Chapter thirty-eight

The shell from Marks’s gun nearly ripped my arm off. I understand the best medical minds and hands at Fayette County General Hospital labored for hours to keep me in one piece. I understand I made it hard for them. At one point, I’m told, I came rocketing out of the anesthesia and nearly sat up on the operating table. I grabbed a nurse by her starched white shirtfront, dragged her to me and whispered: “You see. He never had a chance.” Then I dropped back onto the table like a stone.

In any case, despite my efforts, I was preserved intact for future generations to wonder at and admire. I plan to charge a nickel a pop.

After the shooting, a week went by. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all it did. I lay in my hospital bed drifting in and out of sleep, in and out of pain, in and out of a drugged fog. Faces passed before me. I remember Susannah’s eyes—those blue eyes—staring down at me hour after hour. I remember voices, but I don’t remember words. I remember talking, but not what I said. The time just passed and I just lay there. A week went by.

What brought me out of it, finally, was the sight of him standing in the doorway. Somehow, in my confused state, I was still certain it was he I had killed.… Or rather, that in killing Marks, I had killed him as well, as if the scarred man were a symbol and not a person, and I had laid it to rest.

But he was no symbol. There he was, standing rather awkwardly in the doorway, a slender man in his early forties. Short sandy hair and gray-blue eyes in a thin face. A cheap suit. A thin tie. A jagged scar down the center of his face. I saw him with ambling vision, alternately fading and focusing at the center, blurred at the edges. I wondered if I was dreaming. My heart sped up a little when he came in. But he only walked to my bedside and lay a gift-wrapped book on the table there.

“It’s about the Yorkshire Ripper,” he said. “I hear you like true crime.”

He had a soft voice with a hint of gravel in it. His thin lips barely moved as he spoke. His eyes looked me over. I remember thinking: he’s a man used to listening and watching, not talking. Then I tuned out again for a while.

It was all very weird. It never came fully clear. He stayed and he talked to me and I listened to him as best I could. But I felt like a car radio on a cloudy night taking in distant stations: getting snatches of talk and jazz and news, all of it somehow jumbled together in a solution of static, all of it at once exotic and mundane, some snatches of it clearer than others. He talked for a long time and I suspect he told me things he’d never told anyone. To this day I believe I’m the only one who ever heard it all.

His name was Zachary Johnson. He had been a state highway patrolman when Laura and my parents were murdered. He had been the first to find me and Susannah and, clearly, the sight of him had so terrified us, we had come to associate him with the killer. During the early seventies he quit the force. Some kind of identity crisis. I didn’t get the whole thing. The upshot of it was he moved out to San Francisco. He worked as a bartender there and he fell in love with one of the girls who worked the place. She liked fancy clothes and he bought them for her. She liked drugs, and he bought those too. She liked it when they took drugs together. When he was broke, she left him. He was hooked, by then, on heroin. I think it was heroin.

So he kicked around for a while. There was more to it than that, but I can’t remember all of it. Basically, he kicked around for a while and it was tough and the drugs were bad. He got clean, though, eventually. He got clean the hard way: cold, in a jail cell, while the guards laughed. But it stuck. He made it stick. He got clean and he got free, and started an investigation agency. I remember he said he had to pull a lot of strings to get the license, call in a lot of favors.

Anyway, he went private, and he made ends meet, but it wasn’t pleasant. Keyhole jobs, mostly. Then, one day, he read about Nathan Jersey, about him getting the death sentence. It got to him, nagged at him, stuck in his mind.

He’d never really been happy with the case. He’d followed it because it was sensational and he’d been involved, and something about it had always bothered him. The pieces just didn’t fit together. Of course, that’s not the sort of impulse a person acts on, not in real life. And Zachary Johnson wouldn’t have acted on it either, except he had no real life left.

It seemed to him—when he read about Jersey being sentenced to die—that that moment, the moment when he’d found Susannah and me, had been the best moment of his life. And as that thought occurred to him, it also occurred to him that a private investigation into the Jersey case was called for and that he was the perfect man for the job.

He began it casually, almost as a hobby. And he began it by tracking down Susannah and me. Being there on the west coast, it was easy for him to find the family that adopted me. It took him a lot longer to find me, however. By the time he did, he was caught up in it. It had become more to him than he understood. It was, by then, a way to justify himself to himself, a path to vindication, and he wanted desperately to follow that path to its end.

What he needed was money. What he needed was a client.

So he went to the attorney representing Nathan Jersey. He went to Howard Marks.

I can’t say what Marks was thinking. He’d apparently never worried about us before; I don’t know why he should have wanted to track us down now. Maybe, having kept control of the case this long, having shepherded Nathan Jersey right up to the death house, he was beginning to get a little nervous. Or maybe, more likely, he didn’t want Johnson acting independently. Yes, that must’ve been it. If Johnson was going to reopen the case, Marks wanted to keep an eye on him, wanted to be in control, as he always had been. Whatever the reason, he hired Johnson to find us under one condition: that he would operate in the strictest secrecy so as not to upset our young lives unnecessarily.

So Johnson tracked us down. He found me, and then McGill, and then Susannah.… Her he found on the very night I came to visit her at Marysvale. But he was pledged to secrecy: When I saw him, he ran.

The McGill connection baffled him—until it occurred to him that McGill and Laura might have been what he called romantically involved. As we would later, he began to wonder whether Laura might have been the prime target—and he began to theorize that McGill had killed her in a fit of passion, that McGill was watching us to make sure we did not remember. Excited, he phoned Marks to report his findings. Marks, realizing Johnson was closing in on the truth, forbade him to act. Johnson argued. Marks fired him … then, on second thought, asked him to wait until he arrived in New York, where they could discuss it.

Johnson was pissed, and figured Marks could stew. He headed for Louisiana to see what he could find out about Laura. Marks, meanwhile, must have been alarmed to learn that Susannah and I had been reunited. He arrived in New York with the plan of killing Johnson, Susannah, and me in one blow. But Johnson was in New Orleans by then, and Marks had to settle for me and Sue. He came to McGill’s office first to make sure he had the right man; he tested me with the remarks about the Turner case to make sure I hadn’t remembered and talked already. Then, that night, he called, pretending to be Johnson, hoping to tangle the scarred man in our deaths. That was the second time in our lives Susannah and I escaped him.

Johnson, moving in secret among his Louisiana colleagues, soon knew the Harris story. But it took him quite a while to find the photograph that showed him that Stan Harris and Howard Marks were the same man. The police no longer had one. The papers didn’t; neither did Tulahe. Johnson finally lucked out and tracked down one of Harris’s former classmates, who had caught the killer in a candid all those years ago.

With that, Johnson came rushing back to Hickman, hoping he could get his story told. He was on his way to the Sheriff when he saw Susannah and me drive by. He followed us, lost us—and then guessed where we had gone. It was a good guess. A timely guess. He drove to the Turner inn.

Marks had drawn us there. When I phoned him with the Harris story, he made up that crap about Laura’s letters and I went right for it. He hadn’t wanted to kill me alone and risk Susannah going to the cops. Out at the house, with me and Susannah together, he figured he could finally finish off the Turner killings with no loose ends. Unfortunately, Yardley got there first.

“And that’s it,” said the scarred man. “When I drove up, he fired on me. I swung the car at him. He fell back. I scrambled out, got on top of him, got the rifle. Then I saw you … Well, you were there for the rest.”

He shrugged and looked away from me. Even in my clouded state, I realized he wanted me to say something: something resonant and profound that would give the case the meaning it had obviously taken on for him. I tried to. I really did. I tried to think of something. But the painkiller was wearing off and the throb in my arm was returning and the tranquilizer was still kicked in and my head was swimming and I was tired. I was just too tired.

“Listen,” I said groggily. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He shrugged again. “I’ll let you get some sleep” he said.

He turned, his hands in his pockets. He walked to the door.

“Hey,” I tried to say. I mumbled it. He didn’t hear me. “Hey,” I said again. He turned. “Where’d you get the scar?”

“Oh.” He smiled. He touched the gash sadly. “When I was a kid. It’s a long story. Not very interesting.”

I nodded. My eyelids drooped. The next time I woke, he was gone.