Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

Mallory turned to catch Charles staring at her. As she was walking back to him, she stopped by the doorway to pick up the carton of her mother’s personal possessions. She set it down near the foyer, for soon they would load it into the car. The party was almost over.

Now that they were all together in one room. Augusta proposed a toast to the long road home. Charles turned to Mallory.

And where is home now?

Tomorrow morning she would drive back to New York with him, but how long would she remain there? He resolved that home was neither what nor where, but a person, and it was highly unlikely that she would ever come home to him; one only visited with friends. However, her friendship was no small thing, not something he settled for, but something -

Yeah, right . As Mallory would say.

Charles ceased to tell himself comfort lies and looked down at his watch. It was nearly time to pick up Riker’s bags at the hotel before dropping him off at the airport.

The glasses were drained, the door was opening, and now one of Charles’s unsolved riddles left the formation of circling bats and flew into the room. “Will someone tell me who killed Babe Laurie?”

Riker had not appreciated that, and did his best to pretend he had not heard it. Henry only smiled pleasantly, inscrutable, taking no sides in this matter. Tom Jessop stood with one hand on the door he had held open for Lilith, who had escaped. The sheriff was not so lucky, for Charles was looking directly at him and smiling in expectation.

The sheriff’s face relaxed in good-natured surrender. “Off the record?”

“If you like.”

“It was Fred Laurie. He’s been missing ever since Kathy’s dog disappeared. The little bastard tried to kill Good Dog once before. So I figure he took care of that piece of unfinished business before he ran. I got two witnesses to put him in those woods with a rifle.”

Well, that would neatly clear up the murder of a dog. But it wasn’t even -

“It works for me.” Augusta was polishing an imaginary spot on her wineglass.

Mallory was examining the floorboards, saying, “I suppose Babe’s son is the motive?”

“Yeah, I tend to favor that one,” said the sheriff. “The boy belonged to Fred, not Babe. So one of them snapped, and they had it out on the road. I already wrote up the report and put out a warrant for Fred Laurie’s arrest.”

A look passed between Mallory and Augusta, but Charles could not decipher it. In another minute, he found that he could, but he didn’t want to. In fact, he went to a great deal of trouble to abort an idea at the moment of creation. He managed to altogether eliminate one of the myriad questions in the bat room of his mind, and he ceased to ponder how many bodies might lie at the tip of Finger Bayou.

All he knew for certain was that Fred Laurie had not killed his brother.

That much he had gleaned from the tone of liars coming to agreement on the fine points.

“What’s the evidence against Fred Laurie?” asked Charles, knowing he was alienating everyone in the room. “Don’t you need something besides suspicion to back up a warrant?”

“I’ve got Travis’s deathbed confession,” said Jessop. “He named Fred as the killer. Riker signed a statement to back it up.”

Charles turned to Riker, who found his pack of matches most engrossing, examining them as a strange and rare artifact he had just pulled from his pocket.

The sheriff broke the silence. “Hey, Riker, why don’t we get back to town and pick up your bags? I’ll take you out to the airport myself.”

Riker seemed to like this idea. Of course he did, and he was already moving out the door.

The sheriff turned to Mallory. “Coming back for the trial? Not that we’re short of witnesses. They’re crawling all over each other to turn state’s evidence.”

She shook her head. “I’m done with this place.” After the last goodbyes were said in the driveway, and Riker had made his getaway with the sheriff, Charles lifted the heavy carton into the backseat of the silver Mercedes.

Something had begun to tick, and it was regular as a clock. He looked at Mallory, not suspecting that she was harboring a bomb among her mother’s things, but it did tick.

“It’s a metronome,” she said. “The pendulum must have come loose.”

As they slid into the front seat, he asked, “Do you remember Ira’s piano lessons at all?”

She nodded. “We played duets. There were two pianos in the house then, my mother’s baby grand and an old player piano. Sometimes Ira and I would race each other through the music.”

The metronome ticked off four beats in a measure. The cacophony of birdsongs in the surrounding trees refused to conform to the rhythm.

“Mallory, why did he come to the house that day? Did your mother continue his music lessons after Ira’s father stopped the therapy?”

“The therapy never stopped. Ira missed her. He kept showing up at the house on his regular schedule. His father was supposed to be watching him while Darlene was working, but he wasn’t much of a baby-sitter. So there was Ira, standing out in the yard. My mother couldn’t turn him away.”

Charles sat with the ignition key in his hand. The metronome was slowing its ticks, filling each measure with a single note. The birds were singing louder, faster, in such a rush to get the music out. Tomorrow morning, when they were on the road and beyond the reach of Augusta’s sanctuary, it would be all too quiet, miles of road and -

“You never asked me if I killed Babe Laurie,” said Mallory.

“I didn’t need to. He was hit from behind with a rock – not your style. Now if they’d found him with a nice symmetrical bullet hole and less mess, that would’ve been quite different.” He turned back for one last look at the Shelley house as he put the car in gear. “But I had the feeling that I was the only one in that room who didn’t know the killer’s name.”

“Not true, Charles. Riker and Augusta have their own ideas, but they’re wrong.”

“And the sheriff?”

She turned away from him now. “No one cares who killed Babe Laurie. It just doesn’t matter.”

“I’m so sick of hearing that. I care.” The car moved out of the yard, and then he brought it to a sudden stop on the dirt road. “Are you saying the sheriff knows, and he’s not doing anything about it? You know too, don’t you?”

Of course she did. But she kept her silence. Why had he even bothered to ask? Well, he sometimes forgot that she still followed the children’s code of not ratting on thy coconspirator.

“Hints, Mallory? Anything at all?”

She looked at him for a moment, perhaps weighing trust, as if that were in question after everything she had put him through. The metronome made a tick. He waited for the next beat, but the seconds dragged by. Then it ticked again.

“There’s no proof,” she said.

“Fine, I’m not looking to make a citizen’s arrest. But if you don’t give me a sporting chance to work this out, I’ll go stark raving mad.”

“I told you the hospital was storing old hardcopy files on the mainframe. When the clerk scanned Ira’s first hospital record, she must have seen the old lab report for VD. She flagged his computer entry for a prior child abuse. When I hacked into the hospital computer, there was no file in the system yet, just the flag, Ira’s name and the disease.”

“Child abuse? But he was no longer a child.” He held up one hand. “No, wait – I’ve got it. Tell me if I’m wrong. I know Ira’s diagnosis was changed from autism to profound retardation.” In the absence of a separate facility to treat autism, that was the only way to qualify him for a state therapy program. “That and his dependency on his mother gave him the legal status of a minor child. Right?”