Sanders tried to look as earnest as possible, like he still believed he could count on my vote in the next election.
“How did it happen, Bert? I need to hear it from you.”
He stammered. “It— it was an accident. Really. He stumbled and—”
I closed in on him, grabbed his collar and propelled him closer to where Scott had gone off the building. He stumbled, but caught himself about ten feet shy of the edge.
“Cal,” he said. “Please.”
“If you’re honest with me, if you admit what you did, I won’t throw you over,” I said.
“He just — he started shouting. He wasn’t himself, you know. It was the drugs. But he was shouting our names. Out loud. If he’d kept it up, he was going to draw somebody up there. The police, a security company.”
I gave him another push and he tripped over his own feet, landing a little over a yard from the edge. I looked down at him, pulled back my jacket, and took out my Glock. I’d brought it along for tonight.
“Jesus, Cal, for the love of God.”
“What happened?”
“I–I tried to shut him up. I grabbed him, put my hand over his mouth. We struggled. We were fighting with each other. We were, we were right about here. I tried to get my hand over his mouth again and he— he bit me! He bit my hand. I drew my hand back and — I swear, it was just instinctive. It was a kind of defensive gesture — but I shoved him away.”
“You shoved him.”
“I swear to God, I never... I never meant...”
“Get up,” I ordered, waving the gun at him.
Sanders got to his feet, brushed some bits of gravel that had stuck to his dress pants.
“So you pushed him off right here,” I said.
Sanders nodded.
“Stand there.”
“Cal.”
“Stand there. On the edge.”
“I’m not good with heights,” he protested.
I gave him a shove. “Was that how hard you pushed him? Must have been harder. You didn’t go off.”
“Please, Cal. Please.”
“Step up.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll shoot you. If you don’t stand there, I’ll shoot you. I swear to God I will. I’ve already killed one person since this all began. Maybe it’s easier the second time.”
He put his right foot on the raised edge.
“That’s good. Now the other one.”
His left shoe dragged along the gravel. “I don’t — I don’t think I can do it.”
“Don’t look down,” I advised. “Just look straight out. Look at the tower. It’s pretty this time of night.”
Sanders stood there, his back to me, his arms out at his sides for balance. I raised the Glock and touched the barrel to the back of his head.
“Bang,” I said.
Seventy
I’m not sure what I’ll do. They say you shouldn’t rush into these things. Take some time, then make your decisions.
But I can’t see what’s holding me up. There’s nothing for me here in Griffon. I don’t want to stay in this house, and I don’t want to be in this town.
Augie and Beryl already have their house up for sale. I don’t even know if they’ve decided where they’re going. Still betting on Florida. Augie wasn’t that far off from retirement, and they’d talked in the past about moving down to the Sarasota area. The trouble Augie will have is the same one I’m going to have to deal with. No matter where you go, your memories, and your regrets, move with you.
I’m thinking of going back to Promise Falls. Not to join the police. They wouldn’t have me, and that’s not what I want, anyway. I can keep making a living the way I’ve been doing it the last few years, but I think I’d rather do it in a place where I feel slightly more at home.
Not that I won’t have to be coming back here. Sanders is going to go on trial. Rhonda McIntyre has cut a deal with the prosecutor to testify against him. I left him up there on that roof. Turned and walked away. I wanted to push him. Give him a little nudge with the end of the Glock. But in the end, I couldn’t do it. I asked myself, in that millisecond when I had to make my decision, whether I believed I’d feel any better two seconds later when he hit the parking lot.
I decided I probably would.
But there was something that kept me from doing it. Claire. I couldn’t do it to Claire. I couldn’t kill her father. I could see him charged, I could see testifying against him, and I could see him going to prison. And I could see her having to deal with all of that, with the support of her mother.
But I couldn’t see her dealing with her father’s death.
There’d been too many deaths.
So now I’m figuring out what to do. It will almost certainly mean moving somewhere. If not Promise Falls, then Timbuktu for all I know. In the meantime, I have to start going through everything in the house. What to save, what to pitch.
I can’t keep everything.
In the days after Donna’s death, I didn’t touch her things on the coffee table. I guess I avoided them. Looking at her drawings of Scott, it just hurt too much. It wasn’t until after Sanders had been arrested that I had the time, and the strength, to sift through the items.
I picked up her folder of drawings, weighed it in my hand. So many sketches. I dropped it back on the coffee table, opened it up and a couple of pencils rolled out and landed on the floor.
There was a drawing on top. A sketch of Scott, of course, but with a yellow sticky note attached to it. I read the note, and looked at the sketch.
She’d gotten the nose right. I liked the way she’d captured the wisps of hair that fell across this forehead. At first I thought the lips were a bit too full, but the more I looked I realized I was wrong. Some shading had thrown me off.
I guess Donna was intending to leave this one out for me. Maybe when I’d come home after she’d gone to bed.
She had written on the sticky note, in penciclass="underline" “Cal, I think this is the one. I’m done. What do you think?”
She’d always said she would stop when she believed she couldn’t do another drawing that would be any better.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
Acknowledgments
Authors who do it all on their own are authors who don’t sell books. I have a lot of support.
Thanks to Mark Streatfeild, Brad Martin, Alex Kingsmill, Spencer Barclay, David Young, Danielle Perez, Eva Kolcze, Valerie Gow, Kara Welsh, Malcolm Edwards, Bill Massey, Elia Morrison, Helen Heller, Juliet Ewers, Heather Connor, Gord Drennan, Cathy Paine, Kristin Cochrane, Susan Lamb, Nita Pronovost, Paige Barclay, Margot Szajbely Jenner, Duncan Shields, Ali Karim, Alan K. Sapp, Ken Bain and Lindsey Middleton.
And booksellers. Oh yeah, booksellers.