Unhinged (30 page)

I’d gotten into the habit. And I hadn’t taken all that target practice for nothing. The question still was, was the damn gun loaded?

Screw it. If it went off when I fired it, we would know. Six whirling faces and pairs of eyes saw the gun in my hand, widened startledly, narrowed in scornful amusement.

“Okay, hand it over.” As I’d thought, it was a .32 semiauto, nothing special but plenty for my purposes. Only I couldn’t . . .

Six hands reached out, the whole world whirling.

“No.” I couldn’t get the damned thing level, couldn’t even figure out which direction
was
level.

“Go on, now,” I gasped, “don’t make me—”

But he wasn’t having any. To him, I must’ve looked ridiculous. “I’ll have the last laugh, you know,” he smirked. “It’s too late, now.”

Somehow he was above me on the stairs; I must have fallen when he flung me away from himself. He took a step down toward me, and another. In my dizzy vision his shoe was huge, as if it might crush me. I could see through the spinning balusters to the other faces, too, tumbling below.

“You look like your mom,” said the voice at the foot of the stairs. Ash, I remembered. Lian Ash.

The inside of my head whirled anew, words forming out of the sound of the voice and from some memory I couldn’t quite catch. And then I could, the recollection crystalizing in a burst of all the word games I’d been hearing Sam and Maggie play for so long.

Scrabble, anagrams, synonyms and homonyms. Words spinning. Falling together, mingling with that voice in a dizzy rush.

Lian . . . lean. Tip. Ash . . . tree. Tiptree.

Six guns materialized, inches from me. “Bitch,” someone said. No soul in that voice. “Little bitch.”

“No,” Jacob Tiptree said. I’d found him at last.

“You,” I whispered.

Alive . . .
But I’d found him, I knew with a rush of drowning sorrow, in the moment before my death.

Soundlessly the world exploded.

Hot. Wet. Red.

The sound I didn’t hear blew into my head like a cleansing wind, scouring away nausea, dizziness, everything, leaving in its place a huge emptiness that hung there for a moment, sharp and pure.

Then the world rushed in: the man who had said he was Harry Markle crumpled onto me, bleeding. I pushed him away hard and he rolled off. His right eye was gone, and that is all I am going to say about that.

But I’d never fired at him. Someone else had. A voice came from below; gratefully I focused on it. “Just like your mother,” the voice said, as footsteps mounted the stairs. “You have her eyes.”

A long, ghastly sharp straight razor slid from the sleeve of the crumpled man who had called himself Harry Markle. An NYPD gold shield lay on the stair by the body. Number 1905. Lian Ash picked it up as he shoved the body aside, stepped over it toward me.

The weapon in Ash’s other hand matched the one in my own. He had fired the shot, I realized belatedly, not me.

The razor’s glint disappeared back up the sleeve as the body on the stairs lurched once, convulsively, and tumbled. The sound was like a sack of something heavy and wet thumping end-over-end. Turning from it as Mr. Ash helped me down step by step, I flashed back:
Lifting me . . .

But that was then and this was now, as we reached the foot of the stairs and the man standing in front of me realized: I knew who he was. “I saw you through the kitchen window,” he told me, “when I was out in the yard. You were putting that big gun away in the mantel.”

Releasing me, he stepped back to look at me assessingly. “Unwise, I thought.”

“Yes.” There was an understatement. He was good, I realized, at understatement. I let a breath out. “I guess it was dumb, huh?”

Which was when it hit me that I’d had it all, as Sam would have said, bass-ackwards. “Did you,” I asked slowly, “ever send me any cards? Or a hundred dollars in an envelope, once?”

He looked strangely at me. “No. I didn’t. Never anything at all.”

“I see. No, don’t apologize. I just needed to know.” So it was true, the idea of a life lived in service to that child. And to the woman I was now. The man called Lian Ash wasn’t the last surviving important person in Harry Markle’s sad life. I was. The monster had been hunting me.

“You knew the real Harry was dead?”

He shook his head. “I knew he wasn’t active, not why. We old fugitives tend to keep abreast of these things.”

Yeah, I’ll bet. Like Jemmy Wechsler, who kept his ear to the ground so obsessively, it was a wonder it didn’t sprout roots.

“Once Harry was out of the picture, I figured it was safe to get a little closer to you.” He winked at me. Then he grew serious again. “Till then he was probably watching out for guys like me who might show up in Eastport, try to make contact. From what I heard he’d made quite a hobby out of me. So I stayed in Machias, laid low.”

“And you knew this guy
wasn’t
Harry Markle?”

“I didn’t at first. Scared the heck out of me when I heard somebody by that name was around. I thought he must’ve found out I was here, after all. Didn’t want him to see
me,
of course.”

“Then why’d you buy those guns from Wade, if you weren’t suspicious?”

He shrugged. “One for me, and one for my old landlady, Mrs. Sprague. Always figured she needed one around. Opportunity came up so I took it.”

His eyes met mine. Blue, like mine. “Later I made a point of getting a look at him.
Then
I knew it wasn’t Markle, but if I said so I’d have to say
how
I knew. Besides, the only thing I could think of, he was another cop, and it was some kind of trap for that
other
fellow Markle had been chasing.”

He glanced toward the motionless man in my hallway. “I thought he was one of the good guys, whoever he really was. And I was wrong.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” Boy, was I. “When were you planning to tell me the truth about yourself? Or did you ever intend to?”

“That’s what I came back to do,” he replied quietly. “I’d been afraid to, you see, for so long.”

That I might reject him? Or turn him in to the authorities, maybe. “And you weren’t anymore?”

A short laugh. “Oh, yes. I was afraid. But driving away this afternoon, it occurred to me, I’d just put a gun in my daughter’s hand in case she needed it.” His tone darkened. “I left my little girl alone to fend for herself. And I ran. Just like before.”

“So you came back.” A silence between us. Then: “Give me the other weapon, please,” I said. “Please—”

What should I call him—Dad? I didn’t think so. “Jacob, give me that gun. We need to go out to the kitchen and put this—”

The second weapon, the one I hadn’t fired. “. . . away.”

My mental processes were kicking in with a vengeance, maybe because my body was getting used to shocks: mental, physical, and emotional. I took the gun from his hands, wiped it and gripped it as if I were firing it.

An excess of caution, probably. No one would question the story I was planning to tell. But I wasn’t taking chances, now. Stepping over the motionless man, I made it almost to the kitchen door before a sound made me turn again. The man on the floor rose with nightmare smoothness. In his bloody hand, a razor . . .

And that face. Half the brain behind it is gone, probably
. A layman’s diagnosis, not the way Victor would’ve phrased it at all. But accurate phrasing was the smallest of my worries as I stood staring, momentarily paralyzed with fright.

But
he
wasn’t paralyzed. More to the point at the moment, he wasn’t
dead
.

Yet. The face twisted in despairing triumph, the ugliest thing so far because it showed he knew
yet
was the operative term here. But I guess when half your head is demolished inside, if you know anything it’s that
nothing to lose
has become your motto.

Or slogan. Or theme song. Whatever.
Damn it, Jake, will you
do
something?
a voice in my head yammered uselessly.

The razor at my father’s throat glinted fierily in a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight. Then I noticed I still had the guns, the recently fired one in my hand, the other in my pocket again.

That’s me: always the last to know. It struck me that quite a number of important things had failed to dawn on me in a timely manner lately, but this was no time for self-recrimination.

I knew what I wanted to do, but the blood-drenched, half-demolished figure with the razor gripped impossibly in its fist kept moving, bobbing and weaving. If I fired, I might hit . . .

“Come on, give it here.” The voice dripped contempt, mixed bubblingly with blood, the remaining eye rolling whimsically in a way that would have been cartoonish—any second it was going to pop out on a spring, or a stalk—if it hadn’t been so awful.

“Come on, girlie,” he wheedled. “You ever even held a gun before? Come on.”

In that moment I’m not sure which I hated more: being called girlie, or the fear on Lian Ash’s face.

I dropped that sucker where he stood.

When we reached
the kitchen I put the gun from my sweater pocket into the hiding place with the Bisley, tucking the small weapon in beside the massive one.

“We need to call Bob Arnold,” I said, rubbing my icy hands.

Too many years, too many questions. Where should I start? Did I want to? The baggage I’d carried around for so long seemed lighter than what I confronted: him. In the flesh.

But he didn’t go to the phone. Instead he spoke again in reply to my final question. The one, after all the rest had been answered, that I was afraid to ask.

“I didn’t kill her,” he told me quietly. “I know it’s what you always thought. Everyone did. The police, the FBI—they still think so. That I killed your mother and the rest of them.”

The explosion had half-leveled a city block. Jemmy Wechsler had told me later that a lot of it had been stolen Army ordnance, the kinds of things civilians never get their hands on.

Aren’t supposed to get their hands on, for reasons that were obvious on that early morning years ago, when they all went up at once like a Fourth of July celebration in hell.

A kind of fury seized me. “Why should I believe that? And why, if you didn’t, did you run? And leave me . . .”

The ashes of the wood fire from the shack in the hills were cold in my mouth. Poverty and grief, neither of which I’d earned, and the people they sent me to, my mother’s folks, hating me because I was half him. Watching me every minute for signs that I was like him; finding them regularly.

“Because it was set up to look just exactly as if I did kill your mother,” he responded quietly. “And you. By a fellow who’d learned everything from me. But then he decided that I wasn’t radical enough to lead anymore. Because I wouldn’t kill innocent people for the cause. So he decided I’d gotten too old.” Small laugh. “I was twenty-four. He’s dead now. Last I knew he was a law-abiding husband and father paying taxes and covering his butt with the best of them.”

His smile was bitter. “But at the time he was good. Didn’t miss a thing. If I were to walk into an FBI office today, noon tomorrow I’d be in a federal prison. Your mother’s death was the cherry on a very big cake, Jacobia. Once I was in, I’d never come out again.”

“You ran before you knew if I was even alive.”

Contradiction in his eyes; that didn’t jibe with what he thought. “What’s the first thing you recall after the explosion?”

“Screaming.” I remembered it too well. “Sitting there under that big piece of sheet metal, screaming my head off.”

“You’re sure?” he insisted. “Nothing before that?”

“No. Well . . .” Doubt crept in as I ransacked the old memories. “Floating. Flying through the air. The blast blew me into the yard, sheet metal must’ve fallen on top of . . .”

He shook his head. “Jacobia. There wasn’t a scratch on you.”

That was true. But how did
he
know?

I’d heard many times what a miracle it was, in voices sour with the unspoken wish that it had been me blown to bits and not her. They’d loved my mother, the relatives who’d taken me in, or had felt what they identified as love, once she was gone. That’s the definition of a saint: dead, so you can’t blow your image. I by contrast was very much alive, and what they did know about me, they didn’t like a bit.

“Do you seriously believe you could be blown through the air,” he persisted, “then land under the convenient shelter of a piece of corrugated sheet metal?”

First the explosion.
Then
into the yard.
Floating . . .
It was corrugated metal, grooves like waves on water, glittering.

The lightbulb went on. “You carried me there?”

He nodded slowly and I realized with a shock that I believed him. It explained why I’d been unhurt. It didn’t fix things. But it stowed them in a section of old baggage I knew wouldn’t have to be opened again.

“I thought you murdered her. That’s what they all said.” My mother’s people: to them, her husband’s name had been a curse word. “But killed yourself, too. Burnt to ashes that blew away on the wind.”

The bloodthirsty, satisfied tone when they said it: I’d been tasting those blown-on-the-wind ashes all my life.

“So you’ve been watching me from afar? And when you were satisfied Harry Markle wasn’t on your trail anymore, you moved up here to be closer. You answered my ad for a mason to get nearer still. But you never—”

Of course he hadn’t. After so many years, why should he risk his freedom on what I might do?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could talk to the young fool I was. I wish I could bring your mother back. But I can’t.”

He looked squarely at me. “I can’t do so many of the things I wish I’d done. And I’m so sorry,” he repeated. “For all of it, Jacobia. For everything.”

Which was when Bob Arnold rushed in without knocking, found me covered in blood with a gun on the kitchen table in front of me. He’d come to tell me he’d just gotten the fingerprint report.

But he stopped when he saw us. “On the stairs,” I managed to say, and he went, whereupon I burst into sobs. I despise crying in front of people, always have, but now I thought I could weep for a year and not be done with it, that they’d have to set up a saltwater intravenous to replenish my tears. Then Wade arrived, took one look at me and one at Mr. Ash.