Tom Piccirilli - The Last Kind Words

Grey with his ladies’-man looks, owning a thousand women but not the one he’d truly wanted, the one who’d rejected him forty-five years ago. Like any of us, he was capable of violence.

“No,” I said. “No.”

Where had Grey been spending his nights?

I drove home. I’d been thinking of someone close to the family, someone who might have followed Collie that night, someone who knew our ways. I’d been thinking of Gilmore. I stepped harder on the gas pedal and jockeyed through the traffic. I kept pushing. Someone said, “No.” Someone had been saying that for a while. I checked the rearview. My lips were moving, but I didn’t know the voice.

I slowed when I got to the corner of our block. I eased up to our house and saw Grey’s car in the driveway. I pulled in, got out, and stepped up the porch. I wondered if I’d gone over the big ledge. I wondered if I was finding madmen around every corner because I’d already become one myself.

My mother and father were in Gramp’s room, cleaning and changing his pajamas. My grandfather’s eyes were focused on the ceiling but it still felt like he was looking at me.

My parents glanced at me. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure about what I’d found out or if I’d found out anything at all. The pulse in my belly was throbbing heavily. My father said, “Don’t stare, Terry. Old Shep’s got some pride left.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I turned away and started back down the hall. I moved to the bottom of the second-floor stairs. I looked up and could see shadows playing against the corridor wall. I heard the creak and thrum of water rushing through the pipes. I took a step, thinking, Maybe I should wait.

“Jesus God, what the fuck am I doing?” I whispered.

“Who’s that?” Grey called.

I climbed the rest of the stairs and d trostood in his doorway. Grey was stripped down, with a towel around his waist, about to step into the running shower. He was laying a suit out across his bed. Steam coiled through the air.

I said, “Can we talk for a minute?”

“Let it wait until I come out, right? This goddamn floor is like ice.”

“Sure.”

He padded to his bathroom and shut the door. I had maybe ten minutes to search the room. I hit all the key spots where anything of importance might be hidden. I found forty g’s in cash split among three caches but nothing else of note. If Collie’s knife was here, I couldn’t find it. No trophies, no newspaper clippings. I needed proof. I needed to know for sure. His wallet was on the corner of his bureau. I went through it and discovered nothing that mattered.

I checked the suit he was about to put on.

I reached into the inside jacket pocket and found a photo.

It was old. It showed a pretty teenage brunette smiling happily, head half turned over her shoulder, her hair a wild flurry in the wind, dark and blurred branches of shaking trees in the background. I didn’t have to guess who she was. The only girl he’d ever truly loved. She looked a little like Rebecca Clarke. Roxie Drayton. Dale. All this time later, all the times I’d heard the same story, and I still didn’t know her name. She’d left him at the altar and broken his heart, and in his sickness she continued to haunt him, crawling through the seams of his mind. Every young pretty brunette became a part of the same obsession. My mother had said it herself. An older man who can’t let go of his own youth, who’s preoccupied by the past… Too much silk and not enough sand . She just hadn’t realized how far he’d gone.

Inside jacket pocket. Right over his heart.

I could see him putting the suit on, working the tie until it was perfect, then slowly dragging his thumb across the left side of his coat like he was touching the cheek of the woman.

Maybe I should do a more thorough search, check the rest of the house, his car. Maybe I should wait and watch him longer now that I suspected.

But I wasn’t a patient man. I couldn’t imagine leaving him alone in this house another night with my sister near him. I didn’t know how far into the underneath he was. I didn’t know if I was right or wrong about him. Maybe Collie was going to his bunk each night laughing himself to sleep that I was out here running in circles. Maybe Gilmore hid his trophies elsewhere. Maybe there was a killer in the woods watching the house right now. Maybe my father had gone to see Kimmy for some other reason.

I had to get Grey alone.

I went to my room and shut the door. I thought of all the years I’d spent here feeling safe, surrounded by my family, my father and uncles on watch. I could feel the underneath tugging at me, that insane sense of panic trying to make me jump the wrong way. Vertigo made my legs wobble and I reached out to touch the wall. Behind it was our legacy, three generations of junk.

I sat on the bed and put my head between my knees. When the dizziness passed I called information and got the number for Rocko Milligan’s pawnshop. He answered on the fifth ring with a flamboyant, “Yallooo?”

“Rocko, this is Terry Rand.”

He sucked air. “Holy shit, a ghost from the past. Let me guess, you’re on the narrow and yhe sou met a girl you want to marry, and now you need a good deal on the ring. You know I’m the man to talk to about that.”

“Not entirely on the narrow yet, Rocko, but if I ever gear up for marriage, I’ll get the ring from you. Now listen to me. Do you ever sell my father figurines?”

Rocko coughed out a chuckle. “Terry, not for nothing, but your father is loopy for the fucking things. I don’t get it. They’re not worth shit.”

“When was the last time he came by?”

“He hits me up every month or two. Been a while. I think he goes out east, checks the antiques shops in the Hamptons for this crap. The old ladies out there like their porcelain too. Or they did years ago. Now their grandkids are inheriting it all and dumping it at garage sales.”

“I want you to call him for me,” I said. “Tell him you’ve got a few nice pieces in.”

“I never call him, Terry, he just comes in on his own.”

I listened to Grey moving around in his room, getting dressed across the hall. I almost hung up because it all suddenly seemed so stupid to me. I’d been wrong about everything so far, why should this be different? But I continued to clench the phone to my ear. “I’ll square up with you and make it worth your time.”

“My time’s worth two C-notes,” Rocko said.

“Fair enough. Call him now.”

I walked downstairs. My parents were on the couch, watching a news channel, with Gramp in his chair beside them, a blanket over his lap. His hair had been trimmed. His face was clean and pink. He smelled of baby powder.

My father turned his head in my direction as if to say something, but he didn’t get the chance. The phone rang and he stood to answer. I took his seat and pretended to be interested in the news. My mother was tsking and saying how terrible, how sad. My father asked Rocko what was so special about the pieces, and Rocko must’ve known what to say, because my dad actually said, “Oohh,” with a great delight. It was a sound that at once amused and alarmed me. It was further proof I didn’t know my old man as well as I thought I did.

He hung up and reached for his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. “Rocko Milligan’s got some bisque figurines from ’46. Another buyer is interested so I’m going to run over there.”

“You should go too, Ma,” I said. “I’ll watch Gramp.”

She frowned at me. “What? To a pawnshop?”

“The two of you can go out to dinner.”

“He didn’t ask me to dinner.”

My father looked a little embarrassed, but his expression quickly shifted to one of enthusiasm. The bisque figurines had put him in a tenuous good mood. It was an overreaction in the face of Mal’s death, but I was glad for it. “You want me to take you out to eat tonight?”