One of Us Read online

  “This same partner of mine loved candles. We had hundreds of them. I finally figured out that Wade went into his little freak-out whenever Justin struck a match. I talked to someone at the shelter and she told me that Wade’s previous owner used to throw lit matches at him. When they found him he had burn marks all over him.”

  “That’s terrible,” I say.

  Velma nods vehemently.

  “I know. Well, the idea had been planted in my head. All I have to do is strike a match to get him to perform. Other trainers use whistles and hand gestures. Don’t get me wrong. Wade is a brilliant dog. He responds to those, too.”

  “You use his fear to make money?” I ask incredulously.

  “Wade has a wonderful life. Now if you don’t mind, we were hoping to get this on film.”

  Rafe reaches down while Velma rattles on and picks up Wade again and returns him to his pocket.

  “I’m confiscating your dog,” he says, and goes back inside his house.

  “Wait! Wait!” Velma calls out.

  “He can’t do that,” he says to me.

  “He just did.”

  He starts pounding on Rafe’s door.

  “Don’t bother,” I tell him. “He’ll give him back when he’s ready to give him back.”

  “We have a show to do!”

  “Come back in an hour or so. He won’t keep him longer than that.”

  “I’m calling our lawyer,” Velma huffs.

  “Call away.”

  He starts to stalk off then stops and reaches inside his voluminous cape and brings out a Fiji bottled water.

  “Here,” he says handing it to me. “It’s the only water Wade drinks.”

  I watch until the van is completely out of sight before going inside.

  It’s instantly apparent to me that Rafe is a man who never puts anything away, but since he doesn’t have that many belongings, the habit doesn’t overwhelm his surroundings.

  Clothing and dishes are piled everywhere, but the clothing is clean and folded and the dishes look clean, too, stacked in various spots around the room. A flashlight, pocket knife, screwdriver, roll of masking tape, and a can opener are neatly lined up on a windowsill. The top of a desk set in a corner of the room is functioning as a pantry and liquor cabinet. Bottles, canned goods, a loaf of bread, and a box of Wheaties sit there along with a scattering of Jolly Ranchers of every color but pink.

  I’m not sure if he has a fear of drawers and cupboards or can’t be bothered to take the time to use them. Whatever the reason, he does all his living out in the open.

  An entire bookcase is filled with framed photos of his five grown daughters at every stage of their lives along with those of his numerous grandchildren.

  Mixed among them I’m surprised to also find photos of him with each of his ex-wives: him as a blue-eyed boy in a suit wearing a tie he probably had to borrow clutching a brown-eyed girl in a simple white dress, both smiling breezily, their confidence stemming from the fact they were too young to imagine life beyond twenty-two; in front of a flower-festooned church altar, the big Irish Catholic wedding to Glynnis Kelly, her in a sparkling ivory ball gown, Rafe in a tux this time, grinning broadly, drunk already, a man with a good job, good bennies, the first mistake of a marriage behind him, settling down now to the real thing; at the VFW, in a suit again, not a tux, middle-aged, with a safe schoolteacher in an eggshell suit trimmed in lace holding a bouquet of gardenias, not smiling this time, serious about this one, serious about life; a picnic table outside the Lick ’n’ Putt, the remnants of chili dogs and slushies in front of them along with their miniature-golf scorecards, with a woman to warm his bed and his leftovers, which he thought would be reason enough to make it work.

  I follow the smell of sautéing green peppers, garlic, and onions into the kitchen. Rafe is busy at the stove. Wade stands behind him intently watching.

  A plateful of shredded blackened chicken topped with a handful of fresh herbs sits on the table along with a stack of flour tortillas.

  “Is this cilantro?” I ask Rafe.

  “Yeah, how ’bout that? We ignorant yokels stumble across exotic stuff now and then.”

  I take his ribbing in stride. Normally I’d feel a sting, but after what I’ve been through today, nothing can bother me as long as it’s happening aboveground.

  Wade rises up on his hind legs and paws at the air.

  “What’s he want?” I ask.

  “I think he wants you to take his coat off.”

  I lean down and unzip the little parka. Underneath he’s wearing a black T-shirt with “Doggie Style” written across it in miniscule silver studs.

  “Velma says this is the only water Wade drinks.”

  I set the Fiji bottle on the counter.

  Rafe ignores it and fills a bowl with tap water he sets on the floor.

  “Pour us a drink, too,” he says.

  I follow his gaze to a bottle of vodka. He’s been mixing it with Mountain Dew.

  I refresh his drink and get myself a glass.

  “You know if you two start seriously seeing each other you’re bound to wind up in the tabloids,” I warn him, glancing at the happily lapping terrier.

  I look in his refrigerator for an alternative mixer. Beer, beer, milk, and more beer. I end up settling for straight vodka after discovering one lone lime.

  “Come on,” he says.

  I begin to follow him then realize he’s talking to Wade.

  The little dog trots after him back into his living room.

  Rafe turns on his TV and searches through the channels.

  “Here’s that show about meerkats,” I hear him say. “You should like that.”

  Wade jumps onto the couch, circles the cushion a few times, and lays down.

  Rafe returns to the kitchen and tends to his vegetables on the stovetop.

  “You never told me the whole story about Scarlet and Billy’s gun,” I say to him.

  “Not much to tell. She took it.”

  “How did she manage that?”

  “She got him to take her back to his place. He was shitfaced. He said she talked him into showing her his gun, had sex with him, and when he passed out afterward, she took it and left.”

  “You believe all this?”

  “Not the part where she had sex with him, but everything else.”

  “She admitted to it?”

  “Not to taking the gun, but she took it. There’s no other explanation.”

  “It doesn’t make sense for her to take a gun.”

  “It makes perfect sense. I think this woman has already killed three people that we know of.”

  “A gun is too pedestrian for her. Shooting someone is murder. There’s no other way to classify the act. If she was responsible for those other three deaths, I highly doubt she thinks of them as murders.”

  “Then what the hell are they?”

  “She’s a psychopath. They don’t conduct their lives according to the same moral codes and standards of behavior that the rest of us do,” I explain. “Their social interactions are nothing more than plans to outmaneuver others in order to get what they want. They have no guilt. No remorse. No conscience. What seems a crime to us is an act of expediency or entitlement to them.”

  “A problem solved.”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  Rafe turns off the stove and makes himself another drink.

  “Do you think she was planning to kill Marcella Greger, though, or it just happened?” I ask him. “The sculpture she hit her with was a weapon of opportunity.”

  “A can of gasoline and a dose of penicillin aren’t exactly things you carry around with you,” he replies. “Those murders were premeditated.”

  “But I’m sure they had special meaning to her. There was a reason she decided to set her nanny on fire and p
oisoned a friend. I just can’t see her shooting someone. It may sound strange, but I think she’d consider it to be tacky.”

  He grabs two plates from a stack on the counter and sets them on the table, then leaves the kitchen. He returns carrying two envelopes and a folder.

  He hands me one of the envelopes.

  “What’s this?”

  “Marcella Greger’s niece brought this to me at the police station. Marcella didn’t have much, but she did have a will, and the lawyer who drew it up for her had this letter and instructions to give it to her niece when she died.”

  I take out a four-page handwritten letter.

  “Don’t bother reading any of that,” Rafe tells me. “Get to the last paragraph.”

  “‘I’m enclosing a copy of a letter from my cousin, Anna, I found in her belongings,’” I read out loud. “‘The original is in my lockbox at the UPS store. I’m not as young as I used to be, plus accidents happen. If you’re reading this it means I’m dead and I didn’t have time to tell anyone about this.’”

  He hands me the other envelope. Inside is a single piece of paper.

  On May 24, 1974, Gwendolyn Dawes caused the death of her one-week-old infant, Scarlet Dawes. I knew of a man who had a daughter of the same age he wasn’t able to care for and agreed to switch the babies.

  It’s signed by Anna Greger.

  “Gwendolyn Dawes killed her baby? That can’t be true. What about Scarlet?”

  “Look at the date,” Rafe says.

  It’s the day before Mom killed Molly.

  “Sit down, Danno.”

  My head is whirling. I have all the pieces; I just can’t fit them together.

  “I really struggled with this. I thought about burying all of it and not telling you anything. No good can come of it. Nothing from the past can be changed. There’s no way to get any justice in the future—”

  “What are you talking about?” I interrupt him. “What’s going on?”

  “Listen to me carefully. When I came back from Vietnam, I found myself in some truly fucked-up way missing it.”

  “You said Vietnam was like being in hell.”

  “It was. That’s what I didn’t understand. I was back home. I was a civilian again. That’s what I wanted, but I felt like a stranger. I didn’t belong anymore. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a fact.

  “I couldn’t hate the war the way protestors did, and I was the one who should’ve hated it because I was the one who was there, but that’s exactly why I couldn’t hate it as much as they did. They didn’t know what they were talking about. They were free to imagine whatever they wanted, but it wasn’t abstract to me. It was personal. The deepest emotions I would ever feel in my entire life I felt in Nam; not between some woman’s legs, not winning a championship football game, not teaching my child how to ride a bike, not getting a promotion at work, but in a jungle on the other side of the world killing people who had never done a damn thing to me.”

  People who were just like you, I think silently to myself, remembering our talk from long ago.

  He sits down across the table from me and fixes me with his piercing stare.

  “It may have been the worst thing that would ever happen to me, but it was also the most significant.”

  He hands me a folder with a state police seal on the front.

  “We were able to lift some DNA from the lipstick smudge on the glass,” he explains. “I called in a big favor and was able to get a rush job through the state crime lab.”

  “Is it hers?”

  “I don’t know that for sure since I didn’t have a sample from her to compare it to so I compared it to someone else’s.”

  “What good does that do? Especially when you don’t know it’s hers to begin with?”

  “We both know it’s hers,” he says with a dark finality.

  I open it and study the results of the lab test.

  “You’ve seen enough of these reports. You know what this means?” he asks me.

  “It’s not enough for a match but the two subjects are related. A child? A sibling? We know she has a brother.”

  “Yeah, she does have a brother, but I didn’t run this against Wesley Dawes’ DNA,” he says. “I ran it against yours.”

  twenty-four

  DON’T TELL HER, RAFE insisted, but I convinced him that she probably already knows. This could be why she’s shown an interest in me and why she put that note in Tommy’s mailbox. It seems like something she would do. She loves to mess with people’s minds. It’s the same reason she drew the hanging man in Marcella Greger’s bathroom.

  He still didn’t want me to talk to her, to let her know I know, but I told him I have to confront her. She’s my sister, I explained, but quickly added that I have no delusions about a future with her. I’m not going into this meeting with sentimental hopes of a tearful reunion, that we’ll throw our arms around each other and erase the past.

  I know who and what she is and the impossibility of changing either. She has no moral boundaries and there’s no pill to cure this. No method of rehabilitation. No school of psychotherapy that can explain or fix her. Not even a fairy tale could provide a happy ending to our story. Unlike Wendy tending to Peter Pan’s shadow, no one can sew a conscience back on.

  He agreed to let me talk to her but only if we met in a public place.

  I suggested a drink at the Red Rabbit to her almost as a joke. She agreed.

  I’m waiting at a scarred wooden table in a dark corner nursing a beer trying to silence my mind but having no luck. Rage has pushed aside all other emotions including the grieving I will need to do over what my mother and Tommy and I have endured.

  My rage is a brilliant red and sits perched on my shoulder, not square in the middle of my back the way Rafe’s hate once did. It burns hot against my cheek and casts a golden ruby glow over everything I see. It’s not a burden like hate; on the contrary, its righteous urgency makes me feel weightless.

  In my work I’ve encountered every level of depravity, viciousness, and selfishness, but I’ve never come across anything as heinous as what my father has done.

  My father conspired with an old girlfriend to take a child from her mother and a sister from her brother and sent his mentally ill wife to jail for a horrendous crime she didn’t commit. I recite the words calmly in my head. I feel like standing up in these booze-flavored shadows and saying them out loud, just as calmly, to the half-dozen raggedy men tossing back shots and sucking down beer chasers.

  They wouldn’t be shocked. They’d take it all in stride. One more day in a company town.

  Why did he do it? For what? Money? He certainly doesn’t live like a man who took a payoff for selling a baby and keeping his mouth shut for Walker Dawes.

  I realize now when Walker shook my hand the other day he wasn’t seeing just the great-great-grandson of Prosperity McNab, but the brother of the girl he raised as his own daughter.

  Scarlet just found out. Rafe and I are fairly certain of this. Marcella knew. It’s why Scarlet came back. To talk to her, to confront her, to silence her: it all finally makes sense.

  Walker knows the beast he has lived with all his life, the monster he unwittingly brought into his home thinking she was an innocent stolen babe, is finally going to turn her reptilian gaze on him.

  No wonder he was curious about me. He was evaluating our genes.

  The door opens and Scarlet stands in silhouette under the outside light against a backdrop of black sky swirling with snowflakes.

  Her entrance causes no stir. The men glance then go back to their methodical drinking. Boss’s daughter. One more player in a company town.

  She takes her time crossing the room, pausing to look at the old photos of miners and local landmarks on the walls and propped behind the bar. She orders a drink and brings it with her.

  I
study her face: the heart shape of it, the slightly upturned nose, the wide-set eyes; it’s my mother’s face slightly modified. I never noticed the resemblance before, but I wasn’t looking for it. Now I can’t see anything else.

  She pulls out a chair for her mink then one for herself.

  “How did it go the other night?” she asks me. “Did you get some?”

  “How much do you know?”

  “About your sex life? Nothing. But it can’t be too good if you were going after that.”

  “Do you know who you are or do you only know who you aren’t?”

  This question gives her pause.

  She drinks while staring at me but doesn’t answer.

  “The identity theft you were talking about at Chappy’s,” I go on. “Marcella Greger knew about it, too. It’s why you killed her.”

  She continues staring at me. There’s nothing in her eyes. They’re as flat as the glass ones stuffed into Tommy’s deer head.

  “What do you know?” she finally asks.

  “I know you’re my sister.”

  Her gaze doesn’t waver, but I can tell she’s been mentally slapped.

  I don’t hurry her. I sit across the table and wait for her to decide what her next move should be. Rage burns hotly and contentedly beside me. I’m sure at this point my skin has melted from my bones and nothing is left but one of the charred skeletons from my dream.

  If she reaches out and touches me, I will collapse into a pile of ash.

  “I like it,” she finally announces. “I love it, actually. Because of me the entire Dawes fortune is going to end up in the hands of Prosperity McNab’s great-great-granddaughter. Talk about revenge. Talk about poetic justice.”

  She smiles and takes a sip of her drink.

  “That’s it? That’s your reaction? That’s all you’ve got to say? All you can think about is money?”

  My outburst surprises her. It surprises me, too. I had planned to conduct this conversation without passing judgment or displaying emotion like I would any clinical interview with a psychopath.