“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered.
He took her arm, and she did not pull free.
“How much do you remember about the fire?” he asked gently.
“Everything. It’s engraved in my memory. I wish it weren’t.” Through the light contact of his fingertips on her arm, he felt the sudden trembling of her body. “God damn him.”
He knew whom she meant. “Your father.”
“God damn him,” she said again.
Her knees shook, and her face was pale. Quickly he led her to a tree-shaded bench near a nineteenth-century gazebo, then sat at her side. Annie stared into the distance, at the blocky modernistic shapes of the superior courts and administration buildings, their checkerboard facades smooth and flat like cutouts.
Walker waited. In his line of work he’d interviewed many people-suspects, witnesses, victims, tipsters, cranks. He knew better than to prompt Annie to talk. She would speak when she was ready.
After a minute or two, she found her voice.
“Albert was good to us in the beginning.” She used her father’s first name, as if reluctant to acknowledge his paternity. “A little stern, maybe too much of a disciplinarian-his family, like our mother’s, were all strict Catholics, probably a bit too strict at times. But basically he was kind and… loving.”
The last word nearly caught in her throat.
“He would read us bedtime stories. He’d tuck us in and read The Wind in the Willows and Black Beauty and that one about the pig and the spider.”
“ Charlotte’s Web.”
“He did different voices for all the characters. And sound effects. He was… he was a good man.”
Walker said nothing. From what Gary had told him, he knew that Albert Reilly might have begun as a good man, but he hadn’t finished that way.
“And then,” Annie went on, her voice lowering to a whisper, “he changed. He went crazy.”
“Just like that? All of a sudden?”
“It seemed that way. But maybe Erin and I were too young to pick up on the change until it was obvious. All I know is that he stopped reading to us, stopped tucking us in, stopped kissing us good night
… stopped loving us.”
“Couldn’t your mother talk to him?”
She shook her head violently. “He hated Maureen.”
“Had they been close before?”
“Oh, yes. It was a good marriage; I’m sure it was. Aunt Lydia had some photo albums-our parents’ wedding, Maureen and Albert with the two of us as babies, a trip to Yosemite they took on their first anniversary. In the pictures they always look happy, Albert especially.”
“Do you have any idea what changed him?”
“Not really. But I’ve always thought… well, I know it sounds odd, but maybe religion had something to do with it.”
“What makes you say that?”
Annie looked away, toward rows of flower beds humming with bees. A child scampered past, trailing a balloon.
“I told you he was strict in his beliefs. One night Maureen and Erin and I were together in the living room when he came home. This was a couple of weeks after he’d changed. He was still living with us-he had nowhere else to go-but he was sleeping on a sofa in the den. He’d been sullen and angry for days, but that night he’d stopped at a bar after work, had too much to drink, and his face…” The memory touched her like a ghost, raising a shiver. “His face was wild.”
“Was he violent?”
“Not in what he did, not then. But the things he said to us… the words he used…” Her eyes squeezed shut. “He called us abominations in the eyes of God. That’s why I think maybe it was some kind of religious mania or something.” She said it again, thoughtfully. “Abominations in the eyes of God.”
Walker was silent.
“Erin and I were too little to know what an abomination was, but we knew it must be something bad, something really dreadful. Maureen pleaded with him to calm down; he slapped her. I can still hear that sound, like a gunshot. He pointed at her, then at Erin and me”-she swallowed-“and he said, ‘You’ll burn. All of you. Burn.’”
Walker didn’t know how to respond. This was much worse than the sketchy details in the newspaper story Gary had dug up.
“How long afterward was the fire?” he asked slowly.
“The very next night. August eighteenth, 1973.”
He nodded. He’d known the date from the article.
“What woke us,” Annie said, her voice soft as the whisper of thought, “were the screams. Screams from the master bedroom at the other end of the hall. My mother’s screams.”
She swallowed, finding strength within her. When she continued, her voice was suddenly raw, as if she herself had been screaming.
“Erin and I sat up in our beds and listened. There was a sharp crack; Albert was in there, and he’d slapped her again. The screams stopped, and she started to beg. She said please over and over. ‘Please, please, please…’
“Then she screamed again, but it was worse this time. It was the worst sound I’ll ever hear.
“From the hallway came a dry crackle, like crinkling newspaper, then a funny odor, a burnt-toast smell-smoke. That was when I knew the house was on fire and my mother was burning to death.”
“How did you get out?”
“It was-” She stopped herself and swallowed whatever words she’d intended to say. “I don’t know. Luck, I guess. The flames hadn’t reached our end of the hall yet. We made it downstairs and outside.”
She paused, as if daring him to press for details. He said nothing.
“Outside,” she repeated. “I remember running across the lawn with Erin, into a crowd of neighbors in robes and nightgowns. Old Mrs. Carroway took us both in her big arms and held us, and someone else asked about our parents, and another person shushed him.
“The fire trucks arrived a minute later. I don’t know how long it was before the firemen got inside, but eventually they found Maureen and Albert in the master bedroom, both of them burned so badly they had to be identified later from dental records.
“It wasn’t hard for the arson investigators to reconstruct what had happened. Two gasoline cans were recovered, one in the living room, the other in the bedroom, still in Albert’s hand. He must have hidden them in the garage or the tool shed. In the middle of the night he’d left the den, gotten the cans, and poured a trail of gasoline through the house, starting on ground level, ending in the bedroom, where Maureen was. Then he’d lit the match.”
She looked at Walker, her eyes haunted, brimful of tears.
“He told us we would all burn. He meant it.”
Walker clasped her hand. “And after that,” he said gently, “the two of you went to live with Lydia, Maureen’s sister, in Tucson… and you found out about the other murder-suicide in your family’s history. Lincoln and Oliver.”
“Yes.” A shudder blew through her like a cold wind. “It was like the whole world was crazy. Like everyone in it was a monster. Anybody, at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all, could snap, go insane, and kill whoever he loved most.”
“But it’s not the whole world. There are plenty of good people.”
Annie met his gaze, and he saw the hurt in her face, the lingering residue of trauma, the unhealed grief.
“My father was a good person, too,” she whispered. “Once.”
34
Annie was silent as Walker escorted her out of the community center. He wondered if he’d been wrong to ask about the fire. She had been upset to begin with, and reliving those memories might have served only to traumatize her further.
They crossed the street together. At the curb Annie abruptly turned to him and whispered, “It wasn’t luck.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I told you we were lucky to escape the fire. But it wasn’t luck.”
“What, then?”
“Erin saved me.”
Their shoes clacked on the sidewalk. A robin burst out of the branches of a mesquite tree and shot into the clear, warm air. In the near distance, the bells of San Agustin Cathedral chimed ten o’clock.