Charlaine Harris - The Julius House

I shifted uncomfortably in the cramped space. What was taking Angel so long? A glance at my watch said fifteen minutes had crawled by.

I had a feeling things weren’t going my way when I heard the male voice outside.

“Harley! She’s in the closet,” Charity Julius said, and another piece dropped into place. Harley Dimmoch only wanted his family to call at a certain time because then he, and not Charity, could be sure to answer the phone. He didn’t let them come visit without lots of notice because she would have to stay somewhere else.

“Let’s see who it is,” he was saying, and then I had only the quick rattle of the key in the lock to warn me. I raised the fishing rod and launched myself out of the closet, which almost got me shot dead. The young dark-haired man was holding a no-nonsense revolver in his hands, and at my appearance he fired. Fortunately for me, the fishing rod caught him in the stomach and the shot went high, but at least it settled matters for Angel, who came through the unlocked back door like gangbusters.

The small bedroom was full of shouting, moving bodies, and the fear of the gun.

Charity was so busy trying to grab me that she missed Angel’s appearance until Angel justified all her martial-arts training by kicking Charity in the side of the knee, a decisive move, since Charity shrieked and folded instantly, and thereafter lay on the floor moaning.

Harley Dimmoch had grabbed my arm with his free hand and was trying to aim the gun with the other when Charity shrieked. He saw her go down, and I watched his face twist with desperation. He had begun to swing his arm to fire at Angel when she seized it, twisted his wrist clockwise with a curiously delicate grip of her fingers, slid closer to him and under his arm, and then with his arm twisted and extended in what must have been an excruciatingly painful position, kicked one leg out from under him and kept on raising his arm while he was falling until his shoulder dislocated-or perhaps his arm broke.

He screamed and fainted.

The gun was lying on the floor beside his useless arm. With the end of the fishing rod, I poked it into the closet where I’d been imprisoned and shut the door. Angel and I looked at each other and panted and grinned.

“Idiot,” she said, “if the gun hadn’t gone off, I’d still be out there wondering what was happening.”

“Idiot,” I said, “if you’d known he’d come home, you could have jumped him out in the driveway and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to pull a gun on me.”

“What the hell happened to you? I didn’t hear a thing after I got around back!”

“She punched me in the stomach and then the neck,” I explained, pointing to the young woman clutching her knee on the floor. “That’s Charity Julius.”

For one second Angel’s face reflected the shock I’d felt.

“So the ax-man,” she said, “must be Harley Dimmoch?”

“Yep.”

Charity tried to get up, gripping one of the cheap pine night tables, but she collapsed back on the floor with a white face and sobs of pain. I was far from wanting to comfort her, and she would have been glad if I’d been in her place, but still, I felt uncomfortable, to say the least.

Angel left the room for a minute and reappeared with some heavy, silvery duct tape and a pair of scissors. She used the tape efficiently on Harley Dimmoch’s ankles and Charity Julius’s wrists. I held Charity up while Angel worked, shrinking from touching her but having to.

The gunshot had attracted no attention, apparently. No one pulled up, or called, or knocked on the door. We three women gradually calmed down. Charity regained control of herself. Her wide dark eyes stared at us assessingly.

“What now?” she asked.

“We’re thinking,” Angel answered. I was glad she had. I had no idea what would come next. But obeying an irresistible impulse, I leaned forward and looked into her face and asked, “Who is the third body?”

She closed her eyes for a minute. She must be twenty-one now; she looked older.

“My grandmother,” she said.

“Then who is the woman living in Lawrenceton?”

“My great-aunt, Alicia.”

“Tell me,” I said intently. “Tell me what happened that day.” Finally, finally, first among all the people who had wondered, I would be the one who knew. It was almost like being the only one to discover Jack the Ripper’s true identity, or getting the opportunity to be a fly on the wall on a hot, hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892.

“My aunt was visiting. She was staying over in Grandmother’s apartment with Grandmother.”

“How did she get there?”

“She came by bus. My dad picked her up in Atlanta. She had been there three days.”

“How come nobody knew?”

“Who was to know? Who was to care? We didn’t have many visitors, mostly because Mom was so sick. I didn’t talk about it at school. Why would I? And Daddy had been working on the roof for three days, trying to get it finished. Going to pick her up was a pain in the butt, an interruption, but since Mother and Grandmother wanted her to be there, he did it.

“Harley had come to visit me and to help Daddy. I said I was sick and stayed home from school. I don’t think they believed me, but they knew how much I missed Harley and they were willing to give me a little slack.”

Her face was flinty when she said this. She was willing herself not to feel, as she’d been willing herself not to for all these years.

“Harley-lady, do you think he’s okay? He looks awful bad; you should call an ambulance.” She had asked Angel, not me.

“He’s okay. He’s breathing,” Angel said with apparent unconcern. But I noticed she was taking his pulse when Charity looked away.

“Harley was up on the roof with Daddy, hammering away. It was the day the patio was going to be poured; they’d spent the morning building the form. Daddy just insisted Harley help him, and Harley didn’t really mind, but he had come to see me, and he was going to have to go back home without having talked to me very much. Daddy just didn’t seem to understand, it was like when we lived close to Harley and Harley would help Daddy all the time, but then we could go out on a date and be away from them. But up on the roof, Daddy starts this heavy churchy stuff, about how Harley was going to have to stop drinking and learn how to control his temper if he was going to marry me, which was what Harley and I wanted. And he reminded Harley, all this Bible stuff, about keeping his hands off me until we were married, was what it boiled down to.” She sighed deeply, shifted to try to make herself more comfortable. “Listen, can’t you get me a pillow, or something?”

Angel got a pillow from the bed and eased it under Charity’s shoulders. Charity was as striking as the newspaper picture had suggested, but even stronger looking, with the large dark eyes and the jawline giving her face character. What kind of character, I was finding out.

“So,” she resumed, “Harley decides that up on the roof with my dad is a good time and place to tell him we’ve already slept together.” She rolled her eyes, the very portrait of an exasperated teenager. Silly old Harley. “My dad went nuts. He was yelling and screaming and swinging his hammer around, and said Harley had to leave and not see me anymore. Harley got scared and mad, and he swung his hammer, and it hit my dad in the head, and he died. Right up there on the roof.”

I closed my eyes.

“Then Harley climbed down and told me. Mama had been over visiting with Grandmama and Alicia in the apartment, and she hadn’t heard anything.”

Her face twisted with pain, and I felt another pang of guilt. What were we going to do with these people? But she rallied and plowed on, and I could tell she was feeling a certain degree of relief in the telling.