Chapter Twenty-Six #3
“It was his purpose. To manipulate, to cause, to control, and to capture death.” Nausea churned violently.
He downed more Scotch, pitting the liquor against the nausea.
“It wasn’t all, it can’t be. There was something warped inside him.
Something we never saw. Something no one ever saw, or suspected.
He had friends, a successful career. He liked to listen to ball games on TV and read mystery novels.
He liked to barbecue, he wanted grandchildren. ”
It was tearing him apart, every word, every memory. “There is no defense,” he said. “No absolution.”
She stepped forward. Every emotion inside her coalesced and focused on one point. “He took photographs of her. Of her face. Her eyes. Of her body. Nudes. He posed her, carefully. Her head tilted down toward her left shoulder, her right arm draped across her midriff.”
“How do you—”
“I did see.” She closed her eyes and spun away. Relief was cold, painfully cold. An icy layer over hot grief. “I’m not crazy. I was never crazy. I didn’t hallucinate. It was real. All of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Impatient, she dug her cigarettes out of her back pocket. But when she struck the match, she only stared down at the flame. “My hand’s steady,” she muttered. “It’s perfectly steady. I’m not going to break now. I can get through it. I’m never going to break again.”
Worried that he had pushed her over some line, he moved toward her. “Jo Ellen.”
“I’m not crazy.” Her head snapped up. Calmly she touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette.
“I’m not going to shatter and fall ever again.
The worst is just the next thing you have to find room for and live with.
” She blew out smoke, watched it haze, then vanish.
“Someone sent me a photograph of my mother. One of your father’s photographs. ”
His blood chilled. “That’s impossible.”
“I saw it. I had it in my hands. It’s what snapped me, what I couldn’t find room for. Then.”
“You told me someone was sending you pictures of yourself.”
“They were. It was with them, in the last package I got in Charlotte. And afterward, when I was able to function a little, I couldn’t find it. Whoever sent it got into my apartment and took it back. I thought I was hallucinating. But it was real. It existed. It happened.”
“I’m the only one who could have sent it to you. I didn’t.”
“Where are the pictures? The negatives?”
“They’re gone.”
“Gone? How?”
“Kyle wanted to destroy them, them and the journal. I refused. I wanted time to decide what to do. We argued about it. His stand was that it had been twenty years. What good would it do to bring it all out? It could ruin both of us. He was furious that I would even consider going to the police, or to your family. The next morning he was gone. He’d taken the photographs and the journal with him.
I didn’t know where to find him. The next I heard he’d drowned.
I have to assume he couldn’t live with it.
That he destroyed everything, then himself. ”
“The photographs weren’t destroyed.” Her mind was very clear and cold. “They exist, just like the ones of me exist. I look like my mother. It’s not a large leap to shift an obsession with her to one with me.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that, that it hasn’t terrified me? When we found Susan Peters, and I realized how she’d died, I thought ... I’m the only one left, Jo. I buried my father.”
“But did you bury your brother?”
He stared, shook his head slowly. “Kyle’s dead.”
“How do you know? Because the reports say he got drunk and fell off a boat? And what if he didn’t, Nathan? He had the photographs, the negatives, the journal.”
“But he did drown. He was drunk, stumbling drunk, depressed, moody, according to the people who were with him on the yacht. They didn’t realize he was missing until well into the next morning. All of his clothes, his gear were still on the boat.”
When she said nothing, he spun around her and began to pace.
“I have to accept what my father did, what he was. Now you want me to believe my brother’s alive, that he’s capable of all this.
Of stalking you, pushing you until you collapse.
Of following you here and . . .” As the rest slammed into him, he turned back. “Of killing Susan Peters.”
“My mother was strangled, wasn’t she, Nathan?”
“Yes. Christ.”
She had to stay cold, Jo warned herself, and go to the next step. “Susan Peters was raped.”
Understanding the question she was asking, Nathan closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“If it wasn’t her husband—”
“The police haven’t found any evidence to hold the husband. I checked before I came back. Jo Ellen.” It scraped his heart to tell her. “They’re going to be looking more closely into Ginny’s disappearance now.”
“Ginny?” With understanding came horror. The cold that had shielded her melted away in it. “Oh, no. Ginny.”
He couldn’t touch her, could offer her nothing. He left her alone, stepped out onto the porch. He put his hands on the rail and leaned out, desperate for air. When the screen door squeaked, he made himself straighten.
“What was your father’s purpose, Nathan? What were the photographs to accomplish if he would never be able to show them to anyone?”
“Perfection. Control. Not simply to observe, and preserve, but to be a part of the image. To create it. The perfect woman, the perfect crime, the perfect image. He thought she was beautiful, intelligent, gracious. She was worthy.”
He watched fireflies light up the dark in quick, flirtatious winks.
“I should have told you, all of you, as soon as I came here. I told myself I wanted—needed—time to try to understand it. I justified keeping it to myself because you had all accepted a lie, and the truth was worse. Then I kept it to myself because I wanted you. It got easier to rationalize it. You’d been hurt, you were wounded.
It could wait until you trusted me. It could wait until you were in love with me. ”
His fingers flexed and released on the railing as she stood silent behind him.
“Rationalizations are usually self-serving. Mine were. After Susan Peters, I couldn’t ignore the truth anymore, or your right to know it.
There’s nothing I can do to change it, to atone for what he did.
Nothing I can say can heal the damage he did to you and your family. ”
“No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say.
He took my mother, and left us all to think she had abandoned us.
That single selfish act damaged all of our lives, left a rift in our family we’ve never been able to heal.
He must have hurt her.” Jo’s voice quavered so she bit down hard on her lip until she could steady it.
“She must have been so frightened, so confused. She’d done nothing to deserve it, nothing but be who she was. ”
She drew a long breath, tasted the sea, and released it. “I wanted to blame you for it, Nathan, because you’re here. Because you had your mother all your life. Because you touched me and made me feel what I’d never felt before. I needed to blame you for it. So I did.”
“I expected you to.”
“You never had to tell me. You could have buried it, forgotten it. I never would have known.”
“I’d have known, and every day I’d have had with you would have been a betrayal.” He turned to her. “I wish I could have lived with that, spared you this and saved myself. But I couldn’t.”
“And what now?” Lifting her face to the sky, she searched her heart. “Am I to make you pay what can’t be paid, punish you for something that was done to both of us when we were children?”
“Why shouldn’t you?” Bitterness clogged his throat as he looked out into the trees, where the river flowed in secret silence. “How could you look at me and not see him, and what he did? And hate me for it.”
It was exactly what she had done, Jo thought. She had looked at him, seen his father, and hated. He had taken it, the verbal and physical blows, without a word in his own defense.
Courageous, Kirby had called him. And she’d been right.
How badly he’d been damaged, she realized. She wondered why it had taken her even this long to realize that however much harm had been done to her, an equal share had been done to him. “You don’t give me much credit for intelligence or compassion. Obviously you have a very low opinion of me.”
He hadn’t known he had the strength left to be surprised. He stared at her in disbelief. “I don’t understand you.”
“No, you certainly don’t if you think that after I’d had time to accept it, to grieve, I would blame you, or hold you accountable.”
“He was my father.”
“And if he was alive, I’d kill him myself for what he did to her, to all of us.
To you. I’ll hate him for the rest of my life.
There will never be forgiveness in me for him.
Can you make room to live with that, Nathan, or are you just going to walk away?
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” She rushed on before he could speak, her words fast and hot.
“I’m not going to let myself be cheated.
I’m not going to let the chance of real happiness be stolen from me.
But if you walk away, I’ll learn to hate you.
I can do it if I have to. And no one will ever hate you more than I will. ”
She stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind her.
He stood where he was for a moment, struggling to absorb the shock, the gratitude. But it wasn’t possible. He stepped back into the house and spoke quietly. “Jo Ellen, do you want me to stay?”