Dear Irene

“She didn’t deny hurting the boy.”

“Don’t you see? She was trying to protect me. I shoved that miserable sonofabitch into the wall. I did! The little bastard was choking me to death. She ran over, she tried to pull him off me, but I was the one who shoved him into that wall! They were liars! They were all liars! They hated me and they lied!” He was shouting, and scaring the hell out of me. His eyes were wild and angry, and I berated myself for bringing the whole subject up.

He grew quiet, then said, “She was the best mother in the world.”

I looked over at him. He was crying.

We turned onto Dunleavy. There’s about a five mile strip of it that runs along a flood control channel. As he had said it would, the rain had lightened to a drizzle, but the road was slick and muddy from rain and road construction. Bulldozers and graders sat idle on the right shoulder.

I glanced into the side mirror and felt knots forming in my stomach. We were being followed. I was fairly sure it was Frank’s car. I realized it would be much harder for him to stay out of sight on this dark, deserted road.

Jimmy looked into the mirror on his side.

“What about Maggie Robinson?” I asked, trying to distract him. “She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”

He turned to glare at me. “She was a rotten bitch who did nothing but punish me for her son’s death for years. She was a little worried at first, afraid the Social Service people would come around, check on her. Afraid they hadn’t made me disappear.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Your detective friend was looking into it. You know what he learned. I was just so much lost paperwork. When my stepmother began to realize that she and J.D. had pulled it off, she started beating me. She used to tie me up and burn me with cigarettes. Look!” He pulled back a sleeve. There were rounded scars all along the inside of his arm. “I’d scream bloody murder, but did anyone ever help me? No. I was that poor Mrs. Davis’s problem child.”

He was silent for a moment, brooding. “I learned from her, though. I learned how to be invisible. It was the only way to be safe. I learned how to avoid attracting attention. She needed attention — couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t. It made me stronger than her. No one knew what I was thinking, what I was feeling.”

“Why didn’t you just kill her?”

“I thought about it,” he said. “Especially after my mother died. Peggy wouldn’t let me grieve for my own mother. She’d tell me over and over how glad she was that my mother was dead. ‘Now we’re even,’ she’d say. But I didn’t let her know what I felt. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. She was mean, she was greedy, she was selfish — but she wasn’t the one who caused the problem in the first place. The little liars caused it. Not her. Peggy Davis. Pathetic. She wasn’t any more real than I was. She made sure I wasn’t. Made me change my name. My name! My father was a war hero and I couldn’t use his name!”

“So Margaret Robinson became Margaret Davis,” I said softly, trying to get him to lower his own voice, to calm down. “It took me awhile to make the connection between the nicknames for Margaret; she just changed from Maggie to Peggy. And you became Justin Davis.”

He was looking in the mirror again and didn’t answer me.

“Jimmy,” I asked, trying to get his attention away from it, “why now? Why did you wait all these years?”

He looked back at me. “She would have told on me.”

“Who, Edna?”

“No, no. Peggy. I used to be afraid of her. Not now. Not now… but before, before I learned that she was weak, she knew how to scare me. She was in control. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Being in control. She knew about me, so she was in charge. The person in control has to know everything. That’s why I’m in control now. I know you. I’ve studied you. I know your secrets. Peggy… she knew all kinds of things. We had…” his eyes darted away from me for a moment. “We had secrets,” he said, watching me again, as if looking for some reaction. When I said nothing, he went on. “But then the funniest thing happened. She forgot! She forgot everything! I thought it was one of her tricks at first, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell anyone anything. Nothing at all! Isn’t that funny?”

He smiled at me. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile for more than a few seconds. A big, gentle smile. It transformed him somehow, and oddly, for a brief moment, he wasn’t so frightening. There was a small boy there, an eight-year-old, perhaps. What kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? he once asked me. There was a killer beneath his smile, yes — but I wondered who he might have become if someone as monstrous as Peggy Davis hadn’t been allowed to raise him.

He looked over at the side mirror.

The smile was gone.

“You bitch! You had us followed. It’s your boyfriend, isn’t it? Step on it — go on, speed up!”

“The road is muddy here—”

“Goddamn it! I said speed up!”

I stepped down on the accelerator. It was all I could do to keep the van under control.

“Damn you! Why did you have to ruin everything! It could have been so wonderful! I would have been good to you, you know.” He rolled down his window and leaned out with the gun. “Say good-bye to Mr. Harriman. He’s about to die, Cassandra.”

Suddenly I didn’t care what Jimmy Grant might do to me. I only knew that I wouldn’t let him kill Frank. I used the only weapon I had on hand. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the right.

27

FOR A FEW SECONDS, it was dream like; an unreal combination of motion and time that didn’t fit in the usual order of either. The van went into a spin, the mud from the construction removing all friction from beneath the wheels. We glided along at an amazing speed. With a deafening bang, we tore through a chain-link fence, then suddenly there was a sensation of moving through space. Which, of course, is exactly what we were doing.