Chapter Eighteen
Davy had expected to be angry when he came face to face with Fraser again.
Sure, he’d always expected to die young and, if he was honest, which wasn’t like him, he’d probably deserved it. Not for whatever reason Fraser had for the murder, but in general. He’d not been a good man in life.
Or death, but there wasn’t really any consequence for that. It seemed to be an advantage.
His little brother had still murdered him, though. That was the sort of thing that stirred up all sorts of things from the silt. Or that’s what he’d thought anyhow.
Instead, maybe because he didn’t remember the murder, Davy just watched Fraser avoid a good time like it was a job and felt…
OK, he couldn’t put his finger on it exactly. It was one of the ones he wasn’t good with, but it wasn’t angry or vengeful.
Easy, maybe?
Close enough.
Davy still had a job to do, though. Sentiment and business—or afterlife mystical contracts—didn’t mix.
“Do you ever wonder if my Dad would have done a better job?” Davy asked.
Fraser drew on the end of his cigar. He held the smoke in his lungs as he flicked the ash onto the wet grass.
“No,” he said, the word escaping on gray wisps that filtered up into the leaves of the tree. “What would be the point?”
“I’ve been thinking about him,” Davy poked at what was hopefully a sore spot. “About why he’d do what he did.”
Fraser glanced over at him, his face unreadable. “Is that why you were at the graveyard on the Solstice?”
Davy ducked his head, scrubbing one hand through his hair as he glanced around for Hill. There was still no sign of him. Davy’s tentacles picked fretfully at the grass and foliage as his unease soaked down into them.
With no one to consult on a Hill-approved response, Davy had to try and improvise.
“I guess?” he said. “I suppose I thought about it, but what if I didn’t like his answer? What if I had to do something about it?”
Fraser gave him a confused look. “Like, what?” he asked. “Therapy, so you don’t--?”
He trailed off as he pointed the cigar at his forehead and mimed pulling the trigger. It wasn’t like Davy was that socially astute, but even he was pretty sure that was a bit inappropriate.
“No,” he was. He reached up and hooked his finger into the collar of his shirt to tug it loose as he thought. “I mean, what if he was pushed to it? If there was someone who made him do it?”
Fraser dropped the cigar to the ground and stood on it.
He twisted his foot from the ankle to grind it out.
“You should have asked me if that’s what you were worried about,” he said.
“After the funeral, I had my people go through his life with a fine-tooth comb. There were no irregularities, no unexplained absences or travel, no new people in his life, no unexplained money in or out. None of the pressure points I’d have used. ”
“Then maybe he did something that drove him to it,” Davy said.
He hesitated—worried he was going to be too obvious—but there wasn’t much time left.
If Fraser was going to learn some sort of lesson from this, he needed to get on with it.
“Or someone helped him along. When I was a kid…after you’d married mom… sometimes I wondered if you’d done it.”
Fraser stared at him for a moment. The corner of his mouth twitched, and then he started to laugh, a snorted, rusty cackle of amusement.
“So I could have had dead Albie Rosen to contend with?” he said and tipped his head back to look skyward. “What’s wrong with that? Too easy?”
They both waited a beat. Just in case. If there would ever be an answer to that question, it was this time of year. Not this time, though. Fraser wiped under his eyes with his thumbs and composed himself.
“I have never had any truck with…feeling bad about things you’ve done,” Fraser said. “What’s the point? I knew what I was going to do, and I did it anyhow. Who am I trying to fool crying about it in the aftermath?”
“I’ve noticed,” Davy said. That was a safe answer to run with. Hill wouldn’t have reached out to the dead to get his stepfather to change his ways if he’d believed Fraser’s conscience worked.
“But you were meant to be a younger brother, like me,” Fraser said. “And it’s my fault we aren’t anymore. That…that’s always felt like guilt? I think”
Davy hesitated, caught off guard by the confession. Had the haunting actually worked?
He fumbled for a noncommittal answer that would encourage Fraser to keep talking.
“I don’t understand what—”
“It was a long time ago,” Fraser said dismissively.
“One of our rivals tried to wipe us out during a business trip. Your mother was there and pregnant at the time; she lost the baby. Your brother. It nearly destroyed Albie. For a while he wanted to leave the company and go straight. But…what they didn’t know was that I’d incited the attack so I’d have an excuse to wipe out our rival.
We all knew it was necessary, but Albie and Mark wanted to try and find a peaceful solution first. So, I took matters into my own hands.
And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad about it then.
It worked, and pregnancies are lost all the time. ”
Davy bit the inside of his cheek. The pain helped him keep his temper.
Habit made him run his tongue over the inside of his mouth to feel the old scarred lumps his teeth had left over the years.
The smooth skin he felt instead reminded him of the odds.
He swallowed the thirty-plus years ‘I fucking knew it’ and ‘you could have killed us all’ and went with,
“Why tell me this now?”
Fraser pushed himself up off the tree and brushed his hands together.
“Because when you were born, I realized what I’d cost you,” he said.
“What I’d cost myself. Your brother is the only person who’s stuck with you.
No matter what’s wrong with you or the things you do.
Friends can cut ties, spouses can divorce you, but your brother will always share your blood and bone.
They’ve no way out of it, except to die.
I felt bad you’d never have that, for what I’d taken away from you.
I didn’t care for that. Guilt’s an awful feeling.
So I wouldn’t take anything else from you.
I didn’t kill Albie, so if you’d dug him up… he’d have no bone to pick with me.”
Davy wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It definitely felt like something he could argue—if that was an option—was some sort of lesson learned. On the other hand, his murder apparently hadn’t triggered any sort of epiphany.
“The original miscarriage and near-death experience might have still been a sore point,” he pointed out. “Even if he didn’t blame you for his death.”
Fraser shrugged. “Even if he did, it’s the Invoker who sets the rules of engagement,” he said. “And you aren’t like me. You’d want answers, not revenge. Which I would have given you if you’d just asked.”
“Liar,” Davy said. That slipped past his attempt to pretend to be Hill, who’d have tried their best to soften the blunt statement with mitigating excuses. Fraser caught the slip and gave Hill a mildly surprised look.
“I suppose that’s true,” Fraser admitted after a pause to consider the accusation. “There’s been plenty of times I could have told you and never did. I suppose…I never had much faith in the confessional, but it seems prudent not to die with too much on your conscience.”
“Does that mean that you’ve…had a visitor?” Davy prodded carefully.
Fraser’s mouth twitched into a sketch of a smile. “A powerful man turned pensive about his past on Christmas Eve?” he said. “What other reason is there?”
Davy reached up and pulled a leaf off the tree. He shredded it absently with his nails.
“You mentioned your brother,” he said. So maybe his murder hadn’t been what had given Fraser his encounter with a moral, but if his was the first name that sprang to mind, then it had still weighed on him. “Is that who…”
Fraser twitched his chin in a nod. “I know where all the other bodies are buried,” he said. “Mark’s the only one whose corpse is still in play.”
Mark? Who the fuck was—
Oh.
Davy stitched the pieces together, finally. It was him. That was the name he’d forgotten. Mark. He waited for it to become part of him again, to rewrite the gaps where it had been. It just lay on the bottom of his brain like a wet fish. He didn’t feel like a ‘Mark’. Mark Jones?
Fraser hadn’t noticed his distraction.
“I’m at peace with the pound of flesh I owe my brother,” he said. “And I’m willing to take one more stain on my soul to make sure Tannenbaum doesn’t get to think he won.”
What?
“What’s the deli guy got to do with—” Davy blurted out.
Fraser blinked at him as if he’d forgotten he was there. He hesitated for a moment, the habit of being guarded tightening his eyes. Then he glanced at his watch to see the seconds tick by and shrugged.
“Tannenbaum’s the one who killed my brother,” he said.
“And he’s the only one who knew where he was buried.
I always knew…I knew if I kept the pressure up on him, if I kept shitting on his life, he’d break eventually.
I just thought the stupid ginger bastard would tell me whose pocket he’d been in.
I didn’t expect him to flout the Church and summon the dead. ”
Davy stared at him.
Why lie about that? Now. That didn’t make any sense, it was…
No. It made sense. That actually made everything fall into place, as long as Davy moved one building block in his half-assed recreation of his death.
His little brother hadn’t killed him.
And he’d actually been upset enough about it to spend thirty years ruining a man’s life.