James Patterson - Murder House

“Murphy, I–I’m sorry,” he says. “I was a jerk. And I had you all wrong. I thought you were a loose cannon hassling poor Aiden for no reason. And then I — well, I admit for a time there, I—”

“You thought I was a serial killer.”

He throws up a hand.

“That’s okay,” I say, “for a time there, I thought you were, too.”

He laughs, which might, under the circumstances, be the best response of all.

“When Noah showed me those investigative records,” he says, “and it turned out you were the daughter of — I mean, I thought you’d been playing me all along.”

That’s what Noah thought, too.

“Plus, your fingerprints on that knife—”

“I got it,” I say. I may not like it, but I have so much emotion stirred up inside me right now, I don’t have room for anger.

“Justin’s spilling like a volcano,” he says. “Now that we have him in custody, he won’t shut up. He’s proud of it. He says he’s part of the legacy now, he’ll go down in history, et cetera.”

“I’m sure he feels that way.”

“He told us about everything in 1994, too. Apparently, Holden saw you and your family walking to the beach one day, right past his house. He got one look at you and — I guess there’s a strong resemblance to your biological mother. He followed you around the beach all day, then he hired an investigator, and — well, you know the rest. You got the investigator’s file right there. Then he had Justin snatch you up and bring you to the house—”

“Isaac,” I say, raising a hand. “I don’t want to know the details. I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember.”

“Sure. Yeah, sure, Murphy. Well, I’ll see you next week, then. If you’re ready.”

I shake my head. “You need me to testify at the prelim?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He places my badge and my gun on the table.

“You don’t think I’m going to lose my best cop, do you?” he says. “I may be a horse’s ass on occasion, but I’m not stupid.”

I walk to the cemetery on Main Street, the cemetery where Winston Dahlquist and his descendants are buried. The afternoon air is mild and smells of the rain this morning.

Just down from the Dahlquist plot, Aiden Willis is busy planting flowers in a vase by some tombstone. Back at work already. Always the same, the raggedy shirt, the baseball cap turned backward, the scarecrow hair. He surely takes after his father, not his mother.

Yesterday, the DA’s office officially announced that it had no basis to proceed with murder charges against Aiden for the death of Holden VI. Aiden was too young at the time to have been charged as an adult, and the circumstances, they said, “strongly suggest that his use of force was justified.”

That might be the understatement of the year.

Aiden stops what he’s doing when he sees me approach, squints at me.

I don’t really know what to say to him. I have no sense of family with him. We couldn’t be less alike. We’ve never known each other. We’ve never shared a single thing, other than a mother.

“Hey,” I say.

His eyes scatter about, as always, never holding a gaze.

“You doin’ okay?” he asks me.

“Me? Yeah, sure. Listen, Aiden, I’m sorry for the way I treated you. I thought — I thought you were a part of this. I had no idea it was Justin.”

He nods, his eyes roaming around the ground at my feet.

“Did you?” I ask, uncertain if I should even ask. “All these murders? Did you know it was him?”

His eyes go blank a moment, as if he’s lost in a thought — more accurate, probably, to say lost in a feeling. “Didn’t know for sure,” he says. “Couldn’ta ever proved nothin’. Who’d believe me, anyhow? I’m just a ditch-digger. He’s got all that money and shit.”

“And he had the knife you tossed out the window,” I add.

For a moment, Aiden’s eyes focus, though not on me, looking off in the distance, his mouth forming a small o. “He said he kept it somewheres for safekeepin’. Case I ever got any ideas, he said.”

A not-so-subtle threat. Don’t mess with me, Justin was saying to Aiden, or the cops will suddenly find this bloody knife. Fuck with me and I’ll send you to prison.

He tortured Aiden. He made Aiden shoot up the school yard with him a year after Holden’s death — one of the many things Justin has bragged about to the police — and who knows what else he said and did to him over the years.

“What about me?” I ask. “Did you know who I was?”

His eyes are still darting around, but a sheen of tears covers them. He shakes his head. “When you first came back to town, first time I saw you — you looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure it. Then I finally ’membered where I’d seen you, from all that time ago when we was kids, that day at the Dahlquist house. I didn’t know why you’d come back. Couldn’t figure. But I didn’t know that you were my — that we was—”

The flowers, halfway in the vase, start to tip over. Aiden reaches for them.

“You should probably get back to your work,” I say.

Aiden fixes up the flowers, sets them down firmly, turns to me in his indirect, no-eye-contact way. “I’s too young to know ’bout you at the time. I’da been only little when you was born. One time, when I’s older, I saw a picture of her, with her belly.”

I saw it, too. The photo from the scrapbook, with the baby bump.

“She said the baby didn’t live. She got real sad.”

Probably the same thing that she told Holden VI, that I didn’t live, that I was stillborn.

A little white lie . To protect me, so Aiden wouldn’t look for me. So Holden wouldn’t look for me. So nobody would ever look for me.

His darting eyes, just for a single moment, make contact with mine before skittering away again. “You look like her,” he says. “A good bit like her.”

“I’m lucky. She was very pretty. And courageous. She did a brave thing for me. So did you, Aiden. If there’s anything I can—”

“You wanna see her grave?” he asks.

I start to speak, but a lump fills my throat. I nod and follow him.

It’s a simple grave, farther to the south of the cemetery, an ordinary headstone kept up pristinely.

Our beloved mother. Even though, for all practical purposes, Aiden was an only child. Even though, as far as he knew, I didn’t survive the birth. Still, he included me, the sibling he never really had, the sibling he never knew.

My — our — biological mother. The woman who gave me up to save me. A prostitute who surely wanted something better for herself, and for her son.

And for her daughter.

July 12, 1994 — the day Gloria was killed in a hit-and-run. The day before the seven hours of hell, when I was plucked off the street and taken to 7 Ocean Drive, so Holden could take my life, too, and end any vestige of the tortured, maniacal Dahlquist bloodline.

I look over at Aiden, whose eyes have filled with tears.

“I still miss her,” he says, his voice quaking. “You’da — you’da liked her.”

“I know I would have.” I take Aiden’s hand in mine. “But you still have family. You still have me. You’re my hero, Aiden. And you’re my brother.”

I lean over and kiss him on the cheek. He recoils slightly. I don’t get the sense that a lot of women have kissed him in his life.

“Okay,” he says awkwardly. His face brightens just a bit. “That’d be okay.”