Waiting. She'd been waiting. In the attic. To confront him. He'd been afraid, distraught—I could see his pale hands clutching the steering wheel, his eyes flickering in the reflected light of snow. One turn of the wheel would be all he needed. One turn to escape, to write his own ending. Because now I saw the truth. He hadn't needed to bring anything to read because he'd had no intention of ever getting there. Had I suspected? I must have. For all Klara's haranguing of me and accusing me of unnaturalness—for all her claims to be protecting me against Father—she was the most unnatural one. She was the one whose relationship with Father was horrible. Yes, I finally saw her for who she was—someone who could never accept that Father needed me more than her, who'd manipulated him into loving her no matter what twisted form that took.

I pulled up the wastebasket and vomited. For the longest time I hung my head, breathing through the acid chunks of food. Then I took the letters, all of them, and flung them into the bilious muck. I swept in the photos before continuing to the bookshelves, hugging the putrid receptacle to my chest. I was determined that nothing should remain—certainly nothing Klara might care about. The marbled notebooks I stuffed down in a giant handful. Then came those precious unknown literary works. I tipped them in one at a time. When the basket was full I kept going, spilling them onto the floor, glancing at their titles typed neatly across the spines—Stopping By Woods, National Geographics, Doors, The Stranger, Sleeping on Trains, The Gemini—all those early books that would never grace a bookstore's shelves, all those stories that would never, ever be available to redeem Father's miserable critical reputation. Not that I thought they could. For years I'd seen first-hand what an awful writer he was, how like a blind babe he was without me. I found Queen Dad in a box stuffed into the top of the shelf and quickly read enough to see its prose—yes, prose!—was dead, desiccated, unworthy of repeating. I won't even excerpt it here. I'll just leave a blank to show its nothing quality—a soothing, merciful void like this:

 

I scattered its pages across the floor, then kicked them and fell to my hands and knees and began ripping them to shreds, stuffing the smaller bits into my mouth, chewing them to a pulp, swallowing them down, down, down, until I vomited them up all over again. What had Father once said, quoting Whitman? Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting? Frail, yes, but lasting, no. No one would ever read them now, just like no one would read the awful early drafts of the novels he did publish, the onionskin pages he'd hoarded for years on the off-chance that history should look kindly on his work. I hurled these against the walls, then took the letter opener and mangled the keys of his Remington typewriter. I thought to myself: I'm protecting him. And: I should have done this ages ago.

I don't know how long I stayed up there. Time meant nothing anymore. Hours swam by like elusive fish. By the time I clambered down it was early evening. The shadows were long, the daylight a dying red—the red of police lights, cooling embers, solitary traffic signals in the rain. I went to my room and peered out the window. The gardening trucks were gone. Only Henri's Peugeot remained.

That's when I heard his voice.

Not Father's but Henri's.

He and Klara were coming up the stairs. I couldn't make out their words. They were whispering. Then they saw me. They stopped. I laughed. She must have thought I was having a nervous breakdown. But I was merely trying to stop myself from weeping.

"Are you alright, Milo?" he asked. "We are worried about you." I laughed again. It was the we that got to me—the we that spoke of plans, hushed conversations, fake teary-eyed concern.

I looked down at my vomit-stained pajamas. "It's funny you should say that," I managed. "Because I feel the same way about myself."

Henri tilted his head to one side. He was doing a magnificent job, really—his hand clutched tenderly atop Klara's, eyes benevolent with care. Even his sleeves were no longer rolled up. Still I sensed that tattoo.

"It is a good sign," he said. "That you are worried."

"You think it shows I'm redeemable?"

"That you will accept help. As a former soldier, I know how important this is. Those who are alone . . ." His voice drifted off.

"Help from you?" I said, making it sound like a joke.

Now it was Klara's turn to chime in. "From professionals," she said. "Doctors or psychologists."

"You can go to them," Henri added. "And tell them everything."

Everything?

Suddenly I saw it, the most terrifying element of their plan. That I'd become so frightened that I'd leap at the opportunity to tell someone, especially a supposedly benevolent professional. And where would that lead? What further confessions might I make? Even a simple revelation of Henri's supposed "evidence" against me might be enough to brand me as dangerous and a threat, might vitiate any doctor-patient privilege and lead me straight into the arms of the police.

I realized I was holding my breath. The audacity, the subtlety of these designs nearly overwhelmed me. It almost made me wonder whether Henri really had been a police investigator—it was a trick worthy of a professional.

That's when I noticed Klara staring at me. She looked worried. Paradoxically this gave me hope. I blurted out: "He's not who you think he is." There was more desperation in my voice than I'd intended. But she just muttered: "I'm sorry, Milo. You're the one with the over-active imagination."

The beautiful imagination that created me.

He was smiling.

I had no choice. I closed the door on them. Then swallowed down the bile rising ineluctably in my throat.

Eventually I heard him leave. He strode out to his car with a slow, jangling stride, limbs loose, hair loose and hanging messily across his face. It was obvious what he and Klara had been doing in her room. Still he glanced up at me as if to say: You're creating me even now, don't you see? He shook his head and dragged a boot heel across the gravel. At first I thought he was making a symbolic line I couldn't cross. But he didn't stop there. More lines came furiously, and when he was done he laughed and hopped in the Peugeot and drove away, leaving those etched symbols behind, which eventually coalesced into a single dreadful word:

LIFE.

Water, that necessary ingredient to life, was coursing through our old pipes. Klara was taking a shower. The pipes were humming. No, she was humming. Beethoven? It didn't matter. Afterwards she knocked on my door and asked matter-of-factly if I was hungry. I said nothing. I was still staring out the window. Her footsteps faded down the stairs. At one point I opened my door and heard the television's high whine. I'd always suspected she watched it while eating alone. I did the same whenever she left me.

I waited until she'd gone to bed. Then I went outside. The word was still there. I thought about photographing it as proof, but I knew Klara would only think I'd done it myself. So I kicked gravel over it and went back inside, up the stairs, down the hallway and into Mother and Father's room, straight up the ladder to fetch the wastebasket. I lowered it onto the bed. Papers spewed everywhere. I stuffed them back in. I thought about dumping them into the turret, but I needed to be sure of their fate. So I carried them outside, across the patio, and emptied them into the ditch where I'd once burned my baseball uniform. Then I strode up for the next word-filled load. I did this nearly twenty times, thankful for our old stone walls—and for Klara's oblivious exhaustion. I hauled down everything, including Father himself, who'd grown mercifully silent, until the bookshelves were bare, the desk devoid of everything but the old Peruvian shrunken head and that famously negative review of Museum Collections by The Boston Globe's A.W. Peer: "What John Crane has given us seems, like many an item in museum collections these days, to be nothing more than a dead object from a dead age. His attempt to reincarnate the Victorian social novel has only resulted in the creation of an ugly, inarticulate Frankenstein. We should all do ourselves a favor and put it out of its misery."

I thought about that last line as I poured modeling turpentine over everything. Its dizzying stench nearly overwhelmed me. I stepped back and lit a match. The flame pulled to one side. I was afraid it might go out, but it didn't—it burned right down to my thumb. Only then did I drop it, a little falling star, exploding the darkness with a conflagrant roar. I jumped back, shielding my face, watching the ivy on the wall shrivel and brown. Glowing bits of Father and his opus mingled with Klara's hopeless missives, curling together into the half-moon night, their embers like vanishing fireflies.

Afterwards I stared at the moon and the darkly swaying trees, the wisps of high cirrus clouds. Would they come with lights flashing and sirens blaring? Guns drawn, charging into the house? Soon—I knew it would be soon. Everything was coming to a head.

There was no time for sleep. I pilfered several of Marta's rags and scrubbed every bare surface of the attic. Scrubbed it with bleach to destroy every last molecule of dust: of Father's hair, his skin, the threads of his threadbare clothes. Back downstairs I drifted through the living room and into the study, past the ticking clock, the crumbling Encyclopedia Britannica in the bookshelves, the moonlit reflections of the long-dead day painted in the china cabinet's glass. I began with the trireme. I swaddled it in rags. I hoisted it up the ladder in a wicker basket and installed it atop the desk, where its hull matched the exposed overhead beams. Then I returned to the study for more parts, loading these into the basket with my scalpels and brushes and paints.

I spent two tireless nights hauling everything up—the galleys, dromans, cogs, schooners, destroyers, battleships, submarines—my entire gun-bristling armada. The basket fit everything but the larger vessels: the battleship Missouri and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Kitty Hawk. For these I had to use cardboard boxes from the basement—a damp low-ceilinged place at the bottom of the stairs whose door I had to force open with my shoulder because no one had been down there for years. Certainly I never had. Not since I was a child, when Klara had locked me inside after I'd cut out the eyes of her frog doll—and I'd scrabbled at that door until my fingernails bled.

I found a box of old Christmas lights near the door. I emptied it and ran back up. Like a resourceful Robinson Crusoe I poked holes in it to string a clothesline through. It was large enough for everything but the Kitty Hawk. For that I had to descend once more. I waded through mounds of dilapidated children's furniture and saw an old bassinet, a low table, metal desks and stools. There were also rusted farm implements that looked like medieval torture devices—the rack, the brank, the neck violin, the strapedo. Finally, beneath a pair of oversized shears, I found a cardboard box. The word "school" was printed on the flap. I hesitated, then pulled open the flaps. I saw a marbled notebook, PHYSICS printed in my own blocky hand. A rush of nostalgia came over me—for the ruddy Mr. Mora and his lab benches and formulas containing all the secrets of the universe. F=ma: Newton's second law of motion relating force, mass, and acceleration. t=2π√m/k: describing simple harmonic motion. E=mc²: unlocking the key to nuclear bombs.

I pushed the notebook aside. There was our high school yearbook, The Green Mountaineer, from 1988, Klara's senior year. I flipped through it, cracking the spine, until I reached the class photos in back. She looked younger than I remembered. But her gaze had that familiar half-mad intensity hidden behind a prim smile and horn-rimmed glasses. Below her photo someone had written, in a hasty boy's hand, Don't forget about us all at Harvard! —Mike B. Other students had written similar notes below their own photos:

You've been so great on The Falcon [this was the student newspaper]. I know in a few years I'm gonna read about all the great things you're doing. PLEASE keep in touch, OK? —Wanda Cuxhaven.

I flipped to the middle-school photos. These were much smaller. There was me in skinny miniature, frowning beneath a shaggy curtain of hair, my shirt collar hanging loose despite being buttoned and clasped with a tie. A few pages later came little Lizzy Meecham. I could hardly believe my eyes. Her perky smile and pigtails revealed no trace of the mammoth Elizabeth Silfer.

I was about to close the book when I spotted, on the inside cover, a drawing of a novel—I could tell it was a novel because it said "A Novel" across the middle—with "by Klara Crane" printed beneath and "In bookstores soon!" written in a loopy, exuberant hand (not my sister's) across the bottom. I didn't want to be reminded of Klara's so-called ambitions—the "family drama" she hoped to write, the one she was in a sense trying to write now. So I dropped the book in the cobwebbed crevice between two milk buckets. Then I paused. I thought about a different plot. Or maybe it was the same one? I emptied the remainder of the box and shunted it upstairs. My mind was furiously churning. I realized that Henri wasn't the only one who knew a thing or two about investigating.

The next day I managed to take the MG without anyone noticing. I returned to the library. A perky young librarian directed me to the annual reports of the Vermont Gardening Society: large green volumes full of pictures, tips from local gardeners, obscure horticultural awards. "Of course you can get all this information on-line," she informed me, pointing to a bank of shiny new computers. But I just smiled and said: "It's the historical material I want."

It went back several decades. I saw the name Henri Blanc beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing until just after publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Psychopath. Then there was nothing, a blank (Blanc?), until he reappeared only a few years ago, winning awards such as "Best Floribunda Spray" and "Best Miniature Rose-in-a-Bowl." And the garden owners? Marybeth Bliss, Peggy Sporleder, Phyllis Green, Yvonne Dutton. All female. I wrote them down. One of the names was vaguely familiar. I asked the librarian for help. She typed the names into the computer, and there it was: Peggy Sporleder died from an overdose of sleeping pills shortly after finishing one of the largest private rose gardens in the state.

I closed my eyes and imagined it: the pill bottle on the floor, a pale limp hand, glassy eyes, flowers swaying in the window. A scene right out of Father's early novel, Bloodless Sacrifice. "Can I find out more about this?" I asked.

Further searches turned up little else. Ms. Sporleder had been discovered by a house cleaner. There was a vague allusion to debt, to living beyond her means—just like the victim in Father's book.

Another kind of answer arrived that afternoon, in a thin Confidential envelope that I immediately took to my room and propped upon the windowsill. I sat on my bed and stared at it, almost through it with the outside light. Finally I tore it open. CarInfo was pleased to serve my needs. The Peugeot was registered to Henri Blanc.

I dropped the letter. For the longest time I didn't move. What if he really was just a gardener? Then another possibility occurred to me. One that managed to be both strangely reassuring and more disconcerting than anything. That he was both Henri and Keith. That he (Henri) was deliberately copying Father's psychopath. And that that's how I'd been creating him as Keith—by believing him to be.

That night I lay in bed, turning this idea over in my mind, thinking of all the possibilities it offered. I thought of similar artifices in The Wizard of Oz and The Hound of the Baskervilles—stories of seemingly supernatural beings that turned out to be fake, to serve very worldly (and in the case of the hound, nefarious) purposes. But what was Henri's purpose in this case? I imagined him trying to seduce Klara for her newfound wealth. It must have been irresistible to him, a story Father himself might have written—how a con man pretended to be one of Father's most nefarious villains in order to exploit his only daughter. But would Henri really take such a risk? He must know we'd eventually recognize him—we'd see every little sign. Unless this was part of the game . . . Yes, I could see him even now, raising his arms to show-off that tattoo—how he meant to frighten me so I wouldn't interfere with his plans. And Klara? Klara too. This was his genius: to attract her despite her fears. To tell her to her face that he'd fleece her dry or get me hanged for murder, and still have her swoon over his accent and his ponytail.

Keith by another name exactly.

Suddenly I heard a footfall on the stairs. I paused. I wondered if he was still in the house. I crept to the door and opened it just an inch. I peered into the hallway. The portraits hovered in the gloom. The rows of low dark doors were all quiet and shut up. All except Klara's. Once my eyes adjusted I could see that it was ajar. I imagined he'd just departed, making it the perfect time to confront her. She'd be tired and wouldn't expect it—her defenses would be weak. Perhaps I wouldn't even have to say anything—just look at her and know whether she was a villain or a fellow victim here.

I watched the stairwell until it seemed to change colors, acquiring hints of green and blue. Then came another footfall. Next the translucent outlines of her nightgown. Floating back up the stairs. She wasn't wearing a robe. How odd. I saw how loosely the nightgown was held together, barely covering her pale naked belly. There was also something else, but I didn't realize it at first—didn't see her hand thrust through the folds, those cage-like fingers clutching a trembling rose atop her pubis. This was a picture that crystallized in my mind only after she was gone, when I was left with nothing but her scent on the still night air, and a sense that while one sort of climax had just occurred, another was drawing fatefully near.