Chapter 17

I sat there, staring down the barrels of Arlen’s ancient shotgun. Arlen himself looked like something dragged out of the grave: his stringy white hair in a frenzy, his face gaunt and pale, a tic working restlessly in his eye. The smell of the slough was so thick it was almost suffocating, but under it, I caught a hint of body odor and liniment.

“What’s wrong with you?” Arlen asked. The shotgun trembled in his hands. “Why can’t you leave decent people alone? You had to come snooping around, stirring things up. Why couldn’t you take a hint?”

“Arlen,” Neil said, “put that down.”

“Don’t move,” Arlen barked at him. “I know about you. I know about all of you. You think you could keep it a secret, hide it, make a fool out of me. Laughing at me all these years.”

“No one was laughing at you, Arlen,” Jane said.

“He was my son! He was gone!” And then Arlen’s voice quavered, and he sounded his age. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“He wasn’t gone,” I said. My brain was racing, trying to put together the final piece of the puzzle. Someone had wanted to stop me. Someone had wanted the truth of Richard’s death to remain a secret. And now I knew it had been Arlen who had run me off the road. Arlen who had wanted to bury the past. But why? I tried to remember what I knew about this man. He’d been furious about Candy’s relationships with men, including Zane. He’d been head of the Astoria lodge of the Sons of Sweden. He’d fought incessantly with Richard. “Richard wasn’t gone,” I said again. “He—”

But Arlen braced the shotgun against his shoulder, steadying his aim, and I cut off.

“He didn’t run away, Arlen,” Jane said.

Neil breathed out hard and said, “He killed himself.”

A spasm of pain contorted Arlen’s body. Pure, raw grief—undiluted by the passage of the years. A distant part of me wondered if, twisted by the physical agony of the loss, Arlen might pull the trigger without even realizing it. But another part of me realized that whatever happened, it was beyond my control.

“No,” Arlen managed to say. “No. Not my son. Not my son. No, he wouldn’t. I saw him—”

And then I knew.

Jane and Richard had fought.

Jane had left.

Vivienne and Candy had both been gone.

And Arlen had been home, tending to his sick wife.

“Richard told you,” I said. My voice sounded scratchy even to me. “After the fight with Jane. He walked next door and told you—”

“What?” Neil asked.

Arlen shouted, “No!”

“He told you?” Neil was shouting too now. He sounded almost hysterical, the words shrill and uneven. “What did you say? What did you do ?”

“He didn’t tell me anything!” The scream was so raw that Arlen’s words were barely intelligible. “He came over to pick a fight, the way he always did. That’s all he ever wanted—to make me angry, to make a fool out of me, to make me a joke in the eyes of every decent man in this town. The things he was saying—” Arlen gulped air, and I thought he was no longer here. He was somewhere else, sometime long ago. “I told him to knock it off. I told him this wasn’t a joke. And he said no, it wasn’t a joke. He said—” Arlen’s voice broke. “He said he was sorry.”

Our breaths were ragged, unkempt things, rising and falling in the dark.

When Arlen spoke again, his voice was dull. “I told him he was no son of mine. I told him I never wanted to see him again. I’d kill him if I ever saw him again.” He couldn’t seem to stand up straight anymore, and his labored breathing was like a heartbeat. The muzzle of the shotgun slipped away from me. “That’s why he ran away.”

Jane was crying softly, her head in her hands.

“He didn’t run away!” Neil shouted. “He killed himself, you stupid old man. He was right here, the bottle of pills on the floor next to him. We had to take care of him! We did! We loved him, we were his family, and he did that to us! Because of you! He was everything to me, and you took him away from me!”

Arlen shook his head, his expression empty, not hearing—or not wanting to hear—any of us.

I looked at Jane.

The color had drained from her face. She touched her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut, but after a moment, she began to speak. “I came home that night.” She stopped, and in the caesura that followed was the whole tragedy. Then, somehow, she started again. “I didn’t know what to do. Vivienne was God only knew where—gone to help Candy, I found out later. I didn’t want Neil to see Richard like that, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“No,” Neil said. An ugly flush filled his face, and his chest rose and fell with a limping unevenness. “No. He was mine. I needed to be there.” I thought that might have been all, but then he said, “He would have wanted it that way, Jane. He would have wanted to do right by you. Just like he would have wanted Viv to have enough money to move, so we gave it to her. Just like he would have wanted us to take care of each other.”

Maybe the question was on my face because when Jane opened her eyes, she looked at me and said, “The life insurance. Neil said—”

“He would have wanted it that way,” Neil said again. “He was sick. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Jane shook her head, wiping her eyes. “It seems like a dream now. Like someone else did it. I don’t know what we were thinking. I don’t know why it seemed like the right thing to do.”

“You did this,” Arlen said, and for a disorienting moment, I thought he was talking to me. But he raised his head, and voice muzzy, spoke to Neil. “You did it to him. You made him that way. No son of mine—”

Arlen swept the barrel of the gun toward Neil.

With a wordless shout, Neil lunged at the old man.

The front door crashed open.

Bobby stood there, scanning the room. He was still in the tank and shorts, but he was carrying his service weapon. Maybe it was the weak lighting of the living room, or maybe it was some strong emotion that seemed to grip him—whatever the reason, in that first moment I saw him, I almost didn’t recognize him.

“Sheriff’s deputy,” he shouted. “Drop the—”

Arlen swung the gun at Bobby.

At the same moment, I pushed off from the sofa and flew across the room. I crashed into Arlen. He grunted as we tumbled into the wall. The shotgun whacked me on the shoulder. Then the gun went off, and the sound of the shot rang in my ears.

We hit the floor and separated, and I rolled across the carpet. I scrambled to my feet, looking for Arlen and the gun.

Neil stood over him; he’d wrested the shotgun away from Arlen, and he cried as he held it. Arlen lay on his back, eyes wide and staring, so still that I thought maybe he was dead.

When I looked over, a hole in the plaster showed me where the shot had gone. It was inches from Bobby’s head. Darkness rushed up at me, and I thought I might pass out.

But I didn’t. I heard Bobby taking the gun from Neil. And then Bobby was by me, his arm around my waist, holding me up—or maybe just holding me—as sirens came out of the night.