“Yes, sir, two of his relatives did, his father and a brother.” She shuffled through the file papers, looking for something. “He left this combination confession/suicide note. Shall I read it to you?” Upon our nods of encouragement, Lee began: “Hello.”
A bubble of laughter erupted from my throat.
They both stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling helpless. “It’s just such a funny way to start a confession … hello. Tm sorry, Lee. Carry on.”
She read: “I killed my wife. She was so sick. She begged me. I don’t want to.”
“Well, then, don’t do it!” I said furiously and slapped my open palms on the tabletop. “Maybe she was unhappy because he did a lousy job of taking care of her, I guess that never occurred to him, maybe she would have been better off with other people taking care of her!”
“Well, she’d certainly be more alive,” Geof said calmly.
Lee continued reading: “I’m going to kill myself now. Who would take care of her if I weren’t here? Tell David we’re sorry. We love him. I feel so sad about this. I don’t want to live anymore. Good-bye. Sincerely, Ronald S. Mayer.”
“Good-bye?” I said. “That’s it? Not exactly the Faulkner of confession writers, was he? Hemingway maybe.” I mimicked cruelly: “The woman was sick. The man was sad. They loved the boy.”
Geof’s mouth lifted in amusement at me. “The fish died.”
“Why does this make me so angry!” I asked them. I thought it was only a rhetorical question, but Lee answered me anyway.
“Because she’s not in it, that’s why, Jenny. She’s just this passive, unhappy crippled creature that he does things to. He keeps her alive, or he kills her. He’s God.”
“Which would seem to imply,” I said ironically, “that God answers prayers if Judy really did ask Ron to kill her. What do you know about Parkinson’s disease, Lee?”
“It’s a degenerative disease leading to physical incapacitation. But the brain keeps working fine. It’s the worst kind of nightmare. I have an aunt who has it, and she’s in despair all the time and so’s my uncle. Truthfully, Jenny … Lieutenant … when I heard that Judy Mayer had Parkinson’s, I didn’t have all that much trouble believing this. Except …”
For the first time that evening, Lee looked uncomfortable.
“Except?” Geof echoed impatiently.
“Well.” A flush rose to her cheeks and spread until it pinkened her entire face so deeply that she looked as if she were wearing makeup, which she never did to my knowledge. “The M.E. didn’t find any indication of Parkinson’s in the autopsy …”
Both of us said, “What?”
In that moment, I felt a chill of something, some first hint of something awry, like the first tiny, unnerving symptom of a terrible illness.
“Now wait.” She patted the heavy air with her hands, pacifying us. “It’s not all that dramatic. She didn’t find Parkinson’s, and she didn’t find any evidence of any other degenerative disease beyond the normal aging process. But she did find nerve damage in a couple of cervical vertebrae—”
“Did you talk to Judy’s physicians?” Geof interrupted.
“Yes, sir, I did. Her primary care physician said that Judy and Ron both knew the truth. She didn’t have Parkinson’s. What she was, was paraplegic with some other complications from the nerve damage. But Judy didn’t want anybody else to know about that, because she was so embarrassed by the truth …”
“Which was?” Geof pressed, sounding angry, as she hesitated.
“That her second husband, a man named Dennis Clemmons, beat her up so bad one time that he caused permanent nerve damage.”
I looked over at Geof and didn’t doubt that he could read my mind: She lied about David’s parentage, she cheated the welfare system, she divulged damaging, confidential information … and now this lie, this whopper, not Parkinson’s, but an abusive second husband. You could almost understand her spreading the first lie and this last lie, but when you took them all and added them together, you didn’t know what to believe any longer about Judy Baker Mayer.
“Shit,” Geof said softly and put his face in his right palm.
“She was still an invalid,” Lee said insistently, looking puzzled and worried by Geof’s reaction. I, however, understood it all too well: Was this boy his son, or wasn’t he? Well, I thought, impatiently, he’d take the paternity test and find out. That would settle it. But would it settle this investigation or his involvement with the boy?
Lee was still talking, arguing, pressing her point with Geof.
“She was in pain, Lieutenant. She suffered. It was bad, even if it wasn’t Parkinson’s. It’s still the same motive for him to shoot her and kill himself. From our point of view, it doesn’t change anything.” She waited a moment, then she added nervously, “Does it?”
“What about this Dennis Clemmons,” Geof asked sharply. “Could he have killed them?”
“No, sir. He was alibied.”
“By whom?”
“Forty-five other veterans at the American Legion hall. He was drinking beer at the hall with his war buddies that afternoon.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“He has a record. Burglaries. Served some time.”
“What was she doing with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” he said heavily, sarcastically.
She was defensive. “It didn’t seem important.”
“Everything odd is important, Sergeant. Didn’t you think it was just a little fucking odd that a respectable middle-class matron would divorce her respectable middle-class husband and leave her nice home in the suburbs and take her only child with her to go live with and marry an ex-con who beat her up?”
“He was alibied, Lieutenant! We have a confession note!”
I said, partly to distract him from being such a bastard to her, “What about her answering service, Lee?”
“What about it?” She still sounded defensive.
I told her about Dr. Marsha Sandy’s information and her implied suggestion that Judy might have made some unethical use of her answering service, but with a derisive wave of her hand, Lee dismissed the idea.
Still, Geof bored in on her. “Did you actually investigate the answering service, Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“Because you had the note.”
“Because we were sure of our conclusions, sir.”
I tried again to distract him from taking out his emotions on her.
“Geof, what are you going to tell David?”
His glance shifted to me, and I saw how dark and thoughtful his eyes looked right then. “When we can find him—or he finds us again—I’m probably going to tell him that his father killed his mother. And then I’m going to tell him I’m sorry.”
I heard Lee quietly release a pent-up breath.
“But first I’ll clear up a few details,” he said.
From the look on Lee’s face, I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: What details?
“What details, Lieutenant?”
“You’re out of this now,” he said to her, not unkindly but totally ignoring her question. “You did a good job, but I want a new perspective, and that’s what Jenny and I bring to it.”
“What’s this we business, white man?” I muttered.
He ignored me, too, and kept looking at her. “Call it double jeopardy, Sergeant. You’ve already investigated this crime once, you shouldn’t have to serve the time again.”
She bit her lip before saying, “Be the same verdict anyway.”
“I expect so,” Geof agreed easily. “But we’ll poll a new jury.”
“Because?” she asked carefully.
He shrugged. “Because it’s on appeal.”
“To a higher court,” she retorted, sounding a little bitter.
“He’s my son,” Geof told her.
I stared at him, startled, and thought: This isn’t going to end
well. Just like that, I knew it Somebody is going to regret this. And it would probably be the boy, who was never going to be satisfied to hear what he would never be willing to believe.
Then I realized that Lee was answering Geof. “You understand,” she said to him, “that we also investigated the possibility that the boy did it, that David killed them. I don’t have to tell you that anytime we have two dead parents and one live teenage boy, we’re suspicious.”
“And?” Geof said impatiently.
“He was clear.”
In a tough voice, Geof said, “Maybe you didn’t look hard enough.”
Lee and I looked at each other, each of us seeing surprise on the other’s face: What the hell did he mean by that? But when she asked him, the lieutenant disclaimed any particular meaning. “It wasn’t an accusation,” he said, still sounding impatient with her, so that a flushed, defensive look came to her face again. “Leave your files with me, Sergeant. I’ll take responsibility for them.” He got up from his chair. “Come on, we’ll walk you to your car.”
By the time Lee and I got up from the table and started following him, he was already out in the driveway and the screen door had already slammed behind him.
“I think I screwed up,” Lee said to me in a low voice.
I didn’t know what to say to her, whether to reassure her or not. When we got outside, he was standing on the gravel, his hands in his shorts pockets, staring up at the sliver of late summer moon overhead. The crunching of Lee’s shoes and mine across the gravel sounded unnaturally loud in the overheated silence of the country night.
“Bye,” she said softly to me, and she looked over at him and raised her voice to say, “Good night, Lieutenant.”
He called out a courteous thank you and a good-bye.
I tried to make it up to her by seeing her off in as warm and friendly a manner as I could, and I gently closed her car door for her after she got in, and I waved her off into the night. Then I walked over and stood close to my husband.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
The gaze he turned on me seemed at first as cold and distant as the moon above us. “What?” Then he seemed to really see me, to recognize me, as it were. He put his left arm around my shoulders and started me moving back toward the house with him.
On the second step, pushed against the back, there was a thick shadow, and when we stooped over to look, we both saw that it was another dead animal. We’d all stepped over it when we’d walked down to see Lee off.
“Squirrel,” Geof said after taking a longer look than I wanted to.
“I’ll get rid of this one,” I told him.
He looked at me with surprise. “You will?”
I suppressed a shudder. “You got the possum this morning. It’s my turn. That’s only fair.”
“Yeah, but you had the mouse in your car.”
“But I didn’t have to pick the pieces out of my engine block. I can do this, honey. No problem. I am woman, hear me roar.”
“Well, thanks.” He looked truly grateful. “I hate these jobs, too. I don’t think there’s a sex-linked trait for dealing with dead things. I hate dealing with the bodies of dead people, too. Did you know that?” He stepped over the little corpse and walked on into the house, happily murmuring, “I do love the women’s movement, yessir.”
I was laughing as I held my breath and squatted down to look.
It wasn’t too bad, just a furry tail and part of a squirrel’s leg.
I pulled a tissue out of a pocket in my shorts and gingerly picked up the pieces and walked them back to the covered trash bin, considering the unpleasant chore a small price to pay for equal rights.
“Hey, out there.” I spoke to the black wilderness around me. “Die someplace else, all right? Our steps are not a morgue and my car is not a cemetery.” I paused “Got that?”
I waited until something rustled some tree branches.
“I’ll take that as an affirmative,” I said sternly.
It was not until I had my hand on our back doorknob that the thought came to me: Wait a minute. No squirrel tail crawls up on a front step to die. That squirrel didn’t walk up on one leg. Something left it there, probably between the time Lee first arrived and when she left. But what was bringing us its trophies? A fox, maybe, or a stray dog or cat. Great, I thought. Geof and I had evidently been selected to be the recipients of its prizes from now on.
I stepped into a dark kitchen.
“Don’t turn on the light, Jenny.”
Geof was leaning up against the far wall, his hands in his pockets again, waiting for me.
“You startled me,” I told him, a little angry.
“Sorry. It’s just that I don’t want us to be visible from outside the house. Jenny, the FBI has commissioned psychological profiles to enable them to identify serial killers by the patterns of their childhood behavior. There are three signs you almost always find: As a boy—and it’s almost always a male—the killer will have committed arson, he will have been a Peeping Tom, and he will have exhibited cruelty to animals by torturing or killing them.”
I reached out to touch something: the sharp metal edge of the kitchen counter. “If you really think that, then why did you let me go out there in back by myself?”
“It was a mistake, I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry I did. I was slow to realize he could still be here.”
He. The awful implication hung in the darkness between us. Suddenly, impatiently, I shook it off. “Geof, honestly, I think it’s just a dead squirrel!”
And a dead possum. And a dead mouse.
And a teenage boy, creeping up to our front door, silently, so we didn’t know he was coming.
“I hope so.”
“Anyway, where’s the serial part of that?” I said it half facetiously, resisting the idea of taking this notion of his seriously.
My husband, however, wasn’t joking around.
“His father and mother are dead. And now he has identified me as his father, which makes you—”
“I get it. I think it’s crazy, but I get it. But Lee said he didn’t do it, remember? She said they looked into it, and he didn’t do it.”
“And that’s probably true.”
“But we’re not taking any chances, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“All right,” I said, impatiently. “Is the front door locked?”
“Yes.” He said it casually, as if this were a familiar routine to us, like saying good night and kissing once before we rolled over on our sides to go to sleep, no more than that “I’ve closed all the windows and locked them. I thought we could turn on the air conditioner tonight instead of leaving the windows open. It’s so hot.”
My mouth felt dry, and my face felt suddenly hot and tingly.
“Okay,” I capitulated, feeling resentment ebb as fear began to flow. I walked over to take his hand and to follow him up our darkened stairway to our bedroom, where we moved about without any lights, finding our way to bed by the bit of moonlight that slatted through the curtains, which he closed
But I asked him in bed, “So why did you let me throw the dead squirrel away?”
“Because I don’t think it’s true.”
“Now you tell me.”
He pulled our top sheet and our blue summer blanket up under his arms. I looked over at him lying there, and even in my pique I silently admired him: his attractive, lived-in face; his muscular shoulders and chest, now relaxed and spread out on his pillow; his long tanned arms with the dark hair on them; and his long fingers interlaced on top of the blanket. The rest of his body was outlined by the sheet and blanket. I felt a swelling, nearly an ache in my chest as I stared at him, and I remembered how sweet it felt to place my face in the crook of his neck and to breathe his smell and to kiss the curve of his skin there. I knew how that made him murmur and roll over toward me. He was looking back at me, not knowing what was going through my mind, and he said, as if he needed to hear it again, “Lee did say they clea
red him of suspicion.”
But he’s your son. I noticed his contradictory behavior, noticed that now I apparently was willing to believe the “fact” of his parentage, too. His son. My … what?
Our problem.
“I’m not used to the air conditioner,” I complained, turning my face away from him. “It’ll wake me up.”
He rolled toward me, taking me in his arms, kissing my hair, refusing to release me until he felt me relax, until I’d kissed him back, a real kiss, with real love behind it.
“Are you sorry you married me?” he murmured.
“Every other day,” I retorted and kissed him again.
But I was right about the air conditioner: Whenever the fan shut off, I came suddenly awake to a silent room, aware that something was gone, something was missing. I lay listening to the soft slough of the summer wind outside our closed windows, the tree limbs rubbing against one another, the birds shifting sleepily on their branches, the squirrels shuddering in their nests, the barn owls and the foxes moving stealthily as they stared into the darkness of the woods around us to see what small living things might make the mistake of moving carelessly. I imagined I overheard the ocean withdrawing its tide from our shore, changing its mind, removing itself from us, taking itself to safer, deeper, more comfortable waters. I wanted to go, too. I wanted to sail away on it and to take the sleeping naked man beside me on a boat with me, the two of us and the outgoing sea, drifting further and further away from our home. Each time, when I came awake and before I slipped back to sleep again, I was aware of his skin, the warmth, the smoothness, the roughness and hairiness, the moisture and the heat and the pressure of it, which I could feel even inches away from me, and I wanted more of it: more skin, more touching and stroking and pressing and embracing, more, more.
Once, he woke, too, and he asked, when he felt my insistent caresses, “Now?”
And I said, even though it was three-thirty in the morning, “Yes, now, please.”
9
AT NOONTIME OF THE NEXT DAY, MY FRIEND Sabrina Johnson came running out of the building where she was a state social worker to meet me. Her braided black hair was flying in a long pigtail behind her, and there was a wide grin on her face. I—not feeling much like smiling and moving considerably more slowly in the sticky weather—got out of the Miata to greet her.