an open window while Lincoln talked on the phone. His end of the conversation made it clear he was alone; Lydia was in the hospital-nervous breakdown. Everyone assumed she was worried sick about me. Nobody guessed the truth.”
Erin did not ask what the truth was.
“Once the lights were out, I broke in through the back way. The lock never was any good, which is why I installed a padlock on that door once I bought the place.
“Lincoln was snoring in bed. I clubbed him unconscious with his own shotgun. Lugged him to the carport, dumped him in the trunk of his car. Drove north to Prescott Forest. Lincoln came to around three in the morning and started thumping on the lid.
“It was still dark when I pulled into the woods and popped the trunk. At first he was crazy with rage, till I let him see the gun-his own sawed-off Remington, steady in my hands. He turned conciliatory then. Tried to make nice. Hoped I didn’t hold it against him, what he’d done; it was just a father’s way of showing love; sure, that’s all he was, a loving father…
“I let him talk as I marched him to the creek in the predawn dark. After a while the words dried up, and he started to cry. Weeping like a woman, like the bullying coward he was. But I don’t think he believed I would do it, really do it, until he stumbled over the corpse at the water’s edge.
“Fear put some fight into him. He spun around, grabbed for the shotgun, and I gave him a taste of it, right in the face.”
Erin shuddered. He saw her reaction, and his eyes narrowed coolly.
“Don’t look so stricken, Doc. It’s not the worst way to die. He never even heard the blast.”
Just like I won’t hear it when you shoot me, she thought numbly.
“Before I left, I turned the gun on Harold. Put the muzzle in his mouth and blew his head off. Nobody was going to identify that corpse from dental records.”
“What about fingerprints?”
“I’d never been arrested; my prints weren’t on file. I don’t know if Gund had a rap sheet. But this was 1968, remember. No computerized fingerprint searches, no nationwide data bank. If Gund had been local, his prints could have been on file somewhere in Arizona. But he’d wandered in from Oregon only a couple weeks earlier.
“Low probability the authorities would bother with prints, anyway. The case was open-and-shut, a no-brainer. Lincoln had beaten me; folks back home knew that much. He’d made a lot of noise to the press about how angry he was at his disobedient son. And just a few days earlier I’d been seen by someone who knew the family; my father could have known where to find me. Besides, it was 1968, an angry year.
“When the police found Lincoln, he had the gun in his hand; I’d wedged it into his fingers with the muzzle under his chin, or where his chin used to be. Next to him, there was the body of a boy my age, wearing my clothes, with my wallet. His hair was brown, not blond like mine, but the shotgun blast had scattered most of it, and I’d gathered up the rest and fed it to the creek.
“Lydia’s hospitalization ensured that she was in no condition to view the body. The only people who looked at it were cops, coroners, and morticians, none of whom had known me.”
“So you got away with it.”
“Well, there was one thing that had me worried for a while. One of the papers reported that the police were trying to find a boy named Harold, last seen with me.”
“You must have anticipated that.”
“Not entirely. People entered and left the camp all the time. Nobody kept track of anyone. There was no organization, no one in charge. As it turned out, that’s what saved me. The kids interviewed by the police knew nothing about the missing boy except his first name. They couldn’t agree on his description, and they didn’t even know he was from Oregon; I was the only one he’d talked to at any length. The cops had nothing to go on; there were a million long-haired teenagers named Harold. I was safe.”
“Safe,” Erin echoed softly.
“And free. Free of Lincoln. Free of the past.”
But she knew he had never emancipated himself from his father or his childhood. And at some level, she was certain, he knew it, too.
“Gund had an Oregon driver’s license,” he went on quietly. “No photo on it, fortunately; that particular innovation postdates the sixties. There was only a typed inventory of physical characteristics. The one serious discrepancy between his appearance and mine was hair color, as I mentioned. When I got a new license eventually, I passed that off as a clerical error.”
“Where did you go?”
“New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada… all over. I hitchhiked, did odd jobs, got hassled by local cops. The transient’s life. Not as glamorous as it looks in the movies. Eventually I got sick of all that. I settled in Wisconsin, found myself a janitor’s job at a university. Worked there for twenty years. You’ve read the clippings. You know what I did on the side.”
“What made you relocate to Arizona?”
“You and Annie. I was looking for you.”
Stalking us, she corrected silently. “After all that time? But… you never even knew us.”
“Maybe I wanted to.”
“Why?”
No answer.
Let it go, she told herself. She knew his reason. She had no need to hear him say it.
Except she wasn’t sure. The pieces didn’t quite fit.
And she had to know.
“What is it you feel for us, Oliver?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Feel? Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“You ask me questions, and you won’t accept my answers.”
“Because the answers are incomplete. You went to a lot of trouble to bring me here.”
“For help. For therapy.”
“There are other therapists. Why me? Why a member of the family?” No response. “You took a risk working for Annie. There was at least a slight chance she would identify you. People don’t do things-difficult things, dangerous things-without a motive. What’s yours? What do we mean to you?”
“Nothing,” he said again. “You mean nothing.”
She could see the denial in his face, in the twisted pose of his body.
“You want to believe that,” she breathed, “but I don’t think you do.”
“I don’t give a damn what you believe.”
She would not be deterred by his hostility. She was on the trail of something important, something hidden from her and from Oliver himself; regardless of the consequences, she had to uncover it, had to bring it into the light.
“Annie and I were born in 1966,” she said slowly, “when you were still living at home. Did you ever see us as babies? Did our parents bring us to the ranch?”
“No, never.”
That surprised her. “Maureen never visited Lydia?”
“Not after you were born.”
“How about before then?”
A shrug. “Once.”
“Was she pregnant?”
“No. She wasn’t even married yet.” He shifted in his seat, and his blue eyes flashed. “None of this is relevant to anything.”
It was, though. She knew it was, though she couldn’t see how or why.
“You remember her visit,” she said. “She must have made some sort of impression on you.”
“Not really.”
“Did you talk with her? Spend time with her?”
“Of course not. I was just a kid.”
