Beside Claire, Charlie lifted her head. It was clear there were sirens now, more than one.
“That’s when I knew that I was better than my father. I was more man than he would ever be. So I did what had to be done. Her body was so slack and heavy. For weeks, I paid for every step. But I cut the curtain cord to make a noose, hauled her body up, tipped over a chair underneath her, wiped the blood off the wooden arm of the couch. As I worked, I thought. It was no secret that Elizabeth had been upset and nervous. I decided to say she had broken up with me because of my leg. And afterward, I didn’t owe my father anything any more. Elizabeth’s death set me free, in an odd way. Not just from her, but from owing my father.”
The sirens were close now, Claire thought. Maybe only a block away. But Allen and Howard seemed too caught up in their own person drama to notice.
“You didn’t do it for me?” Howard asked.
Allen shook his head, disgust pulling his features into a mask. “Can’t you get it straight? It’s never been about you, Howard.”
Two cop cars skidded to a stop at the bottom of the driveway. Doors opened, radios crackled, commands were issued in low voices. Claire tensed, fearing that everything was about to change, and not for the better.
“All those years, I held on to that one thought, that you had cared enough for me to risk yourself for me,” Howard said slowly. “And I understood how what I had forced you to do had made you turn away from me.”
Allen shook his head, his expression one of disbelief. “All because of one time that lasted fifteen minutes and that didn’t mean anything? Are you crazy?”
It was more than once,” Howard said, his lower lip jutting forward “You can lie to anyone else, Allen, but don’t lie to yourself. And you liked it!”
“Was that enough to ruin my life! My father used to call me a fag. Why do you think I went to Korea for? To get away from you. Everything you touched you ruined! Me, Elizabeth, your own pathetic messed up life!”
Tears still slid down Howard’s face, but his gaze hardened. He began to drag Mary backward, her head tucked right underneath his chin. His lips seemed to be moving, but Claire couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then his voice got louder, although it still shook. “I’m going to kill her,” he called out, loud enough that the cops on the street could hear. “I’m going to kill her right in front of you. She stood between you and me, Allen, and now she’s going to pay!”
“Down, down!” came the cries from the street. “Get down!”
Claire fell to her knees, then had to tug on Charlie’s pants leg to get her to move. They flopped forward onto their stomachs, but both of them kept their heads raised a little bit. Rather than obeying the shouts of the cops, Allen rushed forward.
“I’m going to kill her! Now!”
Everything happened in a blur. Allen pulling out his gun. The scissors jerking upward. Mary collapsing to the ground, suddenly boneless. The bullet that caught Howard square in the throat, before Allen threw himself over his wife’s body. And the volley of shots that spun Howard around, blood flowering on his shirt, and then flung him to the dirt, his body a few feet away from Mary’s. He twitched once and then was still.
And then Mary moaned. Allen rolled off her and she pushed herself to her knees. Her neck had a single scratch on it, the blood already drying.
And on his knees beside her, Allen embraced Mary and began to sob.
Chapter 48
From the Oregonian
They met at Shari’s restaurant, two National Guard buddies fresh from peacekeeping duties in the Middle East, and one a high school student who looked up to them. The other soldiers, accused of torching their own barracks in Egypt, had returned in disgrace. Together again, they shared a late-night meal to plot the latest in a string of attacks police are calling a stateside “mission” of hate.
Police and family members spent Friday trying to piece together why the three -- Jeff Reynolds, 19, Pat Caruthers, 19, and a 17-year-old juvenile -- would take part in such attacks. The three all grew up in the same neighborhood, and childhood friends said the juvenile had always looked up to two the two older boys.
The three appeared Friday afternoon before Multnomah County Circuit Judge Jesse Gonzalez wearing forest-green jail uniforms and sandals, their hair cropped short in military style. Some victims of the hate crimes said their attackers looked like skinheads.
To family members, the two soldiers and the teen had seemed like gung-ho military types, not bigots. They had dreamed aloud of combat in Iraq. Instead they had been sent home early from the Oregon National Guard. The soldiers were among the troops sent to the Sinai Peninsula in July for peacekeeping duty on the border between Egypt and Israel. There, just after midnight Aug. 13, Reynolds, accompanied by Caruthers, took part in an arson. Reynolds pleaded the military equivalent of no contest to accusations that he squirted lighter fluid on the side of the $100,000 barracks and set it ablaze. The two were caught in the act, and the fire was quickly extinguished. They were confined to barracks, sent home early and demoted in rank to private. Once stateside, he said, the two buddies violated a direct order not to associate with each other.
A few weeks after returning from Egypt, Reynolds and Caruthers confronted an African American man and two African American teenagers in a car. The soldiers brandished a handgun and shouted racist slurs from their car, according to police. The victims fled to a shopping center.
A week later, the two, joined by the teen, jumped a Hispanic man as he waited at a bus stop. They
beat him with a baseball bat, breaking his nose and cheekbone and leaving him covered in blood, police said. One of the men yelled, “You’re leaving tonight in a casket!” Later they attacked a white homeless man for being a “race traitor,” and an Indian motel owner whom they mistakenly thought was Muslim. (A fourth crime, which defaced the home of a Jewish woman, is now thought to be the work of a copycat.)
The most disturbing part about those crimes, according to Lt. Mike Moran, a Portland police detective who interviewed Patterson, is that the two soldiers referred to their actions as “missions.” Their crime spree began to unravel when the teen decided to spray-paint his own apartment in hopes of reaping a windfall of donations. All three are now behind bars.
Chapter 49
UR4GVN
When Howard had begun to drag Mary backward, he had put his lips against her ear and told her to drop when he yelled out the word, “Now!” The short sharp movement of the shears they had all witnessed and been horrified by had been a ruse – he wrapped his own fingers around the closed blades before the point even touched Mary’s throat. As instructed, though, she had crumpled to the ground. Believing Mary dead or dying, the cops – and Allen – had fired. The grand jury had been convened to hear the evidence, but it was a foregone conclusion that the shooting was justified. Suicide by cop – a quick way out rather than face the shame of a trial.
Things were not nearly as clear-cut at the Oregon Art Museum. In disarray, the board of directors had postponed the planning for the new Allen Lisac wing and the hiring of the curator to oversee it. Part of their discomfort had to do with the donor’s shooting his next door neighbor to death over what rumor had it had been a long-standing homosexual affair. Dante said the board’s discomfort was proof that he wasn’t in New York any more, where publicity of any kind was always welcome.
But the Oregon Art Museum’s board had another reason for rethinking their plans. As Claire and Charlie had been confronting Howard, Dante had been hitting the send button on an e-mail to the board. In it, he detailed his doubts about the three drawings in Allen Lisac’s collection, and suggested that all the drawings and paintings needed to undergo a more thorough review.
In his e-mail, Dante had proposed a novel solution to the problem he believed the museum faced. He advocated that they hold the investigation out in the open, in a show similar to one the Met had held in the late 90s called “Rembrandt, Not Rembrandt.” The popular exhibition had invited viewers
to decide for themselves which paintings were Rembrandts and which weren’t by presenting them with scientific evidence and expert opinion, some of it conflicting.
In a similar vein, Dante proposed that visitors to the Allen Lisac wing of the Oregon Art Museum could not only be shown the paintings and drawings themselves, but also the corresponding X-rays, autoradiographs and other technical ways of seeing under a work of art. The museum could bring in teams of experts to evaluate the drawings and the paintings as well as letting kids peer into microscopes. At the core of the concept was the idea that the Oregon Art Museum borrow similar paintings or drawings from other museums and then display them side by side with the ones from Andrew Lisac’s collection – both suspect and not suspect.
The board was still considering the proposal. Even though they admitted it would draw the kind of worldwide attention they craved, they still stumbled over the fact that some of the attention might not be of the type they had hoped for. While hinting that Dante was their top candidate, they had promised to reach a decision as soon as possible. Unable to wait, Dante was returning tomorrow to New York. Claire ached every time she thought about it. She had finally decided to commit to him, but how could she if he were to stay in New York? There was no way, especially now, that she could leave Charlie alone.
#
“Do you want a bag for that?” the cashier asked.
Claire looked down at the book in her hand. How to Heal Grief and Loss. She didn’t want Charlie to see it. The fact that she would buy an advice book at all seemed to somehow trivialize Tom’s death.
“Yes, please.”
“Claire!”
She turned at the touch on her shoulder. Mary. The two women embraced, Claire tentativeness engulfed by Mary’s greater enthusiasm.
“How are you doing?” they said simultaneously, and then they both laughed. Then Mary invited Claire to split a cinnamon roll with her at Fat City. Claire was ashamed by how eagerly she took her up on the offer, by how unwilling she was to go home.
“Can I ask you something, Mary?” Claire said after the waitress had taken their order. “I still don’t understand why the ring was in the wall. Who put it there?”
“Howard did.” Mary lined up her fork, knife and spoon until they were perfectly parallel. “He hid the ring and the purse in the wall, hoping that everyone would think a thief had attacked Elizabeth. I’m sure the reason there wasn’t any money in it was because he took it. He’s always been sneaky and devious, although it took me a long time to see it. The ring must have slowly worked itself out, just like shrapnel still sometimes comes out of Allen’s thigh.”
“What will you do with it now?”
Mary stretched out her right hand, her fingers tucked under her thumb. On her ring finger was a silver band set with a single diamond nearly as big as a dime.
Mary answered Claire’s unspoken question. “We had the stones reset into two rings. We each wear one. What the jeweler did when he melted down the ring is kind of what like happened to us. We went through fire and came out different on the other side.”
“Didn’t it bother you to find out his role in your sister’s death?”
Mary leaned forward, her voice pitched low to match Claire’s. “But he didn’t have a role. Elizabeth was dead before he walked in that door. And before we were married, he told me about what had happened. The truth as he knew it, that it had been his father who had killed her. This was after Warren died. He was sick with cancer even when he was carrying on with my sister. It might explain things.” Mary shrugged. “Then again, it might not. When he told me what had happened, Allen said he would understand if I didn’t marry him. Because of … what happened with Elizabeth, and other … things.” The two women met each other’s gaze. “Because of how his father raised him, Allen never realized his own value. But I looked at him and knew he was what I wanted.”
“I guess you weren’t the only one,” Claire said, thinking of Howard. For so long, Howard had gotten away with murder. Howard had known the how, if not the real reason why. Every look he and Allen exchanged had been heavy with meaning as far as Howard was concerned, weighted down by the extraordinary thing Allen had done for him out of love. And if Allen had chosen never to acknowledge this out loud, well, Howard must have comforted himself with the idea that actions spoke louder than words. And if Allen had entered into a sham of a marriage, well, Howard knew from Elizabeth just how hollow that marriage must be.
“The police showed them to us, you know. His notebooks.” Mary turned her hands over, and Claire noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick. “They were scary. They were supposed to be birding notebooks, but really there were just hundreds of sketches of Allen, with only a couple of drawings of a flicker or a warbler. But mostly just Allen. Every mood, every smile, every expression. Interspersed with notes about every conversation the two of them had, which weren’t many. Even so, Howard read something into everything Allen told him. Not that they spent that much time together. We never did that much together socially, unless Howard managed to engineer it.”
Claire nodded, thinking of how Howard hadn’t been able to bear to live in a world where Allen had never loved him. And when he had realized that his falsehoods were unraveling, he had made the split second decision that it would be better to die – and engineered it that the man he had always loved was also his killer.
“You know the other thing he recorded in those notebooks? How many -” Mary leaned forward and made quote marks with her fingers “- ‘vermin’ he killed. He hated rats, squirrels, what he called ‘trash birds,’ like crows and jays. And every year the total was higher.”
Claire shuddered. “It sounds like he was so closed off, living tighter and tighter in a world of his own imagination.”
“I think he liked controlling things, or thinking he did. It gave him an odd sense of power. Just like after he realized Matt was one of the boys carrying out those attacks, he liked the power of not turning him in. Instead, he paid him to spray-paint Charlie’s house.”
Mary took a sip of coffee. “So how is she doing? When I heard about Tom and then Nova dying, I thought, how can she take it?”
“He’s not actually that bad a kid,” Claire said. “I’ve been to visit him in jail a couple of times. And I’m trying to see what steps I would need to go through to maybe take his brother in for foster care. It seems the dad took off last month sometime, right around when this all started. I can’t bear to think of Jason being all alone in the world.”
“So you’re starting a family. Congratulations.”
Claire hadn’t thought about it like that, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for anything that permanent. Still, any reluctance she felt vanished when she thought about Jason’s hugs. “Maybe I am.”
“And how’s Charlie doing?”
“Not well,” Claire said. “Not well at all.” Which was an understatement. Charlie was disappearing before Claire’s eyes. She doubted that her friend even weighed eighty pounds. The last two nights Claire had come downstairs to find her sitting in a chair in the living room in the dark.
“Tell her I’m thinking of her,” Mary said, as she laid down a ten-dollar bill next to the check. When Claire started to reach for her wallet, she said, “No, let me get this.”
When Claire opened the front door of her house, the air smelled like smoke. She hurried toward the kitchen. She found Charlie wiping the counter with a sponge, while Dante swept the floor. There was spilled flour everywhere, and the air was thick with both the smell of burned butter and another smell. Claire sniffed. Something sweet was cooking in the oven.
“What happened here?” Claire asked, pretending dismay with her hands on her hips. Charlie wasn’t smiling, exactly, but it was clear she was back from wherever she had gone.
“I tried to make some banana bread, but I guess I got a few things messed up,” Dante said. “I was trying to melt the butter, but the next thing I knew the pan was on fire.”
Charlie interrupted,
feigning indignation. “The next thing you knew? There was a fire in my house, and I had to come out of my room to tell him the smoke alarm was making a noise.” She shook her head at Dante. “If you are going to cook, watch what it is you are cooking. You could make a catastrophe with one stick of butter. I do not need such excitement.”
“Yes’m,” Dante said primly.
Claire swiped at her eyes, hoping to hide the evidence before Charlie noticed the tears sliding down her cheeks.
Charlie hugged Claire fiercely. “To be alive is to be alive even to pain,” she whispered in Claire’s ear. “I choose to live.”
The oven timer binged. In a normal tone of voice, Charlie asked, “Who wants banana bread?”
All three of them said yes.
Vanity license plate key
42GRAPH = Photograph
4URIZNL = For Your Eyes Only
ALLMSU = I’ll Miss You
A MR E = A Mystery
CU2NIT = See You Tonight
H2OMEN4 = What Are Men For
HLNBK = Hell And Back
I12KSU = I Want To Kiss You
IH82W8 = I Hate To Wait
IKDUNOT = I Kid You Not
IMZ14U = I’m The One For You
IQ189 = IQ 189
IYQ = I Like You
LK2WTCH = Like To Watch
MD MD = Paradox (pair of docs)
ML8 ML8 = I’m Late, I’m Late
MTNST = Empty Nest
N2ISHN = Intuition
NDHOLE = In the Hole
NE14XS = Anyone For Excess
NOAZARK = Noah’s Ark
NOTENOTE = Naughty, Naughty
NOT4IN = Not Foreign
ONAL4S = On All Fours
OQUAP = Oh, Crap
PB4UGO = Pee Before You Go
RONDAVU = Rendezvous
RUNVS = Are You Envious?
SIR5ER = Survivor
SLWNEZ = Slow And Easy
STUVWXY = Nosy (no z)