One of Us Page 28

  In Anna’s mind Walker’s cruelty was to be expected; he could be excused, but not a mother who didn’t know her own child.

  I INTRODUCE MYSELF BUT feel it’s unnecessary. He knows who I am, and he’s known I’d eventually show up on his doorstep someday. He’s been expecting me for thirty-eight years.

  Fear flickers through his eyes, but then I almost sense some relief on his part. Looking around at the dank, dark, dirty house, I can tell this is a man who stopped living a long time ago. He did an unforgivable thing with the intention of freeing himself, but ended up trapping himself in a tomb of his own filth instead.

  “Dad,” I say with a smile. “We need to talk.”

  I walk past him while handing him the copy of Anna’s letter that I took from Marcella’s house. I took the original from her lockbox, too.

  He doesn’t say anything at first. He’s absorbed in the piece of paper. His lips move as he reads its contents.

  I can’t believe Danny and I are descended from him. We must get our brains from Mom, but hers are mush.

  I catch sight of my reflection in a mirror hanging on a wall the color of tobacco-stained teeth.

  I don’t look like a Molly. It’s a sweet name. A cute name. I’m definitely a Scarlet. But Molly should have been my name and this might have been my house. My life would have been vastly different from the one of wealth and privilege I had with the Daweses, but if I never knew that life, I couldn’t miss it.

  Lost Creek isn’t so bad. Chappy’s makes a good burger. The Kelly girl found great red shoes somewhere. Danny survived and made a success of himself.

  Who am I kidding? Being poor sucks. Anna understood that. Anna saved me. Anna put me in the castle.

  “It’s a lie,” Owen announces.

  This man is going to be one big disappointment after another.

  “Come on, Dad. Let’s not go there. I know it’s the truth. I’ve had a nice long talk with Gwen. Danny confirmed it, too.”

  “How would Danny know?”

  “I forgot to ask at the time, but Danny is much too levelheaded to make up something like this or to believe it if he didn’t have irrefutable evidence. I suppose that’s why I didn’t doubt him.”

  “Does Tommy know?”

  “Tommy who?”

  His house is disgusting. He never washes a dish or does a load of laundry or even throws out a beer can, but he has a state-of-the-art, five-foot-long plasma TV mounted on his wall.

  He notices the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and the six-pack of Coke I brought with me. The bourbon has been heavily laced with Gwen’s sleeping pills.

  I glance upstairs.

  “Are the rooms up there a little less disgusting?”

  “Danny’s old room hasn’t been touched in years.”

  “Grab a couple glasses and let’s go.”

  He and his beer gut roll into the kitchen and come back out with the glasses followed by the rest of him.

  I follow him up the stairs and regret putting myself downwind of him. He reeks of sweat and liquor. I give Gwen credit. She keeps her boozing as hidden as possible. She always smells good, but there’s no perfume and mouthwash that can cover up slurred speech and hand tremors.

  Danny’s room turns out to be truly depressing. I can only hope it used to be better when he was using it. There’s a twin bed and a rocking chair and a dresser with a lamp on top of it. That’s it. Not one sign of his childhood or teen years remains. No toys. No posters. No sports memorabilia. The walls are painted an institutional gray and the comforter on the bed is plain navy blue. No cowboys or superheroes or dinosaurs romp across it.

  It’s pathetic, but it has a window and will serve my purpose just fine.

  “Take a seat, Dad.”

  I gesture at the rocking chair.

  “I’ll make us a drink.”

  “I’ll have mine straight.”

  “You’ll have it with Coke. Live a little.”

  He’s still holding Anna’s note.

  “I’m not sure why she wrote this,” he says to me. “Maybe putting it down on paper was a type of security for her if anything went wrong.”

  I realize he’s moved past any discomfort or trepidation he initially felt over my coming here. He’s confiding in me like I’m an old friend. This must have been a difficult secret to keep all these years. It probably feels good to finally get it off his chest.

  “What could have gone wrong?” I ask, handing him his glass.

  “Hell,” he replies, almost laughing. “Everything.”

  “You must have really loved Anna to take such a risk.”

  He downs half his drink. I wait to see if the cola successfully masks the taste of the pills. Apparently, it does.

  “She was more into me than I was into her. She was kind of obsessed with me.”

  I take in the red, veined nose, the bruised pouches of skin beneath his bleary eyes, the jowly chin, the lank gray hair like motor oil smeared across the top of his flaking scalp.

  He’s overweight but not obese, his bulk not the honest, hard-won pounds of someone who can’t stop eating but the bloat of sloth and ill use.

  “Why not just get a divorce?” I ask rather than question his irresistibility.

  “Divorcing Arly would’ve been a huge mess, plus I had my kid to think about. And Anna wanted to leave. I didn’t want to leave here.”

  “Of course not. Who would?”

  He’s finished his drink already. I make him another one.

  “You cared about Danny? You didn’t think taking his mother away from him and having him live with the stigma of her crime was taking good care of him?”

  “Arly’s nuts. I really thought at the time he’d be better off without her. I realized after she was gone that she was actually a good mother.”

  “If you didn’t care that much about Anna, why did you do it?”

  “The money, I guess. Walker didn’t pay me outright. Anna said he wouldn’t want there to be any kind of traceable evidence. I worked in his mines, you know. So we set it up that I pretended to hurt my back and the disability checks started rolling in. Big ones.”

  I’ve known some self-absorbed people in my time, but this guy blows them all out of the water.

  “You don’t think you did anything wrong, do you?”

  “The Dawes baby was already dead,” he answers. “We didn’t have anything to do with that. And as for you, you got to be the daughter of a millionaire. If you think about it, I did you a favor.”

  “What did you say?”

  He takes a healthy swig.

  “I did you a favor.”

  I watch while he finishes off his latest drink and I make him one more.

  “It must’ve been a big shock for you when Anna killed herself.”

  “It didn’t make sense. That’s for sure. We were all ready to leave. I knew she was sad about leaving you. She liked you. But not sad enough to kill herself.

  “Anyway, I know she didn’t kill herself. I figured it out. She was murdered,” he says as I hand him one more full glass. “And I know who did it.”

  “Who?”

  He yawns.

  “Walker Dawes. He found out she was leaving and he wanted to make sure she kept her mouth shut. Permanently.”

  I have to smile at the thought of Walker in his designer dressing gown lighting the nanny on fire.

  “Wouldn’t he have killed you, too?”

  “I guess he figured seeing what he did to Anna would be enough of a warning to me.”

  It doesn’t take much longer before he begins to doze off.

  I go out to my car and get the rope.

  Back in the room, I walk over to him and yank his head up by his hair and slap his face a couple times. He comes awake but only barely.

  “Can you hear me?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah.”

  “I want you to write something for me.”

  I put a piece of paper in front of him and a red marker in his hand.

  He gives me a bewildered look when I tell him what to write, but the drugs have already made him too groggy to argue or ask questions.

  “I don’t believe in revenge. Vengeance is a petty emotion for small-minded people,” I explain to him. “But Anna believed in it. She used to love to talk about the Nellies and how someday they’d get back at the Dawes family. And all that time there I was a direct descendant of Prosperity McNab living in their midst. Enjoying their wealth. Holding them hostage without even knowing I was. And Anna knew eventually I’d get their fortune.”

  I dangle the noose in front of his eyes. The fog in them clears momentarily and he tries to get up but his arms and legs are like lead.

  I wait for him to pass out then put the noose around his neck and tie the other end of the rope to the bed frame. I push the chair to the window and throw it open.

  Dumping him is harder than I thought it would be. Eventually he goes tumbling out. The bed slides across the room and slams against the wall. The rope is pulled taut and I hear a snap and thud.

  I peer outside. He’s not dead yet. His body jerks and twitches.

  “This is for Anna,” I call down to him.

  twenty-six

  DANNY

  MAX IS OVERJOYED TO see me. He’s not a hugger or even much of a smiler; he’s a blinker.

  His lids flutter rapidly behind the lenses of his glasses while he takes my coat and my briefcase and leads me to my chair behind my desk where he makes a motion for me to take a seat. I do and he stands back surveying me with a mix of fatherly or motherly pride and shocked concern like I’ve just taken my first steps but they’re into a busy road.

  “Is my charcoal Calvin Klein back from the cleaners?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says eagerly and rushes to the closet where I keep a few suits for court.

  “I have to be at the prison in twenty minutes if I want to be able to talk to him before they move him to the execution chamber.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Max appears dressed for mourning in a black shirt, black tie, and a black blazer with a crow feather sheen to it, but he’s not wearing this out of any respect for Carson; I know he’s glad he’s about to be removed from the living.

  “Not really, but I promised him.”

  “Will you come back here afterward or do you want to go home and get some rest?”

  “I’ll come back here. I need to work.”

  I get up from the desk and begin to undress. He hands me a shirt and drapes a suit and tie over my chair before returning to the closet to retrieve a pair of shoes.

  He sits on the couch with a brush and begins buffing them.

  “We have a grand jury date for Mindy Renee Trusty.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s hard to believe this isn’t going straight to court. Do you think there’s a possibility we won’t get an indictment?”

  “She suffocated her newborn son with loose change she found at the bottom of her purse because he was going to be an inconvenience. It sounds like a slam dunk,” I reply. “But she’s a pretty, blond, nineteen-year-old girl who can appear as harmless as a baby seal when she wants to.”

  I wonder what Scarlet would think of Mindy Renee, another attractive female psychopath from a respectable family.

  I open the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk where I keep a mirror and check the knot in my tie while listening to the shushing of Max’s brush.

  All the legitimate research on the subject concurs that psychopaths are born not made. The environment they’re raised in can influence what paths their behavior takes, but nothing can keep them from their lifelong course of callous manipulation and inflicting pain on others in order to get what they want.

  Walker and Gwendolyn Dawes didn’t create Scarlet. She would have been the same monster if she had been left with us. Only her victims would have changed.

  “Your trip back home this past week got me thinking about some of my own demons from my past,” Max says. “I was a coward. I tried to run away from myself. I wanted to completely erase who I was, and most people knowing me now and knowing my past would think that’s exactly what I did, but I learned something very important during my journey. You can’t make a new you by denying the old you. You have to find a way for them to happily coexist.”

  He brings me my shoes.

  “There’s more Stacy in me now than there was when I was in Stacy. I was constantly trying to destroy her. I didn’t like her. But I realize now I did like her. It was other people telling me there were things wrong with her that made me not like her.”

  “Thank you, Max,” I tell him. “I appreciate what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. I’m fine. Everything went very well.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Could Mindy and Scarlet pick out each other in a crowd of normal people? I wonder. Do they give off a scent or a telepathic signal that only their kind can detect?

  Humans are as much a mystery to psychopaths as we would be to a visitor from another planet. They’re trapped in a sense, alien life forms that can adapt their behavior to seem like us when needed but who can never fully comprehend us. I imagine some of their insatiable need to control others stems from a warped attempt to ease their own loneliness.

  “You look haggard,” he says, doing little to conceal the concern in his voice. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good kind of haggard,” he says, backpedaling. “A sexy selfless kind of haggard, the kind that says, ‘I’ve been up all night doing calculations that will cure world hunger and repair the ozone layer.’”

  I smile wearily.

  “What exactly would I be calculating?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I admit I didn’t sleep well this past week, but I promise you I’m fine. Really.”

  I stand to go.

  “I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  He holds up his fist to me. On the back he has written: DON’T GO BACK.

  THE GATES OUTSIDE THE prison are lined with protestors. Placard-carrying, fist-pumping opponents of the death penalty jostle with angry, bullhorn-wielding victims’ rights advocates and others who believe killing Carson Shupe is our duty.

  The people who were personally touched by his crimes will be inside already, sitting silently in hard metal chairs staring at the floor or the curtained glass panel where he will soon appear strapped to a gurney; or they’re at home somewhere waiting for a phone call and the relief that will come in knowing that it’s all over, only to be quickly permanently replaced by the realization that it can never be over.

  Official lines of communication have already been closed, but I’ve been allowed three minutes with him. The warden is doing me a favor. I can’t say he’s a friend of mine, but he’s a personable man and we’ve had many dealings together. He’s also set to retire soon and has plans to write his memoirs. He’s already asked me how to find an agent.

  There isn’t enough time left to move Carson to an interrogation room. I’m taken to the death-watch cell, where he’s been for the last thirty-six hours along with a round-the-clock guard.

  The chaplain is waiting outside the cell, too.

  “He’s not religious,” I tell him.

  “I’m here for the people who are,” he replies.

  Carson is sitting on his bed dressed in what looks like white surgical scrubs and slippers. A Milky Way wrapper lies next to him.

  He notices me looking at it.

  “Do you know your last meal can’t cost more than twenty dollars?” he asks me.

  “What did you have?”

  “What could I have for twenty dollars? Definitely not anything worthy of a last meal. I tol
d them to bring me a candy bar and take the rest of the money and make a donation to the prison library in my name. Maybe they’ll buy a copy of one of your books.”

  He looks even smaller than usual. His fingertips are bloody and raw. He’s been chewing on them again. Under the circumstances, no one has thought it necessary to take him to the infirmary.

  “How was your trip?”

  “Good.”

  “Is your grandfather okay?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s fine, too.”

  “I didn’t think you were going to come.”

  His lips twitch and purse into something resembling a smile.

  “I thought you were going to chicken out.”

  “I try to keep my promises, but in all honesty, I don’t want to be here.”

  “Because you feel bad for me or because you feel bad for yourself because you feel bad for me?”

  “Both.”

  “Time’s just about up,” the warden says from outside the door.

  Two corrections officers I don’t know come in and begin shackling Carson’s wrists and ankles.

  “Do you think I deserve this?” he asks me.

  My rehearsed response leaps to my lips, the one I’ve been called upon to offer in almost every venue imaginable, from post-trial interviews, panel discussions, and cocktail parties to blogs, book-signing Q&As, and even pillow talk, but I’ve never been asked by a man who is about to experience it firsthand.

  It suddenly sounds as dry and irrelevant as it probably always has. Inside my head I hear myself droning on about how capital punishment in its most elemental form is imposed as a means of retribution, but far greater philosophical issues are involved when it comes to a society agreeing to put people to death, how we must consider the reason behind the crime and not the crime itself when making this decision.

  I can’t stop my thoughts from turning to my father. I don’t support the death penalty. It’s ineffective as a deterrent and I’ve never understood the rationale behind a punishment where the recipient isn’t alive to endure it, but thinking about what my father’s done, my animal instincts are stirred and I suddenly appreciate the need: it’s a way to cleanse our species.