I HEADED OUT ON THE freeway toward Duluth in the dead of the cold, wet night, wipers working methodically across the vast expanse of glass fronting Archie’s automobile. The rain spit out of the darkness and I drove twenty-mile stretches without seeing another pair of headlamps. Franklin Hobbs was cooing his way through the night on WCCO. Frank Sinatra sang “Time After Time” and I remembered the words from high school romances. Al Hibbler sang “Unchained Melody” and I let the huge car take over. I felt oddly peaceful, alone, free of surprises and things I could neither control nor understand. I still wasn’t having much success at getting a moral fix on what had been going on but I realized with a sense of ironic detachment that I was at least able to be calm while considering it. My nose didn’t hurt much anymore. I was tired but I wasn’t dead and that put me ahead of the game.
As the invisible night slipped past outside, I hummed to the music and thought about it all, calmly, rationally, analytically. There was, in the first place, the enormity of what the lads had done to Rita and Carver that night at the lodge. Frightened, frustrated—but also arrogant, full of the certainty that they could kill and get away with it. Why? What made them so sure, so confident? I was no psychologist; I made no pretense of knowing the answer. The fact was they’d done it and they had gotten away with it, almost … A quirk, a freak had brought them to grief, an old man who might just as well have taken his secret to the grave. And even if he’d only made his deathbed confession, it took the unlikely marriage of Kim to both Billy and Larry to crystalize the mordant joke.
In the second place there was the awesome retribution visited on the lads from thirty years’ distance. They had sat on their guilt so long, had let the insulation of time cut them off from the unpleasantness; it must almost have passed into misty legend, even for them. Remembered like wartime experiences, heroics and cowardice, the moral imperative of the act long since bled dry. It had happened and there was nothing to be done; there would be no summons from the icy grave.
But they had been unfortunate: Someone had not been quite so willing to let bygones be bygones, someone had carried the past inside, the seeds of retribution, someone whose morality demanded an accounting. And so had waited for them at the end.
At some sticking point, in one determined, unforgiving soul, the caldron had finally boiled over. You will not go free, an inner voice had said, authority echoing, You will pay for your sins. I shook my head and wiped my eyes; too Biblical. Still, the idea was about right.
But who had known it all? And why had it come so long after the fact?
The Maxvill theory had fit so beautifully: Back from the chasm of anonymity, life in shambles and nearing the end, he had struck back and finished them off. But he’d been dead for thirty years.
The Goode theory had made sense, too. He’d been a killer all his life and now, in a spasm of fear, he saw his comrades threatening to clear the fields of their consciences … A collective conscience or only one, it made no difference: The truth from whatever source was working its way back to the surface after all those years of safety … But then someone killed him, too.
The Hub Anthony theory made a kind of sense as well as seeming to be the only, one left: Everyone else, was dead, ergo the one remaining … etc. The judge, the man with the most to lose, the final irony of elegance and style driven to foulest murder; he had fit the killer-from-within-the-group scenario. And at that point you took whoever happened to be left and made the facts fit. But he was shot to death, too.
They were all dead and Agatha Christie would have loved it. Their lives had gone rotten early on and yet they had lived them out, trying to hide the truth with respectability. Martin Boyle … I remembered our discussion of evil, cast now in an entirely different light. A priest … A football hero, a soldier, a judge, a businessman …
Someone hadn’t forgotten. Someone hadn’t let them off the hook.
Billy. Why had he never really crossed my mind? Because he was an Indian, because I was a part of Minnesota, because an Indian was our invisible man? Because a motive never occurred to me … because he wasn’t one of us, those of us who seemed a part of the present? Because he had seemed to help, because he’d finally been the one who had revealed the most to us, most dramatically?
What did I know about him, after all?
For one thing, he still loved Kim. He held nothing against her, found her guilty of nothing. He lived with their daughter—the image of Kim—always before him. He hadn’t remarried. And he knew what they’d done to her mother, to her life … he knew about Larry, the fact that Larry was Kim’s brother. If he loved Kim still, he didn’t need more of a motive than that …
And he knew about death. He knew what had happened to his father; any Indian in Minnesota had had his brush with death. And he probably honored a code of behavior; he felt certain compulsions. He may have accepted the necessity for retribution. And who knew what he felt about the overall justification for killing some rich white men? Surely he knew the story of the club’s raid on the Indian whorehouse.
Once you made the assumption that he could kill, it all made sense. A motive of love and hate. And nobody had ever checked his alibi. From Jasper he could easily have made his forays into Minneapolis, made his kill and gotten out … the invisible man. He could even tell us the story of the club’s murders without fear. In the first place, it stood to reason that no killer would make such a revelation, drawing himself into matters when he might have stayed clear, and, in the second place, by telling us Running Buck’s story he was able to put into words the justification for his actions—proving once again, if only to himself, that he was an executioner, not a murderer …
Billy. The idea played in my mind, darting here, there, like a figure in a shooting gallery, the one you could never quite hit.
I wasn’t altogether sure I was safe. I might still be a candidate for the role of Last Victim. But I knew that I would rather have it be me than Kim, which is, I suppose, a commentary on what rediscovering love can do to your mind. It wouldn’t be Kim, not if I could help it.
Perhaps I was slow to see the truth of it, the only pattern that made sense. I’ve trekked back and forth over the same ground hundreds of times since that night, trying to discern an alarum, a flare in the night which might have warned me … but hindsight is irrelevant. I don’t know if it should have occurred to me earlier or not; in any case, it hadn’t, not until I was north of Duluth and it was a dark-gray five o’clock in the morning. That was when I finally realized who had been killing these old men … I almost smiled at it. Not quite, but almost. It had a very pure, cold kind of beauty to it. It chilled me. I felt as if icy water were closing all around me, numbing and tightening off all feeling, all sensibility, all ideas of right and wrong. I had to get to Kim before something awful happened.
I left Archie’s car in the shelter of some high, ragged brush and picked my way along the wet, sandy path toward the miniature castle she’d shown me. The rain had stopped and a stiff breeze strafed the beach, whipping the whitecaps on the steel-gray lake. I trudged on, head down, hands pushed into pockets, the gun feeling cold and alive, like a docile reptile. I was out of breath when I slid across the wet stone shingle and reached the castle. There was a fire going under a pot of coffee and two cups were placed neatly on a flat rock.
I stood beside the wall, sheltering from the wind, and saw the bronze Mark IV above on the level of the narrow roadway. I could see them down past the edge of the rock slabs, standing on the beach looking out at the vicious, swirling lake. She wore Levi’s, her army jacket, and her hair was loose, blowing in the wind. Her arms were crossed across her chest and she strode slowly along the sand, gulls swooping around her, water advancing toward her. He walked beside her, watching the sand.
She was still alive and I felt a long sigh escape me, my body relaxing. I watched her pace slowly along the rock shelf, spray exploding as she moved. Fog banks a mile out were moving inland.
She looked up finally and saw me, walked toward me, across the seventy yards of rock and beach. He stood alone, watched her moving away. I took her in as she came nearer; the flat gaze of her eyes, the purposeful walk, the slender boyish body I’d never known. When she was near, I stepped forward and held her; her arms went around me, her face beside mine, her grip strong and lingering.
“You’re all right,” I said. “I was so afraid I’d be too late, you’d be dead and that would be all there was …” I heard her breathing, felt the rise and fall of her in my arms, “Oh, God, I love you,” I said. “I love you and I don’t know what to do about it …” My emotions were being turned inside and out. I felt raw, exposed, cheated, fooled, finished. I was in over my head, had been from the beginning, and now it was too late. I knew too much not to know all of it.
I kissed her and she finally pulled her head away, looking away toward where he stood, straight, far away with gray water beyond.
“I knew you’d come. I asked Billy to come wait with me,” she said, watching my eyes. “I knew you’d find me if I came here and waited … but I didn’t want to be alone.” She smiled, looked away, rubbed her nose in the wind. “You’re like an extra side of myself—I wish I knew what that meant, for better or worse … I knew I’d never be able to hide from you … or hide anything from you.” She took a few steps past me, turned at the entrance to the tiny castle. “I’ve made us coffee, Paul.” I followed her inside. She stripped off the army jacket. She wore a heavy blue oiled wool sweater and knelt by the fire, poured me a cup of steaming black coffee. I wanted her near me forever. It was all unspeakably sad. “Well,” she said, “is it time to talk it through?”
“Yes.” I sat down on the rock ledge so I could look down at her small, perfect face, watched as she pursed her lips and sipped the coffee. She was perfect. There was color in her cheek, a glitter in her eyes, her dark hair shone. “You might as well tell me the whole truth this time. They’re all dead now … You and I are the only ones left, kiddo. Two survivors. And him.” I nodded toward the lake.
“Is the killing over?” she asked.
“Oh, I think so. Unless you or I get it in the denouement. What do you think? Is it over?”
“We’ll see, I suppose. It’s like everything else in life. Game’s never over till the last man’s out. Isn’t that what you baseball fans say? Till the last man is out?”
I nodded. “Take me through it … You’ve never told me all you know, Kim. And I realized a couple of hours ago that you know it all. Don’t you?”
When she had finished telling me the story, she stood up and stepped outside. There was a yellow haze in the sky over the lake and the breeze was warmer. I smelled the lake and the wet sand and the beach grass. She looked back at me, took a deep breath, and strolled back down toward the water’s edge. I stared after her, then sank back down beside the fire, filled my cup with the coffee’s dregs, and went outside. The sun was struggling to burn a hole through the fog. I saw my shadow on the castle wall and leaned there, watching her get smaller. My hand wasn’t shaking and I wasn’t breathing hard. I wondered if Billy was still there, waiting. It didn’t make any difference anymore.
She knew the whole story and laid it out for me with the kind of precision that was her custom. She had put it together herself. It was, like everyone else’s theory, perfect.
In 1931 the hunting and fishing club had been formed and the lodge near Grande Rouge had been built. That same year Rita married Ted Hook, bar owner and disabled veteran of the Great War, many years her senior. During the winter of 1931-1932 the club hired Rita Hook to run their lodge for them, do the cooking, keep it shipshape and attended year round. At the same time, she struck a bargain with the well-reared young blades from Minneapolis: She would serve as a ready and willing sexual partner for the entire group; it was a package deal for the enterprising Mrs. Hook, for which she was paid the handsome sum of one thousand dollars per month.
Late in 1932 Rita Hook gave birth to a son, Robert, and it was assumed that Ted Hook, not so frail as he appeared, was the father. In fact, Kim later learned, the father was a member of the group, though it was quite impossible to say which member. The group, as far as Rita’s services were concerned, consisted of Timothy Dierker, James Crocker, Father Martin Boyle, Jonathan Goode, Hubbard Anthony, and Carver Maxvill.
Eight years passed and life in Grande Rouge proceeded nicely. Rita was saving her money, laying countless plans, toying with the thoughts of her future as if they were moving-picture scenarios; a small-town girl who knew there was a great world and was doing what she could to reach it. But in 1940 she discovered she was again pregnant, a victim of either urgency or carelessness. She had no idea which one might be the father but knew that Ted could not be taken in again: Their sexual relationship, pitiful as it had been in the best of times, had ended not long after the birth of little Robert.
Always quick with a scheme, she concealed her own pregnancy, telling Ted that her sister in Chicago, who was not particularly robust, was pregnant by her sailor husband, who was off at sea as usual. Since she was alone and puny, she had written to ask Rita to visit her until the baby was born. Ted Hook didn’t really care one way or the other. Rita went. She lived with her sister, who wasn’t pregnant but was alone, and had her second child, a girl called Shirley. Rita brought the girl back to Grande Rouge, relating the sad events of her sister Patricia’s death in childbirth. It never occurred to anyone in Grande Rouge that something might be amiss. Chicago was awfully far away and, besides, who was there to care?
The members of the club accepted Rita’s request for an increase in her monthly check. After all, she had had two children by them and had been useful; she had retained her looks and her sexual performance remained quite unlike anything they were likely to find at home. But by 1944, with Robert twelve and Shirley four, Rita Hook had begun to feel that it was now or never. The years were gathering a weight of their own. If she wanted to escape, she would have to do it. The club members by then had grown prosperous and prominent. They could, she surmised, afford one final payoff and a good-bye kiss.
She arranged for them all to visit the lodge the night of December 16, 1944. Without precisely threatening them, she flexed her muscles a bit, made sure they understood that attendance was mandatory. With Running Buck to drive her and watch the goings-on, she went to the lodge that dreadful night. She trusted Running Buck: He was mute when it came to blabbing white people’s affairs. She trusted him; she had told him most of the truth of her relationship with the club members, secure in the knowledge that he would never tell. She had needed to tell someone …
Her suggestion of a final payoff had not gone over well with her employers. She had moved on to overt blackmail threats. General Goode snapped, chased her out into the snow with a gun in his hand. Carver Maxvill had tried to intervene, to protect her. General Goode shot and killed them both and the entire group joined in burying the bodies in the ice cave. Running Buck never told what he had seen. The two orphans, Robert and Shirley, were clearly too much for Ted Hook. He arranged, in the aftermath of his wife’s “disappearance” (she was never found—neither was Maxvill; the investigation at the lodge was cursory, without evidence of foul play), for the children to go to an orphanage, the Sacred Heart, in Duluth. They moved on to new homes. Robert becomes Larry Blankenship in Bemidji and Shirley becomes Kim Roderick in Duluth. With the power of their positions and Martin Boyle’s Catholic connections, the club keeps track of their two children. A sense of duty which in the end was the proof that sealed their unhappy fates. The year was 1945.
Larry Blankenship never returned to Grande Rouge. He had no interest in learning of his father’s life or in what had happened to little Shirley. He rejected his past, blacked it out; at twelve he had been wounded too deeply by his “father’s” refusal to keep him. He washed his hands of the whole thing. He became Larry Blankenship.
But Kim, or Shirley, had retained a relationship with Ted Hook. By 1956, when she was sixteen, she was visiting him regularly in the summer, helping out in the roadhouse/motel Ted had built with the $150,000 Rita had saved from her monthly checks. Again, in another time and place, that $150,000 might have led to involved, finally incriminating investigations … but not in Grande Rouge. Ted had blinked hard and gotten his hands on the money. He had lived in Grande Rouge a long time. He knew the right people. He got the money.
While working in the restaurant, Kim at sixteen met Running Buck’s putative nephew, Billy Whitefoot, a handsome Indian boy with nice manners and a gentle way about him. Nature, as it will, took its course. During the summer of 1957 they became lovers. In 1958, having graduated from high school in Duluth, Kim went to Minneapolis and applied for a job at the Norway Creek Club, the city’s most impressive old-line country club. Why Norway Creek? Because she had come briefly to know the members of the hunting and fishing club during the summers she’d worked at Ted’s. Though she couldn’t have known it then, they had sent money for her expenses to the Rodericks in Duluth, explaining their generosity in terms of concern for the unfortunate child of a devoted servant who had run off leaving her children and ailing husband to fend for themselves. Kim did, of course, know who the men were when she met them in Grande Rouge at Ted’s. They spoke highly of “poor” Rita, expressed regret about her disappearance, and seemed nice … that was her word. Nice. She knew them only fleetingly but, yes, they were nice well-to-do men.
Which was what brought her to Norway Creek in 1958. They were the only people she knew in Minneapolis but they were enough. In eighteen years, the first eighteen years of her life, she’d gotten to Minneapolis. Her mother had never made it. Each generation, she learned, betters itself. She was trying. But the city frightened her.
To combat the fear of being alone in the city, she urged Billy Whitefoot to come to Norway Creek as well. Her friends at Norway Creek, the nice gentlemen from the lodge, made sure that Billy was hired as a groundkeeper and general maintenance man. The nice gentlemen never realized that Billy had been close to Running Buck and if they had, it would have made no difference. They had no way of knowing that Running Buck had been watching the night they committed two murders.
It was 1959. Kim Roderick married the Indian boy, who was one year her senior. She was pregnant. Their daughter was born in I960 and by that time she realized that the marriage had been a terrible mistake. She had seen some of what life could provide and Billy, so far as she could tell, wasn’t part of it. Realizing her disinterest, he began drinking and finally left Norway Creek more or less in disgrace. He took his child with him and fled back to the north, where he was safe, where he could think and recover from Kim Roderick, who was moving on, perfecting her tennis game, catching the eye of a well-off gentleman who had been a peripheral member of the hunting and fishing club—sufficiently peripheral that he knew nothing of the arrangement the other members had with Rita Hook, that Kim was the club’s daughter … His name was Ole Kronstrom. He was a partner of Tim Dierker, who was a core club member, and his wife, Helga, didn’t understand him. He befriended Kim; he enjoyed her company; he didn’t really care what others thought of him or of his behavior—and he liked the girl. He asked nothing of her. He cared for her. He began to believe he loved her. She began to believe she loved him. Ole Kronstrom was a replacement for her father and her husband, and he was the first substantial, solid human being she had ever known. As a friend.
Her divorce from Billy Whitefoot was final in 1961. She was twenty-one and she was being looked after by Ole Kronstrom. She played tennis, she led a life of relative leisure; he was giving her time to find herself, an old-fashioned notion but not particularly unwise. It made them both happy. Ole’s pals at Norway Creek, without letting him hear the slightest whisper, found it mildly amusing—that Ole had fallen for their daughter. Of course, they completely misjudged the relationship, assuming it reflected their own inclinations.
Kim Roderick was happy. And she remained happy when she met a new man who had gone to work for Tim Dierker, a promising salesman of thirty, Larry Blankenship. Tim had given him the job with the approval of his fellow club members: After all, Larry was their son. They had even made it known to Larry, obliquely, of course, that there was a position at Dierker’s firm. They were still managing lives, still controlling, chuckling over their power and the means they possessed to assuage their collective guilt. They were taking care of Rita’s children. They were pretty good damn fellows, after all. They’d just been pushed a wee bit too far that night so long ago …
But they were unhappy, indeed, when it became obvious that Kim Roderick’s relationship with Ole Kronstrom was not what it seemed. It did not preclude her becoming involved with Larry Blankenship; involved quickly became too mild a term. Larry and Kim fell in love. The club members didn’t like it. Tim Dierker was horrified. Brother and sister, it was beyond accepting on any level, but when he put it to his fellows, they clucked, admitted it was an unhappy turn, but not quite so ghastly as it might appear. After all, while they had the same mother there was no proof at all they had the same father. And having murdered two people, including their mother, they were hardly well advised to develop excessive squeamishness over what was nothing more than the possibility of incest. Total incest, that was.
Dierker was an old-line moralist. The killings had eaten away at his heart, soul, and entrails for years; he had subscribed to the gestures they’d made toward the children in the intervening years with devout enthusiasm. Relief. Now they were failing to stop another moral horror. And try as he might, Tim failed to stop the marriage; he hadn’t the courage to deal with the truth in the face of his friends’ determination that he remain quiet. Quite logically they believed that to open up the brother/sister business again might run them a terrible risk. The chances of a disaster were too great. Dierker buckled. Brother and sister were married. It was 1964.
In 1966 Kim Blankenship gave birth to a child with congenital brain damage. Ole Kronstrom, always her reliable, trusted friend, saw her through it. Larry, weak and willing and eager to please and an inveterate loser, very nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. He considered the child a result of his own inadequacy. It was the sort of judgment which defined his nature. Kim was twenty-six.
Her marriage to Larry ground along, now together, now apart, half functioning but never successful. His mental condition veered this way and that. He left Dierker’s firm, tried to find himself in a series of dead-end jobs, grew smaller and smaller in his own eyes. And in his wife’s, as well. She grew increasingly dependent on Ole. She went to the University of Minnesota, she developed her natural intelligence, gloried in the newly glimpsed complexities of life and the mind. She took herself too seriously at first; she was not unlike anyone else who discovers in himself the existence of a brain. It is a wonderful discovery. And Ole let her flourish.
She lived apart from Larry most of the time, the exceptions being his desperate attempts at reconciliation. She appeared for these sorrowful occasions but she could not truly lend herself to them. They failed. Larry diminished further still.
It was 1972 and Kim Blankenship was thirty-two years old. Larry Blankenship was forty. She was inevitably moving toward a final dissolution of their marriage. She was living on Ole Kronstrom’s money; Larry was scraping by as best he could. The marriage was dead. Then, far away in Grande Rouge, Running Buck took to his deathbed and told his secrets to young Billy, who was now thirty-three, with a doctorate and a noteworthy career in sociology and Indian affairs and personal friendships with Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Marlon Brando. The old man spilled the whole thing, everything Rita had ever told him—the sexual relationship with the club members, the two children by them, everything. And the story of the night of December 16, 1944.
Billy Whitefoot was stunned. He believed what the old man told him. He faced the fact that he had once loved Kim, one of Rita’s children, and had in his own mind treated her badly by leaving her, taking their daughter with him. He felt a sense of responsibility to her … even love, the remembered sort. And he also knew that she had married Larry Blankenship … Running Buck had learned even that at the lodge, again the invisible man attending to his chores while the members argued it out by the fireplace. Running Buck had heard them say that Larry was Kim’s brother and that, too, he’d told Billy as he lay dying.
For six months Billy had fought it out in his own mind. Should he tell Kim the truth? Or, as Running Buck had done, should he stay clear of white man’s business? In the end, he remembered Kim. And he went to Minneapolis to see her. He was outraged at what the club members had done. He had never felt such violence in himself; it was new, it was awesome. He knew he could kill. He knew these men deserved to die …
So, not quite sure where events were leading him, Billy took his story to Kim and spent an afternoon telling it, wrapping it around them, drawing them closer than they’d been since they’d been kids in love. It had shocked her, of course, but it hadn’t been a surprise, not a surprise because somewhere in the back of her mind she’d feared the faceless thing that haunts childhood dreams. She had taken it well, heard him out, shrugged in the face of the bogeyman come true, coming to stand in the doorway of her life with his shadow erasing the color and falling across her hopes. There hadn’t been much she could say; it was all in the past, she told him, and her marriage to Larry was finished and she couldn’t bring her mother back from the grave, from the, ice cave. Billy hadn’t known what to think. Kim had always been a mystery to him, deep, impossible to fathom. He had felt uncomfortable with her quiet, downplayed reaction. He knew she was thinking. But he didn’t know what. In the end, he fell back on the knowledge that he’d done what he could. The rest of it was up to her. That night he prowled the city, the thought of what the men had done festering in his psyche. Could they possibly get away with it? Could they escape punishment forever? He grabbed a cab to Lake Harriet and stood before General Goode’s home, staring, hating him with an Indian’s atavistic resentment of the white man. He walked all the way around the lake that night, struggling with the givens of his life and this situation. He knew he could make it a good deal more complex by inserting himself; he could make it simpler, too. Finally he heaved a defeated sigh, took a last look at the general’s house, and made it simpler. He went back north to Jasper, to his daughter, to the rhythms of life he’d worked so hard to attain.
Kim faced the truth of Billy’s story without the slightest doubt. It made sense, there was nothing of a dying man’s ravings in them. She tried to measure her response but it was impossible. She felt no particular emotion once the shock had died. She didn’t hate the men at first; disgust, yes, but not an active hatred. Her marriage to Larry left her weak when she thought about it and as time went by she thought about it more and more. How could they have let it happen? And she thought about the child who had resulted from their marriage. She couldn’t turn to Ole. She had no one. And when she thought about the child, she cried. It was the first thing she cried about in a long time. Ole was solicitous but he didn’t understand.
It was 1973 and Larry Blankenship, groping around in his sorry failure’s vacuum, never understanding the forces at work in his life, approached Kim about a reconciliation. He had a good job, a new car, a smattering of hope. Kim couldn’t bring herself to turn him off with the truth; humanely, trying to deal gently with the fragility of his world, she explained that there was no future for them together, only separately. She tried to make him see that he could push on with his life while she went ahead with her own. They would always be friends. It was a hackneyed bit of business, she was aware of that, but it was all she could offer. The truth would destroy him; murder and incest she could handle because her emotions were so pallid by then. They would kill Larry.
Losing her had very nearly done him in as it was. But a nervous breakdown wasn’t the worst that could happen. Nervous breakdowns, even severe ones, you survived. She saw him through it as best she could but she believed it was important to keep herself at a distance, to keep him from leaning on her. It was difficult but she managed it. Ole had helped her through it. His instincts were good. She trusted him. He loved her.
Larry slowly came out of the pit but it was a bad year, in or out of the pit, if you were trying to catch on with an advertising agency. Even if Tim Dierker had pulled some strings to get you the job. It was 1974 and admen were tripping over one another in the unemployment lines. A new man, Larry was the first to go. Alone, he waited for the telephone to ring. He tried to tell Kim his problems but she was tired of his problems. Finally, living in the same building, he took his problems to Tim Dierker. Several times they talked, each adrift in his own hopelessness. Larry had lost his wife and his career wasn’t worthy of the name; he was forty-two years old, had just gone through a nervous breakdown, and had a new Thunderbird he couldn’t pay for. Tim Dierker had just found out he was going to die; he had an inoperable brain tumor and he hadn’t been able to tell Harriet. He told Larry down in Larry’s empty, skeletal apartment and they got drunk together. Like Running Buck, Tim Dierker hadn’t been able to take his guilt to his grave unspoken. In a spasm of premortem confession, fired with liquor, Tim Dierker told him the tale of murder and incest.
Bludgeoned by shock, Larry Blankenship went to Kim and told her the story, begging her to refute it. She couldn’t. That was the end for Larry. For several days he composed himself, sitting alone in the apartment. Then he completed his plan, wrote a note to Bill Oliver, and shot himself in the lobby of the apartment building. It was, he felt sure, the only sane response to the banshee cry of his life.
Which was where I came in from my tennis match.
“Larry’s suicide,” I had said. “Was that when you decided to kill them all?”
She nodded soberly, her eyes cast up toward me, intelligent and calm eyes, pragmatic eyes that saw life as it was.
“Yes,” she’d said. “There was never any real question in my mind after that. If he’d never found out, if he hadn’t ended the way he did … then I don’t suppose I’d ever have done anything about it. But with Larry’s death their outrages became part of the present, part of my life—my observable life. It was too much for me to ignore … So I decided to kill them all since they were equally guilty so far as I could tell. I didn’t want to get so enmeshed in a huge plan. I just wanted them dead in full knowledge of why they were dying …”
She called Tim Dierker and asked to see him. Harriet was out and Tim was trying to outlive his grief at Larry’s suicide. His guilt had almost killed him already. It was stifling in the apartment when she arrived; Tim had been going through his scrapbook. She suggested they go to the roof and he went willingly, babbling about how cool it would be in the rain. Once they were alone in the wind and rain she told him that she knew the story of her mother, her brother. He cowered toward the wall. She pushed him hard at the shoulders, he dropped the scrapbook, she shoved him again, he tried to scramble away. She struck him across the shoulders, wrestled his almost dead weight over the low cement wall. She watched him struggle to his feet on the four-foot graveled extension of the roof. As he came back toward her, she lunged at him. He recoiled and fell backward over the edge. She picked up the scrapbook and left.
She went through the scrapbook carefully, saving the photographs of Rita and Carver. She knew Rita was her mother and, because he had tried to save Rita’s life, Carver Maxvill presented himself in her mind as her father. Somehow he might have known that he was the father … That would have accounted for his determination not to kill Rita. It had cost him his life. She was now redressing that particular imbalance.
She called Father Boyle, introduced herself, and told him that she wanted to talk to him about the woman who had raised her, Rita Hook. She said she was anxious to see whatever pictures he might have kept of their housekeeper. Boyle had received her amiably. He was alone for the weekend, with Father Patulski away. They had gone through the dusty photograph albums noting photographs of her mother and Carver Maxvill. She had already stolen the Carver Maxvill file from the newspaper’s morgue: She simply wanted to learn what she could about these people, her mother and possibly her father.
Father Boyle invited her to sit a spell on his patio. They had chatted, the television nattering away nearby, and she had turned the conversation cold, had watched the old man go moist and gray as she told him exactly how he’d carried the packing case up the muddy, snowy hill on the night of December 16, 1944, how he’d slipped and fallen. She told him what she knew, suggested that he would in all probability dwell for eternity in a fiery Catholic Hell, and shot him. Nobody seemed to hear the shot. Nobody saw her leave.
She bided her time then, involved with my amorous nature, waiting for the next opportunity to present itself. It came the night of her party when I took her to see the rats and James Crocker. She realized that he was staying round the clock. That night I took her home and Crocker’s goons smashed my face in. The next day, while I was theorizing with Archie and Julia, she observed the construction site. I called her that evening and told her about my beating and she commiserated. The following day, my nose preceding me by a quarter of an hour, I went to her apartment in a bluish funk, wanting to egg her into a romantic commitment. I knew I was going to Chicago to root around in her past some more and I wanted a clearer indication of where we stood with each other I didn’t get it. Her mind was preoccupied: She had decided to kill James Crocker that evening.
I was on my way back from Chicago when she set out for the site. Crocker wasn’t surprised to see her: Yes, he’d been quite sure it was she who had been killing his old pals. Yes, he was alone. He was absolutely dead certain that he could talk her out of it. When she left the trailer, he was absolutely dead. And only two remained. But they were more difficult.
Difficulty, however, was hardly an obstacle. The need to kill them all never lessened and she was able to compartmentalize her feelings for me and the obsessive drive for vengeance. While she eschewed involved planning, she did not want to be apprehended. Not before she had finished her task, in any case. The need to kill the five men had obliterated any of her other hopes; once it was over, she would cope. Preferring to remain free, she did not ultimately care if she lost her freedom. The men were more important …
When Archie and I came to her with our revelations regarding her past and the apparent arrival on the scene of her “father”—Carver Maxvill—with the intention of righting the wrongs committed against his daughter, then she had ventured the artifice. She had written the note to herself purporting to be from the deranged Maxvill, urging her to kill herself, and had weighted it down on the table with the fingerprintless gun she had already used to kill Father Boyle and James Crocker. It fit perfectly with our theory and provided her with the precise out she needed: As long as we and Mark Bernstein believed that Carver Maxvill had returned as an avenging angel she was utterly safe. We could look for him forever. She knew he’d been dead for thirty years. So did General Goode and Hubbard Anthony … but they couldn’t tell.
She then chose to disappear, leaving us to fear for her safety, believing that she was ticketed for a bullet because, as Billy finally got around to telling us that night at the lodge, she knew what they had done. In the meantime, the night after her disappearance, she fired once into the windshield of my car, hoping to frighten me off … Coming back from the lodge, Archie and I had cobbled together our Goode theory. He was the logical bet and we assumed he’d get loose from his police protection and go hunting for Kim.
We were half right, about our norm. He got loose from his protection. Kim, however, had made the same assumption. Knowing he was both resourceful and a creature of habit, she went to meet him in the fog on the jogging path. Only one remained and time was growing short. The fog which blanketed the Cities was her ally and she used it.
Again she was forced to rely on the predictability of her quarry. She waited on a side road, concealed by the gray wetness, watching his house. Trusting him to escape from the one place he was sure she could find him, she hadn’t long to wait. His car swirled out of the fog and she followed him through the rain, knowing almost immediately where he was going. Ole’s boat. It was a panic reaction on Hub’s part but he must have thought she’d never strike so close to her own preserve. Like the rest of them, he misjudged her. It was no great problem to board the boat undetected in the storm. He had seemed almost relieved when the door swung open and he saw her.
They talked for a bit. He was almost noble in his decay and guilt and sorrow. He did not ask to be spared. He was the only one she regretted having to kill. When she pulled the trigger, she, not Hub, flinched, sending the slug slightly astray. She did not stop to see if he was dead. She simply left the boat, threw the gun onto the passenger’s seat of the bronze Mark IV, and drove north, where she somehow was sure I’d find her. She called Billy at a filling station, asked him to meet her. She felt obligated to tell him what she had done.
I squinted up at the mustard-colored sky, shielding my eyes. Kim was far along the shelf, sitting on the edge above the lake. She had pulled her knees up and was hugging them to her chest. The sun was growing warm, drying the sand in patches. I went back inside the castle and felt the pockets of her army jacket. I found the pistol she’d used to kill Jon Goode and Hub Anthony. I took the other gun from my jacket pocket, the one she’d used on Boyle and Crocker. I went back into the sunshine holding the guns. She hadn’t moved. Billy was gone. He’d left her to me.
I should have been thinking long thoughts as I walked across the expanse of layered stone. I couldn’t. I felt the breeze and the sunshine filtering through and the shelf beneath my feet. I loved her but that was at least a world away.
She didn’t look up when I stood beside her.
“Two-gun Cavanaugh,” she said distinctly.
“What are you going to do now?”
“That depends on you, doesn’t it?”
She might have been a character on the screen. I had somehow stumbled into her screenplay. It was up to me to handle the props.
“You don’t seem quite real anymore,” I said. “I don’t know how to talk to you … what to say. I had an uncle once who was dying and when I knew it, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him.”
She brushed a hand across her eyes. “Do you still love me?” Her mouth turned up at the corners. She might have been laughing at me. She had gone so far beyond me. She seemed full, rich, in control. I felt hollow. The longer I looked at her, the more I felt as if I were floating away, a man in a balloon going away.
I tried to speak but there was nothing. I nodded, yes, yes …
She stood beside me, squeezed my arm. She walked away. I knelt by the edge of the shelf and looked into the blank face of the lake. I dropped the two pistols into thirty feet of water. It might as well have been to the center of the earth.
When I finally turned back, she was out of sight. I walked back up to the castle. Her car was gone. She had taken the coffee things, kicked the coals into the dirt. I got back into Archie’s car and moved slowly along the narrow path until I reached the highway. I took my time getting back to Minneapolis. It was over. The end.