the mask lowered again, “like you’ve already said.”
“Someone else, yes,” I asked. “Someone waiting for him at an airport or a bus station, or just on a corner, waiting for him to pull up in the car.”
Swenson shook his head slowly, ponderously, as if there were heavy weights inside his head. “No,” he said. “Someone who was already with him. Someone in the house.” He looked at me intently. “Someone helping him.”
I stared at him, astonished. “Helping him?” I whispered. “Helping him kill us?”
Swenson nodded. “We followed your father’s tracks down into the basement,” he said. “They were very bloody, and they went all the way down to the third step.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But that was as far as they ever went,” Swenson added laboriously, wheezing loudly now. “The only tracks on the basement floor were the little ones your mother made through those pools of water that had seeped in from the rain.”
I nodded, waiting, as I knew I must, for the thing that didn’t fit.
“But if your father had fired at your mother from the third step,” Swenson added, “then he would have riddled the box she’d hid behind.” His head shifted back and forth, as if with the weight of what he knew. “But that box wasn’t hit at all,” he added. He brought the mask to his face and sucked in a long, mighty breath. “It hadn’t been moved, either,” he added as he lowered it slightly, “because if someone had moved it, it would have left a smear of blood.” He looked at me pointedly as he returned the mask to his mouth, took a long, heavy breath, then lowered it again. “Someone walked around that box and shot your mother,” he began again, his voice high and tremulous now, breaking with the effort these last words had cost him. “Maybe brought her back up the stairs, too,” he added, “because there were no tracks from your father’s shoes that went below that third step.”
“Did you tell Rebecca this?”
He nodded.
“What did she say?”
“She said he must have changed before he went downstairs,” Swenson answered.
“Is that possible?”
“Well, we found his bloody shoes and clothes in the bathroom upstairs,” Swenson said. “And there was that small amount of time between the second shot and the last one.”
“Was that long enough for him to have changed his clothes, then walked down to the basement and killed my mother?” I asked.
Swenson looked at me solemnly. “Rebecca thought so.”
“Do you?”
For a moment, he seemed to review the whole terrible choreography of my family’s murder, his head lifting slightly, as the mask dropped into his lap.
“No,” he said finally, “I think there was some …”
A quick breath left him, and he leaned back into the pillows, brought the plastic mask to his mouth, and drew in a tortured, wracking breath. “Someone else,” he said, on what seemed like his final breath, the mask returning quickly to his mouth, his eyes peering motionlessly over its rounded, plastic rim, watching me, animal-like, as if his green, amphibian eyes were poised just above the surface of a murky, pool.
Someone else.
As I drove back toward my hotel room that afternoon, I thought of nothing but those words. I remembered that Nellie Grimes had used the same words in her interview with Swenson. She had insisted on my father’s innocence, then ascribed the blame simply and mysteriously to “someone else.”
My lips parted in the only answer I could offer at the time. “The other woman,” I whispered.
But who?
It was nearly night when I arrived back at the hotel. As I headed across its dank, cluttered lobby, the little bald desk clerk who’d regarded me so suspiciously over my long stay unexpectedly motioned me toward the reception desk.
“There’s a package for you,” he said, then reached beneath the desk and handed me a small, rectangular box.
It had been sent first to my house in Old Salsbury, then to the offices of Simpson and Lowe, and finally forwarded to me here. For a single, surreal instant, I sensed that it had come from my father, some macabre remembrance he’d sent to mock and torment me, a blood-encrusted strand, perhaps, of my mother’s hair. I tucked the package quickly under my arm, took the stairs up to my third-floor room, and tossed it, unopened, on the bed.
It lay there for a long time while I sat beside the window, staring out at the deserted street, still trying to reason out the identity of the unknown woman who, in the end, had helped my father destroy not only one, but both my families. Step by step, I once again walked the paces of my father’s crime, following the bloody tracks Swenson had followed, a trail that led from Jamie’s room to Laura’s, and finally down the basement stairs to where two women had waited for him, one crouched behind a cardboard box, the other standing over her, waiting in an awesome silence for the shotgun to be passed.
I drew my eyes away from the window and let them come to rest on the small, brown box that had arrived at my hotel that day. I went to the bed, picked it up, and began to open it slowly, ritualistically, as if I were uncovering a treasure of vast renown, some relic from an ancient faith.
It was no such awesome thing, of course. It was nothing more than Rebecca’s book.
I stared at it, disappointed, exhausted, barely engaged enough to keep my eyes upon it. Still, it had its own dark allure. The jacket was rather melodramatically illustrated with the face of a sinister-looking paternal figure, but
