The realization swept over me like a lifting breeze. “So the second ticket was for my mother,” I said. “He’d planned to take her away at some point, a surprise vacation, something like that.”
“Rebecca nodded. There was no other woman, Steve.”
For a brief interval, I thought it all over again, everything Rebecca had just revealed. There was still something that didn’t fit, and after a moment, I realized what it was.
“But when we were unloading the car the night we got back from Cape Cod, and Laura started complaining about my mother, my father snapped at her, remember? He said, ‘You should know.’”
Rebecca looked at me without expression.
“And Laura went up to my mother’s room and sat down on the bed beside her and put her arm around her.”
Rebecca nodded.
“Well, my father couldn’t have meant that Laura should know about my mother’s illness,” I said, “because Laura couldn’t have known about it that night. She hadn’t been told yet.”
“Probably not,” Rebecca admitted.
“But she went up to my mother’s room anyway,” I added. “So she must have known something.”
Rebecca glanced down at her notes, as if expecting to find an answer there.
“And if my mother was already dying, why did my father bother to kill her?” I asked.
Rebecca sighed. “There’s still something missing, isn’t there? Swenson thought so, too. He never thought it all added up. He never found a motive.”
“A reason for my father to have done it, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s what you’re still looking for, isn’t it?”
Rebecca stared at me in earnest. “I know what it was in all these other men,” she said, “but I’m still not sure about your father.”
I said nothing, but only looked past her, out toward the lake. Night had nearly fallen by then, but beyond the water, I could still make out a dark line of thunderclouds as they rumbled in from the west.
“Motive is everything,” Rebecca said, though only to herself. “There’s no question that your father did it. His fingerprints were all over the shotgun. There were no other fingerprints.” She thought a moment longer, then glanced toward me. “The only question is why?”
I continued to watch the wall of dark gray clouds as it closed in upon us. My father’s face swam into my mind, then dissolved almost instantly, a figment, an enigma.
“It may rain tonight,” I said softly, as if to avoid any further inquiry into the foggy labyrinth of his mind.
Rebecca nodded. “It was raining that day in November,” she said thoughtfully. Her mind seemed to latch on to an unexpected possibility. “Maybe something happened that day in particular. Maybe something happened that brought it all together.”
“And sent my father over the edge, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I remembered the changing faces of my father, those features that slowly descended from the joy of his wedding day to the bleakness with which he’d stared toward my mother from the smoke-filled cab of the old brown van.
“I don’t think so,” I told Rebecca. “I don’t think something just happened that day, something out of the blue, that caused my father to pick up that shotgun.”
Rebecca nodded. “No, probably not,” she said. Then she pulled a single sheet of yellow paper from her briefcase. “All right,” she said, “let’s start again. Let’s start from October 10, the day your father learned that your mother was dying. We’ll go from there to the end.”
I said nothing, but merely waited for her to guide me back toward that day, as I knew she’d always planned to do.
“Your mother was dying,” Rebecca began. “How did things change in the family because of that?”
“I never knew she was dying,” I told her. “No one ever told me. And I don’t think Jamie knew, either.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because he was the same old Jamie up until the moment my father murdered him,” I said. “He was always up in his room, always alone. Nothing changed with Jamie.”
“So you don’t think he ever found out about your mother?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He certainly never changed in his attitude toward her.”
“What was his attitude?”
“That she was a maid,” I said, “someone who washed clothes, cooked meals, vacuumed up that gray grime that my father was always tracking up from the basement.”
“That’s the only way Jamie saw your mother?”
“More or less. I don’t think he gave her much thought.”
Rebecca wrote my observations down in her notebook, then glanced up again. “Do you think Laura ever knew just how serious your mother’s illness was?”
“Oh, yes, of course she did,” I said.
I saw my sister in the solarium once again, sitting sullenly in the wicker chair as she had that September afternoon, snapping at me to “stop it,” without adding what must have been the final, unsaid portion of that sentence: “Don’t you know your mother’s sick, don’t you know she may be dying!”
“Laura looked quite upset the afternoon before my mother came home,” I told Rebecca. “And after that, for the next few days, she looked very strange.” I shrugged. “At the time, I couldn’t have known what was bothering her, but I did notice that she seemed …” I stopped, searching for the right word. “She seemed dazed,” I said finally, “like she couldn’t quite figure out what to do, how to handle it.”
“Did she treat your mother differently after that?”
“Yes,” I said. “For a time, she treated her much more gently.”
Rebecca’s eyes narrowed questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘for a time’?”
Even though it had been my own phrase, it struck me as being almost purposely vague, just as it had clearly struck Rebecca as being so.
“Well, for the first few weeks, Laura was very gentle and helpful,” I explained.
It was easy for me to recall all the little gestures of kindness my sister had made toward my mother during that brief time. She’d helped her in the kitchen, gone shopping with her on Saturday afternoons, and had been generally more tender toward her than she’d ever been.
“But that kindness didn’t continue?” Rebecca asked.
“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It lasted for a few weeks, more or less until my mother tried to kill herself.”
“How did it change after that?”
“Laura seemed to withdraw from her,” I said. “From my father, too. At about the same time.”
“That would have been around the middle of October, then?”
I nodded.
“Jamie was the only one who stayed the same during all those weeks,” I added, then thought a bit more of it, remembering how often he’d begun to bait my mother, too, as if one target were no longer enough for his steadily building spitefulness and anger. “Actually, I think he got a little worse,” I said. “He was sharp with my mother during those last weeks, but he also began to pull away entirely. From all of us, I mean. It was as if he couldn’t stand being in the same house with us anymore.”
Growing more sullen with each day, bitter in what must have been a terrible, homebound loneliness, I remembered that Jamie had begun to absent himself almost entirely from the family during the last weeks of our time on McDonald Drive. He’d never joined us in the little den anymore, or even gone on those rare family outings to the drive-in movies. Instead, he’d sealed himself in his room, remaining there for hours at a time, coming down only to eat quickly, and after that, trudging up the stairs again.
“Toward the end,” I told Rebecca, “Jamie was just a face in the hallway or on the other side of the dinner table. My mother didn’t like to be around him. Neither did I. And, of course, Laura hated him.”