As soon as I stepped inside, the walls began to convulse, which generated another roar from the crowd across the road. Crossing the buckled floor, I went straight up the backstairs behind the kitchen, following the frayed carpet runner.
The wind was moaning through the broken windows on the fourth floor. Halfway down the hallway, another narrow staircase abutted the chimney. It led up into the darkness of the attic on the fifth floor. I turned on my flashlight and headed up.
The attic was choked with discarded mattresses, furniture, and wooden packing crates. Under the open rafters, the gusting wind sounded like the breathing of some primordial beast. Pigeon droppings and plaster dust swirled around me, creating a murky, sour fog.
Since Afghanistan, I had never felt I had knowingly experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome until that very moment. In my mind’s eye, I saw the faces of the men I had lost, the horrific ruin of them after the Taliban had finished with them. For a few seconds, I couldn’t move as I stood in the murky fog and tried to wipe out the memory.
I felt the building suddenly shift again. Off balance, I grabbed the nearest doorjamb and held on. When the grinding noise stopped, I saw a faint gleam of light spilling out of one of the doorways.
Hearing a low burst of chatter on my radio, I reached into my jacket pocket and turned it off. Pulling my .45 out of its shoulder holster, I moved slowly forward along the plaster wall until I could see into the room.
In the far corner, an old Coleman kerosene lantern sat on a metal desk. A .45 semiautomatic exactly like mine rested alongside it. Next to the gun was a framed photograph of a young man.
I stepped into the room.
“You won’t need that,” said Francis Marion Taylor, looking straight into the barrel of my pistol.
The expression on his lean and weathered face was as tranquil as if he had just enjoyed a good steak dinner and was waiting for bedtime. There were deeply grooved wrinkles around his pale-gray eyes. I recognized him immediately.
He had been sitting next to Ben at the bar when the four slumming angels had asked about Guadalcanal. He was wearing the same army field jacket with the Vietnam combat badge.
“So you have finally brought me to bay, Major Cantrell,” he said with a taut grin.
I dropped the .45 to my side as a loud vibration began to shake the outer wall beneath the rafters. It sounded like a professional boxer working a light bag.
“I’m not sure how long this building is going to last,” said General Taylor. “You should find a safe exit while you can.”
“I take it you’re not planning to go with me.”
“No.”
I doubted I could take him against his will and decided to play for time, if there was any time left, before the building went.
“I needed to ask you why,” I said, holstering my .45. “I think I already know the answer.”
“When Creighton died, I was deployed in Bolivia with a covert antidrug task force that was then assisting their government. By the time I returned home, he had been buried, both literally and figuratively. One of the boys in the fraternity he had just pledged had told police that he was depressed over breaking up with his girlfriend. The district attorney determined it was a suicide and ended their official inquiry.”
“Who was the fraternity boy?” I asked.
“Dennis Wheatley.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew that Creighton hadn’t been there long enough to have a girlfriend. He was so naïve in many ways. I suspected that there was more to it, but my wife begged me not to let my anger over his loss consume me . . . and to move on with our lives. Then the Persian Gulf heated up, and I was deployed there for two years followed by the invasion of Panama. I was overseas for pretty much the next five years. Then my wife died. The years passed. Creighton became a distant and painful memory, one that I simply wanted to avoid.”
A crack of splintering wood was followed by another building shift. I watched as the Coleman lantern slowly slid off the edge of the metal desk and rolled down the canted floor.
“What happened to make you change your mind?”
“Earlier this year, I received a letter from an officer who had served under me in Iraq and was now in charge of the ROTC program here at St. Andrews. He asked if I was aware that a chair was being endowed at the new nanoscience learning center in the name of Creighton Taylor. He wondered if I planned to be on hand for the inaugural lecture. I told him that no one from the school had contacted me to let me know.”
I nodded in anticipation of his next words.
“Considering Creighton had been a new transfer student when he died, it made no sense that he would have a chair named in his honor unless there was another reason for it.”
“Guilt,” I said.
He nodded back.
It was Wheatley’s own money that caused his murder, just as his money had to be behind the blackmail threat.
“It wasn’t easy, but I found out that this chair was one of several endowments underwritten by the Wheatley Foundation. That’s when I decided to come back here to meet him and find out what really happened to Creighton.”
“You still had doubts?”
He nodded and said, “Right up until Wheatley confessed just before I helped him up on the railing,” he said. “He told me it was the three of them—him, Massey, and Palmer.”
I stared at him in sadness.
“Grief and rage,” he said. “Two very powerful forces . . . as powerful as that hurricane out there . . . powerful enough to choke off every other human emotion. I did try to fight it. My late wife would never have countenanced this.”
The building convulsed for another ten seconds, and then it was quiet again.
“It was like finding out I had incurable cancer.”
“And now you’re cured.”
“Hardly,” he said, picking up the framed photograph from the desk and tossing it over to me.
“Creighton was my blood,” he continued as I looked down at his son’s broad, innocent face. “The last of my family there will ever be. I wonder if you can understand that.”
“Nobody wrote a rulebook for something like this.”
“Like most of my ancestors, I wanted to be a warrior. It took me away from my family during most of the years Creighton was growing up. In many ways, I’ve led a wasted life.”
“I would have liked a mulligan myself.”
He smiled. He had a good smile.
“I’ve got a different future planned now.”
I knew what he meant to do. I kept wondering how I could get us both out of there alive. I didn’t want his death on my conscience to go along with the other three in Afghanistan. I handed the photograph of his son back to him. He placed it on the table next to his .45.
“Why did you make Massey . . . ?”
“He wanted to go out naked,” he said, already knowing where I was heading with the question. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Guilt makes people do strange things.”
“I’m told you were a good army officer,” said Taylor next.
“By whom?”
“I checked you out with friends at Fort Benning after Ben Massengale told me what happened to you in Afghanistan. The army makes mistakes.”
“Yeah . . . I learned that,” I said.
“You weren’t responsible for the deaths of those men. You were betrayed by a border chieftain who was supposed to be our ally.”
“And he wasn’t punished for it,” I said bitterly. “The general in command gave him a free pass.”
“They circled the wagons. Generals are more important than majors. I guess you learned that too.”
“The faces of those men have haunted me ever since.”
“They never leave you.”
“I checked you out too, General,” I said.
“Really.”
“My friend told me you could have had one of the top slots in the corporation, but you didn’t take to the rarified atmosphere of the Pentagon.”
“Or it didn’t take to me. Either way, it wasn’t a good fit.”
His gray eyes were so luminously pale that they looked lit from inside. They followed me as I walked over to the shattered window and glanced out.
I wondered what our chances of survival would be if we jumped from there. A big sycamore tree was waving its branches about fifty feet away. There was no way to reach it unless I could fly. Glancing back at General Taylor, it was obvious he knew exactly what I was thinking. He watched me intently as I came back toward him.
“After telling me what they had done to my boy, do you know what Wheatley said? He said he would create a ten-million-dollar memorial scholarship in Creighton’s name here at the college . . . and he was going to pay me a substantial annuity for everything my family had suffered. He offered me money.”
“He was just trying to make up for what they had done in the only way he knew how,” I said.
His eyes went cold again.
“Are you a father?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, I hope you never have to find out what it’s like to lose your only child, my friend.”
I was about to tell him that Wheatley had pancreatic cancer and would have been dead in a few weeks when the building tremors began again a moment later. I felt them first in my feet. It was as if I was standing too close to the railroad tracks and a big freight was rumbling past.
“We have to go now, General,” I said, keeping my voice calm.
“Not without you.”
“Everybody dies.”
“In due time.”
“There’s no reason for both of us to end our lives here, Jake.”
“I’m not leaving without you, General,” I said, taking a step toward him.
“You apparently need further encouragement,” he said, as if I were an obstinate pupil. Sweeping the .45 up from the desk, he thumbed back the hammer. I stopped short. He paused again to look down at his son’s face.
Grabbing the framed photograph of his son, he hugged it to his chest with his left hand, swung the .45 away from me, pointed it at his heart, and pulled the trigger.