Where the Broken Lie (25 page)

Something electric and wiry snakes its way through my brain. Lips dry and tongue thick, I reach blindly to my nightstand for the glass of water that isn’t there. I squish my head between both hands to suppress the pain that came from sitting up too quickly. I rub my eyes and remember the night before …

Tammy and Tory packed up their stuff and have left for home. I am alone. The emptiness of this house is haunting and for the first time in my life, I am afraid to be alone here. I make myself a vodka tonic. Then a second and a third. I drink them in silence in the chair that had been Grandma’s.

Knitting needles and yarn stick out from the bag beside the chair, an almost finished white and blue baby blanket stuffed down inside of it. On the end table is a TV Guide with an unfunny sitcom star on the cover. A universal remote. A coaster. A rotary phone. A lamp.

A distorted version of me stares back from the black screen of the television.

Around me the walls are covered with photographs of family. The picture of Grandpa and Grandma on their wedding day in the center of one wall, surrounded by everyone who ultimately came from them.

The clocks tick and tock loudly in their offbeat rhythms the same way they did in my dream. In sync with none of it, my heart still beats. Chest rising and falling unnaturally, I force the air out of me. Blood pulsates through my body in quiet fury, causing muscles to throb and fingers to curl.

And then, finally, the sound of something heavy on the steps of the back porch. I count the steps until the screen door squeals open and my grandfather steps inside.

He says hi and I say something back that comes out slurred and unintelligible.

“You’re drunk,” he says with a smirk and a hint of approval.

“Worse things to be.”

I drink from my vodka tonic and slurp up the ice cubes, swirling them around the inside of my mouth before crunching them to water. I set the drink on the table and stare outside through the picture window in front of me. The same window Grandma had stared through as she lay in bed dying.

“Just an observation. Not a judgment.”

“Judge not lest ye be judged, right?”

He looks at me sideways, wolfish eyes narrow and probing. I have seen this in him once before. It was the night he went searching for Katie Cooper with the rest of the town.

“Grandpa, they’re going to find her, right? I mean, you’ll find her?”

“Think I’ll make myself a drink, too” he growls. “Seems like a good night to get drunk.”

He comes back a couple minutes later with four fingers of Scotch in a tumbler, no ice. He sits down in the chair opposite from me and takes a sip.

With a fiery exhale, he says, “Where are your ladies at? In bed already?”

“Gone. And they won’t be coming back.”

I stare at him hard, but he holds my gaze. No hints revealed in the eyes of the wolf.

“That’s too bad. I liked having them here. Helped fill the emptiness your Grandma left. I suppose that means you’ll be going soon, too.”

“Why didn’t you visit Grandma more in the nursing home?”

I had wanted to ask him why he killed Katie Cooper, but this came out instead.

He leans forward in his chair and hangs his head.

“I know. I know, Tuck. I should have, but I just … I couldn’t stand seeing her like that. I know it’s not right, but your Grandma understood. Believe me, she understood.”

“Understood what, that you put your own feelings ahead of hers as she lay on her deathbed?”

“I suppose you could put it that way. I ain’t justifying it, Tuck. I’m telling you I was wrong.”

“You knew it was wrong then, but you did it anyway.”

“Yes, I suppose I did,” he says dismissively.

Blood and alcohol race to my head as I rise from the chair.

“You knew it was wrong then, but you did it anyway,” I repeat.

“I heard you the first time,” Grandpa says defiantly. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry, okay?”

“YOU KNEW IT WAS WRONG THEN, BUT YOU DID ANYWAY!” I shout.

And in the heavy quietness that followed, I realize that I am standing above Grandpa now and pointing out the window behind him. Pointing at the Cooper’s house.

Fear in those wolf eyes now, they dart around. Then a slight shift of his head as he looks over his shoulder at what I am pointing at. What he already knows is there. He gathers himself and stands.

“I’m getting another drink. Maybe you ought to do the same.”

As he tries to slip by me, I grab his shoulder, whip him back around, and shove him down into his chair again.

“NO! No, Grandpa. I’m not finished.”

In my rage, I had clipped him on the nose and he is bleeding. He squeezes at it gently, wipes a bare arm across his face and smears the blood.

“What the hell are you doing, Tuck?” he whispers.

“Just trying to figure some things out, Grandpa.”

The word hangs on my lips like a dying breath—
Grandpaaah.

My father’s father. His blood in my blood. The weight of it all sunk me and I briefly consider forgiveness because it seems like the best way to be able to love myself. But it’s only a moment and in the end I decide that it is my fate to love us both less.

“Grandpa,” I repeat, checking the taste of the word on my tongue.

All tenderness has been drained from the word and in its place all things wicked. All things unnatural. All things heinous.

“Why did you tell Alvin Keller that you saw James Johnson with Katie Cooper the day that she was killed?”

“What? James who?”

“Johnson. That was Slim Jim’s real name. James Johnson. Now, why did you tell Old Man Keller you saw him with Katie?”

“How the hell—who told you about that? Alvin tell you that?”

“Never mind how I found out, just answer the damn question. Why did you say you saw them together?”

“Because I did.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did, Tuck. I seen them as I was coming back in from town. I had run out to buy some whiskey,” he says lifting his glass of Scotch as evidence of the claim. “I know I shouldn’t have left your sister like that, but I did. And I seen them when I come back into town.”

I tell him about Slim Jim’s late night snack at the Halperns that very night.

“Does that sound like the actions of a man who’s just killed a little girl?”

“How the hell should I know? That Slim Jim was nutty as a fruitcake, everyone knew that.”

He gets up again and pushes his way past me, the blood on his arm smears across my shirt.

I want to believe him and it would be so easy to. I can end it all it right now and go on pretending until I forget it all together.

I look at the burnt red streak on my shirt, dab at it, and hold it to my eyes. Grandpa’s bloodstains on my hand. His blood on me. His blood in me. I want it to be good blood.

My eyes land on the day’s mail piled on the dining room table.

An idea.

I look again at the blood on my hand.

After a moment, I say, “He was a little touched in the head. That’s true.”

Grandpa lets out a deep sigh and after a moment says, “I always felt kind of sorry for the guy, wondered if maybe there was some way we might have helped him that could have prevented what happened.”

Broken parts, I thought.

Grandpa moves in close to me and cautiously rests a hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, what say I get us a couple more drinks?”

I glance again at the mail on the table.

“Yeah,” I answer. “I think we could both probably use another one. Thanks.”

When he exits the room, I grab the mail from the dining room table and pull out one of Grandma’s hospital bills that had been delivered that day. I slide it into my back pocket and sit back down in my chair.

Grandpa returns and hands me my drink.

“Here you go. Made it just the way you like it—extra strong.”

He takes a big drink of his Scotch, exhales an approving hiss, and holds the half-empty glass up to his.

“And mine, extra stronger.”

He winks at me and I smile weakly.

“You’re running with the big dogs now, Tuck. Be careful.”

“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” I say, but he waves it off.

“No,” I continue. “I am. It’s just … I started getting these anonymous letters out at the cemetery saying Slim Jim didn’t kill Katie.”

“That’s what set you off on me? A letter from some anonymous crackpot?”

“Sounds stupid, I know. I guess I’m still not in my right mind yet.”

He gives me a grandfatherly grin that lets me know I am forgiven and then he takes another swig of Scotch.

Looking over the top of the glass at me, he says, “So you been talking to Alvin Keller, huh?”

“Yep.”

Then he lifts the glass again and pours the remainder of that firewater down his throat, swallowing it in three easy gulps—mouth open wide, eyes like saucers, features exaggerated by the glass in front of his face and the alcohol inside of me.

My what sharp teeth you have
, I think.

My hands caress the rim of my own glass and I twirl it slowly around on the table.

“It took a while, but he eventually showed himself—it was Keller writing those letters at Slim Jim’s grave. That’s how I found out that he was the anonymous tipster. Told me that story of you leaving Heather alone, but I was thinking Heather was with us in Glidden. Now, that I think about it, though … I guess I’m not so sure. That was an awfully long time ago. Anyway, you can see how that got me to wondering, right?”

“Yeah, sure. I can see that, but … Christ, Tuck, I’m your Grandpa. Hows ‘bout a little benefit of the doubt?”

“I know, I know. Anyway, that Old Man got me so screwed up with some of the shit he was telling me … I wasn’t thinking straight. Crazy old man, small town rumors. I should know better.”

Then I lead him out a little further.

I lift my face to meet his gaze, contrive a look of embarrassment and say, “The thing is … the thing is, Grandpa …”

“What?” he prompts, seeming more amused than anything else, but with a touch of concern behind the laughter.

“It’s like I said, Grandpa, he really got to me. I mean, I believed him to the point that I actually, I don’t know, dug into it a little. You know?”

“Whadya mean 
dug into it
?”

“You know, I looked into it. Investigated, I guess you could say.”

His eyebrows move together ever so slightly and his eyes narrow.

“Investigated, huh? Christ, that was twenty years ago, Tuck. What the hell is there to investigate?”

“More than you’d think, actually. See, they kept the evidence. All these years they kept the evidence up at the Sheriff’s office.”

“You don’t say?”

“I do. It’s been in a little shoebox in a backroom. Just sitting there collecting dust all these years.”

“How ‘bout that.”

“Yeah, how about that,” I volley back, the words coming out a little sharper than I had intended.

I affect a tender smile and sip my drink.

“So, Sheriff Buck, he let you have a look at it, did he?”

Then he lurches forward and from the edge of his seat says, “What did you find in the shoebox, Tuck—shoes?”

The whiskey is starting to hit him now. He laughs hard and leans back in his seat again.

“No, no shoes. But there was a plastic bag with some of her belongings.”

“Belongings?”

“Oh, you know, things that she was wearing and carrying with her that day. Even the bag has a few hairs in it that don’t like they’re Katie’s and there were stains on the clothes, too. I figure maybe they could be from the killer—you know, blood or spit or …”

I get up from my chair.

“So anyway, turns out that there’s a lot they can do with evidence these days that they couldn’t do back then.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like DNA testing.”

Grandpa sets his empty glass on the end table and walks toward the bay window. He wipes a hand over his mouth to clean away the froth around his lips.

“Anyway, I uh … well, Grandpa, I ended up—let’s say ‘borrowing’—a hair sample from your comb—not the easiest of tasks, by the way,” I say with a smile.

He starts to say something, stops.

Raises his hand, lowers it.