip.”

“No, you didn’t. I checked. I always check. My dad’s taught me all about guns since I was twelve. I’m a good shot. Not that I’d have to be at this range.”

“Shit. Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“You’re not going to get the chance.”

“Just let me explain.”

“You people are thieves and liars and murderers. What makes you think I’m going to listen to you even one more second?”

It was a good question. If I came home and found the brother of the man who’d murdered my sister standing in the middle of her bedroom, I would’ve made my play by now, whatever it was.

But along with the low-slung burning fury and the distress and the dull edginess that comes when someone hooked on pills needs to pop another one, she was intrigued and wanted to know what the hell I was doing here.

I had to engage her. I said, “Your rooms are the same. Yours and Becky’s. Why?”

“So you’ve already been in mine.”

“Yes.”

“Did you steal anything?”

“No.”

“Not enough time?”

“There was plenty of time. But I’m not a thief anymore.”

“Now you just break in to houses but don’t take anything.”

“Technically I didn’t break in. I just—”

“Shut up!”

“Your rooms are the same, except you’ve got a hiding place for your goodies. You’re hooked on antianxiety meds.”

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened as if I’d just slapped her. It was an ugly expression on a cute face. Then she grinned without humor. That was worse. She studied me and was offended by what she saw. “Care to guess why, you prick?”

I nodded. “I already know why. You should just call the cops. Ask for Detective Gilmore. Don’t worry, he’ll definitely give me a good beating. He already has this week. He’ll probably let you watch. Or help.”

She was still calm, assured, centered, but the hate inside her was looking to get out, and it flickered in her eyes. They were at least a little crazy. I’d done that to her. My family had done that to her.

“Last chance to tell me why you’re here. After this, I think I’m going to shoot you. I’m not sure where. Maybe in the knee. Maybe the balls. Maybe the head. I haven’t decided. Did you think about dying when you were going through our things?”