“For a killer,” Richard said.
Phil looked at him hard.
Richard said nothing.
Phil kept staring at him. “You don’t live with a kid for four years without getting to know him.”
Phil, good old Phil, was heading toward something. Richard watched him warily.
The hippy hair, the I’m-your-best-friend note he took with Dylan, what kind of teacher was that? “What are you getting at?” he asked.
“Long drive isn’t it? Four hours or something?”
“Something like that.”
“Never miss a visit, do you?”
“You have a problem with that?” This guy was getting on his nerves in a big way. “I’ve got a good barber I can recommend,” Richard said.
Phil ignored the cheap shot. Rose above it, Richard thought acidly.
“Eight hours round-trip twice a week. Lot of time and energy. Most kids your age wouldn’t do that.” Phil’s pupils widened slightly as if he wanted to look past Richard’s eye sockets and into his mind. “Why do you?”
“Because he’s my brother,” he snapped. “What are you getting at?”
“Nothing, man, just talking is all.” He stood up. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ll look after your brother.”
He left.
Goddamn stupid fuck, who did he think he was talking to? “Fucking cunt,” Richard whispered. “Guard!”
An old man in a gray uniform stuck his head in the door. “We’re counselors now, didn’t you know that boy?” The old guy grinned, but Richard wasn’t in the mood.
“I have to see the warden.”
“Warden’s gone home. Having his supper about now, I expect.”
“I don’t care if he’s having his goddamn hair done, I need to see him. Now.”
The guard looked uncertain, deciding whether Richard’s rage or tearing the warden away from his dinner would go hardest on him.
“The warden will want to hear what I have to tell him,” Richard said. “Trust me on that. And trust me, if you’re the one makes him hear it later rather than sooner, you’re going to be out of a job.”
The guard blinked then. “Okay, kid. You win. Come with me.”
Richard left without saying good-bye to his brother.
LOUISIANA, 2007
James Ruppert. Kills eleven family members at Easter dinner. 1975. This guy was nuts. I guess we’re all nuts though, so I’ll do him. I don’t see myself killing family the way Ruppert did and, before you ask, no, I didn’t crave this sort of action back when I was at home. But you’ve got to admit his family was shitty to him. And here he is, forty-one and still living at Mommy’s house. That had to say “failure” in a big way, proving what his dad was always saying he was. Big brother’s over to dinner with his eight kids-Eight! You’d think the brother would have shot his own self-and his wife who used to be James’s girlfriend, and while she’s cooking up the Easter ham, he knows Mom’s thinking about throwing him out on his ear; and he hasn’t got a job, so he’s broke. Then you factor in that he stands to get a lot of dough from insurance. Shooting the family starts to look pretty good. Sane even. Until you get to the kids. Maybe he figures they aren’t quite people; with eight of them, they wouldn’t seem like an endangered species exactly, just a housecleaning issue. What I don’t get is why go to all that trouble then wait for the cops? Did he think he would get off on a thing like that? If he did, then he really was nuts. Hey, maybe he should have gotten off on the insanity plea. Catch 22. We’re all nuts, but if we tell you that, then we’re not. I feel sorry for James; he was fucked from the start.
17
Marshall was scared. Polly could see it behind the sparkle in his eyes, behind the sparkle of the two-and-a-half-carat diamond ring on the table between them. Whether he was scared she would say yes or refuse, she didn’t know.
Despite the cynicism she cultivated in her dealings with the opposite sex, Polly was a romantic. Ivanhoe was a favorite of hers, Sense and Sensibility, Sleepless in Seattle. As a girl, she’d read Costain’s The Black Rose so many times the cover began to look like third base at the Little League park. She had taught True Love, as seen by poets, playwrights, and novelists most of her adult life. As she would point out to her students, not only did true love not necessarily run smooth, it was often fatal.
They were in the courtyard of the Court of Two Sisters in the Quarter. A canopy of ancient oaks sequestered the garden, each tree strung with a thousand tiny lights, and each light refracting in the facets of the diamond engagement ring. It surprised her that she wasn’t surprised. It also surprised her that she wanted to pick it up, slip it on her finger, and scamper down the aisle in a cloud of white taffeta. Perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her.
Staring at the black velvet box with its glittering promise so lusciously displayed, she heard herself saying, “We’ve only been together for a month.”
“But what a month,” Marshall replied and, with the long-fingered hand she loved to hold and watch when he drew pictures for Emma and Gracie, nudged the box a few inches closer.
She wondered if she eyed it as the mouse eyes the bit of cheese in the trap, not knowing it will soon make literal the notion that it was dying for a nibble.
“Cliché or not, I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” Marshall said softly.
Polly felt that way as well. They had re-created a timeline she had skipped over: They played as children with her daughters, they giggled on the phone for hours like teenagers, they sat up late over wine arguing politics and saving the world like college sweethearts, they went to openings and museums like upwardly mobile thirty-somethings, they sat on his balcony in rocking chairs the way old folks were said to do. A lifetime together.
“The girls… ” Polly said lamely.
“I aced the interview,” he reminded her with his wonderful smile, slightly crooked, as if a part of him mocked the hope of his own happiness.
Polly worked hard at treading the thin line between being completely open and honest with her daughters and burdening them with adult concerns. She had kept her so-called love life-the sporadic dates she’d enjoyed over the years-separate from her home life and her children. That hadn’t been true with Marshall. Knowing Gracie and Emma noticed the interplay between them, she told them they might be getting serious.