56

I stayed at my in-laws’ house that night. Mike and I had checked the windows, doors, and alarm system. He was armed and the police car was parked out front. I draped my arm over Jill as we slept on the pull-out couch. I almost felt as if we’d recovered our old life. Then I remembered the revolver under her pillow. Would we share our bed with a loaded gun for the rest of our lives?

The next morning, at the sunny kitchen table, we ate toast and cereal while the Doobie Brothers loudly accompanied us from Grandpa Mike’s stereo. It was the first normal breakfast we’d had in weeks.

Garth clanked something on the table. My spoon fell into the bowl. He held up a pocketknife. This one was blue rather than red like the one my father had given me. Garth’s was thicker and had more blades. “Look what Grandpa gave me,” he said.

“Grandpa Mike?”

Garth tilted his head at me. What other grandpa did he know?

There was nothing monstrous about a pocketknife. I managed to say something nice. Then forced another spoonful of Cheerios into my mouth. My cell phone rang.

Special Agent Blake said something about Magnolia Thrush.

I motioned Jill to turn down the music and take our children to another room. When it was quiet I said, “What?”

“They found her body in her apartment … this morning.”

My elbows collapsed and I had to steady my head with one cupped hand. I saw her behind my eyes, her shy, gap-toothed smile as she held out the mismatched ceramic mugs. Her frail voice was as soft as a breath.

“They think he killed her the day before yesterday.”

Right after we’d dropped her off at her apartment. “But why?”

“Betrayal. For abandoning Kogan all those years before. Then she shows up at Stateville and she’s working with the FBI.”

Magnolia hadn’t escaped him or her past. She was murdered because of me.

“Look, I don’t think Kogan wanted her killed. She was the only person who loved him as a boy. He protected her anonymity.”

Blake said something. His words barely registered.

“What?”

“We have an idea. You’re not going to go for it, but I just want you to hear me out.”

“An idea about me? About my involvement in this?”

“Of course not,” Blake said. “Look, we’re running out of time. We have a chance, a slim chance, but a chance to catch Kogan off guard.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“He doesn’t know that his disciple murdered Magnolia. Yet. The prison grapevine hasn’t picked it up. The Chicago Tribune got a letter from the killer but hasn’t published it. We don’t have much time.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“What we’re thinking is, you could spring the news on him. His son telling him about it might jolt him into giving us something.”

They’d keep the news from my father so I could club him with it. In the hope that it would somehow break him? It seemed beyond desperate.

Blake gave a weary, almost husky sigh. “If you get on the G5 tonight you could hit him with it at the crack of dawn, when he’s still not awake. The shrinks think it might work.”

But the shrinks had forgotten something. Harvey Dean Kogan didn’t sleep.

He shambled across the prison meeting room’s dull floor. His blue shirt and pants hung on him as if he’d lost ten pounds. When he turned his dog eyes on us, the power of what we knew surged through me. I held our secret close, like a concealed knife.

“Where’s my sister?” he said.

Polly smiled, but her eyes seethed. She sat next to me. “I’ve missed you, Pop.”

He took in her face and the ear studs, then her black pants and black shirt. He slowly grinned. Lowering himself opposite us, his back to the door, he dropped his manacled hands and they clanked and thudded on the table.

“By God, you look like your mama. But you’re not like her, are you?”

Polly chuckled. “I’m more like you, Pop. But we both already knew that.”

Those unblinking amber eyes locked onto her as if he could hear the thoughts behind her words. “After thirty-one years, you decided it was time to visit.”

She shrugged. “I thought we could talk about women.”

He sniggered once, like a hiccup. His head swiveled and his eyes locked on me. “Polly’s not afraid to look deep down. All the way to the bottom of the well. Your sister was always stronger than you, Tex.”

Polly said, “Thanks, Pop. But you forgot something.”

She leaned back in the stiff plastic and metal chair. Making him wait. I breathed in her hatred.

She said, “I’m also stronger than you are. So is Mama.”

He rubbed his hands together, the chain between the manacles softly jingling. “Polly and Rose, the images and likenesses of God. That’s why you’re so strong. After all, the two of you healed asthma.”

It was like watching a fight, the two opponents circling and feinting. Which made him less wary of me. “Why did he kill my boss?” I said. Let him think this was the news I’d come to tell him.

“Did he?”

“Why?”

He’d cut his nails back to nubs. His thin fingers, even his yellow hands, looked weak. “Maybe he thought she was blocking your promotion.”

His mockery couldn’t touch me. My fury had boiled down to something more concentrated and potent.“What contact have you had with him, Pop?”

He looked down and picked at stray flecks of skin on his left hand. “I can hear your hearts. The blood is rushing through your brains, synapses snapping. Anger gives both of you power.”

I said, “You knew the killer, didn’t you? Ronny White, the boy on the train.”

Amusement filled his eyes. We were inside the frames of his photographs, on ground that he controlled. “Is it that bad, you have to go back forty years?”

“Where’d that mama’s boy go after you took his picture?” Polly said.

Kogan’s outstretched fingers chafed against one another, the handcuffs chiming. We’d moved him outside the photograph now, but he still thought he controlled us. Good.

“How’d you know him?” I asked.

His unblinking yellow eyes fixed on mine. “We discovered the abyss together.”

Abyss. The word seemed tired. “You killed his mother,” I said.

“I killed a lot of mothers.”

Polly slammed her hand on the table. “But this mother sold out her seven-year-old son. It’s the only good thing you did in your sorry life.”

His whole face spread into a broad grin: a chasm of caramel-colored teeth. “I guess I’m a hero now,” he said.

His taunt hinted at righteousness. I could have appealed to that deluded notion of goodness, but I was done being nice.

“Did you hear that?” I called to the ceiling. “They’re going to remember that line, Pop. Years from now they’ll tell how the Preying Hands thought he was a hero. You’ll be their punch line.”

Polly smiled at me. My shoulders relaxed. Probe, evaluate, find the wound, pull it open.

He said, “Do you know what I hear? I hear those gaping hurts your mama put inside you. You’re still just a little boy and a little girl whose mama didn’t love them. At least not as much as she loved God.”

Polly crossed one black jean leg over the other. Leaned back so he could see her inlaid cowboy boots. “When did you get so boring?” she said.

He pointed a bony finger at me, the sibling he thought was weaker. Just wait, I thought.

“The boy was asleep when I killed his mother. The next morning, he wasn’t surprised at all to see a stranger there. I fed him cereal and a piece of buttered toast. ‘Is today a prize day?’ he asked. Such a small, high voice. ‘A prize day.’”

I squinted, let the outrage pass through my body. He was nothing but sound. He couldn’t affect me, couldn’t even touch me.

“After breakfast I took him to see his mama. I’d made her look so beautiful, you couldn’t even tell she was an addict. A fresh peroxide rinse and her hair shampooed and blow-dried, her mouth closed to cover those awful teeth.”

I pictured Jill’s blonde hair and green eyes, Garth’s eyes widening and dimming. Forever.

“Her teeth weren’t as ugly as yours,” Polly said.

He gave a single snicker. “The boy stared at his mama’s severed head on that bed. His whole body shook. I told him she couldn’t hurt him ever again. I told him to stare deep into her eyes. Look at how honest her eyes had become. Can you see how he started to moan with the truth of it? And then cry? Yes, you can picture that, can’t you, Tex? I know your sister sees it—the beautiful grayness, the shadow that joins life and death. The boy was reaching out to touch her hair when I used the chloroform on him. As he faded into unconsciousness, he had that last image of his mother. By the time he woke up, I and his mother were gone. All he remembered was her head lying powerless on the bed. I wanted her head to become part of his dreams. That and the man who saved him.”

“You bastard.” Polly said it softly. She leaned over the table, her hands squeezed into fists. Maybe she hoped that he’d lay a hand on her. Then she could bite and kick and gouge.

He chafed his cracked palms together. “There’s the girl I remember. But you’ve really got to dress better. No wonder no man wants you.”

I said, “You destroyed that boy.”

“I saved him. He became a son of God.” Kogan stared up at the heavens with feigned piety and pressed his hands together in prayer.

I couldn’t hold back my contempt. I unsheathed one of our weapons. “You pretended he was Jonas.”

He blinked.

“Jonas seeing your mother’s head.”

He took two breaths, short and labored. “You think you’re so clever. Such a clever little boy.” He turned to Polly. “His big dyke sister trying to help.”

“And proud of it,” Polly said. “What did Ronny White change his name to?”

“Les Filson.” His smile burrowed into us like his eyes. “The police will pretend they’re near him. They’ll be all over the television. But turning up the gas flame won’t work.”

“It worked on you,” Polly said.

His lips and gums were speckled with the metastatic lumps of cancer. And yet he didn’t appear in pain. It was my own stomach that was growling and cramping.

“Do you really think I believed all those idiots on TV? When the police said they were a foot away from catching me, you know what I did? I laughed. I laughed for days. Would the Preying Hands let the police trace him to photography chemicals?”

Polly’s eyes widened. I could see her mind shaking and whirling. Mama had told us, and the press reported, that the police found him through a photo supply store. Polly and I had believed it our whole lives.

I said it then; my sister needed it. “He killed Magnolia.”

Our father’s face froze around his smile. I yanked out a copy of the letter the Chicago Tribune hadn’t yet published. Slapped it down in front of him. He was sitting and yet he looked dizzy. As he read, his eyes blinked.

My Dear Public:

Two women betrayed my docent. First was the mother who tortured him. But worse was the sister who abandoned him. Justice served.

Goodbye, Harvey.
Thank you.

“It’s a fake. It’s just another stupid police trick.” His voice had become shrill.

I pulled out the police report and slowly—so he’d have time to dread it—laid the page in front of him. “Her murder will be on the front page of tomorrow’s newspapers.”

He lowered his head and sucked in ragged breaths.

“Even Jonas didn’t love you like she did,” I said. “And the last time you saw her, you made her weep.”

More yellow seemed to ooze into the whites of his eyes. His mouth had formed into a rigid, cancer-scarred oval. I think at that moment he saw the death of a dream: what his life could have been if he’d escaped with Magnolia.

Polly said, “Ronny White killed the only person who cherished you.” She pulled a picture from her lap and set it down in front of him. It was a photo the killer had made of Magnolia.

Harvey Dean Kogan stared at it: the Christmas tree lights that adorned Magnolia’s long hair, the candle-wax tears and dollar signs drawn in magic marker on her cheeks. Her own severed thumb protruded from her mouth. It was a copy of the picture of Barb Smith, a prostitute the Preying Hands had killed in Chicago.

Most people would have felt a tinge of sympathy then. But we were riding something deeper. Blacker.

“Look what you did,” Polly said. “He dressed up her face like a whore.”

Kogan leaped to his feet. He backed up, his buttocks hitting the door.

“That’s the man who thinks he’s your son,” I said.

He brought his shackled hands to his face. He pulled the cuffs apart but he could only cover one ear.

I rose. Polly stood beside me. She raised the picture in front of him. “Look at what he made for you,” she hissed.

Desperation filled his eyes.

“Who is he?” I yelled. “Give us a name.”

“You still need me,” he said.

“Who is he?” Polly shouted.

His eyes flicked to the door. “Deputy,” he yelled. He raised his face to the ceiling, as if to make the men listening hear better. “I have the legal right to go back to my cell.”

“They don’t care,” I said. “Sit down.”

He glared at me. Was that fear in his eyes? He took a step toward us and slowly sank into the chair. Lowered his hands and twisted them inside the cuffs. “He’s”—his voice broke—“someone close to you. At the bank.”

Polly glanced at me. The elation I felt glinted in her eyes.

“Who close to us at the bank?” I yelled.

“He’s more my child than either of you.”

He closed his eyes and let the poison of those words sink into us. We shouted at him, but his extraordinary ears had become deaf.

When we’d settled back into the chairs opposite him, he opened his eyes. “You’ve got the rage, don’t you, children? Too bad you don’t have a piece of rope or a blade. But that will come later.”

Then I understood it. All of it. “You have an agreement with him not to kill us. Not Polly or Mama or me. And not Jill or our children.”

His eyes flinched. “Is that what you think?”

“He wasn’t supposed to kill Magnolia either. But he doesn’t want you as his daddy anymore. If he kills your family, he’ll be free of you.”

“Tex, I think I know him better than the FBI.”

His whole sick scheme coalesced in my mind. As long as I didn’t know the name of the murderer, as long as his adopted son roamed free and didn’t kill us, I’d have to keep returning. Returning so he could force me to accept that I was like him. As if I were still a child, he would make me submit to his power.

“Don’t you see?” I said. “He’s going to kill all of us. There’s no reason to protect him.”

He smiled. His mouth widened and all I saw in those ruined teeth was arrogance. “Has he betrayed me more than you have?”

I don’t recall Polly and I walking out, or even shutting the door. What I remember is the weariness that slid like sand over my body. In the hallway, it weighed me down until I held on to Polly and she to me. I thought of Frieda counting in Spanish, of Garth whooshing his superheroes through the air. I thought of Jill sliding her arms around me.