The Man Who Killed His Brother (3 page)
Read The Man Who Killed His Brother Online
Authors: Stephen R. Donaldson
The trembling climbed up through my bones. I had to clamp my forearms between my knees to keep from shivering.
“How long has she been gone?” Ginny asked.
“Eight days.” Her voice was as brittle as it could get. Brittleness was the only defense she had left. “Last week Tuesday she went to school and didn’t come home.”
“Did you call the school?”
“Yes. That evening. First I called some of her friends, but they didn’t know where she was. They said they hadn’t seen her since PE. So then I called the school. She goes to Mountain Junior High. It’s just five blocks up the street. They said after fifth period she wasn’t in any of her classes. Fifth period was PE. They thought she must’ve gotten sick and gone home. But she didn’t come home. She didn’t.” Lona was insistent. “I don’t have anywhere to go on Tuesdays and I was here all the time.”
“I understand,” Ginny said. As smooth as Vaseline. “What did you do after you called the school?”
“I waited—I waited a while.” Her hands were starting to twist in her lap. One of them went up to push at her hair, but she jerked it back down again. “As long as I could stand. Then I called the police.”
“You called the police.” Ginny was good at neutral sympathy. I wasn’t. Alcohol is a jealous comforter, and it doesn’t like to let go. Right then my nerves had all the abstinence they could stand, and now they were going to get even with me. I was going into withdrawal. I was shaking all over. My head was shivering on my neck—my brains rattled in my skull. The need was using a vise to squeeze sweat out of my forehead. My jaws hurt because I was grinding my teeth, but I had to do something to keep from groaning out loud. I had to have something to hang on to, and the only thing in reach was Lona’s voice.
“Yes,” she said, in the same small brittle voice. “I talked to Missing Persons. Sergeant Encino. I’ve talked to him half a dozen times, but he doesn’t help. He says he wants to help, but he doesn’t. The first”—for a second her voice shuddered as if she was about to lose control, but she didn’t—“the first time I talked to him, he said she’d probably be home in a couple of days. He said kids are like that, they run away, and then they come home. He gets cases like
that all the time. He said—he said it’s department policy that they don’t even start looking for runaways for three days. It’s about impossible to find runaways because most of them are trying hard not to be found, and anyway most of them come home in three days. That’s what he said.
that all the time. He said—he said it’s department policy that they don’t even start looking for runaways for three days. It’s about impossible to find runaways because most of them are trying hard not to be found, and anyway most of them come home in three days. That’s what he said.
“If I wanted the police to start looking for her right away, he said, I’d have to go down and swear out a complaint against her. File charges against her! He advised me not to do that. If I did, he said, the police would start looking for her right away, but if they found her they wouldn’t bring her home. It’s not against the law to run away and they couldn’t bring her home against her will. They’d put her in some kind of juvenile shelter—he called it a JINS facility—where she could run away again whenever she wanted, and I wouldn’t get her back until a judge in juvenile court ruled on my complaint.
“I said, What if she hasn’t run away? What if something happened to her? But he just told me to try not to worry, and to call him when she came home.”
She dug out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she went on. “So I did what he told me. I tried to wait. He’s a police officer, isn’t he? He works for Missing Persons, doesn’t he? He knows what he’s talking about, doesn’t he?” She was talking to Ginny now, asking Ginny to tell her she’d done the right thing.
But after a minute, she aimed herself at me again. “I tried to wait. But I couldn’t. I called him again Wednesday, and Wednesday night. I asked him to check the hospitals. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe she was in a hospital, and the doctors couldn’t call me because they didn’t know who she was and she was hurt too bad to tell them.
“He told me I didn’t have to worry about that. He said the hospitals always call the police when they have a patient they can’t identify and they hadn’t had any calls like that recently.
“I wanted to call the hospitals myself, but I didn’t. I waited. I used to do a lot of waiting when Richard was alive.”
I was dripping sweat, and my head almost split open when she said his name.
“I tried to do it again, but it wasn’t the same. He was a grown man. He was doing what he wanted to do. She’s a child. A child!”
“What happened then?” Ginny asked. She might as well have been living in another world. Lona was talking to me. She and I were tied together in that dim room by fear and need. Ginny’s questions were just cues, promptings.
“Thursday in the mail I got a letter from her.” She didn’t offer to show it to us. “It said, ‘Dear Mom, I’m not going to be coming home for a while. I’ve got something to work out. It might take a long time. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right. Love Al—Al—’” But she couldn’t say the name. For a long minute she didn’t go on. I could feel her eyes on me, but I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking at the place where the sweat was dropping from my face onto my pants and sinking in, making a dark patch in the material—just watching the sweat fall and hanging on to her voice.
“What did you do after you got the note?”
With an effort, Lona got started again. “I—I called Sergeant Encino. What else could I do? I asked him to help me. He told me I’d have to file a complaint. Even though she’s just a child.” She didn’t shout, but the protest in her voice was so strong it almost made me lose my grip.
Ginny asked softly, “Did you do it?”
“No.”
“You don’t believe the note.” It was just a statement of fact.
“No!” She was so vehement I looked up at her. “She wouldn’t run away from me. Never!”
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Axbrewder, but it doesn’t prove anything. Can you tell me why you’re so sure?”
The question didn’t faze her. She’d thought about it a lot since Missing Persons had asked her the same thing. “Because she wasn’t the kind of girl who runs away from problems. If she had something bothering her, something she hadn’t told me—which I don’t believe—she wouldn’t have to run away from it. Her father taught her”—then she faltered,
but only for a second—“her father taught her to stand her ground.”
but only for a second—“her father taught her to stand her ground.”
I believed her. I was in pain from head to foot—I wanted to pound my hands on my knees, just to distract myself from the hurting inside—but I believed her. If Alathea had run away because she found out about me and her father, found out her mother had never told her the truth, then the note didn’t fit. She would have been angry, and it wasn’t an angry note. And I couldn’t think of anything else in the world she would run away from. She wasn’t the kind of kid who gets herself into trouble she can’t handle. She had too much common sense.
Lona was right, the note didn’t fit at all. There had to be something wrong with it. Something. But I was in no condition to figure out what. I wanted more coffee—wanted to try to trick my nerves into thinking the stuff was on its way—but I couldn’t control my shakes enough to even pick up the cup. Something inside me was at the breaking point. If this withdrawal went on much longer, I was going to be a basket case.
Ginny must’ve been thinking along the same lines, because she asked, “What about the handwriting? Do you recognize it?”
“It’s hers,” Lona said carefully, “but it’s different than usual. She has such neat writing, she’s always gotten A’s in penmanship, and this is so messy. It looks like she wrote it while she was riding in a car over a rough road.”
“How about a postmark?”
“Sergeant Encino asked me about that. It was mailed right here in town.”
Suddenly I passed over the crest and the crisis began to recede. You never know if the first one is going to be the worst or the easiest, but this one was beginning to let go of me. The pain ran out of me like dirty dishwater. It left me feeling like I’d been bedridden half my life, but at least I was able to get my voice back. Without looking at Lona, or unclenching myself at all for fear the need might turn around and come back at me before I had the chance to recover, I asked her, “How was the note signed?”
She didn’t answer. I could feel the air of the living room pleading with me, raging at me, hating me, but she didn’t answer.
My voice grated in my throat. “How did she sign her name?”
A long time passed. Finally Lona pulled herself together enough to say faintly, “Alathea.”
Alathea. That was it. Proof this whole thing was serious—that there was trouble worse than just a runaway thirteen-year-old. It was a minute or two before I realized I hadn’t said what I was thinking out loud. From somewhere inside I mustered up the strength to say, “She never called herself Alathea. Everyone else did, but she didn’t. She called herself ‘Thea.’ That’s what her father called her, and she never called herself anything else.”
“That’s right,” Lona said. Just echoing what she heard in my voice. She knew it was true. It just hadn’t occurred to her.
“All right.” Ginny said. “I can accept that.” Back-to-business Ginny Fistoulari. “We’ll take the case on that basis. I don’t know what all I’ll need from you, but I’d like to start with a list of her friends. Names, addresses, phone numbers for everyone you can think of.”
“Sergeant Encino asked that. I thought you’d want a copy.” She got up and handed Ginny a sheet of paper, then went back to her chair. She never turned her face away from me the whole time. We weren’t finished with each other yet.
But Ginny wasn’t finished either. Maybe she didn’t like being left out of the silence. She stood it for half a minute, then said, “I’ve just got one more question, Mrs. Axbrewder. Alathea disappeared last week Tuesday. Why did you wait more than a week to call me?”
“Sergeant Encino told me to wait and try not to worry. He told me she’d come back when she was ready. I thought I was doing what Richard—what Richard would want me to do. But then I read, in yesterday’s paper—I read about that Christie girl.” She was under too much strain. Her brittleness was starting to crack. “Since she didn’t come home, I’ve been reading the paper every day. Every word. I’ve
been looking for some kind of news that would tell me what happened.
been looking for some kind of news that would tell me what happened.
“Yesterday I read about that poor Christie girl. Carol Christie. The paper said”—she was right on the edge—“she ran away from home three months ago, and Monday they found her body in the river. She was just thirteen, the same age as my Alathea.” Her hands were jammed into her hair, pulling at the sides of her head as if that was the only way she could keep herself from crying. “The same age.”
I didn’t have anything else to offer, so I gave her something to get mad about, hoping it would help her hang onto herself. “But why us, Lona? Why me? If you have to have a detective, you could’ve called some of Richard’s friends on the force. They would’ve referred you to someone you could trust.”
“Because you owe me!” Her sudden vehemence was as physical as a fist. “You took my husband away from me! You owe me my daughter back!”
“We’ll do our best.” Ginny came between Lona and me as if she were afraid we were about to start hitting each other. “There are no guarantees in this business, but we’ll do everything we can. Which is more than the police are doing.
“Now.” Ginny was on her feet, and I joined her. Force of habit. I didn’t actually feel strong enough to stand. And I sure didn’t want to tower over Lona like that. It was a cheap advantage, and with her I didn’t want any cheap advantages. But I’ve been following Ginny so long now, taking orders from her, I hardly ever think about it anymore. “There’s one thing we have to settle before we can get started. My fee.”
“There doesn’t have to be any fee,” I said, ashamed money had ever been mentioned.
“Mrs. Axbrewder has to pay something,” Ginny snapped. “If she doesn’t, I can’t call her my client. And if she isn’t my client, I don’t have any legal standing. Anybody who wants to can tell me to stuff it.”
There was no help for it. Lona was looking at me, and I had to say, “She’s right, Lona.”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute. When she found her voice again, she wasn’t angry any more, just weak and helpless, and at the end of her rope. “I don’t have much,” she said. “Richard’s pension is so small. And my job—I work as much as I can, cleaning house for some of the neighbors. It’s hardly enough to pay for clothes.” Then she said, “I have a hundred dollars.”
Ginny said, “Fifty will be plenty.” Fifty bucks would just about pay two days’ rent on her office. “If I get in trouble with the commission I can always tell them it was only an advance.”
The commission frowns on private investigators who work cheap. The same kind of argument doctors and lawyers use—people who work cheap are presumed to be shoddy and unscrupulous. Unprofessional. If I still had a license, I’d be in danger of losing it twice a day.
Lona shuffled out of the room and came back a minute later with the money. Ginny took it without counting it and gave her a receipt. Before I could think of anything else to say, Ginny and I were out on the walk again and Lona had closed the door behind us. In the whole time I hadn’t had one good look at her face.
Ginny made straight for the car, but I dawdled along for a moment. Though the sun was getting hotter, in the shade of the trees it was still bearable. I wasn’t eager to sear my butt on the vinyl of the Olds. And I wasn’t satisfied, either. There were things I needed to know.
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