When Holt left, I got in my car and followed her on to Philips Highway. She exited into downtown, and I headed north toward the airport and Felicia Bronson’s house. I parked in the driveway, and as I went up the front path, her dogs barked at me from the windows. The air was still and hot and smelled of swamp water and jet fumes. I knocked, and the dogs went wild.
Felicia Bronson opened the door, wearing cut-off shorts and an orange T-shirt. Her dogs danced around her, and she held her overexcited terrier by the collar. Her eyes looked flat, but she recognized me and said, ‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Ask to talk to Detective Holt,’ I said. ‘She’ll tell you I’m more of a danger to myself than to you.’
‘I want you away from my house,’ she said, and she started to close the door.
But two mutts, one with a diseased left eye, broke free and dodged outside. I caught the one with the bad eye, but the other ran across the yard and into the street. I shoved the first dog back into the house and went after the other.
It let me get close, then bore down to the ground as if it would attack. I reached for it, and it darted away. We repeated that game three times, moving farther up the block and then back toward the house.
Then from the front lawn, Felicia Bronson said, ‘You’re an idiot, aren’t you?’
She stood by the driveway, cradling her terrier in her arms.
The dog I was chasing bore down again and barked, daring me. I reached, and it darted away.
‘You’re letting him call the shots,’ Felicia Bronson said. ‘Walk away. Make him come to you.’ She went to the front porch.
I looked at the dog. It barked. I followed Felicia Bronson to the house. The dog barked again and fell in behind me.
Felicia Bronson held the front door open, keeping the other animals back. I stepped inside, and the dog came in after me.
The house smelled terrible. Garbage lay on the hall floor, and a stain from dried dog urine marked the doorway to the living room. Felicia Bronson closed the door and scolded the dogs.
‘Should I leave?’ I asked.
She looked at me with those flat eyes and asked, ‘What do you want?’
I said, ‘There’s a little town called Bostwick, about fifty miles upriver from here. Were you ever there with your boys?’
She frowned. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘How about Tomhanson Mill?’ I asked. ‘It’s near Bostwick.’
She shook her head. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Could Steven and Duane have gone there without you knowing?’
She said, ‘In the last year before they were killed – after their father left – they snuck out at night. They would take my car and drive. In the final months, it became an every-night thing. They could have gone anywhere between midnight and morning if they had enough gas. But I’ve never heard of these places.’
‘You never heard them talk about driving that way? There’s a park there too – Etoniah Creek State Forest.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten nothing about Steve and Duane, especially in those last months when they stayed up all night and started acting crazy. I take care of these dogs so I won’t hear their voices in my head or smell their sweet skin in the air. I remember every word they spoke. Every time they laughed. Every time they cried. In the last month before they died, they talked all the time, and I remember it all. I thought it was drugs, but they swore it wasn’t. I remember every promise, every lie. If they went to that town, they never mentioned it in this house.’
So I tried to place them near the judge on Byron Road. ‘How about Black Creek?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘We all spent time over there. When their dad and I first separated and before he moved to the Southside and then to Miami, he rented a place on Orangewood. Why?’
‘I’m trying to put the pieces together,’ I said.
But she said, ‘The pieces don’t go together. They never did. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying.’
‘Did they get caught for any burglaries in the Black Creek area?’
She shook her head. ‘They mostly broke into big houses out at the Beach. They liked the mansions.’
‘Is it possible they also did places by Black Creek?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘They have some big houses there too. Duane and Steve got caught for pawning watches and jewelry from the Beach, but after they died, I found other things. Bracelets. Coins.’
‘I’d like to see anything you still have,’ I said.
She said, ‘I gave it all to Duane’s girlfriend. That wasn’t the part I wanted to remember.’
‘Can I see what’s left?’
‘Why?’
I figured that if Duane or Steven had stolen something that got them killed, it probably was more than a watch or jewelry or coins. Felicia Bronson might not know what she had. ‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to put together the pieces.’
‘And I told you the pieces don’t go together.’ But she considered me, and I thought I saw life behind the flatness of her eyes. ‘You can’t touch anything,’ she said, and she walked into the hallway.
Before the kitchen, there was a closed door with a child-safety gate stretched across the frame, probably to keep the dogs out when the door was open. She touched the doorknob as if she feared it was hot – and pushed the door open.
Although the cops must have searched the house after Steven and Duane died, the room looked as if Felicia Bronson had closed the door when she’d heard about their murders and never gone in again. The covers on the bunk bed were pulled back, the sheet on the top bunk hanging down like a curtain over the bottom bunk. Dirty clothes – T-shirts, a pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, socks turned inside out – lay on the floor. On a table where one or both of the brothers had been taking apart a little television, a set of screwdrivers rested on top of a pile of electronic parts. A pair of pliers lay on the floor. Two school backpacks leaned against the table legs. A closet door was closed. Pen and pencil drawings of fighter jets hung on the walls. A blanket of dust covered everything.
The backpacks and the closet interested me. I started to step over the gate.
But Felicia Bronson grabbed my arm. ‘No.’
I said, ‘I need to see—’
‘No,’ she said again.
‘Did anyone ever go through their things? Someone must have. The police? Bill Higby?’
She looked at me, and the life had sucked back out of her eyes. ‘This is mine,’ she said, and she steered me down the hall.
I could have shoved her aside and gone into the bedroom. I could have poured her dead sons’ backpacks on to the floor and rooted through their closet. But I just said, ‘I need to talk to Duane’s girlfriend.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘I need to know more about the man who threatened her and your boys.’
‘She has two babies of her own now. She’s hiding but she’s also living.’
‘I need to talk to her.’
Felicia Bronson pushed her dogs away from the front door and opened it.
But I pushed it closed again. I said, ‘The man who killed Steven and Duane also killed two other boys – down near Bostwick.’
Her hands trembled.
I said, ‘That man, or someone connected to him, just killed Rick Melsyn and your son’s old friend, Darrell Nesbit. Lynn Melsyn can help.’
She closed her flat eyes, as if to make me go away, then opened them again. Her whole body shook. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Who will be next? Can you carry that weight too?’
Again she closed her eyes. Again she opened them. ‘I’ll call her,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll ask if she’ll talk to you.’
I knew I would get no more than that. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
She shuddered, and the dogs quieted around her as if they sensed her distress. She said,
‘I’ll tell her I think she shouldn’t talk. She should keep her mouth shut and live.’
That afternoon, as thunderclouds stacked over the river, I went back to Dr Patel’s office. I sat on his couch, and he sat on his chair, and I asked, ‘What do you know about mercury poisoning?’
‘Are you thinking of trading in the box cutter?’ he said.
‘What are the symptoms?’
He set down his notepad. ‘Do you know about mad hatters?’
‘In Alice in Wonderland?’
‘No, the real story. Back when Lewis Carroll was writing, hat makers often went insane. True story. They used mercury to make felt for hats. It gave them muscle spasms. Caused brain damage. They hallucinated, had mood swings. They stopped sleeping.’
I thought about Steven and Duane Bronson driving through the city night after night in their mom’s car.
‘Probably good for business at first,’ he said. ‘They worked while others slept, but that just meant putting more mercury into their systems and a faster decline. Before hat makers, alchemists used mercury when they tried to turn lead into gold. Instead, they turned their brains into paste. Psychiatric journals are full of case studies reaching back more than three thousand years.’ He picked up the notebook again and readied his pen. ‘Why the interest?’
I gave him a short version of what I’d learned about Jeremy Ballat, Luis Gonzalez, and the Bronson brothers. I left out the connection to Judge Skooner but mentioned Tomhanson Mill.
‘A place like that could do a lot of damage,’ he said. ‘The most famous case happened in Japan in the nineteen-fifties. A fertilizer company pumped mercury waste into a bay near a fishing village. More than a thousand people died.’
After we finished talking about ways that chemicals could wreck the mind and body, he taught me a slow breathing technique that, he said, might stop my head from buzzing and my skin from crawling. Each time I breathed in, I should ask myself if the source of my tension was real. Then, as I emptied my lungs, I should assure myself that it was an illusion.
‘But what if the source is real?’ I asked.
‘Breathe some more until you convince yourself it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Never underestimate the power of false belief. If it keeps you on the right side of sanity, go for it.’
A hard rain fell as I drove out of the Medical Services Building parking garage. The tires hissed on the wet pavement as if practicing Dr Patel’s technique. When I passed Sahara Sandwiches, the black hooker was sitting outside at one of the picnic tables, letting the rain drench her. Maybe she was denying that the source of her misery was real.
At the Cardinal Motel, I pulled into the spot by my room. Sheltered from the rain by the overhang, a new mattress, wrapped in clear plastic, leaned against the outside wall. Next to the mattress, my old running coach Ernie Kagen also leaned against the wall. He wore exercise shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt, and flip-flops. He looked almost as wet as the hooker.
‘Hey,’ he said with a nervous smile as I got out.
‘Hey,’ I said.
I unlocked my door, and he stepped inside, his odor swelling around him.
As he stood by the TV, I lugged the mattress inside and dropped it on the bedframe.
‘I told you a lie when you came to my house,’ he said. ‘At least, I was less than honest.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘The truth is you scared me, showing up like that. I should have been prepared.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
He stepped toward me, then stopped. ‘I haven’t been well,’ he said.
‘Sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘I should’ve lived different,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ve been a hypocrite.’
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘It won’t help. But I want to come clean with you. Of all people.’
‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘Not to me.’
But he said, ‘That kid on the track team in Gainesville? I did it. It was a one-time thing. An accident. But I wanted to tell you the whole truth.’
The whole truth. I could’ve pressed him about his arrest for soliciting a kid in New Orleans. I could’ve told him that in my eight years in prison, I’d never met a one-time abuser. I could’ve told him to get the hell out of my room. I said, ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You have nothing to be sorry to me for,’ I said. ‘Your visits did me good when I was inside.’
‘Yeah, but what I was thinking about you when I came – you know what I wanted.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
He stepped toward me again. He smelled like old milk. I wondered if desire could curdle like that.
‘It’s time for you to go home,’ I said.
He screwed up his lips, as if he would beg me, or curse me, or weep.
But he said nothing.
He went out through the door into the rain. I watched as he got into his car and started it. He pulled on to Philips Highway – slowly, so slowly it seemed he must think that when he reached his home he would find the windows covered with bars.
I locked the door. I pulled the window shade closed. I stripped the plastic wrap from the mattress, and the smell of new fabric tangled with Kagen’s odor. I stripped off my clothes and lay naked on the mattress.
I breathed in deep, sucking the smells into my lungs.
I breathed out, denying the world’s evil.
I breathed in, thinking, Is every person – my dad in his drunkenness, Jared in his selfishness, Bill Higby in his self-righteous injustice, Felicia Bronson in her confused despair, Coach Kagen in his rot – a disease?
I breathed out. No, Cynthia is fire-hardened and beautiful, and there are others like her – Thelma Friedman, Deborah Holt maybe, Hank and Jane at their best.
I breathed in. Can I vent the badness from inside me with a box cutter? Can I shoot it out from between my ears with a pistol?
I breathed out and started laughing. I laughed at Coach Kagen, at all the abused boys and girls, at my father, at Felicia Bronson, and at Bill Higby. I laughed at myself. I punched the new mattress with my fists and elbows and laughed. My neighbors, Jimmy and Susan, pounded on the wall separating our rooms and yelled at me to Shutthefuckup.
So I dug my fingers into my arms and held the laughter in until tears streamed from my eyes. I looked through the tears to see if I was cracking from the inside out. Who needed a box cutter? Who needed a pistol in the ear? Insects ripped free of their shells. Birds molted. Snakes shed their skins. Why shouldn’t I?
When I stopped crying, I had sweated a stain into the new mattress.
I got up and walked around my room, looking at the TV and furniture as if they were objects new to the world, or I was new and seeing the world for the first time. I showered then and put on pants. I turned on the TV and lay back down and waited for the five o’clock news. When it came on, the follow-up to the story of Jane’s plea for a delay on Thomas LaFlora’s execution got only thirty seconds. The reporter said the State Attorney and the Governor’s Office believed the execution should go forward as scheduled. The reporter also had tried to contact Randall Haussen for a comment on Jane’s insinuations, but Haussen hadn’t returned phone calls. The story ended with a clip of an assistant state attorney for the Fourth Judicial District saying, ‘The time for delay was twenty-five years ago, when Thomas LaFlora shot his victims to death. His execution is long overdue.’
The news ended with a teaser. On the eleven o’clock broadcast, the anchor promised, they would give fresh details about the shooting deaths of Rick Melsyn and Darrell Nesbit.
I turned off the TV. I had five and a half hours until the news came on again and six and a half hours until midnight, when I’d told Cynthia I would pick her up.
Time – my enemy and friend.
I finished dressing, grabbed my keys, and went out through the rain to my car, thinking that, if nothing else, I would get dinner. Then my phone rang. Caller ID said Felicia Bronson was calling.
When I answered, she said, ‘Lynn Melsyn will talk to you.’