Chapter thirty-two

The three of us stood a long time without speaking. Stood still, with the lamplight pinning our shadows to the floor. Susannah was at the window now, her arms folded, her reflection staring back at her. I was sitting on the stairs, tracing shapes with my finger on my jeans.

Yardley sat in the easy chair, his legs crossed at the knee, a cigarette moving to and from his lips. As if he were enjoying a relaxed smoke at the end of the day. But though his stony face remained impassive, his eyes went deep. I could see the longing in them, the loss and the regret. Or maybe I only imagined I saw them, knowing they were there, knowing how they felt.

We went a few minutes more without a word, and then Susannah broke it. She didn’t turn from the window. She just whispered, “I want to see her.”

Yardley and I both lifted our faces to her. Now she did glance back at us.

“Laura. My mother. I want to see a picture of her. Do you think at the Chronicle …?”

Yardley put his cigarette out in an ashtray on the lampstand beside him. He pushed wearily out of the big old chair. Wearily, he moved toward the door to the kitchen. Just beside it, there was a rickety old phone table. A manila envelope lay atop it. He picked it up, seemed to weigh it in his hand. Then he brought it across the room, held it out to Susannah.

She did not reach for it right away. She looked up at the man.

“Old clips,” Yardley said. “I brought them home to read.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and would you have shown them to us?”

He didn’t answer. Just stood there, holding out the envelope. Susannah lowered her eyes to it finally. She took it from him with a trembling hand.

His shoulders slumped, Yardley moved back to the chair. He sank into it. He looked at me.

“I only brought them tonight,” he said. “After McGill called.”

My lips parted. “McGill. He called?”

“That’s how I knew about him and Laura. That’s how I got it solid anyway. He got the message you sent. When he couldn’t reach you at home, he figured you were in Hickman. And figured you’d have stopped in at the paper. He reached me when he called.” He smiled sadly. “Not bad for an old man.”

“No,” I said. “Not bad. What did he say?”

Before Yardley could answer, there was a sound from the window. I turned in time to see the manilla envelope slip to the floor. Susannah stood holding a yellowed newspaper clipping in her hand. Her eyes were fixed on it. The dim light glistened in her tears.

She stared a second more and then stepped back—almost stumbled back—until she was propped against the windowsill. The brittle old newspaper page rattled as her hand shook.

I got up, went to her. Took the page from her hand. She kept staring at the place where it had been.

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s …” My voice trailed off.

“Uncanny,” Yardley said softly.

“The eyes. The look in the eyes. The lips.”

“Bee-stung lips. That’s what McGill called them.”

As Yardley spoke, Susannah’s fingers rose to touch her own lips. Bee-stung lips—a good description.

She shook her head forcefully. Her hair whipped back and forth, a few tears flew free. Pressing her lips together now, she took the page from me, looked at it again, hard.

“What else?” she asked hoarsely, not looking up. “What else did he say?”

Yardley took a deep breath. He leaned his head back in the chair, fixed his eyes on the ceiling.

“It was tough,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell him where you were without your say-so. He didn’t much like that. I finally got him to agree to call back after I’d had a chance to talk to you. After that, we started fencing, back and forth. I’d let him know I was onto something, he’d confirm it and give me a little more, I’d make a deduction from that and so on.”

He lowered his head. Looked at Susannah. I looked at her. Leaning against the windowsill, she continued to stare at the photograph of her mother.

“After a while, though,” Yardley went on, “he gave me the whole story …”

Carl McGill [Yardley told us] liked to play down and dirty, but he was, in fact, from the upper crust of Indiana, which is about as upper crust as you can get. He married Patricia Blake when they were both nineteen, and entered the Army under an officer’s training program. When he got out, he went to college and began working on the Hickman Chronicle. His wife came with him.

McGill liked the newspaper business. It suited him. It was smart and tough, and so was he. He found the idea of working on the college rag distasteful, beneath him, so he drove an hour each way, every other day, to put in some time at the Chronicle. The minute he graduated, he was planning to take his clips and head east. He had hot contacts in Philadelphia.

It was all planned. And then he met Laura. His wife was ill, and he’d taken his laundry to Hickman so he could dump it in the Laundromat while he worked. He met her there. Saw her sitting before a machine, her legs crossed, a magazine opened on her knee. She had red hair and blue eyes. And those bee-stung lips. They made her face look lopsided and goofy whenever she smiled.

She was a reserved young woman, even shy, with a soft voice and a southern accent—she’d grown up in New Orleans. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t smart particularly. She was just a waitress. But she was sweet and very gentle and had an innocent quality that made McGill crazy. The first time they talked seriously, she told him she’d left the south after a bad love affair. It turned out that, at twenty-three, she was still a virgin and had headed north when boyfriend Stan turned out to be “not so nice” as he’d seemed. “Not so nice.” McGill loved that. That was how it started between them.

McGill had married young and, up to that point, he thought he loved his wife. Where he came from, she was the sort of girl you married. She knew how to say the right things and do the right things and impress the right people, and how to stand by her man. She knew how to prove herself by scrimping and saving until the trust fund clicked in. That was how it was done. Anyway, she was strong and loyal and stiff and prim and wan, and McGill had thought he loved her. He still did, but he was drunk on Laura now, and not all the guilt in the world could sober him up.

As for the baby: that was dumb. McGill and Patricia had been trying to have one. When they didn’t, McGill assumed he was sterile. But the fact was, Patricia was sickly. She always had been, and he might have guessed that the problem lay with her. Maybe he did. Maybe he knew. Maybe there are no accidents, anyway.

So Laura got pregnant. McGill wanted to marry her. Laura refused him. She wanted his baby but she wouldn’t break up his home. They kissed, they wept. But Laura stood fast. She went into the backlands, to my father’s inn, to have the child. McGill stayed with his wife. His heart was broken.

Two years later McGill enters his senior year. He’s not the man he was. Something is sour in him. His wife, hurt, is even colder than before. Sometimes, he still works at the Chronicle, but a lot of his time there is spent staring out the window, checking out the passersby.

Coming out of the Army, McGill had entered school halfway through the year. Now, two years after he lost Laura, he was ready to graduate. It was November. He was ready to go home for Thanksgiving, then collect his clips and head for Philly. It was all planned.

Then, just before the holiday, someone killed her. Killed Laura and my parents. And Sue and I alone survived to tell the tale. The way McGill told it, he suddenly changed all his plans. To the amazement of his family and friends, he started working at the Chronicle full-time. He was the best they had—he was the best there was—and he took the job on one condition: he got to cover the murder. He said clips on a really big story like that would secure his reputation. But naturally that wasn’t it. And it wasn’t revenge, either, not according to McGill. He didn’t come to the paper to make sure justice was done for Laura’s murder. He didn’t give a damn about justice for Laura. She was dead.

He came back for Susannah.

The police had mistakenly identified her as my sister—that’s how it got in the paper. After that there were the elections, the news marched on, and no one cared who she was but the Chronicle. McGill just let it ride. Very quickly, he stopped mentioning her in the stories altogether. He must have known that wouldn’t work once the trial got started, but he didn’t plan to hang around that long. Anyway, he wasn’t trying to keep Hickman from finding out about her. In a town that size the townspeople already knew. He was trying to keep his wife from finding out about her. And he was trying to adopt her.

He pulled strings. With his family background, he had plenty to pull. Laura had some family down south, but they were dirt poor and completely uninterested in feeding the bastard of a woman they barely remembered. Within three months he had it set up. He convinced his wife to adopt, and then he convinced her to adopt Susannah. He quit the Chronicle, and he quit Hickman. Patricia never found out the truth, or if she did, she never let on.

As for me, McGill told Yardley, he figured I’d be all right with my rich relations. But he kept track of me. And when he tracked me to that Poughkeepsie rag, he came to find me. He said he felt he owed me that.

“That’s why he never told me,” Susannah said. She was the first to speak when Yardley finished. She was sitting on the floor now, her back against the wall. She had the newspaper clip on her raised knees. She was still looking at it. “He didn’t want mother to know.”

I nodded, then hung my head. Maybe that was it. But Patricia McGill had been dead for quite some time, and Carl had finally told the truth only now, when it seemed to him I might already know. He’d had plenty of time in the interim to invent noble motives for himself. Like his motive for finding me. It may have just been curiosity, after all. Or maybe he wanted to keep an eye on me.

Still, Susannah seemed satisfied. In fact, she seemed now, sitting there, to have slipped off somewhere far away. And as she gazed into her mother’s face from that distance, a slight smile—a smile of understanding—slowly appeared on her lips.

“It doesn’t help us much in the end,” said Yardley.

I pulled my eyes from Susannah.

“This is Monday night,” he said. “Thursday at dawn, all things being equal, Nathan Jersey dies. Two days away, and we’re no closer to getting him off the hook now than we were before.”

“Further if it comes to that,” I said. “We’re at a dead end.”

He nodded. “The motive.”

“Right.” I ran a hand up through my hair. Let out a long breath. “Unless there’s something about Louisa Campbell’s rape, something we’re missing.”

“Or the lynch mob.” Yardley’s voice was tired, heavy, as if it were an effort for him to work the thing over anymore. “Maybe if we went back to Marvin Campbell.”’

“Not unless you have an elephant gun.”

“Maybe if we could track down Louisa.”

“We might. He said she was out west …”

“Oh hell.” Yardley sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling down. “I mean, it’s not like a motive is missing or anything. It’s just that we have so many. A guy like Turner—like your father—a guy who took in strays, blacks, unwed mothers, he’d have so many enemies in a town like this … I mean, once you get rid of Jersey, that only leaves everyone else.”

I tapped my fist once against my knee. “Still,” I said. “Still. It happened so soon after the thing with the lynch mob. It had to be connected. Someone must’ve killed my father for …”

“Don’t you see …”

Her voice startled us, stopped us. We both turned to her where she sat against the wall. That same half smile still played on her lips, but the tears had spilled over now and were running down her cheeks. She did not look at us, but kept studying the picture of her mother, kept smiling into that picture, as if she had not been talking to us at all.

She swallowed hard. “Don’t either of you see?” she went on hoarsely. And now at last, she looked at me, her eyes swimming. “Whoever it was—he didn’t come to kill your father, Michael.”

She choked back tears. It was a moment before she could continue. In that moment, Yardley squinted at her hard, disbelieving. And I felt my own face go blank with the sudden understanding of what she was trying to say.

“He came to kill my mother,” she said finally. “Your father just got in the way.”