stopped answering the phone when it rang at the house on McDonald Drive. It was as if he could no longer imagine that the call might be for him.
“He’d become a worthless shell,” I told Rebecca at one point. “He’d been stripped of everything by then.”
It was the word “stripped” that seemed to catch in Rebecca’s mind. She repeated it slowly, as if it had conjured up something even darker than my father’s crime.
“Stripped to the bone,” I said assuredly. “There was nothing left of him.”
I recalled the dreadful baiting which Jamie had continued to inflict on Laura, and how, in the last weeks, my father had sat by and let it go on day after day. The force that had once moved him to defend my sister had dissipated.
Rebecca didn’t challenge my description of my father’s disintegration, but I could see that it disturbed her. For a time, she even seemed curiously disoriented, as if she’d lost her way somehow. At the next meeting, her questions skirted away from the final days of my family’s life. Instead, she concentrated on other issues, our routines and schedules, the division of chores, all the minutiae of my family’s existence.
Then suddenly, during the second week of November, she regained her direction. It was as if after standing poised at the edge of something for a long time, she’d now decided to plunge over the side.
I arrived at her cottage late on a Thursday afternoon. She’d already started a small fire in the hearth, and it was blazing warmly when I arrived.
“It’s cold out,” she said as I came through the door.
I nodded and began to take off my coat.
“I like November,” she added. “I think it’s my favorite month.”
It struck me as an odd choice. “Why?”
She thought a moment. “I guess because it’s cold enough to make it clear that winter really is coming,” she said, “and that we need shelter.”
I shook my head. “Too rainy,” I said. “Too confining.” I shook my shoulders uncomfortably. “It gets into your bones.”
I sat down in my usual seat, then waited for Rebecca to ease herself into the chair across from me.
But she didn’t do that. She took a seat at the table by the window instead, her briefcase already open before her. For a few seconds, she hesitated, her eyes glancing first out the window, then back to her briefcase, then at last to me.
“Do you remember saying that these men had actually seen the monster?” she asked. “That they’d looked it in the eye?”
“Yes.”
“We have to do that, too,” she said. She picked up a single photograph and handed it to me. “We have to look it in the eye.”
It was a picture of my father standing in front of the hardware store on Sycamore Street. It had been taken the day he’d opened the store, and all of us were with him. I, an infant, slept obliviously in my mother’s arms, while Jamie and Laura seemed to hang like small sacks from my father’s hands.
It was the first photograph she’d shown me in which we were all together, and something in it frightened me so much that I actually drew back from it unconsciously, as if it might strike out at me.
I handed the picture back to her. “Okay,” I said. “Now what?”
She looked at me evenly. “As a picture, a family tableau, it’s practically idyllic,” she said.
“Yes, it is. So what?”
“We’ve been through each of the relationships in your family,” Rebecca said. “Now we have to look at the possibility of something outside the family that might have had some bearing on the murders.”
It was then I knew that we were racing toward the end of it. She’d gotten as much information about my family as she expected to get from me. Her final task was simply to assure herself that in getting the story of my family as it related to its destruction, she’d gotten the only story there was, that there were no loose ends, that my father fully and completely conformed to her archetype of “these men.”
“You mean another person?” I asked. “Someone connected to my father? A lover, something like that?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said.
The very idea seemed preposterous to me. It was as if I could accept the fact that my father had slaughtered his family more easily than the notion that he might have loved someone outside the circle of that destruction.
“I don’t think he was the type to have another woman,” I said offhandedly. “Of course, a love affair is not something he would have talked about with a nine-year-old boy.”
Rebecca looked at me. “Would he have talked about it with Laura?”
The question brought back a quick play of memory.
“Maybe,” I said. I remembered how, during the weeks before her death, my sister had appeared to stiffen and grow cold toward my father, to give him unmistakably hostile glances. I’d noticed the change at the time, but been unable to understand it.
“I can say that things did change between Laura and my father,” I added. “At first, after we came back from Cape Cod, they seemed closer than ever. But not long after that Laura withdrew from him.”
Suddenly I saw this change as the key to everything. The last link my father had had with us, his love for my sister, had abruptly broken. His one and only tie to us had snapped, setting him free to kill us all.
I remembered the look on my sister’s face when she’d glanced at my father from time to time during the last
