Jeff Abbott: Distant Blood

The letter was not signed, and my friend at the police station in Mirabeau could find no prints on the paper or the envelope. I gave the original to the FBI. They gave me a copy. I burned my copy one night, watching the smoke waft into the air in the quiet of my backyard. I did not want it in my house.

The final ending came in the cool of Candace's cottage back in Mirabeau. She had left Port Lavaca without me.

I didn't know where her heart lay. Philip and Gretchen told me that when she recovered her senses from her poisoning, she sank into deep depression when told her baby was gone, and that I had been poisoned as well. But when I recovered, she showed little interest in seeing me. I railed and begged the others to take me to her, trying once to get to her room and forcibly being restrained. Gretchen assured me Candace did not want to see me as the needle slid home and I faded into a chemical drowse.

She came in once, while I slept, and Gretchen said she seemed to want to take my hand, but then she fled the room. Her father and mother came from Mirabeau to drive her home.

After I had visited Sangre Island one last time, I returned to Mirabeau. My sister fetched me and cried much of the way home. Candace, she said, would not speak to her.

I had been home three hours, feeling frozen and inert, when I rallied the courage to go to her house. I felt ill, and I felt sad, and I felt hot anger that she had abandoned me.

She answered the door, looking thinner than was good for her and pale under the barest summer tan. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail.

“Sweetheart?” I said. “Are you just never going to talk to me again?”

She made no move to let me in. “No, I'll talk to you. You're looking good, much better than when I saw you last.”

“I didn't get to see you then. You left-”

“I had to, Jordan. I don't ever want to see the Texas coast again. I needed to be… away from that place.”

“I needed you. Pop was a wreck, and Deborah wouldn't speak to any of us and left, and-and I needed you.”

“I'm sorry. I don't mean to hurt you.”

Her eyes were flat, uninterested in what I had to say. “Do you not love me anymore?” I asked hoarsely.

“I don't know. I can't do-I can't do this anymore.”

“What, sweetheart? Tell me.”

“You're drawn to trouble, Jordan. You can't bear to pass it by. You can't leave things alone. If you had-”

“If I hadn't, Jake would have gotten away with murdering Lolly and Brian.”

“If you hadn't, I'd still be pregnant with our child.” The cold, hard truth hung between us.

“That's not my fault.”

“I'm not sure I believe that, Jordan.” She began to ease the door shut. “I just have to have some time to think. Think about us. If there is an us.”

I slammed my hand against the closing door. “I love you. You know how I love you.”

“Yes. Right now I wish you didn't.” The door shut.

For a long while I stood on her porch, unable to move. I had no words for her. I had no comfort for her.

Because I didn't think she would have believed the end of my story. When I returned to the Goertz house on Sangre Island with Pop and Gretchen and Philip and Tom-to see what was left, to begin to put our lives in order-I had spent a restless night in my own room, endlessly contemplating Pop's upcoming hearing, the dread I'd felt when Candace collapsed, the loss of my unborn child, the death I'd nearly faced, the horrible secrets that had shrouded this house so long it had warped the very wood of the building itself. I was taken with a notion to burn the house to the ground and salt the earth. I'd wandered out to the porch in my sleeplessness.

And there I saw two small figures, standing hand in hand at the house's edge-one a boy of twelve, the other a boy of younger years. They'd shimmered in the midnight moonlight, their faces in brief, stark relief. Brian, and a child I did not know, yet knew with my heart and soul. With Candace's eyes, and my nose and blond hair, and a wide, pert smile of sweetness like Pop's. They both raised hands toward me- in warmth, in love-and dissolved into the night breeze from the bay.

I wanted to follow him, into the breeze, into the night.

Instead, I went back inside the house, to the family God had given me. I went into Pop and Gretchen's room, where I listened to the soft sibilance of his snore, and sat on the floor, watching my father sleep until the dawn.