She did not explain this, nor did Ashley ask her to, although the younger woman doubted security was so easily found, even just over the border in Vermont.
Scott left the town library hurriedly.
What he had heard was an unsettling story-a small-town-America story that mixed rumor, innuendo, jealousy, and exaggeration together with some truths, some facts, and some possibilities. Stories such as the one he’d just heard have a certain radioactivity. They may not be clear to the naked eye, but they generate infectious power.
“The thing you need to know,” the librarian had told him, “was just how messy the death of Michael O’Connell’s mother truly was.”
Messy, in Scott’s mind, hardly captured the situation.
Some relationships are volatile from the start and should never form, but for some curious and hellish reason, take root and create a deadly ballet. That was the home life that Michael O’Connell was born into: a father who was abusive, more often than not drunk, who maintained a household riveted together by bolts of anger; and a mother who had once been a high school valedictorian, who had tossed away her promise on the man who’d seduced her in her first year at community college. His Elvis good looks, dark hair, muscled body, good job in the shipyards, fast car, and ready laugh had all hidden his harsher side.
The police visits at the O’Connell household had been a regular Saturday-night event. A broken arm, teeth knocked out, bruises, social workers, trips to the emergency room, had been her wedding gifts. In turn he’d received a broken nose that spoiled his handsome face when it was set improperly and more than once had to stare down his wife when she waved a kitchen knife in his direction. It was a steady and all-too-familiar pattern of abuse, violence, and forgiveness that would have continued forever, except for two events: the father fell, and the mother grew sick.
The senior O’Connell slipped from a work spot thirty feet in the air, slamming into a steel girder when he tumbled. He should have died, but instead spent six months in the hospital, recovering from a pair of fractured vertebrae, managing to gain an addiction to painkillers and a substantial insurance and disability settlement, the majority of which he wasted buying rounds of drinks at the local VFW hall and falling prey to a couple of get-rich-quick schemers. Meanwhile, O’Connell’s mother had a bout with uterine cancer. Surgery and her own dependence upon painkillers led to a life filled with greater uncertainty.
O’Connell was thirteen on the night his mother died. One day past his birthday.
What Scott had learned from the librarian and a quick search of the local newspaper’s files was both troubling and confusing. Both parents had been drinking and fighting; it had been going on for some time, according to some neighbors, but it was not all that unusual and was not a 911 level of violence. But in the early evening, just after dark, there had been a sudden eruption of loud noises, followed by two gunshots.
The gunshots were the questionable part of the story. Some of the neighbors distinctly remembered a significant space of time-thirty seconds, perhaps as much as a minute or a minute and a half-between the shots.
O’Connell’s father himself had called the police.
They arrived to find the mother dead on the floor, a close-contact gunshot wound to her chest, a second bullet in the ceiling, the barely teenage boy huddled in the corner, and the father, face covered with red scratch marks, holding a snub-nosed.38 pistol in his hand. This was the senior O’Connell’s story: They’d been drinking and then they’d fought, as usual, only this time she had pulled out the revolver that he kept locked in his bureau drawer. He didn’t know how she’d managed to find the key. She threatened to kill him. Said he’d punched her once too often, and that he should get ready to die. Instead he’d charged across the kitchen like an enraged bull, screaming at her, daring her to fire. He’d seized her hand. They’d grappled. The first discharge went into the roof. The second went into her chest.
A fight. Too much alcohol. An accident.
That was his story, or so the librarian told Scott, shaking her head as she did.
Of course, Scott understood, the police immediately wondered whether it had been O’Connell’s father who had brandished the weapon, and the mother who had been the one fighting for her life. More than one detective looked at the crime-scene photos and thought it was just as likely that she’d refused his drunken advances and had grabbed the gun barrel in a fatal attempt to prevent him from shooting her. The shot in the ceiling was an afterthought, conveniently provided to make his version of events seem truthful.
And in that confusion-where two stories of equal possibility had presented themselves, the one of self-defense, the other of the cheapest sort of drunken murder-the only answer could be provided by the teenager.
He could tell one truth-and send his father to prison and himself to a foster-care home. Or he could tell another, and the life he knew-the only life he knew-would more or less continue, absent his mother.
Scott thought that this was perhaps the only moment that he would feel any sympathy for O’Connell. And it was a retroactive sympathy, because it stretched back almost fifteen years.
For an instant, he wondered what he would have done. And then he understood that a terrible choice is no choice. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.
So the young O’Connell had backed up his father’s history.
Scott wondered, Did he see his mother being shot in his nightmares? Did he see her fighting for her life? Did every morning when he awoke and saw the way his father eyed him with distrust brand some terrible lie into him?
Scott drove across town and pulled his car up in front of the O’Connell house. It’s all right there. All the ingredients necessary to become a killer.
Scott did not know much about psychology-although like any historian he understood that sometimes great events turned on emotions. But he knew enough to know that even the most armchair Freudian could see how his past made O’Connell’s future dangerous. And, as Scott found himself breathing in rapidly, he knew the one thing standing square in O’Connell’s life was Ashley.
Will he kill Ashley just as easily as his father killed his mother?
Scott lifted his head and once again focused on the house where O’Connell grew up. As he watched, he was unaware of the shape that emerged from the shadow of a nearby tree, so that when a set of knuckles knocked suddenly against his window, he turned in surprise, feeling his heart abruptly quicken.
“Get out of the car!”
This was a demand without compromise.
Scott, confused, looked up and saw the face of a dark-haired man with a crooked nose nearly pressed up against the window. In one hand, the man held an ax handle.
“Get out!” he repeated.
Scott’s panicky first instinct was to put the car in gear and then to punch the gas, but he did not, just as he saw the man pull the ax handle back like a batter eyeing a hanging curve. Instead, he took a deep breath, undid his safety belt slowly, and pushed open the door.
The man eyed him dangerously, still brandishing the ax handle as a weapon.
“You the one asking all the questions?” he demanded. “Just who the hell are you? And why don’t you tell me why you’re so goddamn interested in me before I knock your head clean off?”
Sally turned to her computer and realized that what she had been about to do was potentially incriminating. She reached into her desk drawer and removed an old yellow legal pad. Opening a computer file with the details of an as-yet-unspecified crime would be a mistake. She reminded herself to think backward-more or less the same way a detective does. A piece of paper can be destroyed. It was a little like walking across a beach; footprints above the high-tide mark could last forever. Below, they were quickly erased by the never-ending waves.