Текст книги "Fear Itself"
Автор книги: Duffy Prendergast
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
The next morning a small crowd gathered at Catherine’s grave and Sarah and I both tossed a handful of dirt onto her coffin after it was lowered into the ground. As we walked back to the limousine I heard Rita yell “You killed her, you bastard!” I stopped without turning, and then decided to ignore her rather than confront her, and I continued my stroll to the hearse.
* * *
Catherine had not been in the ground long enough for the worms to begin circling her casket when the blue plague showed up at my front door in the form of Detective Bergant. I parted the mini blinds and peered into the yard at the dark blue Crown Victoria parked in my driveway. At least he had waited until after the funeral I supposed.
I told Sarah to go to her room and play and then I answered the third repetition of relentless raps upon my front door and I showed the good detective into my living room.
I forced a smile, “What brings you to my home this morning detective?” I was sick to my stomach at his mere presence; at his representation of more misery in my life. He had not come to console me, but rather to separate me from Sarah. Or at least that is what I suspected, or more accurately, feared. He had no empathy for me. No sympathy for me. He had only his own selfish desire to solve the case no matter the consequences; for his fifteen minutes of fame, or the promise of a promotion. I loathed the man, who despite my obvious innocence, had decided to pursue me like a hound to a fox, or more likely a fox to a rabbit. His face bore a snide expression, much like the one he wore when he pulled his ridiculous and transparent stunt: Amber in the next room. I could not find it in my heart to forgive him for such a crude assault on my intelligence.
He wore the same type of inexpensive white shirt and if not the same, a replica from a closet filled with many in a series of plain inexpensive suits, grey with a simple thin black tie absent a clip, and on his feet a pair of shiny black military style low-quarters.
“Have a seat.” I pointed to a chair and he walked over to it and waited until I was seated before declining to sit himself choosing instead to tower over me.
“No thanks.” He said, “This will only take a minute.”
“Have you brought Amber along for the ride?”
He laughed and his face blushed with embarrassment. “No, she was not available.” He retrieved a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and leveraged a single white stick from the pack with the shake of his wrist. He pursed it between his lips and lit a match.
“I prefer that you don’t smoke in my house.” I smiled, this time in earnest. My stomach was still threatening to evict my breakfast, but I felt the need to establish to this want-to-be Dick Tracy that I would not be bullied. I had too much at stake.
He kept his cigarette in his mouth but waved the match about until the flame was extinguished. “I’ll get right to the point. Your wife was poisoned and I think you did it.” His eyes seemed to gauge me, scanning me for a giveaway.
“Then you think wrong.” I felt my throat swell at the blunt of his words and I resented my body for it’s’ betrayal.
“Your daughter, Sarah, right?” He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and pointed to a school photograph sitting atop the mantle,
“Is she yours?” he said as he walked over to the picture to have a closer look.
“Who else’s would she be?”
“What I mean is, did you get your wife pregnant, or did the doctor work some kind of magic?” He feigned an attempt at a conjuring wave of his hands.
“No. I got her pregnant the old fashioned way; missionary style.” I felt my face flush.
“Did you ever wonder how your wife got pregnant after all those years of trying? I mean, does that sound likely?”
“Just lucky I guess. Persistence. We fucked round the clock you know.”
“Sure you did.” He smiled. “She was a pretty girl, your wife.” He sighed as though it brought him pain to ask the next question. He forced a grimace, “Is it possible that Sarah’s father is someone other than you?”
“Fuck you.”
“What?” He stepped toward me as if to intimidate me but I stood instead and stepped toward him and poked my finger into his chest.
“Fuck you! Fuck you for asking such a question.” I gave him a little shove. “Sarah is my flesh and blood. Don’t you go trying to make this into something it’s not! The deceitful– husband approach didn’t pan out, so you’re working on the unfaithful-wife/jealous husband argument? Go fuck yourself. Sarah is my daughter.” I could feel the heat of my own breath as it reflected off of his face.
“Really?” He flared his eyebrows and cocked his head. “I got somebody who says that the kid is not yours. Uncle Henry says that he’s the proud papa.” He seemed to take sincere joy in his revelation, as though he’d solved the case.
“Then maybe he killed Catherine. Arrest him! Is Uncle Henry in the next room? …like Amber I mean?”
“No, unlike Amber, though, this guy is real.” He put the cigarette back into his mouth. “Never had a clue about ole Uncle Henry?” he smirked as he struck a match and lit his cigarette.
I stepped backwards and sat back down in my chair. My knees had grown weak.
“I don’t know an Uncle Henry.” His attempts were getting more pathetic with every pass. Sarah was my flesh and blood. The resemblance was undeniable. My wife had said so on many occasions. The good detective was fishing again, but in the wrong pond and with the wrong bait.
“Why don’t we ask Sarah?”
“Why don’t we leave my daughter out of this?” I stood up again, the blood rushing to my head and all thoughts of fear gone, replaced in the time it takes for a flame to ignite gasoline, by anger. I took a step toward him and staggered him backwards into the soft folds of the blue leather recliner. He looked up at me, cigarette smoke trailing across his face, with a mixture of fear, shock and confusion.
“I’m only suggesting that…”
“Sarah is my daughter. Anything you do to try and take her from me might result in your untimely death!”
He stared back up at me. His eyes studied my face. He looked puzzled. He couldn’t seem to figure out how our positions had reversed. He had such a perfect plan, how had it backfired, I could see him wondering? I felt completely empowered for the first time since I found myself inside of his interrogation room. He looked into my face and I could tell that he knew that I was innocent. But he didn’t like getting shown up.
“Have a seat Mr. Derrick.” He had regained his equilibrium, if not his sense of power.
I stepped backwards and sat back down on the sofa and glared at the menace who had dared to threaten my life.
“The fact remains that your wife was poisoned. Your fingerprints are on the carafe of wine where the poison was found. You’ve got some splainin to do Mr. Derrick.”
“I poured her a glass of wine. Of course my fingerprints were on the glass.” I could feel my jaw clenching, “And what sort of poison is it that you found?”
“A household product. Something you put in your car every so often.” Again he was trying to read my face. He drew a long pause, “Antifreeze.”
“Antifreeze?”
“Your fingerprints were also found on a bottle of antifreeze in the garage.”
“Yes, I’m sure they were, along with the cap to the radiator. Why don’t you dust that for prints as well?”
“What would that prove?”
“It wouldn’t prove a thing, just like my fingerprints on a carafe of wine and a wineglass doesn’t prove a God-damned thing. My prints were on the bottle as well. Did you get that too?”
“No. We couldn’t find an opened bottle of wine.”
I shook my head. I looked him in the eye. “I didn’t kill my wife. Now why don’t you get up and leave me and my daughter alone to grieve the death of my wife and go find her real killer?”
Detective Bergant pulled the half burnt cigarette he had been lipping from his mouth and he drew a deep breath. “If you’re innocent then you won’t object to a paternity test for your daughter, will you?”
“Yes, I do object! I won’t dignify your request with that option. You insult my wife’s integrity while she lies in her grave, unable to defend herself? Well who’s going to defend her if I don’t?”
“Well then, how about we start with a lie detector test then?”
I weighed the question. “I thought those tests weren’t reliable?”
“Reliable enough to get me off your ass if you pass.”
I paused, pondering the ramifications of such a test. What did I have to lose? “Then fine. I’ll take your lie detector test. But you lay off when I pass.”
“How does tomorrow at nine in the morning sound?”
“Where?”
“Down at the station.” “I’ll be there.”
As I watched the Crown Victoria pull out of my driveway I had a flash-back to an evening a few nights before Catherine died. It nearly buckled my knees. Sarah and I were in the kitchen doing a science project for her second grade class. We were testing antifreeze to see at what temperature it began to freeze. It was a simple enough project. We poured some antifreeze from the container in the garage into a coffee mug and put a small thermometer into the solution and placed it in the freezer. Then we checked on it every few minutes. The antifreeze began to freeze at minus forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. While I was pouring the antifreeze into the coffee cup Sarah asked me, “Daddy, what does that mean?” as she pointed to the skull and crossbones on the back of the container. I told her that it meant that it was poison. “If I drink it will I die?” Yes, I said. She said, “If you drink it will you die?” Yes, I said. “If mommy drinks it will she die?”
Hearing Sarah’s voice in my head asking the last question sent chills down my spine.
She couldn’t have done it. She wouldn’t have done it. She loved her mother too much. She was just your typical sweet little girl, incapable of such evil thoughts or actions.
But, Sarah had the knowledge to accomplish the task. And, she knew that the wine in the decanter in the refrigerator was mommy’s wine.
I closed the door slowly and made my way back to and fell into the couch. I was in a mild state of shock. I had to ask Sarah if she had done it, but I didn’t want to know the answer to the question; not if she had actually done it. I felt sick to my stomach for even considering that Sarah was capable of murder.
If she had killed Catherine, deliberately, what would I do? I couldn’t turn her in. I couldn’t stop loving her. I was trapped, and I suppose the easy thing to do would have been to pretend that the notion that Sarah might have murdered Catherine had never occurred to me. But what if the police went to her school and inquired and the teacher told them about the experiment? They would come for her. I had to know if Sarah had killed her mother.
“Sarah, can you come here honey?”
I listened as Sarah fumbled with whatever toy she was playing with and then sauntered into the living room with her head down. She had tears in her eyes. I wondered if she was feeling guilty. But my paternal instincts made me want to erase her tears.
“What’s the matter honey?” I pulled her to my lap and I hugged her.
“I heard what the policeman said.” “Did what he said make you worry?”
“Yes.” She whispered into my ear, her head resting on my shoulder. I held her tight. I didn’t want to see her face as I spoke to her.
“What did he say that worries you?”
“That mommy drank the freeze…like the stuff we did for my school project.”
My heart raced. I couldn’t help myself. Tears began to trace down my cheeks.
“Why does that bother you?”
“Because they think you killed mommy with the freeze.”
“Who do you think killed mommy with the freeze?”
“I don’t know?”
“Did you ever touch the freeze?” “Yes.”
“Did you touch the freeze after I told you never to touch the freeze by yourself?”
“No daddy.” She began to raise her head but I held it to my shoulder as my tears drizzled down upon her head.
“Did you put the freeze in mommy’s wine?”
Sarah started to cry again, at first with low sobs, and then, after tearing herself away from my grasp, with blubbering whimpers as she tried to contain her emotions, and finally she broke into a balling frenzy with loud incoherent yelps, like those of a cat crying out in the night.
I held her in front of me grasping her by the shoulders. I looked at her face; at her reddened cheeks; at her still baby-smooth skin. I looked into her eyes and saw a crazy terrified confused mind.
“Did you pour the freeze into mommy’s wine?” I asked her firmly, doing my best not to shout.
“I don’t know.” She screamed at me. “Did you put the freeze in mommy’s wine?” I could hear my voice, as if listening to myself from outside of my body. My voice was deep and low and threatening.
“No! No!” She screamed, “I didn’t touch the freeze! I didn’t do it!” she sniffled, drawing a stream of runny snot up into her nostrils. “I didn’t put the freeze into mommy’s wine! I didn’t do it!” she was shaking her head violently from side to side.
I pulled her to my chest and I hugged her as hard as I could. “I know you didn’t baby. I know you didn’t!”
“I didn’t do it daddy!”
“I know baby. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you, but I had to know.”
And as I held her there, I still wasn’t one-hundred percent sure that she hadn’t killed Catherine. All I knew is that I hadn’t. And I knew that eventually I would be indicted. I would be publicly disgraced as the murderer of my wife; a letch; a woman killer. I would be tried and convicted in the press. I would lose my job. My neighbors would point at me and talk about me under their muffled breaths. I knew that it would not be long before I would be locked in jail, separated from Sarah forever. The lie detector test was not going to set me free. The police had my fingerprints on the decanter. They had my fingerprints on the wine glass and the bottle of antifreeze. They had Amber. They had Uncle Henry, whoever he was.
Uncle Henry! “Sarah baby?”
“What daddy?” she was still trembling and whimpering from my interrogation. I laid her back on my arm as I would an infant and looked down at her.
“It’s okay honey.” I wanted to calm her;
to let her know that my forth-coming questions were not a continuation of the former brow– beating.
“I’m not mad honey. I’m done talking about the freeze, okay?”
“Okay.” She quietly croaked, not quite convinced of my sincerity.
“Do you know Uncle Henry?”
Her eyes shined back at me in wide silence; her little lids with tiny blond lashes almost pinned themselves to her eyebrows. Her eyeballs, speckled with red hair-line tributaries, were punctuated with dilated black spheres amid grey-blue sunrays. I sat her up on my knee and I held her shoulders again. The whites of her eyes grew larger. I had asked a question she had been dreading for a long time; a box she had hoped would never be opened; a secret she had been warned about, and sworn an oath to keep.
“It’s okay. I’m not mad about it. Is it a secret?”
“Yes.” Her expression was serious. She knew the weight of the question.
“Is it a secret you had with mommy?” “Yes.”
“Do you know Uncle Henry?”
“Mommy said not to talk about Uncle
Henry. She said you would get mad.”
My stomach knotted up and tears once again began to fill my eyes. There really was an Uncle Henry. Sarah was not my flesh and blood. I looked into her eyes again, this time though I was not searching for guilt. I was searching for me. I had loved her since she was born. Since before she was born. I loved her still, flesh of my flesh or not. And no one, not Uncle Henry, not the police, not Catherine’s parents; no one was going to take her away from me.
“It’s okay. Mommy’s dead now. She won’t care now if you talk about Uncle Henry. She can’t hear you.”
Sarah’s eyes turned up and then rolled to the side as she sucked on her bottom lip,
“Uncle Henry was mommy’s friend.” She stingily volunteered.
“When did you see him?” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful and fretless but
I heard my voice quiver.
“He used to come and see us sometimes while you were at work.”
“Where did you see him?” My voice slipped as a single tear slid down my cheek and I averted my head in time to catch the tiny bead of saline with my fingertip before I returned to her studied gaze.
“Here, at our house.” Her voice grew more trusting; more casual.
“Did he go into the bedroom with mommy?” My heart was breaking. I felt the piercing intrusion of pain in my chest as though a knife had been thrust into my ribcage. I could almost feel my bleeding heart as the imaginary shank penetrated my flesh and my heart pumped like a fountain.
“No daddy. He was just her friend. He said he was really coming just to see me, not mommy.” Her eyes were sincere. She began to gush with words, like a river through a burst dam. “He just started to visit us a little while ago. At first he said that he was my daddy, but I told him that he wasn’t and that I already had a daddy, and mommy gave him a dirty look, like when I say something wrong and we’re in the grocery store. And then he told me he was my Uncle Henry and that he was just teasing about being my daddy. And he drank coffee with no sugar in it…” she grimaced, “and he talked about before when mommy took care of his wife, when she was sick, and then she died, and then mommy didn’t come over after that. And Uncle Henry is old and he has hair growing out of his ears.”
“Older than me?” I had to interrupt. “Way older.” Her eyes got big and she giggled, “He’s got white hair and wrinkles and hair sticks out of his nose too.”
I pulled Sarah too my chest again. I was so hurt. Catherine had had an affair. She had been with someone else. She had loved someone else. I felt so betrayed; so wronged. I wanted to die at that moment. I clutched Sarah to my chest as I slid down on the couch and I sobbed out loud.
“Are you crying because of Uncle
Henry?”
“No baby, I’m crying because I miss mommy.” I lied. The truth was that I did wish that Catherine were there at that moment so that I could scream at her; so that I could interrogate her; so that I could inflict verbal injury upon her. I screamed inside of my head “Why! Why? Why did you do this to me?”
And, finally out loud, “Why!” “Why what daddy?”
“Nothing honey.” I shook my head and buried my face in my hand.
Sarah lifted up from my grip and smiled and flared her eyebrows, “Okay, lover!” she giggled, and through my tears and pain, so did I.
* * *
Later that evening, while I was alone, after Sarah had gone to sleep, as I was rummaging through some papers in Catherine’s desk (in a corner of our semi-finished basement), I pieced things together. Henry, I remembered, was one of Sarah’s clients. Or rather his wife was her client. Henry’s wife was a terminal cancer patient who had contracted skin cancer on her upper lip but despite her late age (she was almost sixty at the time) she had vainly refused treatment because she knew that the proposed surgery would have blemished her beauty. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized to her brain and Catherine was employed as her visiting nurse during the later stages of her illness. Catherine fed her and comforted her and changed her diapers and performed other menial tasks until the day she died. The woman, Lenore was her name, refused to go to a hospital and made Henry promise to let her die at home. Catherine quit that job after Lenore’s death. She said that she couldn’t stand the heartache of befriending people knowing that they would soon pass away. It was just too much for her emotionally. And shortly thereafter Catherine discovered that she had become pregnant with Sarah and her career became a moot issue.
I sifted through all kinds of papers on top of and inside of Catherine’s desk including medical bills and unfilled prescriptions and grocery lists; every odd thing. I got lost in the memories of some of the photographs I found and I became particularly distracted when I came across a pendant that I had given Catherine on the day after our first kiss. The morning after our kiss I woke up early and rode my bicycle all the way up to St. Clair Avenue to a pawn shop that I had passed many times but had never entered. I remembered my mother going there to hock her engagement ring once to buy groceries. I walked in with the almost twenty dollars I’d saved from delivering news-papers and I picked out a Beautiful necklace. As it turned out the necklace I chose cost over three-hundred dollars. The clerk laughed when I pulled out twenty odd dollars in single dollar bills and change and then directed me to some necklaces in my price range. I settled for diamond chips instead of diamonds but I think the clerk still gave me a generous deal.
I got a little choked up and began to cry. I had forgotten that I had given the necklace to Catherine. I was touched that she had thought to keep it. I found it in a lower drawer in a little white box accompanied by the note that I had written. I unfolded the note and it read:
I wish that I could kiss you forever. Love Mathew.
I cried out loud for a while but then, through tear clouded eyes, I continued my search for clues to Catherine’s relationship with Uncle Henry. I didn’t find a single tittle of information; no love notes; no cards; no scrap of paper with his name or phone number.
I did find Catherine’s journals, a series of diaries that she had kept since high-school, but the pertinently dated logs had been stripped of their pages, charred pieces of which I remembered seeing recently on the hearth of our seldom used basement fireplace. After hours of self-inflicted mental torture while searching through Catherine’s private papers I found not a thing. I sifted, carefully at first, and eventually impatiently, until it was almost morning and the floor around Catherine’s desk (along with her desktop) were covered with a collage of papers, photographs and mementos. And then, just before dawn, I started to pack.
