massacred by an early frost. We were surrounded by casual death. I thought about the past spring, when the flowers had been planted, and now most of them were gone. The first color was showing in the leaves.
Eric was the image of blissful ignorance. I was tired of wearing suits and formality and maturity and what was happening to me.
“Have you been looking at your mail lately?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Those letters with little windows in front that you see your name through.”
“Huh?… Oh. Jason, it’s no problem. I’ll get everything paid off now.”
“Do you even know how much you owe?”
Talk about a sheepish look. “Not that much.” Baa, baa. It was good for him there was no spaghetti close by.
“Does a hundred eighty thousand sound familiar?”
He was alarmed. “No way. No.”
“What have you been spending it on?” He didn’t live that richly. His apartment was expensive, but it was just that and his cars. Certainly not clothes.
“I don’t know.” He looked at the heap beside him. “The leathers were three thousand, I think.”
“And that doesn’t include any sharks that don’t report to credit agencies.”
“None of those, Jason. I did a couple times back in college. Now I’ve got credit cards.”
“Rule number 83-don’t take money from anybody who doesn’t own a building in Manhattan. Rule number 84- until you’ve got the cash under control, don’t buy anything with a price more than three digits. Rule 85-don’t be stupid, Eric.”
He grinned. “The first one’s easy, the second one maybe. Eighty-five would really cramp my lifestyle.”
“So would breaking it. Things are different now.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, the difference is we’ve got a lot more money.”
“You don’t know how big a difference that is.”
“You’re getting way too tense, Jason.” He was sitting next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed, just being a friend, a brother. “Come on. It’s okay.”
For five seconds I almost broke open. I had always taken care of him, through school and life, and now I needed someone to take care of me. I wanted to tell him what my life had become, and what I hated about it. I wanted to tell one person about how I didn’t know what I was doing and I was afraid, and I wanted someone to tell me why I was here. Just tell me why.
The man who could have told me wasn’t there. We’d buried him a week ago.
There was sound from the path behind us. I turned, and maybe I was even expecting it was him. It was Katie.
She was also in jeans, and I felt even more out of place in that comfortable, informal place; she sat at my left and Eric at my right. I have very few moments that are intimate, where I know I am in love; and I loved both of them then, my wife and my brother. If only money could have kept the rest of the world away from us. But instead, it drew the world in.
“Have you told him?” she asked me.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to tell Katie, except in anger. I regretted that I’d told her abruptly the way I had. And I couldn’t get angry enough at Eric to hurt him that way. I’d rather drown a puppy than tell this puppy his daddy had been murdered. It didn’t make any difference to me that it could have been either of them who did it.
“What?” Eric said.
I took a deep breath. “Last night I talked with a man from the police. He said that Melvin’s accident… wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t an accident?”
“That’s what they think.”
He stared right at me for a long time. “Someone killed him?”
“That’s what they think,” I said again.
“Do they know who?”
I tried to remember: what had I first said when Wilcox told me?
“I don’t think they do.”
“Who would want to?”
Did he really mean that? Was he that innocent?
“That’s what the police will try to find out.” I couldn’t tell if it was worse for Eric that Melvin had been killed, or just that there might have been someone who would have wanted to kill him. He really didn’t grasp what kind of man Melvin had been.
“How would they have done it?”
“The policeman said it was the brakes.”
“The hydraulics or the pads?”
This was a puppy with a degree in mechanical engineering. “He said the lines had been drained.”
He frowned. “How could they tell?”
“I guess they were empty.”
He shook his head. “But I saw the car. The front axle was so smashed that the hydraulic lines were torn off. There’s no way to tell if they’d been empty before the crash. And he would have known right away that something was wrong. Do they think it happened at Mr. Spellman’s house? It couldn’t have been low on brake fluid for very long.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out soon.”
He put his chin on his hand and stared. “I… I wonder who would kill him.” Then he was quiet. At least that was done.
It wasn’t, though. Katie had a question. “What about Angela?”
“She could have killed him.” No, I didn’t say that, but only barely. Instead I said, “One of us needs to tell her.”
“We should go over together.”
Yes, we should. It was an hour to the big house, an hour to tell her, an hour back. I could get to Fred’s office by eight. I had one more word for Eric.
“This is not public yet,” I said. “Don’t talk about it, okay?”
“Who would I talk to?” The kid must have some friends.
“If someone calls. A reporter maybe. Just hang up and call me.”
“Okay.”
“That’s Rule 86-don’t talk to anyone about it.”
I left Eric to the hamburger Rosita had fixed for him and went back to my office, and dialed.
“Yes, honey?”
“Pamela,” I said. “Would you please pay Eric’s bills for me?”
“I’ll do it this afternoon. Do I still have access to the personal expenses account?”
“I think so. Thank you very much.”
Twenty minutes later Katie had changed into a somber dress and her pearls, and we were waving good-bye as Motorcycle Man shattered the peace of our neighbors. Then we were on the roads I knew so well, away from the city and down the coast. It wasn’t that I had driven them with such frequency, but rather with such portent. It had been the Road to Melvin. What was this the road to now?
My card still worked at the gate, of course. We circled around the front lawn and into the courtyard, the endless brick walls surrounding us. The wings on either side were two stories, and the monolithic mass in front was three. Forty-eight windows looked down on us as we stepped out of the car. I used to count them every time I came home from boarding school.
Angela was expecting us. We were shown in to a feathery front parlor that Melvin had never used. It had always been hers. The rest of the house hadn’t changed, but it had the feeling of a corpse at a viewing-the soul was gone. Angela had some of that feeling about her, too.
She watched me with her wide eyes, her fluffy lashes flittering about them. We smiled and exchanged just a
