Hearing the doubt behind the question, he turned back to the window, pulled his hands from his pockets, and placed them on the edge of the sink, leaning into it. “Have you ever been questioned by the police?”
“Other than being stopped for speeding, no.”
“It makes you feel guilty, even though you’re not. It’s the loneliest, most isolating feeling in the world.”
“Your father—”
“Couldn’t be bothered to go with me to the police station.”
“You had Gall Hathaway in your corner.”
“The police questioned us separately. He wasn’t in on those initial interrogations.”
“If I recall correctly, he retained a lawyer for you.”
“Not right away. We didn’t think a lawyer would be necessary. During those first couple of shakedowns I was all alone.”
“They came down hard on you.”
“You could say, yeah. He thought for sure I’d killed your sister.”
“The detective, you mean?”
“Moody. You called him Monroe in your book, but his name was Dale Moody. Soon as he got my name from your folks—who also thought I was the culprit—he came to my house, woke up me and my old man, asked if he could talk to me about Susan. But he didn’t exactly put it in the form of a polite request. Till then I didn’t even know that she’d been murdered. I learned that from him when he started trying to strong-arm a confession out of me.”
“What was that like, being pressured to make a confession?”
He left the window and went to the fridge, took out the pitcher of tea and brought it back to the table. She shook her head no when he held the pitcher above her glass, so he poured himself a refill, then resumed his seat across from her. However, instead of taking a drink, he placed the fingers of both hands against the glass and rubbed them up and down.
“Dent?”
“What?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I heard you.”
“Well, how did you feel?”
“How do you think? I felt like shit. Enough said.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m inviting you to vent your anger, and I think you want to.”
“After all this time? It’s a little late.”
“Yesterday you said it hadn’t been long enough.”
He removed his hands from around the glass and rubbed his wet fingertips on the legs of his jeans. He frowned irritably at Bellamy, but she kept her expression calm and inquisitive.
He mouthed another curse, then said, “The girl I’d been making out with two days earlier was on a slab in the county morgue. Something like that sorta messes with your mind, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, I would.”
“I was trying to wrap my brain around Susan being killed by the tornado, when this
“I tried to capture those conflicting emotions in my book.”
“You described the scene real well, even down to leaving my old man out of it.”
“I omitted him because I didn’t have a sense of him.”
Dent barked a laugh. “Join the club. I lived with him, and I didn’t have a sense of him, either. For all practical purposes, the man was a fucking ghost.”
That struck her as odd phraseology. “Explain what you mean by that.”
“Why? Are you plotting another book?”
She slapped the tabletop as she came quickly to her feet. “Okay, don’t explain it. You’re the one who proposed we take this trudge down memory lane, not me. You can see yourself out.”
As she went past him, his arm shot out and encircled her waist, bringing her up short and close to him.
The contact startled her, making her breath catch. They held that pose for several moments, neither of them moving, then he relaxed his arm, dragging it away from her slowly, trailing his fingers over her rib cage. Softly he said, “Sit down.”
She swallowed and resumed breathing. “Are you going to act like a jerk?”
“Probably. But you wanted to hear this.” He nodded her toward the chair.
She returned to it, placed her hands primly in her lap, and looked at him expectantly. But after several seconds, he shrugged. “Well? Ask away.”
“I have to pull it out of you? You’re not going to volunteer anything?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What happened to your mother?”
The question caught him off guard, and she was glad it was he who seemed unbalanced for a moment. He looked away, shifted his position in the chair, rolled his shoulders in a defensive gesture. “I was told she died when I was a baby.”
She continued watching him, dozens of follow-up questions implied.
Finally, he said, “I never saw a death certificate. My old man never took me to visit a grave. We never commemorated her birthday or the day she died. There were no maternal grandparents. None of that. I don’t even know what she looked like because I was never shown a picture of her. It was like she’d never existed. So what I figure, she left me with him. Split. Vamoosed. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me.”
“Maybe he never came to terms with it himself.”
“I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. Anytime I bugged him for information about her, he would say, ‘She died.’ End of discussion.”
“So it was just the two of you?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it cozy.”
“You speak of him in the past tense. He’s no longer living?”
“No.” Then, bitterly, “Not that you could call what he did ‘living.’”
“He was a ghost,” she said, using the word he’d used earlier to describe the man.
“You know, on second thought, that’s not an apt description. Because he
His moss-colored eyes turned hard. “But he never attended a single school event. He never met a friend. Never watched me play a sport, and I played them all. I signed my own report cards. He functioned. That’s all. He wasn’t into sports, women, religion, gardening, stamp collecting, basket weaving. Nothing. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke.
“His conversations consisted of maybe three sentences, including the ones he had with me. He went to work every day, came home, served our supper, turned on the TV for a couple of hours, then went to his bedroom and shut the door. We never took a vacation. Never went anywhere. Not to the movies, ball games, pool halls, the city dump.” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “We did nothing together.
“I’d misbehave, do something
“He was a consistent SoB, I’ll say that for him. He died a puzzle I never solved and had lost interest in a long time before. All I know about him is that whatever it was that shut him down permanently shut out the rest of the world.”
“Including you.”
He raised a shoulder. “No matter.”
