Prayers For Rain

She glanced nervously at Angie.

Angie smiled. “It takes a lot, but once he gets revved up, honey?” She shook her head. “Pack up the kids and get out of town, because Main Street’s going to explode.”

Siobhan glanced back in my direction. “He’s smarter than you,” she whispered.

I shook my head. “He’s had the advantage of access. Now I do, too. I’m in his life now,” I said. “I’m in it up until the very end.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re…” She dropped her eyes, continued to shake her head.

“No idea of what?” Angie asked.

She raised her eyes and her head stopped moving. “What you’re truly up against, what you really walked into.”

“So tell us.”

“Ah, thank you, no.” She placed her cigarettes in her purse. “I’ve given you all I care to. I trust you won’t call me to the attention of your INS friend. And I wish you both the best, though I don’t think it’ll help.”

She stood, slid the bag strap over her shoulder.

“Why did Pearse have to be so merciless with Karen?” I asked.

She looked down at me. “I just told you. She was the only heir.”

“I understand that. But why not just have her meet with an accident? Why destroy her piece by piece?”

“That’s his method.”

“That’s not method,” I said. “That’s abhorrence. Why did he hate her so bad?”

She held out her arms, seemingly exasperated. “He didn’t. He barely knew her until Miles introduced them three months before she died.”

“So why do all that to her?”

Her hands clapped her outer thigh. “I told you-it’s his way.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s all I have for you.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “Big chunks of this don’t add up, Siobhan.”

She rolled her eyes, exhaled a weary sigh. “Well, that’s the thing about us criminal types, yeah, Mr. Kenzie? We tend to be a bit untrustworthy.”

She turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’ve a friend in Canton. I’ll stay with her for a bit.”

“How do we know you’re not going straight to Pearse?”

She gave us a wry grin. “The moment I didn’t arrive on the train into Boston, they knew you’d gotten to me. I’m a weak link now, aren’t I? And Pearse doesn’t like weak links.” She bent for her overnight bag, lifted it off the floor. “Not to worry. No one knows about my friend in Canton, except for you two. I’ll have at least a week before anyone has the time to go looking for me, and by then, I expect you’ll have all killed each other.” Her flat eyes twinkled. “Have a nice day now, won’t you?”

She walked to the door, and Angie said, “Siobhan.”

“Yeah?” She grasped the door handle.

“Where’s the real Wesley?” Angie asked.

“I don’t know.” She wouldn’t look at us.

“Guess.”

“Dead,” she said. She still didn’t meet our eyes.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “He outlived his usefulness, yeah? We all do where Scott is concerned, sooner or later.”

She opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot. She walked toward the bus stop on Main without a look back, just a steady shake of her small head, as if simultaneously bitter and bemused by the choices that had led her here.

“She said ‘they,’” Angie said. “You notice that? ‘They knew you’d gotten to me.’”

“I noticed,” I said.

Carrie Dawe’s face cracked in on itself as if it had been hit in the center with an ax.

She didn’t weep. She didn’t cry out or scream or move much at all as she looked down at the photo of Pearse we’d placed on the coffee table in front of her. Her face merely folded inward and her breath turned shallow.

Christopher Dawe was still at the hospital, and the great empty house felt cold and haunted around us.

“You know him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Angie said. “Correct?”

Carrie Dawe nodded.

“What does he do for a living?”

“He’s a…” She swallowed, snapped her eyes away from the photo and curled into herself on the couch. “He said he was an airline pilot for TWA. Hell, we met in an airport. I saw his IDs, a route schedule update or two. He was based out of Chicago. It fit. He has the trace of a midwestern accent.”

“You want to kill him,” I said.

She looked at me, eyes wide, then dropped her chin.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Is there a gun in the house?”

She kept her chin pressed to her chest.

“Is there a gun in the house?” I repeated.

“No,” she said quietly.

“But you have access to one,” I said.

She nodded. “We have a house in New Hampshire. For ski season. There are two there.”

“What kind?”

“Excuse me?”

“What kind, Mrs. Dawe?”

“A handgun and a rifle. Christopher sometimes hunts in the late autumn.”

Angie reached out, put a hand over Carrie Dawe’s. “If you kill him, he still wins.”

Carrie Dawe laughed. “How’s that?”

“You’re destroyed. Your husband is destroyed. Most of the fortune, I’ll bet, will go to your criminal defense.”

She laughed again, but this time tears had sprung out along the tops of her cheekbones. “So what?”

“So,” Angie said softly, tightening her hand on Carrie’s, “he set out years ago to destroy this family. Don’t let him succeed. Mrs. Dawe, look at me. Please.”

Carrie turned her head, swallowed a pair of tears that reached opposite corners of her mouth at the same time.

“I’ve lost a husband,” Angie said. “Just as you lost your first. Violently. You got a second chance, and yeah, you’ve fucked it up.”

Carrie Dawe’s laugh was one of shock.

“But you still have it,” Angie said. “You can still make it right. Make a third chance out of your second. Don’t let him take that.”

For a good two minutes, no one spoke. I watched the two women hold hands and stare hard into each other’s faces, heard the clock tick on the mantel above the dark fireplace.

“You’re going to hurt him?” Carrie Dawe said.

“Yes,” Angie said.

“Really hurt him,” she said.

“Bury him,” Angie said.

She nodded. She shifted on the couch and leaned forward, placed her free hand over Angie’s.

“How can I help?” she asked.

As we drove over toward Sleeper Street to relieve Nelson Ferrare on the roof, I said, “We’ve tailed his ass for a week. Where’s he vulnerable?”