I was conscious again when they settled me into the ambulance, but not for long. Later, when I woke up, I looked at the hospital room, did not especially like what I saw, and went back to sleep.
At ten I was fully awake and in a different room.
Molly was in a chair close to my bed. From the number of magazines at her feet, I guessed she had been there quite a while. My voice cracked when I tried to speak.
I felt dizzy, but I did not pass out.
‘Wade?’
‘He got out of surgery a couple of hours after you did. It was bad, but he’s going to make it.’
‘What happened?’
‘Buddy had a revolver in his coat. Denise found it or knew it was there. After she shot you, she turned the gun on Roger. I don’t think she even knew I was in the room.’
‘They’re both dead?’
‘All three of them.’ After a moment she said to me, ‘I have the DVD, David.’
I closed my eyes, nodding, message received. When I woke up again Molly was gone. I talked to the nurse, then to the surgeon. That afternoon my mother showed up. She was the one who told me Molly wouldn’t be back. ‘She said to tell you she’s closing the house up.’
I saw Kip Dalton only after I had refused to talk to anyone else. I told him I had put together most of the pieces of the puzzle before Roger drove out to the farm, but not all of it.
Kip smiled at me. ‘Anything you can give me will help, professor.’
‘Buddy and Denise killed Walt and Barbara for the inheritance, but they needed to get rid of their new partner to get the money.’
‘What did Johnna Masterson have to do with anything?’
I shook my head. ‘Sport mostly, though it got blood on Roger’s hands, which gave them a degree of control. I expect Buddy showed Roger how they could frame me for her murder and do whatever they wanted to her. That would have appealed to Roger, I think.’
‘Well… they did.’ Kip’s face twitched as he said this, and I knew it was worse for Johnna than I could imagine.
‘The night they came out to the farm, they said they were going to let us go if we cooperated.’
Dalton nodded. He understood how killers use false promises to control their victims.
‘I think Buddy had convinced Roger they were going to terrorize us for a while and then stage another murder-suicide. Another bad marriage that ended badly. Truth was Buddy planned to kill Roger so Denise could inherit Roger’s money. Given my history with Roger and Denise, the sheriff would not have been inclined to look any farther than the evidence right in front of him: Roger shows up at the farm and all three of us go down with gunshot wounds. No one would even think to ask Buddy Elder about an alibi.’
‘According to your wife it would have worked if your neighbour hadn’t stumbled into the middle of things.’
‘When Buddy went out to take care of Wade, I had a chance to convince Roger he was the patsy unless he was man enough to make the first move.’
‘You must have talked fast.’
‘Have you tested the gun Denise used on Roger and me?’
Dalton nodded. ‘It’s the same gun that killed Johnna Masterson.’
‘You know that night, I couldn’t understand why Buddy took the gun with birdshot and let Roger grab the twelve-gauge. I figured he overlooked the difference in the guns, but I should have been known better. Buddy hadn’t overlooked anything from the start. That was no different. The weapon he intended to use on Roger was the handgun they had used to kill Johnna. Once he eliminated Roger with it he could turn the birdshot on Molly and me, and no problem at all if he had to shoot us a few times before it took. The sloppier the work the more convincing the scene. The point was to make it look like we had a gun battle using our guns, as if Roger showed up to talk, and things got out of hand.
‘That. 38 is yours?’
I shook my head. ‘Buddy told me one time it’s cold.
I expect it is, but once you matched it to the Masterson homicide and found my prints on it, you would have believed it was mine.’
‘Closing out our investigation of that case as well,’
Dalton muttered.
‘At that point Buddy’s only problem would have been controlling Denise Conway, who suddenly had five million all to herself, but somehow I don’t think that would have been a problem.’
‘I started doing some background on Mr Elder after you passed that polygraph, Professor. On paper he looked just fine, but when I called down to Louisiana I found out Denise Conway was his half-sister. They had the same mother, grew up together in the same house.
‘According to the mother Denise got married about three years ago. Husband had some money. Eight months later, poor soul killed himself.’
‘Police reopening that case?’
‘I recommended they take another look at it. I’ll tell you something else,’ Dalton added with a sly grin.
‘Your friend Mr Elder was plenty smart. He went to college just like his transcripts say, but their mother tells me Denise was the one in the family who tested off the charts. According to her, that girl was a genuine prodigy.’
‘Denise was behind the whole thing?’
‘Appears to be the case.’
Gail Etheridge dropped by one morning before I could get around much. She wanted to know if I intended to bring suit against the Beery estate. She wasn’t drumming up business, just curious, I expect, but I suggested she find our neighbour before some shark got hold of him and have a little talk with him.
If anyone deserved the mother lode, I said, it was Billy Wade. Gail said she would look in on him after she left me. ‘Be sure you do,’ I said, handing her a twenty,
‘and give him this for me if you will.’
Gail waved the bill at me. ‘What’s this for?’
‘He’ll know.’
Pocketing the twenty she told me, ‘I wanted to come by and apologize for not believing you, David.’
‘I didn’t have much of a track record,’ I said. ‘From your perspective it must have looked like pure self-destruction.’
‘Well, you can be an unbelievably stubborn man sometimes.’
‘No hard feelings, Gail.’
‘How are things going at school?’
‘They offered me three years’ salary if I’d just go away.’ Gail nodded at this with a vague look of satisfaction. She had probably calculated something like this and knew, too, as I did, that if I pushed I could get a lot more out of them and even keep my job. ‘I told them to go to hell. I said I’d go away for nothing.’
Gail’s satisfied smile curdled. ‘I take it you’re representing yourself?’
I laughed. ‘What gave me away?’
She appeared to want to give me some advice, but as I wasn’t paying for it she restrained herself admirably and changed the subject. ‘Molly’s going through with the divorce, I understand?’
My laughter caught in my throat. ‘Looks that way.’
‘I thought you two had worked things out.’
‘I was in trouble, Gail. Molly wouldn’t leave me until she got me out of it. That’s just the way she is.’
‘You’re a fool to let a woman like that get away.’
‘Molly’s not the most forgiving woman in the world.’
‘I guess I’m missing something.’
I didn’t answer her. Gail could think what she wanted.
I spent a week in Florida once I was up and moving around a little. Molly and Doc were already doing business together. She had a broken down house, a genuine catastrophe, she was living in and a second under contract that she intended to patch up for the snowbirds. She seemed happy to be starting over, a bit uncomfortable with me around but too polite to say so.
Lucy was doing well in school, working three nights a week giving private lessons on Ahab to rich kids and training a couple of wild-ass quarter horses fresh off the racetrack for the owner of the stable. We had a talk one evening on a horseback ride about the lie Lucy had told me, the affair that never was. Her idea, she confessed.
It might well have been Lucy’s creation, or Lucy might have imagined it was, but we both knew her mother, if not in fact instigating it, had gone along with it. I didn’t care to point this out because Molly wasn’t really the one to blame. It was my fault.
‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘what your mother went through those first couple of years after you were born, Lucy?’
Jezebel skittered because she felt Lucy’s body stiffen.
We were walking suddenly on forbidden ground.
‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully.
‘You’re way ahead of me then.’
‘She never told you?’
‘She never told me, and I never asked.’
Lucy considered this for a long time without offering a comment.
‘I don’t know who was more afraid of the truth, Lucy, your mother or me. I guess I was always afraid if I heard about how she got through it, I wouldn’t be able to love her in quite the same way. I think she understood that or started believing it herself. We walked around your mother’s finest moment, the choice to give you life, and ended up turning it into something she thought she should be ashamed of.’
Lucy blinked.
‘What your mother did, coming off the streets and making a life for the two of you, not one girl in a thousand could have accomplished, and I made her think she had to keep it to herself.’
‘I don’t understand why she wants a divorce!’
‘You remember when I told you that silence is the biggest lie of all?’ Lucy nodded. ‘Well, our lies caught up with us, kid.’
I met Robert The Realtor, who wasn’t an entirely offensive character. He and Molly were intimate. I could tell by the way he shook hands with me.
I had imagined something else for Molly and me when I got down to see her, but it wasn’t going to happen. A week into it and I knew the only thing Molly wanted was for me to take off. There were no words to erase our history together, and for a time it seemed there weren’t even words to talk about it. The night before I left we had dinner together in Naples.
Afterwards we walked along the beach. I think in the dark with the wind around us to carry our words off to sea we could finally speak about things that mattered.
She said she was sorry she had put Lucy into the middle of things. She should never have done that. She was the one who had left the farm for a drive with Buddy the night Johnna Masterson disappeared.
‘It was my fault,’ I answered. ‘I should have said something. Instead, I just pretended to believe you both.’
‘When did you know?’
I laughed and looked out at the dark mass of ocean.
‘I knew from the start, Molly. I knew it from the moment Lucy told me she met Buddy at a frat party.
The kid is a terrible liar. It’s one of the things I love about her.’
Molly considered this for a moment. ‘Would it have made any difference if you had said something?’
‘You would have known upfront that whatever happened between you and Buddy doesn’t change how I feel about you.’
Molly walked for a while without speaking, and I thought she might be ready to give me another chance.
When she finally spoke, I knew all my chances were behind me. ‘When I look at you, David, I see that night all over again.’
I wondered if she meant the deaths of Buddy and Roger and Denise or if she was talking about the humiliation of watching herself on Buddy’s homemade video.
‘We beat them, Molly.’
‘We didn’t beat anyone. We survived.’
‘We survived together,’ I said.
‘I need to start over. I don’t want to carry that night with me for the rest of my life.’
At the airport the next morning, Molly and Lucy were there to send me back into the winter. I got a hug from both of them, a daughter’s kiss from Lucy.
Ipicked up work at the Ford dealership in DeKalb a few days later. I told Milt, ‘For a while.’
Then I gave him a wink. ‘And don’t ask me to lie. I won’t do it even if it costs me!’
Milt grinned with his big horse teeth. ‘You‘re giving me shivers!’
‘He was a good man, wasn’t he?’
‘Tubs? Tubs was golden, David. Look at the boys he raised if you don’t believe it.’
‘I never knew that until he saved my life,’ I said.
Milt smiled but he didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘When was that?’
‘The night I got shot.’
Milt tried to put it together, but he couldn’t understand how a man already in the grave could save his son’s life.
Back in the wastelands again, I got my wish and managed to put my name on the wall every month as the number one salesperson, but even stone-cold sober I wasn’t any Tubs Albo.
I kept in touch with Molly by e-mail. It was all business, selling off property a piece at a time, moving the date of dissolution back a couple of different times so we could settle things financially and have the divorce as the last event of our relationship. Lucy kept me informed about the more intimate matters of their life.
Oklahoma had offered her a full scholarship, and she accepted it. Molly sold the house they were living in and was shopping for another catastrophe she could resurrect. Robert bounced out of Molly’s life, and now there was a man named Ted, who was a cabinetmaker.
Fifty-something. Flat ass. Boring.
One day, in early June, I was working a couple in the closing booth when Milt called me out. ‘Got a customer wants a pickup. Won’t deal with anyone but you.’
I pointed at the desk where I had been working.
‘I’ve got buyers here, Milt.’
‘I’ll take the T.O. myself, David, no split. You go take care of the pickup.’
I knew better than to hope for what I was hoping, but I couldn’t help myself. Milt was conning me, and Milt didn’t play games when it came to making money.
There was no way he’d pull me off a close to go talk to some tire kicker about a pickup. So there was only one person it could be.
Two salesmen were keeping Molly company when I walked up. I doubt they were talking trucks.
‘You looking for a pickup?’ I asked.
Molly smiled at me the way she had the day I met her. ‘Might be.’
The salesmen left us, and I walked over to be close, though not daring to touch her. ‘What brings you north, Molly?’
‘I got an offer on the farm a couple of days ago.’
‘A good one?’
She smiled. ‘Good enough.’
I waited.
‘I thought before I took it I’d talk to you about it.’
‘The farm is yours, Molly. You don’t need to talk to me.’
‘That’s the thing. The minute I got the offer I knew we needed to talk. When I sell the farm that’s it. It’s all gone.’
‘I thought that was the point.’
‘So did I.’
‘Well, if you’re asking me my opinion, I’d say the only way to know is for the two of us to drive to the farm and take a look at it.’
She laughed. ‘That’s a long drive just for a look!’
I gave her a sly smile. ‘They’ve got motels between here and there if we get sleepy.’
She grinned prettily at the idea. ‘You can leave? Just like that?’
‘I can do any damn thing I feel like, Molly. I’m fear-less these days.’
‘I knew a guy like that once.’
‘Why’d you let him go?’
‘He got careful. That was part of it. Mostly he knew too much about me.’
‘Hard to forgive a man that, I expect.’
‘We need to talk,’ she said after a moment. ‘About a lot of things.’
I took her hand and held it for a moment to be sure she wanted me as much as I wanted her, and then I said, ‘What do you say we do that on the way home?’