“David?” asked Damon Montgomery to my query. He made a show of rubbing his eyes, avoiding my gaze. “He’s not here, I thought you knew where he was.”
“Mr. Montgomery, do not give me any shit. Somebody told David about that job at the Amoco station, and you’re the only person it could have been. He’s not anyplace else we have looked, but he’s here in town working every night. So that means he’s staying with you.”
It didn’t necessarily, but luckily, that didn’t occur to me. I was stuck on the idea that they had baby-sat David all those times, and that convinced me they were doing the same thing now.
“Has something happened?” he hedged.
“My husband has been nearly killed by those maniacs that David calls family,” I exaggerated. “And I want to talk to him. Now.”
“Oh, my God,” Damon Montgomery said on an indrawn breath. “You’d better come in. I’ll get him.”
But a voice behind him said, “I’m already here, Day.”
“The porch,” Montgomery urged. “We’ll go there, so we don’t wake up Mother.”
“Wake up Mother?” questioned a clear, derisive voice from the stairway to the second floor. I looked up and saw her there in a bathrobe. She said sarcastically, “Mother has already been disturbed, Mother will join you on the porch if you don’t mind.”
“No,” the kid said to both of them, but he was looking at me from out of the shadows of the hallway where he stood. “Just her and me.”
“Please,” I urged, for once agreeing with him.
“I don’t know …” Damon hesitated.
“Fine,” his mother said.
30
IT WAS ONLY ONCE I WAS SEATED ON THAT porch with David that I realized I was still wearing that damn beige dress, now spotted with blood, and my ruined shoes. I’d even slipped Geof’s blue rain jacket on again when I left the house, so I was wearing exactly the same clothes, down to the no-longer fluffy bow tying back my hair. It and my hak were stringy and plastered down now. What a sight I am, I thought.
The kid had on blue jeans, nothing else.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“I am cool,” he said sardonically, making a joke of it.
“Let me tell you what happened tonight, David.”
He shrugged, but I didn’t let that discourage me. At some point in my recital, he stopped looking me in the eye and began to gaze off into the distance beyond the screens that encircled us on the porch. And his posture changed, his spine curving out of its usual straight rigidity into something more hunched, making him look as if he were hiding something. When I finished, he said after a few beats of silence, “So?”
I had nearly talked all of the emotion out of me. All I had left by then was exhausted, desperate sincerity, but at least it didn’t sound like pleading.
“David, none of this makes any sense without your memory of it. Nobody else remembers everything. Or, if they do, they’re not saying the truth. Do you really want your father cleared? If you do, answer my questions.”
He stared coldly at me from the couch where Damon had sat.
“How old were you when your mother divorced your father?”
For a moment, I didn’t think he was going to cooperate, even now. And then he muttered, “Eight.”
“Why did they split up, David?”
“Mom split,” he said bitterly. “Dad never deserted us.”
“All right, why did she leave him?”
He gave me an ugly grin. “Love!”
“Really?”
“How would I know? I was just a kid.”
“Did you and she go to live with Dennis Clemmons immediately?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have a job then?”
“Dennis the Menacing? Yes.”
“What was it?”
“Construction, working day labor for my dad’s company.”
“Your father kept Clemmons on? The man who stole his wife and his son? Why did he do that?”
“Because Mom wouldn’t take any money from Dad, no child support or alimony, no settlement, nothing. And Dad knew we had to have money to live somehow, so he let Dennis keep his job.”
That bespoke a generous spirit that surprised me; no, it shocked me, because it bore no resemblance to the man in the videotapes, the one I thought of still as the Executioner.
“Why wouldn’t your mother take any money from him?”
David shrugged. “Pride, I guess. Stubborn. I don’t know.”
Pride? Judy Baker Mayer hadn’t been a woman with a whole lot of “pride” to spare, it seemed to me. Stubborn? What for? Although maybe some unexplainable stubbornness helped to account for why Judy had applied to Sabrina’s office for state financial aid—to keep from taking any help from Ron Mayer, even indirectly through Dennis’s job.
“How do you know that about your father, David?”
The expression in his eyes was unreadable. “Mom told me so.”
That statement stalled me again; I was once again completely baffled by this family’s strange intertwinings of apparent love and apparent hate. Then I doggedly pressed on; if I couldn’t figure it all out yet, maybe I just didn’t have all the facts yet.
“Okay, so how old were you when Dennis lost that job?”
“Uh, ten.”
Two years, for two years Ron Mayer had provided a job and a salary to the man who was his wife’s second husband and his son’s stepfather.
“Why’d he get fired?”
“He beat Mom up.”
“Your father knew about that?”
He sarcastically replied, “I think he figured it out.”
“So he fired Dennis.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not why he said he did it, I mean he didn’t want to humiliate Mom by telling people what Dennis did to her. So what he told people, what the public excuse was, was that Dennis was a lousy employee, which was true, and that he was a criminal, because of being caught burglarizing those houses.”
“Why’d your parents say your mom had Parkinson’s disease? Why not something else, like a car accident?”
He shrugged again. “It was the first thing that came out of Mom’s mouth the first time somebody asked her what happened to her. Then she had to stick to that story.” The bitterness piled up in his voice again. “We all did, Dad and me, too.”
“Were you there when Dennis did it?”
“I’m not going to talk about that,” he said quickly. “Ever.”
I waited, but he remained absolutely silent.
“I understand—”
“I fucking doubt it.”
“Have it your way. So … Dennis got caught, then he beat up your mom, and then he got fired, is that the way things happened?”
He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“And she suffered the nerve damage that put her into the wheelchair, and then she applied for state financial assistance, and then …”
“Dennis went to prison.”
“And your mom went back to your dad?”
“Yeah, and she divorced Dennis and married Dad again, and we all lived happily ever after.”
I felt myself near tears and fought them back.
“So when did Dennis suffer his injury?”
“You mean when did he get the shit beat out of him as he so richly deserved? Right after he got out of prison.”
“Do you know who did it to him?”
“Yeah, my dad’s brothers.”
I wanted to take a deep breath, to react, but I knew I couldn’t, that I had to disguise my responses.
“Do you know why?”
“The fact that he beat up my mother isn’t enough for you?”
“I don’t know, David, was that the only reason why?”
He let out a deep, angry, impatient breath. “He said he was coming back for her. And me. My uncles made sure he didn’t.”
“Did your dad want them to?”
“No!” He was angry suddenly, defensive for his father. “He wa
sn’t like that, he wasn’t like them.” David looked down at the ground between his feet and then up at me, directly into my eyes. “Like me.”
Again, I tried to hide my reaction; I didn’t dare let him see how much he frightened me by doing that, looking like that, saying that.
“Whose idea was it to build the ramp for Dennis?”
“My dad’s.”
Again, he had shocked me. “Why?”
He shrugged and turned slightly away from me. “Because that’s how he was.”
I wanted to embrace him suddenly in spite of everything, I wanted to reach out and grab him and take him into a tight hug and comfort him as I told him, “No, that wasn’t how he was.” But I couldn’t comfort this boy, I couldn’t touch him. I was afraid of him.
I sat back, pushing my palms into my thighs to still the visible trembling of my hands.
“David, those videos, those confessions …”
I saw him tense, and I was frightened again.
“There were penances, too …” I said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything.
“Beatings. Who did the beatings, David?”
“My uncles,” he said quickly, too quickly.
“What about your father?”
“Sometimes.” Defensively, he added, “He had to. All the men did, I would have had to do it, too, if I’d stuck around, but that was one good thing about Mom leaving Dad, it broke our ties to the Carpenters, and there’s no way I’m ever going back to that now, no way, not even if they nail me to a fucking cross.”
How was I to reconcile the paradox of a father who made sure his divorced wife was taken care of on the one hand but who could punish the tiny child in the film so cruelly on the other?
It was then that I thought of the embrace—the warm, loving embrace—at the end of that video. And I remembered the warm, loving voice at the close of the videos of Judy and of Dennis and how that voice said so forgivingly, “Good.”
That was Ron, too.
“Did somebody make them do the beatings, David?”
“Yeah, sure, Granddad. He’s the”—he snorted with sardonic amusement—“patriarch.”
“He’s in charge?”
“Fuck, yes. It’s all his ideas, everything.”
The patriarch with a sword that cut two ways: with punishment, he controlled them; with forgiveness, he controlled them.
“Anything else?” David asked, his voice less guarded now.
“Who killed Dennis Clemmons?”
His head came up, his dark eyes blazing; instantly, he was all tension. “My uncles.”
“You know that?”
“I don’t have proof if that’s what you mean!”
“Do you think they killed your parents?”
He shot to his feet. “That’s what you’re supposed to goddamn prove, damn you! What do I have to do, give it to you on a fucking platter?”
Yes, please! I thought. Serve it to us!
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he walked across the porch floor and then passed through the doorway. Pushing myself out of the rocking chair, I hurried after him.
“David, wait, please.”
He was heading for the stairs,
“Why did you come see us when you did? Why then?”
He had his hand on the banister, but he turned to face me, his face as hard as his voice, nothing young, nothing innocent about him, except perhaps his faith in his father. “Because I found the scrapbook, Mom left it for me, and she left me those tapes of her confession and Dennis’s.”
“Is that what you meant when you said your mother told you so, about Geof?”
He nodded yes.
“Where’d you find those things after she died?”
“Here.” His voice was a little softer, holding what sounded like a touch of gratitude to the only friends he had. “Damon kept a box of stuff for my mom here, personal stuff that she didn’t want anybody in Dad’s family to see, because they’d make her confess for it and do penance. You can’t keep anything personal around those people.”
A gentle voice came down to us from the top step. “I didn’t know what was in it—”
“Day?”
‘It’s okay, David, I’ll tell this part.” Damon Montgomery, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe, looked down on us, talking softly. “She kept a box here, like David said, and after she died, I was too heartbroken to dig into it for a while. When I got into it, I saw it was for David, she’d even put his name on it, so I knew she wanted David to have everything that was in it. I think she put that tape and that scrapbook there the very morning she died, because she came over that day—Mother told me—asking for me, but I was at a client’s.” His voice caught in regret. “Mother told me that Judy had a videotape with her and a big pink book. Mom said Judy told her that she was going out to the Mayer farm that afternoon with Ron.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Just one tape?” I turned to David. “Where’d you find the other one?”
“In my parents’ VCR,” he said. “Like you did.”
“And all of that made you come out to find Geof, because—”
“Because then I knew my uncles had done a penance on my stepfather.” His voice had turned cold and old again. “They waited until he got out of prison, then they beat him up. They could do it then, because Mom and I had already gone back to live with Dad. If they could do that, I figured they killed Mom and Dad, too.”
“Why would they do that, David?”
But that was a question that threatened his view of the world, and his only response was anger. He jabbed his right hand in the air at me. “That’s that fucking cop’s job to find out!”
“David,” gently cautioned the voice on the top step.
“You’ve been helping him all along, haven’t you, Day?” I moved closer to the banister to see him better. “You’ve been helping David to lead us around by the nose. You turned the air-conditioning on next door, didn’t you? He must have called you to tell you we were on the way. And you gave us that cockamamy story, so we wouldn’t suspect that you’d been in there right before we were.”
I looked at both of them. “Who did the graffiti?”
“I did,” David said challengingly.
“Only at the school,” Damon gently corrected him. “I did it next door.”
“And the dead animals?” I heard my voice rise in my distress. “Did you do that?”
“Big deal,” David said. “They were already dead. Road-kill, for God’s sake.”
“I’m sorry if that upset you.” Damon Montgomery sounded embarrassed. “I thought David was getting a little carried away, but we only wanted to get your attention, you see. And keep it Can you please understand? It was so important, and we didn’t know anything else to do. Who would pay attention to a teenager with no evidence? Or to me? I’m such an authoritative kind of person!” He laughed a little in self-mockery. “So David kept watch on your activities until we were pretty certain we’d hooked your husband into investigating the case again.”
“Just a couple of boy scouts,” I said.
“You’ve got to clear my dad,” the boy said, and for a moment, I thought he sounded like a boy, and I was tempted to believe that’s all he was and to look at what they had done as escapades, mere pranks. But then I remembered the high school principal’s description of the chalk drawing in the art room, and I thought of what it would be like to lift roadkill from the highway and carry it to our door, and I thought of this “boy” lingering around our property, spying on us. And the “man” at the top of the stairs? Maybe, I thought, he was the only child here.
“I’m tired, and I’m going home,” I told them.
Nobody stopped me, but only Damon said good night.
Nobody stopped me in the house, that is. Somebody was waiting for me near my car, however, crouching in the shadows of an oak tree: Damon’s mother, Sheila.
“Please,” she whispered, and I was so tired I didn’t even flinch. “Le
t me talk to you.”
I walked into the darkness under the tree and looked down at her.
“They told me what they’ve been doing,” I said.
She let out a sigh. “Thank God. I wanted to myself, but he’s my son, I was afraid he’d go to jail. He won’t, will he?”
“I don’t know.” But I crouched down beside her then, because finally I realized that what I had taken for coldness in her, for a kind of snooty matriarchal anger, had only been fear all along. Fear for her child and, as I was about to learn, for herself. I said, wondering why she felt she had to approach me like this in such an odd, furtive way, “Are you all right, Mrs. Montgomery?”
“I baby-sat him,” she whispered. “So many times. I loved him. But you know, cruel families beget monsters. I don’t know any longer what sort of child he is. If he’s his mother’s son, then he is sad and lonely. But if he is his father’s child, then I’m afraid of him, of our own dear David. I’m afraid of his influence on my son. I’m afraid to sleep at night. I’m just so afraid …”
She touched my jacket sleeve, and I took her hand to hold.
“May I take you somewhere else to sleep tonight?” I asked her.
“No, I have to go back in there.”
I realized she was afraid to leave her son alone with … Geof’s son.
“Please,” she said to me, “find out what kind of boy he is.”
She shooed me away then, so that no one would become too suspicious of the time it had taken me to start my car and to drive away. I hated to leave her. I suspected she had chosen to sit on the ground and wait for me because she was so frightened that her legs wouldn’t hold her up until I came back out of her house alive again.
31
“TELL ME AGAIN, JENNY, SLOWLY.”
I was so tired, but I forced myself to recite the whole thing one more time for Lee Meredith. “Judy went to live with Dennis when David was eight years old,” I began.
This tune through, I told the sergeant everything. Everything. I handed everything over to her as well—the scrapbook, the list of Judy’s telephone answering service clients that Marsha Sandy had obtained for me, the videotaped confessions, even Lee’s own files that she had brought over for us to study. As I talked, she wrote down the chronology, and when we were finished, she studied it for a few moments, then looked up.