It had been Delia’s.
So Futzy told the gathering of survivors.
“Something else,” Winnie said from the couch, holding Claude’s hand and Bray’s. “The coroner’s report repeatedly mentioned right-handed stabs to the bodies. Now I remember the janitor at the light bank lifting a hand to adjust the lights just before the music started. Did anyone else see that?”
Tweed spoke up. “We were on the bandstand. Me and Dex.” She looked up to recapture it. “The janitor was raising his left hand, kinda drifting it hazily over the switches, struggling to recall which ones he was supposed to throw.”
Futzy brought back other scenes. Gerber Waddell screwing in lightbulbs, triangulating an American flag, weeding flower beds in front of the school. He saw Gerber’s left hand moving, ever moving, his right hand idle or thumb-tucked into his belt.
Futzy looked at Trilby Donner’s little girl. “Pill,” he said, “which hand did you see holding that dry ice pellet? Can you remember?”
“I think so,” the little girl said.
Gripping the oak railing, she brought the scene back with a squinch and a twist to her face. The narrow crack through which she had seen the killer’s arm.
Her hands let go, shaping a slow fog before her. First the left rose, then stopped, falling back into place. Then with increasing certainty, the other, the right, lifted, finding its fixed place in the air, holding the invisible pellet, the arm, the hand, a gesture of strength mixed with delicacy.
The movement of Pill’s hand matched precisely Delia’s gesture on the couch, right before the little girl had fainted.
Trilby Donner, once more in shock and torn umpteen ways, listened as the questions confirmed what all this had been leading to.
Delia Gaskin, Brest’s hush-hush lover and her own, had, by dint of damning evidence, just been convicted of multiple deaths: Zane Fronemeyer and his wives, Sheriff Blackburn, Jiminy Jones, a slew of seniors in the midst of a night of terror, and then, to redirect the finger of accusation, poor innocent Gerber Waddell, a feeb falsely futtered, his reputation forever besmirched.
Trilby felt shame.
And violation.
How could a person seem so decent, mouth all the words of love one could ever hope to hear, yet beneath that facade be monstrous?
She and Brest were still deep in grief over Bix’s death.
Now, their relationship had once again been ripped raw. A betrayer had wrapped herself about their ailing hearts, a snake whose hooded guile had penetrated deep to the soul.
Trilby’s hand went to her mouth.
Her eyes teared up.
Keep it together, keep it together.
Focus on Pill.
Focus on her beautiful innocent girl, nodding to this or that question from the gathered adults, her words pure and carefully chosen.
Pill was not the easiest child to raise. She tested for boundaries. She gave guff. She pushed back.
But always, Trilby sensed her child’s secret delight in being reined in, in knowing where the limits were.
Trilby had feared, coming off the prom, a shattering. She had seen Pill move this way and that in new psychic space, struggling to keep her balance in a world rearranged, a world from which her father had been violently ripped.
But now, here in Claude Versailles’ living room (how she wished Brest could witness it), Pill was taking confident steps onto solid ground. In this precious eight-year-old girl, her childlike honesty in full display, Trilby had her first glimpse of the proud woman her daughter would become.
This vision anchored her.
These were her friends and colleagues, their eyes afire with appalled awe at the deception and temerity of Delia Gaskin. But primarily their eyes brimmed with wonder at the emergence of Pill, her Pill, her lovely daughter, getting near to being gangly of limb, a slim barely-there little girl in bib overalls and close-skulled brown hair.
Her friends could not save Trilby from the madness of the moment, but Pill could. For all her quiet frailty, Pill would pull her mother through; Trilby sensed it deep in her heart.
So too would it be with Brest.
Somehow they would survive this time, keeping a dread secret from the monster in their lives, as would Pill (her innocence wily enough not to tell Delia a thing), until this close-knit community took its proper revenge upon her.
That revenge would not be long in coming.
Already, as the final questions to Pill were asked and answered, Trilby saw wheels turning.
In Futzy Buttweiler.
In Jonquil Brindisi.
In Claude Versailles.
Retribution would be swift and sure.
She and Brest, newly wounded and raw, would be seen after.
More important, Pill would see her father’s murderer dealt with. She would forgive her mommies for their bad choice, rectified at once and explained when she was much older. And she would find firm footing in this marvelous society in the greatest country on the face of the planet.
From the midst of torment, a new seed of hope and solidarity would sprout.
Trilby had never loved her daughter more than she did at this moment. That’s what her tears, freely flowing now, announced to all who cared to observe them.
Hope was justified, she thought, even when life seemed most hopeless.
25. Piecing Together What Was Torn Asunder
Bray looked up at the sound of Claude’s front door opening. In walked Brest Donner from having dropped Delia Gaskin home.
Brest was a hard woman, he thought. Beauty edged with greed, an inturned nature. Before too many years had passed, her great-eagle sweep and flare would droop into something vulturish.
Bray considered the abomination this woman had instigated: a female threesome.
He couldn’t help but be judgmental about such a perverted combination of partners. Despite his years as an outcast and the prejudicial treatment he had suffered, there were certain personal choices that struck him as simply wrong. Three women in a sexual entanglement was one of them. Didn’t the Bible have a few prohibitions against that sort of thing? He believed it did.
“Okay, what’s up?” said Brest. “A surprise party?”
Everyone spoke at once. While the confusion was sorting itself out, Bray whispered to Winnie, “They’ll slap us in jail.”
She goggled at him. “Jeepers, Bray, now what’s your problem?”
“We were heroes, weren’t we? You and me, the two social pariahs, especially. We did the media circuit and the world changed, a tiny bit anyway.”
“So?”
“So now the story will turn way the fuck around: We made a mistake, we got fooled, we fucked up. They’ll take everything back, they’ll try us for Gerber’s murder, they’ll demonize us, it’ll be Notorious for sure.”
Claude leaned to Winnie. “Is our handsome yummy-nums lapsing into Bray-mode again?”
“He sure is,” Winnie said.
