“We’re close to the end, I think.”
Something in my face must have puzzled her, because for a moment she stopped and regarded me closely. “We’ve gone through each member of your family,” she explained, “and their relationships.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“There are things I’ll never know, of course,” she added. “Your father still seems very mysterious to me.”
“My father,” I repeated softly. Curiously, I suddenly thought of him almost as a rival for her attention, a dark, majestic figure whose profound experience of life and death utterly dwarfed the humdrum banality of my own.
I felt the need to bring him down. “Are you sure he’s worth knowing any more than you already do?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you’re sure he fits your criteria, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re sure that Nellie Grimes, for example, had nothing to do with the murders.”
She nodded. “Yes, I’m sure of that,” she answered.
“You found her, didn’t you?” I said. “You found Nellie.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. Nellie Grimes died eight years ago. But I found her daughter, May. She lives not far from Somerset.”
“How did you find her?”
“Through Swenson.”
“I thought he hadn’t known anything about Nellie.”
“He’s never mentioned her to me, that’s true,” Rebecca told me, “but only because he’d never thought of her as actually connected to the case.” She paused a moment, then went on. “After the murders, Swenson talked to a lot of people who’d known your father. He was trying to get some idea of where he might have gone after the murders. One of the people he talked to was Grimes.” She reached into her briefcase and handed me a picture of a woman standing on a small wooden porch. “She was living in Hoboken,” she went on. “Swenson remembered seeing May playing in the backyard despite the drizzle. He said her dress was muddy, and that her hair was wet and stringy, but that Nellie didn’t seem to care.”
It was hard to imagine May in such a state, or her mother’s indifference to it. In all my other memories of them, they’d been dressed as well as they could afford to be, always neat and clean, as if waiting to be put upon display.
“Nellie Grimes was not doing very well at that point,” Rebecca added.
“What did she say about my father?”
“She said that he’d always been very kind to her,” Rebecca answered, “and that he’d given her some money when she’d left Somerset.”
In my mind I saw the envelope pass from my father’s hand to Nellie’s.
“She also told Swenson that she didn’t believe your father had killed his family,” Rebecca added.
“Then who did?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She only said that she was sure it was someone else,” she said. Then Swenson asked her directly if your father might have been involved with another woman, and she said absolutely not. She told him that she knew for a fact that your father was not that kind of man.”
I remembered the way Nellie’s face had lifted toward my father that day in the train station, and I suspected that it had lifted toward him in just that same tempting way many times before. In isolated places, no doubt, where no one could have seen him answer to the intensity of such a call, but he’d drawn back on those occasions, too, resolutely, with his own unfathomable pride.
Rebecca looked at me as if she expected me to contradict her, then added. “May also had a very high opinion of your father.”
“But she was just a child,” I said. “What could she have known about him?”
“Actually, she remembered him quite well,” Rebecca said. “Very clearly, even down to the gray work clothes he always wore.”
For a moment it struck me as intimate knowledge, and I felt a strange resentment toward May Grimes, as if she’d usurped my place as the sole surviving witness.
“How would she have known anything about my father?” I asked.
“May evidently spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” Rebecca continued. There was no place for her to go after school, so she played in the back room. Sometimes your father would come back there and try to entertain her a little.” She smiled. “May remembered that he bought her a Chinese checkers set and that they used to sit on the floor and play together.”
I could not bring the image to mind very easily, my father sitting on the bare cement floor with a little girl, playing Chinese checkers, trying to help her pass the long boring hours of a winter afternoon.
“She remembered something else,” Rebecca said, the tone of her voice changing. They were playing together one afternoon. May thinks it was just a few weeks before the day your father took her and her mother to the train station.” She paused a moment, as if hesitant to go on. They were alone in the back room,” she continued finally. “May had been staring at the board, making her next move. When she finished it, she looked up and noticed your father staring at her. She said he looked different, very sad. She asked him if there was anything wrong. He didn’t answer exactly. He only said, This is all I want.’“
I felt my skin tighten, but said nothing.
Rebecca watched me cautiously, gauging my mood. “I remembered you telling me that he’d said the same thing to you.”
“In exactly the same words.” I shook my head helplessly, my father’s mystery still as dense as it had ever been. “What was going on in him?” I asked, though very softly, a question directed toward myself as much as toward Rebecca.
Rebecca, however, actually offered an answer. “At that point, when he said that to you in the basement,” she said, “he was probably very depressed.”
I could see that she was leading into something.
“Depressed about what?”
“Well, he’d finalized his plan by then, of course,” she said. “He’d canceled the two plane tickets, for example.” She looked at me significantly. “He did that on October 10.”
I knew then that the “new developments” she’d mentioned on the phone earlier had to do with those two mysterious plane tickets. She’d tracked down their enigmatic meaning and was about to lay her findings before me like a parting gift.
“Why did he cancel those tickets?” I asked. “You know, don’t you?”
Rebecca leaned forward, settling her eyes on me with a deep, probing gaze. “You remember the night before you came home from the Cape? You saw your father and mother talking together, and he had his arm around her.”
“That’s right.”
“And the next night, the night the family got back to Somerset, you saw your father and Laura beside the fence in the backyard.” I nodded.
“You said that they looked as if they were engaged in a very serious conversation,” Rebecca went on. “Then later, you saw them come up the stairs, and it was at that point that you heard a few words pass between them.”
“That’s right.”
Rebecca drew her black notebook from the briefcase. “I want to be sure I have this exactly right.” She flipped through the notebook until she found the page she wanted. This is what you heard,” she said. Then she quoted it: “Your father: ‘Tomorrow.’ Laura: ‘So soon?’ Your father: ‘Yes.’“ She looked up. The ‘tomorrow’ that your father mentioned would have been September 3.”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you again: do you remember anything about that morning?” Rebecca asked.
I tried to recall it, but it remained a blur of activity. My mother had prepared the usual breakfast of cereal and toast, and after eating, Laura, Jamie, and I had all gone back upstairs to finish getting ready for school. The only thing that seemed different was the fact that my father had still been at home when we’d all left the house about a half hour later.
“My father stayed home that morning,” I said to Rebecca. “He usually left before we did, but that morning, he didn’t.” I drifted back to that day again, but only far enough to regain one last, minuscule detail. “He was sitting at the kitchen table as I passed,” I added. “I was racing for the door, you know, excited to be going back to school, but he shot his hand out, grabbed my arm, and stopped me. ‘Kiss your mother good-bye, Stevie,’ he said. And so I did.”