'How about Jeannie?'
'My uncle Cash told her that she could think of us as family and anytime she needed help come to one of us. Patrick and my father said that was so.'
'And?' Susan said.
'And she started to cry.'
Susan nodded.
'Finally,' she said, 'someone to depend on. Must have felt good for her.'
A couple of pigeons came to where we sat on the bench and stood giving us the beady eye. We had no food to give them. So after a long accusa tory moment, they waddled to the next bench.
'Did you know,' Susan said, 'in certain tribal cultures of the early Middle Ages, the child of a princess was raised by her brothers?'
'I didn't know that,' I said. 'Why did they do that?'
'Something about keeping the question of bloodline in-house, so to speak,' Susan said.
'A little-known fact,' I said.
'I have a PhD from Harvard,' Susan said. 'I know many of them.'
'All of them as useful as that?' I said.
'Oh, heavens no,' Susan said. 'But I do have a question.'
'Of course you do,' I said. 'You're a shrink.'
'How did you feel?' she said.
'Me?'
'You. You were fourteen years old and you'd just killed a man.'
'At the time, I didn't know quite how I felt,' I said. 'I'm not sure I do now.'
Chapter 24
Cash drove Jeannie home. I took a shower and put on clean clothes. There were biscuits left over from breakfast. My father cooked up some antelope steaks and fried some green tomatoes. When Cash came back, we sat down to supper at the kitchen table.
'She got her story straight?' my father said.
'Yeah,' Cash said. 'Tell it just like it happened until the bridge. They hid on the bridge, he went on past them downriver. Don't know where he is.'
'Work for you?' Patrick said to me.
I nodded.
I said, 'I did kill him, though, didn't I?'
Patrick and Cash both looked at my father.
'You made it easier for him to kill himself,' my father said. 'But you didn't make him kidnap Jeannie, or beat her, and you didn't make him chase you down the river with a bowie knife. And you didn't require him to do it drunk, understand?'
'So why not just tell the whole truth?'
'It saves some trouble if we don't,' my father said. 'I told you once that there was right and wrong and there
