Distant Blood (45 page)

A hard knock rapped on the door. I heard Pop: “Jordan? Uncle Jake? The phones are working again—”

I tried to yell, but it was hardly more than a gasp. Jake threw a pillow down on my head and called: “Jordan's fallen asleep, Bob Don, and I don't want to wake him. Come back later.”

I yanked the pillow from my head, my vision swimming, and somehow found air to fight past the deadness of my throat and my tongue. I screamed, a long, wavery sound.

“Jordan! Jake, what's wrong?”

The end of the cane slammed against my head.

“Jordan?”
The door pounded with the force of Pop's blow. I pulled myself out of the cane's reach, adrenaline pumping me to my feet. No way was I giving up to die. I staggered toward the wall, trying to aim for the door.

Very nasty. Very. You may not even have ten minutes left.

Blurriness descended across my eyes, and I sagged against the wall, fighting to keep my balance. I saw Jake, murkily, moving off the bed and toward me, his hand pressed against his chest.

The door buckled in, wood splinters flying as the hinges cried out in protest. Pop was there, catching me, cradling me in his heavy arms.

“Oh, sweet God!” he cried out. Nausea squeezed my guts.

Jake's voice, wavery and a little breathless, drifted into my ear as I gasped against my father's rain-wet shirt, “Bob Don, now it had to be done.” He let out a raggedy, tortured breath. “Jordan would have told on us all—”

“What have you done to my boy?”
Pop screamed, and he shoved me toward the bathroom. Suddenly my head was dangling above the toilet and Pop's fingers were jammed in my throat. Already nauseous, I retched, but slapped his hand away from mine. “No—didn't swallow. On my skin. He poisoned—the—bandage—” Pop shoved my hand under the faucet, rinsing my palm, screeching at the top of his lungs for Deborah and the others.

“There's no antidote, Bob Don.” Jake spoke, his breath coming in short gasps. “I'm sorry. You see the sacrifices I make—for the family. You see I had to do it, for you, for all our sakes.” His own color didn't look good through my glassy vision. “I don't feel well. Now kiss Jordan goodbye, and fetch me my heart pills. Please—”

Pop released me. I stumbled back into the bedroom, leaning against the elaborate oak paneling of the room I would die in. I slid to the floor, blinking hard, wondering if I could ever feel warm again. I swallowed bile. I blinked harder as I heard voices raised in fear, screams, supplications.

Bob Don, for God's sake, get me my pills … my pills … oh, God.

I tried to call back—was one voice Gretchen's? My throat refused to work. I raised an arm, feeling as if breath were a memory, and focused my vision on the figures in the room. I could see Jake's hand raised in a silent plea, Pop's hand holding something just out of his grasp.

You kill my boy and you want your goddamned pills, old man?

I watched a hand fall, I watched a life end. I closed my eyes.

More screams. Someone rushing past me, into the bathroom. Hands touching me, pulling me up from the floor. A kaleidoscope of noise, and fear, and grief, and in the middle of it all, Pop standing before the bed, with Uncle Jake lying before him, fingers splayed out across his withered chest.

IT WAS LIKE A WAKING DEATH FOR ME.

Somehow, Deborah kept me breathing when my lungs felt like lead. She screamed at me through the swimmy visions, through the fading lights, and as the Coast Guard helicopter rocketed away from the island with Philip, Aubrey, Candace, Jake, and me aboard, through the convulsions. Philip hollered at me, too, that I had to live. His voice—not a whine this time—pierced the rumble of fading thunder.

I asked for Pop. They would not tell me where he was.

At one point I believed myself dead. It seemed logical. My blood felt as cold as it could be without freezing into slush. Cut me and it would have been like pricking a Icee cup. Then I remembered the swirly Icees Sister and I drank as children, chattery cold and sweet against our teeth. I fell asleep—or slipped into coma, you pick—before we landed at the Port Lavaca hospital.

I awoke under a rebreather mask, oxygen pouring into my system, an IV dripping into my arm. My fingers felt numb, but when I scratched on them there was a flash of sensation. Jake was correct. There was no specific antidote to monkshood, but the hospital had pumped me full of oxygen and heart stimulants and I had made it past the first crucial hours. When I could speak, and a nurse busily strutted into the room, I said, “I want my father. And I want my girlfriend.”

She started like I'd scared life out of her. “I'll see what I can arrange.”

She arranged Gretchen.

My stepmother took my hand and held it close. She explained that Pop had told the police everything. About Paul. About Brian. About Mutt. Paul's suicide had been reopened, and Pop was being questioned under house arrest.

Candace was going to be okay. So was Aubrey. They were just down the hall from me, and when I could have more visitors, and they felt up to it, they could come see me, or I could see them. Many of Gretchen's sentences were long. She spoke forever. She held my hand and she cried.

Philip's wound was superficial, although he told me it hurt like hell. He joked and he laughed, and when the rebreather mask came off and I just had the nasal prongs, he said they should charge me less. He said the doctors had identified the poison used against Aubrey and Candace— convallatoxin, a cardiac glycoside similar to digitalis, found in lilies of the valley. Jake had apparently poured water from the vase of lilies in the study into the cranberry juice. The water was poisonous from the cut lilies. I remembered the vase, sitting there in quiet beauty, and shuddered.

Philip said Jake had a heart attack after attempting to kill me. Apparently his medication had been misplaced and they couldn't find it to give it to him in time. I remembered Pop's voice taunting Jake with the pills.

It was an entirely new code of silence.

Aubrey's notes and laptop had been found, stashed in Jake's room, full of hints from phone calls from Lolly that Paul's demise was no suicide and telling him she kept evidence under Sweetie's watchful eye. Aubrey, not Pop, had been the one ripping open Sweetie's bed to locate Paul's stashed jewelry. Wendy had simply either lied to me or seen Pop in the hall right after Aubrey made good his escape. Jake had stolen Aubrey's notes and laptop right before his attempt to kill Aubrey and silence him forever regarding Paul's death. Aubrey was no hero, though; he confessed to being the one to spike Gretchen's drink, eager to note for his book how the family—and Gretchen—would react to her loss of sobriety. Gretchen and Sass were not pleased with him in the least, but they waited until he was released from
the hospital to lecture him thoroughly and suggest he get some counseling.

I kept asking to see Candace. Later, I was told. Later.

The police questioned me—Victor Mendez and Tricia Yarbrough leaning down into my face. I told them I'd fainted during the poisoning and seen nothing. I kept my eyes focused on a ratty piece of tile in the ceiling.

Jake's death was ruled natural causes, by heart failure. And several days later the toxicology results came back from Travis County. There was a lethal dose of digitalis in Lolly's system.

This story has three endings. First, about Pop.

Time passed. I rose from my bed, trembling with the sensation of knowing I would live, wheeling the IV along with me, easing a robe over me, when Pop arrived with Gretchen.

We embraced in silence. He rubbed the back of my head gently.

They sat in chairs, I sat back down on the bed.

“They said you told them about Paul's death—” I began, glancing toward the closed hospital-room door. I was in a private room, which I couldn't afford. I had heard one of the nurses talking about the press descending on the hospital because of that “crazy family on that island.” At least I would hear this alone.

“Yeah, I did. And there's going to be a hearing.” He stumbled over the words and would not look at me. “Gretchen, would you excuse us?”

“Of course. I'll go check in on Aubrey.” She did not mention Candace. I watched her leave.

“No.” I shook my head at the word
hearing.
“No.”

“They're searching for Uncle Mutt and Wendy,” Pop offered by way of diversion. “He's been charged with Rufus's murder.”

“The boat—?”

“No sign of it. Or them.”

“Pop, they can't find you guilty. We'll all testify—”

“Yeah, Jordan, family members on the stand should sway ajury. …”

“We aren't manufacturing that three of us were poisoned.

And poor Rufus was shot, for God's sake. Do a residue test on all our hands. That'll prove none of us killed Rufus….” My voice trailed. “And Jake. He died from the heart attack.”

Pop's face was ashen. “Yes. He died.” His face cracked, and his voice broke under the unimaginable weight.

“We need never speak of this again.” I could hardly hear the words coming from my own throat.
But you don't believe in codes of silence.

“I killed my brother, Jordy, and now I've killed my uncle. I—I'm some sort of fucking monster!” Pop sobbed hard, covering his face with his hands, shivering under fearsome grief.

I wrapped my arms around Pop. And heard Jake's voice from that nightmarish evening:
I'm not a monster.

“No, you're not,” I murmured. “You're not. You're not.” It turned into a slow, slow litany. Eventually he came to know it was true.

Pop did not go to jail. The police talked to him and Aunt Sass for hours on end about Paul Goertz.

After the truth about Paul came out, Deborah didn't speak to Pop. Or Aunt Sass. Or to any of us, ever again. I think of her often. She moved to Atlanta, to work in a clinic. Texas had gone bad for her, forever, I suppose. I think she could understand Pop having to shoot Paul; but she could not grasp the fear that made the family hide the crime, and the hiding of the crime is what killed Brian. The guilt was no less burdensome because it was shared by so many.

Paul Goertz's body was never recovered. Sass confessed she, Lolly, and Mutt had weighed it down and dumped it far out at sea. Perhaps his bones still remain in the watery sludge at the Gulfs bottom. We will never know.

The police exhumed Brian Goertz's remains. The tests found traces of monkshood in the boy's body. Jake had poisoned him when he'd discovered Brian was close to unearthing the truth about Paul's disappearance, then taken him down to the beach and drowned him. At least, so they hypothesized. I tried not to think what had transpired on the dark beach so many summers ago, the poisoned boy being
dragged toward the water by his bruised throat, an old man with the bright flames of hate in his eyes.

Pop was exonerated. After a humiliating hearing that made him an old man. He and Gretchen are back in Mirabeau now, but press across the state had their field day and it doesn't seem quite so busy at his car lot. He sits and watches the tabloid talk shows much of the day, as though he needs to hear confessions of others, no matter how paltry or sordid.

The second ending came far after the others, but it is the least important. The following Thanksgiving, I received a letter with a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, postmark and the following text, printed in a generic computer font:

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.