Liar Page 15

  “Did he?” I asked.

  With a small smile, he said, “You should have asked years ago.”

  “Did he?” I repeated.

  “Kill her? I honestly don’t know.”

  As I sat trying to absorb the implications of that statement, he added, “If he was the one who killed her, he didn’t kill her to be with us. My mother and I had discovered his marriage to Gwendolyn, you see, and that caused—a certain number of changes in our happy little family.”

  “Start from the beginning,” I said. “Tell me what you know about Arthur and Gwendolyn.”

  “You’ve already forgotten the story of the princess in the garden?”

  “No, but maybe you could tell the sequel to that story in a little more straightforward style.”

  “I liked the way he told it,” Rachel said.

  “Thank you,” Travis said. “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

  I held my tongue.

  We waited. He sat quietly, looking as if he were mentally composing another tale. He stared down at his scarred hand; his expression changed to one of profound sorrow. Suddenly he stood up. “I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said. “Not tonight. It’s too soon. Excuse me.”

  He murmured thanks to Rachel for the meal, said good night, and walked to the front door. I followed him.

  “Travis, wait,” I said, as he opened it.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I stepped outside with him on the front porch, closing the door behind us. It was dark there, and somehow that made it easier to talk to him. The porch lamp wasn’t on, and there was no moon. A street lamp down the block provided the only light.

  “You’re a member of my family. No ifs, ands or buts. And if you need my help, I don’t want you to feel—what happened between our parents—that was—that had nothing to do with you.”

  I saw him smile a little in the darkness. I heard him pull his keys out of his pocket. “If you’re talking about the infamous pass my father supposedly made at your mother, I probably know more about it than you do.”

  There was that word “supposedly.” Mary had used it, too. “I was there,” I said. “You weren’t even born yet.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. It was a warm night, and the scent of salt air on a light ocean breeze was mixed with wood smoke from fires on the beach. A couple of cars drove past the house. Finally he said, “Close your eyes and picture that day. You were what, about ten years old?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Ah, yes. Eleven. An age when girls are thinking much more often about what goes on between men and women. Are your eyes closed?”

  Reluctantly, I went along with the program. “Yes, now they are.”

  “My mother was out of town, visiting our grandmother in Kansas, right?”

  “Right.”

  “My father was injured while working on a tree.”

  “Yes. He fell from a ladder. He hurt his shoulder, I think.”

  “Yes, his right shoulder and elbow. He fell on his right side. He had been treated at the hospital, but he needed a ride home. You and your sister were with your parents when they met him at the hospital.”

  I nodded. “He had a cast on his arm, but they were going to let him go home. We were going to drive him home.”

  “Right. But on the way home, you stopped at a pharmacy, so that he could fill a prescription.”

  I opened my eyes. “How do you know so much about this?”

  “Close your eyes. My father told me, of course. No, don’t look. Just try to go back to that day. I think you’ll be able to see it a little differently.”

  “Okay, so we’re in the drugstore,” I said.

  “Yes. You stay with my father and your mother, your sister Barbara goes off with your father, trying to talk him into buying something for her.”

  “Yes. I don’t remember what it was, though.”

  “My dad said she wanted some sort of curlers that could be preheated?”

  I laughed. “Yes!”

  “Now think of my father and your mother standing at the counter, and you, nearby.”

  “Just on the other side of my mother, a little behind them.”

  “And what happens?”

  I frowned. “Your father reaches over with his good arm—beneath the counter, out of sight of the clerk—and takes my mother’s hand and squeezes it in his own. My father is just walking up the aisle behind them. He’s seen your father take her hand, and he has a fit.” I opened my eyes. “Or did your father tell it differently?”

  “No. He told me all of that. But you’re forgetting part of the story.”

  I frowned.

  “Close your eyes again, think of what happened.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell me?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Better if you remember it on your own. It’s funny—whenever I dared to ask my father questions about the night of the murder, he said the same thing—if he just gave me the answers to my questions, I’d never know whether or not he was telling the truth. I’d either come to trust him for other reasons, or learn the truth for myself. So think about that moment in the pharmacy just before you go to sleep tonight. Maybe you’ll dream the answer.”

  “Dream it? You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head in resignation, pointed the plastic alarm remote on his keychain toward the camper and pressed a button.

  The explosion blasted out the windows of the cab and sent the hood of the truck rocketing up into the air, making it into a strange, careening metal kite. We were both knocked back through the doorway into the entry. I sat up, dazed, and saw that both truck and camper were on fire. “Cody!” I cried.

  15

  We ran toward the camper, but by now smoke was pouring out of it, and the heat was too fierce to get close to it. Travis tried, but I pulled him back, afraid that he would be burned.

  “Get the hose!” I said. “Near the front steps!” As he ran for the garden hose, I bolted over to the Karmann Ghia, opening the trunk to get the small fire extinguisher I carried there. Rachel charged out of the house just as Jack came out of his. Seeing the fire, he hurried to his van to get another extinguisher. Rachel ran back inside to call 911.

  I aimed at the door of the camper shell, as did Travis; I felt a hard lump in my throat and tears stinging my eyes, but tried to hold on to a slim hope that Cody was alive. Despite the heat, Travis reached for the door handle, but the instant he opened it flames and smoke roared out, pushing him back.

  “Get away from it!” Rachel shouted at us. “Let the fire department take care of it!”

  “Cody!” I said. “Cody was sleeping inside!”

  Jack’s extinguisher was empty; he was pulling Travis back. Soon mine was empty as well. I tried to reach for the hose, but Rachel grabbed my arms from behind. Horrifying images of Cody burning alive in that camper drove me into a frenzied struggle against her. She quickly maneuvered me down to the lawn and pinned me there. My face in the grass, my breath coming hard, I heard sirens howling their way closer. The sound somehow got through to me in a way all my discomfort did not; I realized that if Cody was in that camper, there wasn’t a chance in hell that he was alive. I heard myself groan as the fight drained out of me and an agonizing ache replaced it. Rachel let up a little. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I’m sorry about Cody,” I heard her say as she moved off of me, “but keep in mind that it could have been Travis.”

  “Small consolation,” I heard Travis say as he sat down next to me.

  I found myself wishing that they would both go away. Or shut up. Just shut up.

  Or better, maybe I could just disappear, be somewhere where I didn’t have to smell smoke and didn’t have to think about what was burning in that camper. Where I could get sick or scream or sob or smash something to pieces, or follow any of the other impulses warring within me. Perhaps, I thought, it would be nice to faint. Unfortunately, I have some idea of what it takes to make me do that, and—damn it a
ll to hell—I knew I wasn’t even close.

  Cody. Poor Cody. I should have never—but I stopped myself from taking that road.

  I started wishing that Frank were home, because I knew he would know what not to say, but then I was glad that he didn’t have this addition to the list of things he was trying to cope with.

  “I left a window open,” Travis reminded me. “Maybe Cody got out before the camper caught fire.”

  I pushed myself up.

  Travis had already started looking in the bushes near the house, calling, “Co-dy… kit-kit-kit…” I checked under the Karmann Ghia and the Volvo. Jack started investigating hiding places in his yard.

  The fire truck pulled up, its occupants perhaps a little baffled to find three adults ignoring a vehicle fire, stooped down and talking in coaxing voices to plants and bushes. Rachel was cautiously using the hose to keep the lawn wet, trying to prevent the fire from spreading. She was the reason some of my other neighbors were at a distance; she had warned one of them off in an authoritative voice when he ventured too near— when he approached again, she squirted him in the crotch with the hose. He swore at her, but retreated. The others were now murmuring to one another in a rubbernecking huddle.

  The firefighters made quick work of putting out the blaze, and began talking to Rachel.

  I looked over at Travis, and saw that he was cradling his right hand, wincing. I moved closer to him and saw that his palm and fingers were red and swollen, covered with blisters—in a peculiar pattern. “You burned it on the door handle…”

  “Yeah, pretty stupid, huh?”

  I shook my head. “It must hurt like hell. Let’s ask one of the paramedics to take a look at it.”

  We both turned then to take our first real look at the camper. It was a charred hulk. I heard Travis moan softly. That small sound made me realize how wrapped up in my own concerns I had been.

  “Pretty lousy day for you, isn’t it?” I said.

  He choked out a laugh.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Irene Kelly, master of understatement.”

  The police arrived while a paramedic was placing Travis’s hand in a saline soak. More law enforcement soon showed up; investigators interested in everything from bombs to arson to attempted murder.

  They left a long time later, towing the remains of the camper off with them, saying they needed it for further study. The fire had left little for Travis to salvage from it. The detectives were frustrated. The only names Travis could supply for potential enemies were those of the DeMonts.

  “But they had no way of knowing I’d be here in Las Piernas,” he said. “I didn’t know I’d be here myself.”

  They asked for information on them all the same. He told them the DeMonts lived in Huntington Beach, then said, with a glance at the place where the camper had been parked, “I’d give you their addresses, but—”

  Rachel gave me a warning look, then said, “Don’t worry about it, Travis, these guys will be able to find them.”

  The detectives reassured him on that point, and left soon after. Two uniformed officers in a cruiser were left behind, to keep an eye on the house. Things began to settle down.

  The paramedics had wrapped the hand lightly in a gauze bandage, but said that as soon as Travis was done talking to the police, we should take him to an emergency room, to have the hand treated.

  I went into the house to get my keys and to quickly change my blouse, which, after my time facedown on a wet lawn, made me look like the loser in an outdoor mud-wrestling competition. On my way back out, I passed by the kitchen, glanced in and saw a sight that stopped me in my tracks.

  “Cody!”

  Peering up from the kitchen counter, where he had evidently been having a grand old time demolishing the leftover lasagna, Cody mistook my shout of relief and figured he was in trouble. He streaked out past me into the front yard.

  Apparently the others saw him, for by the time I got out to the front yard, Jack, Rachel and Travis were all surrounding the Karmann Ghia, bent low and talking sweetly to him. I joined them, and saw that he was twitching his tail, watching me warily.

  “Come here, you big oaf,” I said, but I was crying.

  Cody, all orneriness aside, is usually attuned to my moods. Demonstrating this, he came closer and peered up at me—his gray face covered with lasagna sauce—and then ventured out from under the car.

  I picked him up carefully, still worried that he might be hurt. He was impatient with my attempts to fuss over him, twisting and clawing, but when Travis began petting him, he sniffed delicately at Travis’s lightly bandaged hand, and settled down. Soon I realized that other than a messy face, the cat was fine.

  “Sorry for the delay,” I said to Travis. “I’ll take you to the hospital now.”

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “Las Piernas General. It’s closest.”

  He seemed relieved. Seeing that I had noticed, he said, “St. Anne’s is a good hospital, but since my dad—well, I don’t think I can go over there yet.” He quickly changed the subject. “Will eating lasagna make Cody sick?”

  “It’s not good for him, but God knows he’s eaten worse things.”

  The cat, who was sauntering back into the house, flipped his tail at me in a manner reminiscent of an obscene gesture.

  “I see Cody speaks Italian, too,” Travis said.

  By the time the emergency department doctor finished working on his hand, Travis’s ability to hide the pain of his injury was failing. The doctor offered to give him an injection of morphine, but Travis said the prescriptions he’d been given would be enough and he’d wait until he got home.

  It was about two in the morning when we got to the pharmacy, but it was a busy night. Throughout the time we waited for the prescriptions, Travis was silent. He sat with his head resting against the wall, his eyes closed, his brows drawn together in pain or concentration, I wasn’t sure which. His face was pale.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to be told both of your parents were dead, then on the same day, see all your possessions—everything but a trunkful of costumes—destroyed by someone trying to kill you with a bomb. This on the same day you had been involved in a car accident, infuriated because a cousin—from a branch of the family that had disowned yours—showed up unexpectedly and hounded you. The same day you had suffered a second-degree burn on your hand because you thought a cat was being burned alive in your camper.

  All things considered, I had to admire how well he was holding up— but he wasn’t looking so great at the moment.

  “Do you want to go back for that injection?” I asked.

  He opened his eyes. “No, I can wait. Listen, I’m sorry you’ve had to pay for all of this. I have some cash in the trunk. When we get back to your house, I’ll pay you back.”

  “Forget it. I would have paid for it anyway,” I said to him. “You were wounded trying to rescue my cat.”

  He looked as if he might argue, but seemed to change his mind and lapsed back into silence.

  I returned to thinking about what an awful day he’d had, kept trying to think of comforting things to say, but none seemed adequate.

  When the harassed pharmacy clerk finally called Travis’s name, we walked up to the counter together. It was then, as we were standing at the counter, that—with his help—the memory came back to me.

  I was standing to his left. The weary clerk shoved two plastic bottles of pills and a tube of ointment toward us.

  “Which of the pills are for the infection?” Travis asked.

  She tapped the top of one of the bottles, then started to ring up the charges.

  “Can I take that on an empty stomach?” he asked.

  “Directions are right on the label,” she said.

  “Do I need to eat something before I take it?” he asked again.

  She sighed with long-suffering, picked up the bottle and glanced at it. “Yes. Take it with meals.” She rapped it down on the counter as if it were a gavel.

>   She had just finished entering a second set of numbers on the cash register when he said, “If I take the pain medication, will it make me drowsy?”

  “Read the label!” she snapped.

  “Can I operate machinery?” he persisted.

  Wondering what was wrong with him, I picked up the bottle and said, “No, Travis. You shouldn’t take these and drive.”

  “How many times a day do I take them?”