“You enjoyed it. What your father did.” Each word was a step forward into an unknown darkness strewn with lethal trip wires. “At least sometimes. At least a little bit. Didn’t you, Oliver?”
His right hand closed over the barrel of the gun, clutching it tight.
“You do think I’m queer,” he breathed.
“I haven’t said that.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Don’t bullshit me, you little whore.”
“Oliver-”
“You filth. Stinking filth.”
His hand was sliding down the gun barrel toward the handle, and she knew that when he reached it, he would lift the gun and shoot, shoot without thinking, shoot to kill.
“Oliver,” she said more sharply. “Stop it.”
His hand froze an inch from the checkered grip.
“I’m sorry if you heard me say something I didn’t mean to say.” She spoke softly, keeping her tone neutral and nondefensive. “It wasn’t my intention to suggest that you were homosexual. I hope you understand that.”
He seemed slightly mollified, but his hand remained on the gun. “Then what were you suggesting?”
“Only that you may still be afraid of something you felt with your father, years ago. An emotion or a physical sensation. A fleeting response, meaningless… but it haunts you. I think that’s why you see sexual needs as threatening, dangerous-”
“But I don’t,” he cut in. “I’m not threatened. You’re on the wrong track. Sex doesn’t have anything to do with… with anything.”
“You believe that, I’m sure. But it may not be true.”
“Are you saying I’m a liar?”
“I’m saying your true feelings are buried deep. So deep that you can’t find them, can’t acknowledge their reality.”
“That’s just stupid,” he whispered, but she heard doubt in his voice for the first time.
“Don’t fight me on this, Oliver,” she said. “Open up to me. Please.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment. Then slowly he lifted the gun, as if to remind her of its presence. A shade too ostentatiously, he slipped it back into the side pocket of his jacket.
“I thought we were talking about my father,” he said mildly.
She yielded, afraid to press any harder and see the pistol return. “How long did Lincoln continue to mistreat you?”
“Until I left home.”
“At eighteen?”
“Yes.”
“He was still abusing you at that age?”
“Not as often. But… yes.”
“Did you leave because of Lincoln?”
“No. It was Lydia. She disowned me. Ordered me out of the house.”
Erin blinked, taken by surprise. “Lydia? But… why?”
He fixed his stare on her. “That, you can’t know.”
Instinctively she understood that this was one territory she dared not explore, the one secret he would not share.
“All right,” she said evenly. “So you left Tucson. Went to the Prescott area, as I recall.”
“In a stolen car. I ditched it when it was almost out of gas. Had no money to fill the tank. Started walking, and met up with a bunch of kids my age. Hippies. My hair was long, and I looked scruffy enough to fit in. We got to talking, and I improvised a story about burning my draft card and going underground.”
“You stayed with them.”
“For a few weeks. We moved from town to town, keeping close to the edge of the woods. Living off the land, they called it, though really we were scrounging through garbage.”
“Then your father came looking for you-”
“No. It didn’t happen like that. Not like that at all…”
His words trailed off, and his eyes lost focus. Ordinarily she was not averse to leaving a patient wrapped in thought, even for long minutes if necessary. But not now. If he became passive, disengaged, his internal controls would relax… and his impulses might take over.
From experience and study, she knew that epileptic episodes were most likely to occur in that half-aware state between wakefulness and sleep. As the mind wandered, the seizure threshold was lowered, sometimes to the danger point.
She had to keep him talking and alert, without getting him agitated. Emotional stress could trigger a seizure also.
A fine line to tread. A tightrope over a chasm.
“Tell me, Oliver,” she said softly. “Tell me how it did happen.”
“It was evening. A summer evening. Warm day, cooling as the sun hung lower.” His voice was remote and thoughtful, his words drifting up from a deep well of memory. “I went for a walk in the woods with another guy from the camp. Just the two of us. He wasn’t a friend, exactly, but he’d been pleasant to me. Funny to think he was just a kid. We both were. Just kids. Eighteen years old. Funny.
“We found a creek, ambled far enough along the bank to leave the camp sounds behind. In the quiet, we sat by the water, smoking. Peaceful there, with the current forking around the rocks, and the sun setting, and that sweet-smelling smoke.
“After a while it was dark, and we were both pretty high. Then… he got rough. You know what I mean.”
“He wanted to do what Lincoln had done.”
A shaky nod. “I told him no. He tried to force me. I remember him tugging at my jeans, me on my belly, struggling, and him hard against my rear, like Lincoln giving me some discipline, Lincoln making me bleed, and then he was Lincoln. Maybe it was the dope or… or some kind of long-buried revenge fantasy surfacing, I don’t know, but he was Lincoln, and I wasn’t going to take it from him anymore.
“Guess I went wild then. I don’t remember now. But I must have fought back, really fought, for the first time in my life.
“When I came back to myself, there was a rock in my hand. It was bleeding. At least it seemed to be. Blood from a stone, I remember thinking. I touched my face-wetness there, too. He’d broken this”-he fingered his pulped, shapeless nose-“and I hadn’t even noticed. Then I looked down, very slowly, and there he was, on the ground, with his pants around his knees and his dick hanging out and his skull open wide.”
“How did you…” Erin hesitated, choosing the right words. “How did that make you feel?”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
She believed him. The rare breakout of emotion must have consumed itself, leaving him empty and blank. He would have had no reaction to the body sprawled before him, the body of a boy of eighteen, killed in the woods.
Eighteen. Oliver’s age. Of course.
Erin shut her eyes, making the obvious connection. “This boy’s name-”
“Harold Gund.”
She nodded. “You took his identity. And erased your own.”
“I hadn’t planned on it. But as I sat there, watching the moon rise over the trees, I worked everything out. I saw a way to cover up the murder and take revenge on Lincoln. I felt strong enough then. I’d been liberated. I was… free.”
“How did you do it?”
“Gund was my height, my approximate build. I changed clothes with him, taking his wallet, leaving mine with the body. Used some of Gund’s money to hop a bus to Tucson the next morning, then rode a city bus from the terminal to the edge of town that afternoon. At night I walked to the ranch. This ranch.
“Easy enough to sneak onto the grounds; the gate wasn’t padlocked in those days. I eavesdropped through an open window while Lincoln talked on the phone. His end of the conversation made it clear he was alone; Lydia was in the hospital-nervous breakdown. Everyone assumed she was worried sick about me. Nobody guessed the truth.”
Erin did not ask what the truth was.
“Once the lights were out, I broke in through the back way. The lock never was any good, which is why I installed a padlock on that door once I bought the place.
“Lincoln was snoring in bed. I clubbed him unconscious with his own shotgun. Lugged him to the carport, dumped him in the trunk of his car. Drove north to Prescott Forest. Lincoln came to around three in the morning and started thumping on the lid.
“It was still dark when I pulled into the woods and popped the trunk. At first he was crazy with rage, till I let him see the gun-his own sawed-off Remington, steady in my hands. He turned conciliatory then. Tried to make nice. Hoped I didn’t hold it against him, what he’d done; it was just a father’s way of showing love; sure, that’s all he was, a loving father…