Night after night, I went through the packet of papers and photographs Rebecca had sent me by then. I no longer felt them as a link to her, but only as a way to keep alive my hatred, both of my father and myself. One by one, I stared at the photographs or read over the police reports. I savored each blood-soaked image, drank in every word, my eyes heavy in the early morning light, but glaring still at each macabre reminder of the hideously destructive nature I had inherited from him.
I grew bloated on our evil. I could think of nothing else. I lost my job, sold my house, and moved into a cheap hotel, but I didn’t drink or sink into madness. That would have dulled the fierce edge I wanted more than anything to retain in what was left of my life. I didn’t want to forget what the two of us had done. I wanted to remember every harrowing detail until the time of our executions.
Slowly, the plan emerged. I would track him down by moving through the places he’d moved, looking steadily for some clue both as to how he had been formed and where he might have gone.
As the weeks passed, I journeyed back to the little house in which he’d lived out his solitary youth, then to the hard-scrabble warehouse on Great Jones Street, and finally along the dreary line of small New Jersey towns through which he’d wandered, looking for work, finding none, moving on, in a trail that struck me, even then, as terribly forlorn.
I went through all the papers my Aunt Edna had left me, searching for addresses where he’d lived, references to places he’d been. I went to rooming houses that were now libraries, cafes that were now clothing stores, rural meadows that were now bald, grassless tracks of suburban housing. I traced names: cousins, co-workers, people he’d lent money. I found them living in back rooms, asylums, basements, old hotels. I found them dead, as well, wild boys and dancing girls reduced to names carved in gray stone.
I lost track of time. Hours glided into days, weeks into months. My father’s trail, never warm, and mostly fanciful, grew cold, and in the end I was left with a list of names and dates and places that were no more able to guide me to him than the random scribbling I might read from a bathroom wall.
In the end, you will find your way.
It was the older detective who’d said that to me as I’d sat, dazed and unmoving, in the rainy driveway that night. But now, when the words returned to me, I realized that they were carried on a different voice, the one which had guided Rebecca before me, and which, after so many years, so much brutal evidence, still dared to suggest that something didn’t fit.
It was easy to find him. Swenson, after all, was not hiding from anyone.
A woman met me at the door. She wore a green dress dotted with small white flowers, and her hair was pulled back into a frazzled reddish bun.
“My name is Steve Farris,” I told her.
It was a name she clearly recognized. She stepped back and eyed me with a keen vigilance from behind a pair of large, tortoiseshell glasses.
“I guess you want to see Dave,” she said.
I nodded. “Is he here?”
“Sure he is,” the woman said. “He can’t get out anymore.” She stepped away from the door. “Come on in,” she said. “He’s in the back.”
I followed her down a short corridor, then into the shadowy bedroom where he lay. His condition seemed worse than Rebecca had described. Propped up by three large white pillows, he sat in a small metal bed, his lower body covered by a worn, patchwork quilt, the air around him little more than a cloud of medicinal fumes. There was a cylindrical orange oxygen tank at his right, and as I entered, he drew its yellow plastic mask from his mouth and watched me curiously.
“This is Steve Farris,” the woman said.
Swenson nodded to me, then swung his head to the right, as if trying to get a somewhat better look at me.
“You need anything, Dave?” the woman asked.
Swenson shook his head slowly, his eyes still leveled upon me.
The woman walked over to his bed, drew the blanket a little more snugly over his stomach, and disappeared out the door.
During all that time, Swenson’s eyes never left me.
“The son,” he said finally in a breathless, ragged voice.
“Yes.”
He motioned for me to take a seat near the bed, then returned the mask to his mouth and took in a quick, anxious breath. The face behind the mask was pale and ravaged, though his green eyes still shone brightly from their deep sockets.
“Rebecca thought you might come by here,” he said, after he’d withdrawn the mask again.
“She did?”
He inhaled a long, rattling breath, lifted the mask again, then let it drop. “She said there were things you might want to know.” His pale skin seemed strangely luminous in the gray light, as if a small candle still burned behind his eyes. But it was the eyes themselves that I could still recognize from that moment he’d turned to face me so many years before, those same eyes settling quietly upon me as I’d sat stunned and silent in the back seat of his unmarked car.
“Smart woman, Rebecca,” Swenson said shakily, his head drifting slightly to the left. “Very smart.”
“Yes, she is.”
The green eyes bored into me, a young detective’s eyes, swift and penetrating, but now embedded in a slack, doughy face. “What do you want to know about your father?” he asked.
It was a question which, as I realized at that moment, had never actually been asked of me, and which I’d never actually asked myself. What did I want to know? Why had I come so far in order to know it?
“I want to know what really happened,” I told him. “I want to know exactly what my father did.”
“That day, you mean?” Swenson asked. The mask rose again, the great chest expanded beneath the patchwork quilt, then collapsed. “November 19, 1959,” he added, as the mask drifted down and finally came to rest in his lap.
He’d said the date not to impress me with his memory, but to suggest how it had remained with him through all the passing years, how he’d never been able to rid himself of his own, gnawing doubt, the persistent and irreducible presence of something in that house that didn’t fit. And yet, at the same time, he seemed reluctant to begin, as if still unsure of where it might finally lead.
“My father had planned it for a long time, hadn’t he?” I said.
Even as I said it, I saw our lives dangling helplessly over the fiery pit of my father’s dreadful calculations. One by one, it seemed, he’d weighed the separate elements of our lives and deaths. Like a Grand Inquisitor, he’d heard the evidence while staring at my red-robed mother from the smoky fortress of his old brown van, or tinkering with his latest bicycle in the chill dungeon of the cement basement. One by one, we’d come before him like prisoners naked in a dock. Day by day the long trials had stretched on through the months, until, in a red wave of judgment, he’d finally condemned us all.
After that final condemnation, as I supposed at that moment, it had been only a matter of working out the technical details. Perhaps he’d considered various weapons for a time, carefully weighing the advantages of knives, guns, poisons, before finally deciding on the shotgun for no better reason than that he’d bought it years before, that it rested quietly in the green metal cabinet in the basement, that it was ready-to-hand.
“How long had he been planning it, do you think?” I asked Swenson, coaxing him forward, as one might nudge a man, ever so subtly, toward the edge of a cliff.
Swenson shrugged. He started to speak, but stopped abruptly, and returned the mask to his mouth. He took in a long breath, then let it out in a sudden, hollow gush. “If he planned it early, then he must have changed his plans,” he said.
I said nothing, but only waited, as it seemed to me I had in one way or another been waiting all my life.
“Did Rebecca think he had a plan?” Swenson asked.
It was odd how far she seemed from me now. I saw her poised over her black briefcase, withdrawing papers in her usual methodical manner, showing me only what was relevant at t
hat particular moment, concealing all the rest. I could recall the tension of my lost desire, but only as something remembered by another man, a story told by someone else, so that now when she came forward in my mind, it was as little more than a messenger sent to me by my father.
“I think so,” I told him.
He looked vaguely surprised to hear it. He stared at me quietly, his breath coming in long hard pulls and quick exhalations. “Well, maybe he did,” he said. The mask lifted, lingered for a moment at his mouth, then fell again. “But maybe he didn’t.” He tried to go on, but his breath could not carry the weight of another sentence. He took a quick inhalation, then added, “He got away, that’s for sure.”
“All the way to Mexico,” I said.
Swenson nodded. “Using nothing but back roads,” he said, “or we’d have picked him up for sure.” He coughed suddenly, a hard, brutal cough, his face reddening with the strain. “Sorry,” he said quickly, then returned to his story. “He left all his money in the bank.” He looked at me pointedly as he drew in another aching breath. “Does that sound like a well-thought-out plan?”
I looked at him, puzzled, my eyes urging him to go on.
Swenson shifted uncomfortably, the large head sinking and rising heavily, its little wisps of reddish hair floating eerily in the veiled light. “He left the house at around six o’clock.”
In my mind I could see him go almost as clearly as Mrs. Hamilton had seen him, a figure in a gray hat, carrying nothing with him, not so much as the smallest bag.
“He went downtown to the hardware store after that,” Swenson said. A short cough broke from him, but he suppressed the larger one behind it. “Several people saw him go in, but since he owned the place, nobody made anything of it.”
“What did he do in there?” I asked.
“He cleaned out the cash register,” Swenson answered. “Took every dime.” The mask rose again, then fell. “Then he went to that little store near your house.”
“Oscar’s?”
Swenson nodded. “He bought a lot of food and stuff for the trip.” He stopped. The mask climbed up to his mouth, settled over it for a long, raspy breath, then crawled back down into Swenson’s lap. “And he made a phone call.”
“A phone call?”
“From that little phone they had out front,” Swenson said, without emphasis. “We don’t know who he called,” he added, “but the kid that was standing behind him, waiting to use the same phone, was sure that he never got an answer.”
“Someone else,” I said in a cold whisper, “he was calling someone else.” The face of Nellie Grimes came toward me, lifting slowly, gently, as if offering a kiss.
Swenson’s great head drifted to the left. “Someone else, that’s right.”
“Rebecca told me that you spoke to Nellie Grimes,” I said.
Swenson returned the mask to his lips, sucked in a long breath, then let it drop unceremoniously from his mouth. “It wasn’t her.”
“Then who was it?”
Swenson wagged his head wearily. “I don’t know.” He brought the oxygen mask to his mouth again, took in a long, noisy breath, and let it fall back into his lap.
I could feel a tidal fury sweep over me as I imagined him at that phone, still working feverishly to carry out his escape. It was a rage which Swenson could see in its full, thrusting hatred, and it seemed to press me back roughly, like a violent burst of wind.
“You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” he asked.
I stared at him icily, but did not speak.
“You want to kill him for what he did that day,” Swenson said. He seemed neither shocked nor outraged by the truth he’d come upon. By then, no doubt, he’d slogged though a world of death. His only word was one of caution.
“There’ll be more to do after that,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He lifted the mask to his face, leaned into it, and took in a long, rattling breath. “Someone else,” he said when the mask lowered again, “like you’ve already said.”
“Someone else, yes,” I asked. “Someone waiting for him at an airport or a bus station, or just on a corner, waiting for him to pull up in the car.”
Swenson shook his head slowly, ponderously, as if there were heavy weights inside his head. “No,” he said. “Someone who was already with him. Someone in the house.” He looked at me intently. “Someone helping him.”
I stared at him, astonished. “Helping him?” I whispered. “Helping him kill us?”
Swenson nodded. “We followed your father’s tracks down into the basement,” he said. “They were very bloody, and they went all the way down to the third step.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But that was as far as they ever went,” Swenson added laboriously, wheezing loudly now. “The only tracks on the basement floor were the little ones your mother made through those pools of water that had seeped in from the rain.”
I nodded, waiting, as I knew I must, for the thing that didn’t fit.
“But if your father had fired at your mother from the third step,” Swenson added, “then he would have riddled the box she’d hid behind.” His head shifted back and forth, as if with the weight of what he knew. “But that box wasn’t hit at all,” he added. He brought the mask to his face and sucked in a long, mighty breath. “It hadn’t been moved, either,” he added as he lowered it slightly, “because if someone had moved it, it would have left a smear of blood.” He looked at me pointedly as he returned the mask to his mouth, took a long, heavy breath, then lowered it again. “Someone walked around that box and shot your mother,” he began again, his voice high and tremulous now, breaking with the effort these last words had cost him. “Maybe brought her back up the stairs, too,” he added, “because there were no tracks from your father’s shoes that went below that third step.”
“Did you tell Rebecca this?”
He nodded.
“What did she say?”
“She said he must have changed before he went downstairs,” Swenson answered.
“Is that possible?”
“Well, we found his bloody shoes and clothes in the bathroom upstairs,” Swenson said. “And there was that small amount of time between the second shot and the last one.”
“Was that long enough for him to have changed his clothes, then walked down to the basement and killed my mother?” I asked.
Swenson looked at me solemnly. “Rebecca thought so.”
“Do you?”
For a moment, he seemed to review the whole terrible choreography of my family’s murder, his head lifting slightly, as the mask dropped into his lap.
“No,” he said finally, “I think there was some …”
A quick breath left him, and he leaned back into the pillows, brought the plastic mask to his mouth, and drew in a tortured, wracking breath. “Someone else,” he said, on what seemed like his final breath, the mask returning quickly to his mouth, his eyes peering motionlessly over its rounded, plastic rim, watching me, animal-like, as if his green, amphibian eyes were poised just above the surface of a murky, pool.
Someone else.
As I drove back toward my hotel room that afternoon, I thought of nothing but those words. I remembered that Nellie Grimes had used the same words in her interview with Swenson. She had insisted on my father’s innocence, then ascribed the blame simply and mysteriously to “someone else.”
My lips parted in the only answer I could offer at the time. “The other woman,” I whispered.
But who?
It was nearly night when I arrived back at the hotel. As I headed across its dank, cluttered lobby, the little bald desk clerk who’d regarded me so suspiciously over my long stay unexpectedly motioned me toward the reception desk.
“There’s a package for you,” he said, then reached beneath the desk and handed me a small, rectangular box.
It had been sent first to my house in Old Salsbury, then to the offices of Simpson and Lowe, and finally forwarded t
o me here. For a single, surreal instant, I sensed that it had come from my father, some macabre remembrance he’d sent to mock and torment me, a blood-encrusted strand, perhaps, of my mother’s hair. I tucked the package quickly under my arm, took the stairs up to my third-floor room, and tossed it, unopened, on the bed.
It lay there for a long time while I sat beside the window, staring out at the deserted street, still trying to reason out the identity of the unknown woman who, in the end, had helped my father destroy not only one, but both my families. Step by step, I once again walked the paces of my father’s crime, following the bloody tracks Swenson had followed, a trail that led from Jamie’s room to Laura’s, and finally down the basement stairs to where two women had waited for him, one crouched behind a cardboard box, the other standing over her, waiting in an awesome silence for the shotgun to be passed.
I drew my eyes away from the window and let them come to rest on the small, brown box that had arrived at my hotel that day. I went to the bed, picked it up, and began to open it slowly, ritualistically, as if I were uncovering a treasure of vast renown, some relic from an ancient faith.
It was no such awesome thing, of course. It was nothing more than Rebecca’s book.
I stared at it, disappointed, exhausted, barely engaged enough to keep my eyes upon it. Still, it had its own dark allure. The jacket was rather melodramatically illustrated with the face of a sinister-looking paternal figure, but the title seemed as cool and academic as its author: THESE MEN: Studies in Family Murder, by Rebecca Soltero.
For the rest of the night, I sat at the window of my room and read Rebecca’s study of “these men.” One by one, she explored and exposed them, moving through those elements of character and background which united them, closing in on that single element which joined them together in a dark, exclusive brotherhood, the fact that they were, above all, deeply romantic men. So much so, that each of them had found a kind of talisman, an emblem for his extreme and irreducible yearning. “Creatures of a visceral male romanticism,” Rebecca wrote, “each of these men had found a symbol for what was missing in his life.”