28

THE GIRL was waiting just outside the door, her back against the wall, her face in her hands. As I came out, she dropped her hands and stared at me uncertainly, through wet eyes.

“Are you going to help him? Like you said?”

“I’m going to try.”

She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I thought you came here to hurt him.”

“It’s my fault. I gave you that impression.”

She put a hand back to her mouth and chewed nervously on a knuckle. “I don’t know how Paul’s going to pay for this—now that that man is dead.”

“Have you talked to your father?”

She laughed forlornly.

“Talk to him,” I said. “This is different. Maybe he’ll listen.”

But I could tell from her look that she had no confidence that she could sway her father.

“If that man hadn’t killed himself,” Nancy Grandin said, “we’d be all right. I just don’t understand him. I don’t understand why he did it.” She looked over her shoulder at the door to her brother’s room. “I don’t understand why he did any of this. It’s so twisted, really. To get Paul started on this way of living. Then try to rescue him when it’s too late.”

“Your brother told you it was Mason who had seduced him?”

“He never talks about it.”

“Then maybe Greenleaf didn’t do it, Nancy. Maybe he just wanted to make amends for other things in his life.”

“But my father found those letters.”

“From what your mother said, they didn’t prove anything.”

She shook her head. “Someone did this to him. Someone he trusted.”

I didn’t say it to the girl, but whether it was Cavanaugh or Greenleaf or some stranger in the dark, the kid had mostly done it to himself.

******

I drove back to town through the rainy cornfields. A tattered mist hung smokily in the distance, trailing from the branches of trees and crawling above the fields. Occasionally it drifted wraithlike across the road. At night, in the same hot drenching rain, the fog had probably cost Ira Sullivan his life.

He’d come up to Columbus looking for what I’d been looking for: an explanation of what had happened to Mason in Stacie’s bar on the night that he died. But he’d known something that I hadn’t known—he’d known that Paul Grandin wasn’t at the bar with Mason. He’d known it because he’d already met one of the men who had actually been at Stacie’s that night. Marlene Bateman had seen them together in the parking lot. He’d only gone to Paul Grandin, Jr., to find out why Mason had met with the other men. It was something I intended to find out, too.

Around one-thirty I got back to town. I took 71 all the way in, getting off at Dana and cutting over to Rose Hill—to Del Cavanaugh’s stone fortress. I pulled up beyond the carriage circle, parked, and walked back to the front door pavilion. The garden to the side of the house, where Cavanaugh and I had sat and talked on Monday morning, was soaked with rain. I could hear it falling in the oak trees, see it dripping from the cast-iron patio furniture. In the rain the old stone house had a look of misery and abandonment.

I rang the bell and waited. After a time the mother answered. She scowled when she saw me.

“He’s sleeping. He can’t be disturbed.”

“Mother?” I heard him call out.

The woman’s face became vibrant with loathing. “I want you to go. I don’t want you bothering him. My God, how much time does he have left?”

“Mother?” Cavanaugh said again.

I saw him appear in the dark wainscoted hall behind her. He was using a walker. He came into the gray light, dragging himself forward with an effort that seemed to me to be exactly commensurate to his mother’s fierce determination to keep me out. It was what his life appeared to have come down to—a daily battle with his mother. For all I knew, that was what his life had always been like.

“Mr. Stoner,” he said, breathing hard with the exertion, “do come in.”

“I don’t want him here,” the mother said, addressing Cavanaugh. “Haven’t you seen enough trouble?”

“Mr. Stoner is not here to start trouble, Mother. He’s here to settle a kind of bet, a little wager I made with him about why our mutual friend did away with himself.”

“Del, you are not responsible,” the mother said icily.

The man raised his arm as if he were going to strike her. “Get out of the light!” he shouted. “Get out of my way!”

She shrank back into the hall, glaring at him. “There will come a time, my boy, when you will need things from me. Keep that in mind.” She turned away and walked stiffly up the hall, directly up a wainscoted staircase—out of sight.

The man stared after her furiously. “She thinks I’m going to need her at the end,” he said, half to himself. “She is quite mistaken. I have remedies of my own for that eventuality. She’ll see.”

Just from the sound of his voice, it seemed to me that he’d deteriorated in the few short days since we’d first spoken. He turned his skeletal face back to me, smiling gruesomely. “Do come in,” he said, triumph burning like candles in his sunken eyes.

I followed him as he pulled himself down a hall, through an opening into a large living room with a stone mantel running half the length of the wall. The French windows on the other wall filled the huge space with diffuse, stormy light.

“This used to be a ballroom in my father’s day,” the man said with a touch of pride. “Many illustrious people played and danced in this room.”

He pulled himself over to a tall leather chair, studded with brass, and sank down into it with a sigh. The soft, flattering light coming through the far windows fleshed out the decay of his face. For just an instant I caught sight of him as he’d once been—young and arrogant and cruelly handsome.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to another high-backed chair across from him.

I sat down, smelling the old soaped leather and the dust.

“So,” he said, laying his hands one atop the other on his knee. “Was I right?”

“I suppose you were. But you didn’t tell me the whole story, Del.”

“What fun would that have been for a detective?” he said, grinning.

“Mason came back here again, didn’t he?”

“Yes, I concede he did.”

He wanted me to tease it out of him—just for the fun of watching me flail at the truth.

“He told you about another friend of yours, Paul Grandin, Jr.”

“Poor Paul,” the man said, without a drop of pity in his voice. “I understand he’s experiencing some health problems. I warned him this could happen. I tried to instruct him in taking proper precautions. But you know young people won’t listen.”

I felt a wave of disgust well up in me like nausea. “You seduced him, didn’t you, Del? Back when Mason was living with you?”

The man didn’t say anything.

“That was why Mason left you, wasn’t it? That’s why Mason felt responsible for the boy—and took the solicitation rap for him.”

“Mason’s feeling of responsibility had nothing to do with me,” the man said flatly. “He had his own cross to bear.”

“You mean Ralph Cable.”

“My, my. So many names from the past. Isn’t it odd how infectious the past is? Yours, mine, Mrs. Dorn’s. It all somehow becomes cross-pollinated and interwoven, so that we willy-nilly inherit parts of each other’s history—and live them out as if they were our own story.” The man stared at me with mild contempt. “Do you know what I would do, if I had it in my power? I would have the whole world wired to my heart. And when that heart stopped beating—why, the world itself would wink out.”

“You’re a piece of work, Del.”

“Thank you,” he said, grinning again.

“What did Mason tell you he was going to do, after he’d dropped Paul at that rest home?”

“Ira asked me that very same question, no more than a day ago. Do you know Ira Sullivan, Mason’s lawyer?”

“I know he’s dead.”

The man flinched with his whole body, as if he’d been jolted with electricity. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

“He was killed on the interstate last night in a car wreck, coming back from Columbus—where you’d sent him, Del.”

Cavanaugh’s face trembled with an emotion so strong that he had to bite his own lip to keep from breaking down. I watched him battle his grief with a mixed feeling of pity and contempt. He’d literally willed himself to stop feeling anything for anyone but himself. But I’d taken him by surprise. With an effort that was almost as impressive as his march past Mom to the front door, he managed to keep from crying out.

“I did not know that,” he said, fighting the tremor in his voice. “I confess I am sorry to hear it. Ira was a . . . friend.”

“He died helping me try to solve this puzzle, Del.”

“Then you must feel quite terribly responsible.”

“I’ve had better days.”

He nodded, as if the high jinks were finally over, as if the news about Sullivan had momentarily blasted him back into the human race.

“Mason came here on Monday evening. He told me what he’d done with Paul. He told me he was going to meet with some people that night and try to settle things for Paul—and himself.”

“What did he mean by that?”

Cavanaugh took a deep breath. “I assumed he was going to talk with the district attorney. Ira had the same impression. Ira had talked to a friend who knew Mason’s problem, someone in the district attorney’s office, and there had been . . . various allegations had been made.”

“What allegations?”

“I honestly don’t know. I just know that he was going to try to resolve the problems that night. So that he and Paul could live out Paul’s final days in peace.”

“He said that?”

“In so many words.”

But I didn’t believe him anymore—not when it came to Mason Greenleaf’s various loves. Cavanaugh’s hatred for Cindy Dorn was so intense that he would have said anything to obliterate her memory of Mason.

When I told him I didn’t believe him, the man stared at me contemptuously, as if I’d ceased to be a worthy adversary. He called out, “Mother! Show Mr. Stoner to the door,” as if he was calling a new opponent into the ring.