CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I open the front door for Lewis, still not sure where we’re going. She doesn’t lock it as we leave. I guess this is a pretty safe neighborhood.

She takes her keys out and heads for the Lexus.

“I’ll drive,” she says.

I ask her where we’re going.

“It’s not far.”

I make sure the recorder in my breast pocket is on and away we go. A couple of turns, and I realize we’re on the street above the Quarry. Ahead, I see the home where Lewis, Wesley and Alicia were reared, where I was last seen burglarizing the brick patio and trying to keep Wesley from beating me to death me with a shovel.

Lewis uses the turn signal despite the fact that there probably is no moving vehicle within three blocks of us.

But she doesn’t reach the driveway. Instead, she turns just before the fence. There’s a long expanse of lawn in front of us, probably a lot that Harper Simpson bought so his nearest neighbors would be a little farther away, or maybe so that one of his kids would build next door someday.

She drives us for maybe fifty yards and then she stops but leaves the engine running. I look back and can see the outline of the big house behind us to my left. We seem to be in some sort of clearing. It’s a little warm with the heat on, and I open the passenger side window about halfway. I can feel the winter damp sitting on us like a cold, wet towel.

“Well,” Lewis says. “Here we are.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re at the place where you get to hear the truth, Mr. Black. The jumping-off point, so to speak.”

I hear what sounds like a chuckle, but when I look at her face, she isn’t smiling. She’s staring straight ahead, into the blackness.

“You seem to have it all figured out, Mr. Black,” she says. “You’re a very clever man. But maybe you don’t have it all figured out. Why don’t you tell me what you know.”

“I can tell you what I suspect.”

“That’ll do, then.”

“I don’t think Richard Slade had anything to do with your sister’s death.”

Lewis turns toward me.

“Well, if not Mr. Slade, then who?”

“I think I know. I think you know. Your brother.”

Lewis doesn’t deny it, just sighs.

“Let me enlighten you,” she says.

“I knew. I pretty much knew right from the start, when they would disappear into one another’s bedrooms and not come out for a couple of hours. I should have stopped it, but how do you tell your parents something like that? And they both would have denied it.

“They liked to rub my nose in it, really, the way they would smirk at me, playing grab-ass with each other right in front of me, daring me to confront them with it.

“I never did confront Wesley, but I did try to talk some sense into Alicia. But she would do whatever Wesley wanted her to do. Alicia was easily led.”

After what she calls “the incident at the Quarry” and Wesley’s disappearance, things were more or less as normal as they apparently ever got around the Simpson household.

“But something would always happen. He’d go off his medication and his illness would start all over again. He told me one time that the drugs made him feel like he was at the bottom of the sea, in the world’s heaviest diving suit.”

I ask Lewis if she minds if I smoke. I promise I’ll blow it out the half-open window.

She starts to say no, then shrugs.

“Why not? What’s the harm?”

I suck in the much-needed carcinogens and exhale them into the night like a blue fog.

“You’re sure,” Lewis asks me, “that you can’t be persuaded to part with Alicia’s manuscript? I’ve read it already, you know.”

Alicia had suspected that, so I’m not all that surprised.

I tell her that, for the time being, I’d prefer to keep it.

“As you wish.”

She cracks her window an inch or two. Even with mine half-open, it’s getting pretty warm in here.

“Well,” she says, “then I guess you might as well know everything. Confession is good for the soul.”

She surprises me by taking the Camel from my mouth, taking a big drag.

“I quit ten years ago,” she says, “but you never lose the itch, do you?”

I concede that you apparently don’t.

She hands the cigarette back.

“I thought the whole mess was over. It had receded into the past until it had almost vanished from sight.”

She told me that Alicia hadn’t seemed to be fazed much when the story first broke. But when it became more and more obvious that Richard Slade had not raped her, that he had been in prison all those years because of a case of mistaken identity, she became more and more withdrawn.

“Then, last Thanksgiving, she told me she was writing her ‘memoirs.’ I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She said confession was good for the soul, and I told her that was a crock, that confession was good for nothing but ruining a perfectly good life.”

Lewis sighs, looking straight ahead. I don’t think she’s even talking to me now. She might not even know I’m here.

“She just stared at me. And then you know what she said? She said, ‘You think this has been a perfectly good life? You think hell is a perfectly good life?’

“I had always thought there was more to the story than Alicia let on, even back when it first happened, but I was still fool enough to think it was just her feeling guilty about maybe being mistaken, maybe sending the wrong man to prison for the rest of his life.

“I thought that right up to the time I finally got to read what she had written. How could I have been so stupid?”

All through the holidays, Alicia was writing. She didn’t try very hard to hide the fact, Lewis said. When asked about what exactly she was writing, Alicia just smiled and said, “The truth.”

“I tried to stop her,” Lewis says, “and she told me at one point that she had quit. But I knew she hadn’t.”

The wind is starting to pick up. I pitch the butt out the window and roll it up a little.

The day after Richard Slade was officially exonerated by the state, Alicia went to the gym. She left to work out at five every morning. That, a little grocery shopping and meetings of various charity boards she was on comprised most of her time away from the home where she had spent most of her life. If she lived in a bigger town with meaner or at least less lazy media types, her front lawn would have been strewn with cameramen and talking heads all night.

Lewis says she used her key to get into her parents’ old house. She went up to Alicia’s study and got on her computer. Alicia apparently hadn’t tried to hide anything.

“She hadn’t changed her password in the last ten years, when she told me what it was—Simpson. All I had to do was log in, and there, on her desktop, was a folder that said, ‘Confession.’

“I took a glance at the first chapter, and I knew what it was.”

There were some disks in the drawer, so Lewis made a copy and left.

“That night, after Carl went to bed, I went to my laptop and started reading. By the time I was finished, light was coming in the window, and I knew everything. Everything I never wanted anyone else to know.”

The next day, a Wednesday, she went to her parents’ home again before dawn, went back to the computer and erased everything.

She sighs.

“Except, of course, that my careless little sister wasn’t so careless after all. She had copied everything. Hell, she probably even has it copied on a disk somewhere, although I haven’t been able to find it. When I told her I had erased everything, that it was for her own good, she just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She said she’d just go to the police and the newspaper and tell them everything. She was beyond caring, Mr. Black.

“I knew what I had to do.”

I hesitate to break the spell. It’s always good to let the subject talk for as long as he or she wants, give them enough rope for a proper hanging. Sometimes, I feel like a shrink or a priest. But I have to ask.

“So, when did you tell Wesley about all this?”

She looks at me like I’m speaking Urdu. She laughs.

“Wesley didn’t know anything about all this until yesterday,” she says.

“But he knew all along the wrong man was in prison.”

“I don’t know what Wesley knew. He seemed so sane at times, but then he’d go into some tirade about ‘those black bastards’ who raped Alicia, and I really wondered if he knew at all, or if it was just somebody else inhabiting his body that night. Somebody else inhabited his body a lot, especially back then, before the drugs got better.”

It wasn’t that hard, the way Lewis explains it. Carl kept a variety of guns around the house, collected over the years. Lewis had gone out with him to the firing range on occasion. He had one gun, a Colt, that he used to brag he’d gotten from a guy his firm represented. It was completely untraceable. Carl joked that this was the one he’d use if he ever had to kill somebody.

“He’s still not aware it’s missing,” she says. Her laugh is as dry as an Arab’s umbrella.

“I just sat there, at that light at Cary and Meadow. Thursday morning, the light was green when she went through. Friday morning, the same thing.

“Then, on Saturday, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her Acura coming down the street. About half a block before she got there, just when I thought I’d wasted another night’s sleep, the light turned to yellow. Alicia might have run it, but she didn’t.”

Lewis was parked on the left side of the street, just before the light. When Alicia stopped, Lewis got out of her car, ran the twenty feet between her and her sister and tapped on Alicia’s window.

“She seemed surprised, and then she recognized me, and she rolled down the window.

“And then I shot her. Three times. I don’t think she really felt anything. At least, I hope not.”

How humane, I’m thinking.

“You see,” Lewis says, turning to face me, talking to me again, “I couldn’t let her do it. I couldn’t let her ruin us like that.”

I’m thinking that things are pretty much in the crapper for the Simpson-Witts anyhow. She seems to have read my mind.

“I tried,” she says. “But there’s just too much out there now. It would be like trying to put water back in a vase after it’s spilled. There’s nothing left to do now. Except this.”

I’m getting a little uneasy about what “this” might be.

“Um, maybe we could make some kind of arrangements. About the manuscript.”

She doesn’t even bother to laugh this time.

“No, Mr. Black. This is it. You’ll never give Alicia’s manuscript back. And Carl will, someday soon, realize that his prized Colt is gone. He might cover for me, but I’ve considered the odds, and the chances of that damn confession not seeing the light of day, compounded by the chances of Carl not reporting that gun missing and solving the big mystery of who shot Alicia, are not very good at all.

“I hope my children will forgive me. But now I’m very tired, Mr. Black.”

I ask her if she wants me to drive back.

“I don’t think so,” she says, as I slowly, quiet as a mouse, reach for the door handle. I’ve already released the seat belt. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and I can see that what lies directly ahead of us is space. The yard seems to slope downward a few feet in front of us and then disappear into nothingness. I am fully aware, for the first time, of what lies beyond and beneath us.

“Mr. Black,” Lewis Witt says, “did you ever see that movie, Thelma and Louise?”

I’ve already rolled the window back down. But when I push on the door handle, I learn to my great regret that Lewis has put the childproof lock on. I give up all pretense and subtlety. My pleas and promises bounce off her.

“Here we go,” Lewis says. She slips the car into drive.

As the car starts moving forward, slowly at first, I have only one option.

I once rode in a pace car at the NASCAR track in town. They were giving all the reporters free rides, probably because they liked to torture helpless creatures. There are no doors on those damn things. You have to climb in through the window and then climb back out again. I still have the hoary image of a fat woman sportswriter wedged halfway in, halfway out, her butt blotting out the sun, imbedded in my brain. When I’m trying to be good, I think of her.

So, for the second time in my life, I attempt to leave a car via the passenger-side window. It seems to take forever, and I can feel the car gain momentum. When I finally throw myself, head first, to freedom, I’m tumbling downhill. It doesn’t feel like good luck, but a tulip poplar stops me ten feet from the edge. I scream like a little girl when my already abused ribs collide with the tree’s thickness, but it saves me.

I hear the roar of an engine and then a second of silence as Lewis Witt leaves solid ground.

The sound, when the Lexus hits the water fifty feet below, is as cold and final as a death rattle.