John Hart - Down River

“I’ve been waiting for you to get back,” he said. “I told Janice that I want to have everyone to the house for dinner. I want you to come.”

“Janice didn’t like that, I bet.”

“It’s what families do. She knows that.”

I looked at my watch. Afternoon was upon us. “I need to speak with Parks Templeton,” I said.

My father’s face twitched with sudden worry. “What’s going on?”

“Robin thinks that Grantham has an arrest warrant with my name on it.”

He understood immediately. “Because they’ve identified your prints on Dolf’s gun.”

I nodded.

“Maybe you should leave.”

“And go where? No. I’m not running again.”

“What are you going to do?”

I looked at my watch again. “Let’s have a drink. On the porch. Like we used to do.”

“I’ll call Parks from the car.”

“Tell him he should get here sooner rather than later.”

We walked outside and turned for the parking lot. “There’s one more thing I’d like for you to do,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I stopped and he did, too. “I want to speak with Janice. In private. I want you to make it happen.”

“May I ask why?”

“She testified against me in open court. We’ve never talked about that. I think we need to get it behind us. She won’t want to have the conversation.”

“She’s scared of you, son.”

I felt the familiar anger. “How do you think that makes me feel?”

Back in the car, I pulled out the postcard sealed in its plastic bag. Danny never made it to Florida; I was pretty certain of that. I studied the photo on the card. Sand too white to be real, and water so pure it could wash away sin.

SOMETIMES IT’S JUST RIGHT.

Whoever killed Danny Faith had mailed this postcard to try and hide the crime. It could very well have prints on it. I wondered for the hundredth time if I should tell Robin about it. Not yet, I decided. Mostly for her own good. But it was more than that. Somebody, for reasons unknown, had killed Danny Faith. Someone pointed a gun and squeezed the trigger; lifted Danny up, and dumped him down that great dark hole.

Before I went to the cops, I needed to know who.

In case it was someone I loved.

We gathered on the porch, all of us, and though the liquor was expensive, it felt thin and false, like the assurances we traded. None of us believed that everything would be all right, and when the words dried up, which they often did, I studied faces that were naked in the hard rays of the bright, falling sun.

Dolf lit up, and loose tobacco settled on his shirt. He flicked at the small, moist pieces with an utter lack of care. Yet he wore his larger concerns like he wore his boots, as if he’d be lost without them; my father could have been his brother in that regard. They were pared down, the both of them, scoured clean.

George Tallman watched my sister like some part of her might fall off, and he’d need wariness and great speed to catch the piece before it struck and shattered. He kept an arm pressed against her, and leaned low when she spoke. Occasionally, he looked at my father, and I saw adoration in his face.

Jamie sat darkly next to a row of empty bottles. His mouth dipped at the corners, and hard shadow filled the sockets of his eyes. He spoke infrequently and in a low rumble. “It’s not fair,” he muttered once, and I assumed that he was speaking of Grace; but when I pressed, he shook his head, and tipped back the brown bottle of whatever foreign beer he’d chosen.

Janice, too, looked tortured, with chipped nails, dark circles, and hollow eyes. She’d deteriorated even over the past day. Her words came often and forced, and they were as brittle as the rest of her. She played the role that my father had imposed upon her, that of hostess, and, to her credit, she tried. But it was a brutal thing to see; and there was little mercy in my father’s eyes. He’d told her what I wanted and she did not like it. The fact of it was all over her.

I kept an eye on the long drive, looking for dust behind bright metal. I hoped for the lawyer to make it first, yet expected Grantham and his deputies to arrive at any moment. A lawyer friend once said that it was easy to hate lawyers until you needed one. At the time I’d found him glib, but not now.

Now he was a goddamn genius.

The day settled as our conversation dwindled to nothing. There was danger in words, trip wires and blind spots where great harm could be done. Because the reality of murder was more than the concept of it. It was the loose, damp corpse of a man we’d all known. It was the questions that sprung up, the theories that we’d all turned over yet not once discussed. He was killed here, where the family lived and breathed, and that danger alone should be enough; but there was also Grace.

And there was me.

No one knew what to do with me.

When Janice spoke to me, her voice was too loud, her eyes directed somewhere over my shoulder. “So, what are your plans now, Adam?” Ice clattered in the fine crystal beneath her white-tipped fingers, and when our eyes finally met, there was a sudden filling of the space between us, as if countless wires connected us, as though they all started humming at once.

“I plan to have a conversation with you,” I said, and did not mean for the words to sound like such a challenge.

The smile slipped off her face, taking most of her color with it. She wanted to look at my father, but did not. “Very well.” Her voice was cool and even. She smoothed her skirts and rose from the chair as if an unseen force lifted her. She could have carried stacked books on the crown of her head, even as she leaned in to kiss my father on the cheek. She turned at the door, more calm, I thought, than she had ever been. “Shall we go to the parlor?”

I followed her into the cool interior, down the length of the long hall. She opened the door to her parlor and motioned me ahead of her. I saw pastel colors and rich fabrics, a bag of incomplete needlepoint on what my mother would have called a “fainting couch.” I took three steps into the room and turned to watch her as she gentled the door shut. Her thin fingers spread out on the dark wood, then she turned and slapped me. Pain flared like a match head.

Her finger rose between us, and the damaged paint shone on her nail. Her voice wavered. “That’s for having your father lecture me about the meaning of family.” She stabbed her finger in the direction of the porch. “For insulting me in my own home.” I opened my mouth, but she spoke over me. “For calling me on the carpet in front of my own family like I was some wicked, wicked child.” She lowered her hand, tugged at the waist of her pale yellow silk jacket, and suddenly, she was shaking. Her next words fell into the room like petals from a dying flower.

“I refuse to be frightened, and I refuse to be manipulated. Not by you and not by your father. Not anymore. Now, I’m going upstairs to rest. If you tell your father that I struck you, I’ll deny it.”

The door closed with the faintest click, and I think that I would have followed her out, but it didn’t happen. The cell phone vibrated in my pocket, even as I took the first step. I recognized Robin’s number. She was out of breath.

“Grantham just left with three deputies. They plan to execute the warrant.”

“They’re coming here?”

“That’s my information.”

“When did they leave?”

“Fifteen minutes ago. They’ll be there any minute.”

I took a deep breath. It was happening again. “I’m on my way,” Robin said.

“I appreciate the thought, Robin, but whatever is going to happen will be long done by the time you get here.”

“Is your lawyer there?”

“Not at the moment.”