William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I WANTED TO TALKon the drive home, I was so excited I was bursting with talk. The whole chilling story of the Reddmans and the Pooles was coming clear and more than ever I was certain that the sad entwining of the fates of those two families was at the heart of the plague that was presently afflicting the Reddmans. We were close, so close, to figuring it all out and to taking the first steps toward retribution, as well as toward a lucrative lawsuit. I wanted to talk it out, desperately, but just as desperately Caroline wanted silence.

“Are you all right?” I asked after three of my conversational gambits had dropped like lead weights in a pool of silent water.

“No,” she said.

“What can I do?”

“Just, just shut up,” she said.

Well at least she knew what she wanted.

So, as we drove in silence out of the Main Line and toward the city, I considered to myself what we knew and what we still needed to learn. Claudius Reddman had stolen the company from his friend Elisha Poole, had embezzled sums which he used to buy up a portion of the stock, and then, after reducing the company’s value with his thievery and through production holdbacks, had purchased the balance of the shares for an amount far below their true value. In the process of making his fortune he had ruined his friend, driving him to drink, to poverty, to suicide, and Reddman knew all he had done, too, because right after Poole’s death, either out of guilt or a misplaced magnanimity, he brought Mrs. Poole and her daughter to live in the shadow of his wealth and grandeur, in the shadow of Veritas. Is it only a coincidence that shortly thereafter tragedy began to stalk the Reddmans?

Charity Reddman was murdered and buried in the plot behind the house, alongside the statue of Aphrodite. Who killed her? Was it Christian Shaw, disposing of his inconvenient lover, as Caroline believed, or was it maybe Mrs. Poole, wreaking her husband’s revenge? And the Reddman tragedies didn’t stop there. Hope Reddman died of consumption, which might have been poisoning instead. Christian Shaw was killed by his son with a shotgun blast to the chest. Claudius Reddman’s lungs filled with tumors and his muscles grew wild with palsy. How much of this tragedy was just the natural order of things and how much was bad karma and how much was directly caused by the Pooles? We as yet had no answer and probably would never find one, but if we only reap what we sow then Claudius Reddman’s harvest was appropriately bountiful. But it hadn’t ended with his death.

Somewhere along the line, it appeared, Faith Reddman Shaw sought to make amends. We knew that she had examined her father’s old journals and discovered his crime. Was it after this discovery that she found Emma Poole and brought her to the luxury apartment in Philadelphia to live out her life? Was it then that she found Harrington, Emma’s grandchild, lost in an orphanage, and brought him to the estate to be raised as one of her own? Was the purpose of the Wergeld Trust to ease her family’s conscience? Conciliation, expiation, redemption she had said she was seeking, and it appeared she had been seeking it actively. But still all this had failed, somehow, to stem the curse, because someone had hired Cressi to kill Jacqueline and probably Edward too. Their deaths might be all tied up with Edward Shaw’s gambling debts, true, both killings ordered by Dante to collect on his loan, but after visiting the house of Poole I suspected it had more to do with the ugliness of the Reddman past than anything in the present. So who was ordering the killings? Harrington, the only known surviving Poole? Robert Shaw, knocking off his siblings to increase his inheritance with which he could play the market, showing himself as ruthless in matters of business as his great-grandfather? Kingsley Shaw, carrying out the deranged commands of the voice of the fire? Or was it maybe Faith Reddman Shaw herself, coming back from the dead as her son had claimed, sacrificing her grandchildren one by one as bloody final acts of reparation for her father’s crimes?

Something Caroline had said nagged at me. “Where was Nat tonight?” I asked. “You said he wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t. I don’t know where he was.”

“Was he at Jacqueline’s funeral?”

“Of course.”

Nat, the estate’s gardener and caretaker, was missing. It was not like Nat to miss a Reddman funeral. More than anyone he seemed to know the family’s secrets and I wondered if perhaps his knowledge had proved deadly. A shiver crawled through me just then and I had the urge to stop the car and spin it around and return to Veritas. He was there, I would have bet, in Faith Reddman Shaw’s overrun garden, lying there now just as peacefully as Charity Reddman, the two of them stretched before the statue of Aphrodite, with the mingled ashes of Faith and Christian Shaw ensconced in its base. There was a killer on the loose and its thirst knew no bounds and I was certain now that Nat had also suffered its vengeance. I would have stopped the car and turned around and checked on my certainty myself except that whoever had done it was still there, waiting, waiting for us.

“I want to go someplace where no one has ever heard of the Reddmans,” Caroline said, breaking her long quiet. “Someplace where I can drink wine all day and let my hair grow greasy and no one would ever notice because the whole countryside is full of greasy drunks. France maybe.”

“Last time it was Mexico.”

“Well this time I mean it.” She took out a cigarette, lit it with my car’s lighter; the air in my Mazda grew quickly foul. “It’s all gotten way out of control. I’m through.”

“What about the one good thing in the Reddman past you’ve been looking for? How can you give up before you find it?”

“It’s not there. There’s nothing but cold there. All I want is to get as far from it all as I possibly can.”

“It’s getting worse, Caroline. Whatever is happening to your family is growing more and more brutal.”

“Let it. I’m getting out.”

“So that’s your answer, right, run away. Sure, why not? Running is what you’re best at. Quit on our investigation just like you quit on your movie.”

“Who told you that?”

“Kendall.”

“She talks too much.”

“You have your story pat, don’t you? A happy childhood, a loving home. If something went wrong in your life then it could only be because you were a failure, unworthy of the love of your mother, your father, of Harrington. That’s why you trashed your movie before it was finished, why you flit from interest to interest, from bed to bed. You do everything you can to maintain your comfortable self-image of failure. It’s the one thing you truly can control. ‘Look at the way I branded my flesh, Mommy. Aren’t I a screw-up?’ ”

“France, I think. Definitely France.”

“What then could be more terrifying than learning that maybe it’s your family that is screwed up to hell, that maybe your home wasn’t so loving, that maybe you’re not to blame for everything after all. What could be more terrifying than realizing that success or even love might actually be possible for you.”

“Give it a rest, Victor.”

“Look, I don’t want to find the answers more than you do. I was doing just fine before you came along. You’re the one who says she needs saving. The answers we’re finding could give you what you need to save yourself, but you have to do some of the work too. You tell me it’s hard, well, sweetheart, life is hard. Grow the fuck up.”

“Hide out in France with me, Victor.”

I thought about it for a moment, thought about all I had wanted at the start of everything and suddenly I felt a great swelling of bitterness. “It must be nice to have enough money to run from your life.”