51

The next afternoon, Harvey Dean Kogan stepped into the attorney meeting room at Stateville Correctional Center, his ankle and wrist chains rattling. He wore the same blue denim shirt, the sleeves rolled up. He stopped as if his shoe had stuck to the concrete.

“Hello, Harvey,” Magnolia said. She sat beside me at the little table, facing the door, her blonde and gray hair hanging past her shoulders. I’d flown in early that morning, again on an FBI Gulfstream jet. We’d picked up Magnolia in Chicago and headed straight to State­ville.

“Who are you?” Harvey said.

“Magnolia.” She gave him a small, difficult smile that revealed the gap in her upper front teeth.

“Does the FBI think I’m stupid? You’re not Magnolia.”

She wore a long blue dress that had to be at least twenty years old and fit her like a tarp. She might have worn the same dress when she ran away at sixteen.

“Harvey, they told me you had cancer.” Her voice was as soft as the air around us.

He turned away and shuffled and clanked to the door. Loudly knocked. He wasn’t even going to speak with her.

Magnolia said, “Remember when you stole that plastic ring and gave it to Mother? You were about five. You thought that ring was the most beautiful thing you ever saw.”

He turned.

“But Mother just called you names and threw it away. Then there was that dog of yours, that brown mutt. I can still hear the shovel.” She let out a heavy sigh. Her eyes had brightened with tears. “What she did to you when you were a child …”

He shuffled and jingled to the table and sat in the chair across from us. His face looked thinner and more sallow, as if the cancer had sucked up a little more of him. His chains chimed and he lowered his hands to the plastic tabletop.

“So I guess the FBI dug you up. They thought my old hag of a sister could make me help them.”

“I wanted to see you again,” she said.

He turned to me and smiled. More cancer sores had covered his lips. “So you finally get to meet your aunt. Better talk to her now before she runs away.”

Mama had always pretended that her husband’s malevolence didn’t exist and highlighted the good in him. That was the way to manage my father. I said, “You knew if people didn’t look for Magnolia … you knew she’d have a new life. That’s why you told the world you killed her. It was one of the best things you ever did.”

He jerked his gaze from Magnolia to me and blinked. His rotting smell drifted across the table.

“You were a wonderful child,” Magnolia said.

“Yes, I’m a child of God, aren’t I? Does the FBI think that will open me up? Split me apart like a tin can?”

Magnolia leaned toward him. He drew away.

“I should have taken you with me,” she said. “I’ll be regretful the rest of my life.”

He lowered his head and stared down at the table. Her gentleness and milky eyes, her soft voice, seemed to have melted part of him. “Where have you been all these years?” he said.

She gave a slow, resigned shrug. “In Chicago. Doing people’s books. Paying their bills, mostly.”

“Did you marry?”

“No.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it.

“Children?”

“No.”

Her long torso drooped until her hair almost touched the table. That whole stooped body formed a single word: penance. Maybe that’s why Harvey Dean Kogan’s amber eyes gleamed.

“This man killed another woman,” she said. “A mother with a daughter who loved her.”

He dug his yellow nails into the table. “Did you ever think what our mother would do to me after you ran away? She only had me to beat for what you did.”

Magnolia’s whole face was squeezing shut.

“Oh, you cry now, don’t you? But did you even try to contact me?”

Her long fingers slid in and out of her palms. She could only stare at her lap. “I … I couldn’t bear to think about that life.”

His back straightened. He was drawing strength from her anguish. “You knew what she’d do to me and you didn’t even reach out. Not once.”

Magnolia raised her great hands over her face. She was dissolving. I had to help her.

I said, “Magnolia and Jonas were the only ones who loved you when you were a child. You felt it from Polly and me, too. You can still feel love, can’t you?”

He laughed. “Have you been talking with the FBI headshrinkers again, Tex? Or are you reading those self-help books?”

Magnolia’s hands dropped. She stared at him, the tears streaming down her face. “Oh, Harvey, what have you become?”

His eyes flared. “Fifty years. And now you only show up for one reason. To help the FBI.”

She began to sob.

“You did nothing to save Jonas. Nothing. Jonas, who was better than all of us.”

“I … I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know? It was a hundred degrees that night. The whole shack was made of tin. How could you not know what that heat would do to him?” Harvey tsked. “Your own baby brother.”

I didn’t know how to stop him or even deflect his cruelty. I had to say something. “You didn’t help him either. You were twice your mother’s size, and what did you do? You just lay in your bed. A weak coward who couldn’t even stop an old woman.”

Magnolia pulled herself up and shook her head. She turned toward the door.

“Sit down in that chair,” he yelled.

She sat.

The only way to blunt him was to attack. “You dreamed you and Jonas took an axe to your mother. Cutting up those women … that was your way of trying to save him, wasn’t it?”

He shook his head, the chains rattling. “And here I thought I was the one who lived in fantasies.”

It came to me. From nowhere, like one of Mama’s angel thoughts. “That first time I came here you told me something. You said the child was the father of the man.”

He chuckled. “It’s not the child who’s the father of the man. It’s the man who kills the child’s witch mother. He’s the real father.”

I nodded at the camera behind him. “The man who killed the child’s mother,” I said.

His face stiffened. He looked away. He’d slipped at last. What had Mama said that night when Polly and I sat in her living room? She’d told me to think about the kinds of thoughts the killer’s mother put into him.

I jerked forward in the chair. “The killer is a child of one of your victims.”

Harvey Dean Kogan rose and strode four rattling steps to the door. He knocked.

“He grew up to be the brother you lost,” I said. “Who is he? What’s his name?”

He turned and took in Magnolia’s bent shoulders and soft weeping. “If you want his name, Magnolia will have to come back to see me. Just her. All alone. And then we’ll have a real conversation.”

The door opened.

“Clarence, take me home please.”