“Talk sense, you old bitch,” Delamare says evenly.
“I take what I can use,” Parson says quickly, holding up his hands. “With Virgil it was the kabala—; with Clementine it was Trist’s bottles—; with Trist it was anything at all. You each had some manner of fright in you, some superstition, that I was able to make use of.” He grins coquettishly. “Belief in anything is a kind of madness, Oliver.”
Delamare leans back against the head-board. “Do you mean to tell me you have no beliefs? You, with all your charms and hoo-doos?”
“Not at all,” says Parson. “I believe in my charms and hoo-doos, as you call them—: I believe in them absolutely. They would have no power otherwise.” He shuts his eyes. “Thaddeus understood that well, God rest him.”
“What did he believe in, then?”
“Himself.”
Delamare hesitates. “But the Redeemer—”
“Is whoever I decide on, Oliver. Whoever I should please it be.”
“Why play checkers with us, then? Why set us to murdering each other?”
Parson sighs. “You’ve been desperate for a mystery, you and Virgil, when all along the facts were plain. Nature, Oliver, will out. You were thieves and murderers to a man—; I had only to stand aside and let you go to market.” He clucks. “If I’d wanted to preserve you, on the other hand—”
“But you didn’t,” Delamare says tightly. “You wanted us to kill each other off.”
“I wanted to see what became of you,” Parson says. “To see who managed, who was nimble—; who was left standing at the end of it, and why.” He purses his lips. “I’d lost my dearest boy, you see.”
“That’s right,” says Delamare. “Virgil and I took him from you.”
Parson bobs his head. “I can’t make do without a dearest boy, Oliver. It’s not in the way of things.” He clucks again. “Who could I speak the tongue to, with him gone?”
“Don’t fret,” Delamare says, palming back the hammer. “You’ll soon be reunited.” But his voice is fainter, more effortful than before.
Parson only shrugs. “I resolved to make the best of it—: to settle on whichever of you was left. Think of it as a raffle, Oliver, or an examination at school.” His looks demurely at the floor. “I needed a new Redeemer. A new dearest boy. Is that something you can understand?”
Delamare redirects the Colt from Parson’s forehead to his privates. “Who murdered Goodman Harvey?”
“Harvey did.” Parson all but blushes. “I may have— encouraged him, somewhat.”
“I suppose you encouraged Trist, as well.”
“Not at all, Oliver. I merely held the rope.”
Delamare narrows his eyes. “Don’t tell me Kennedy snuffed himself.”
“Small chance of that, sad to say!” Parson titters. “Stuts was a special case. Too stupid to be my dearest boy, too vicious to be let alone. A touch of hoo-doo, as you put it, was required.”
Delamare goes quiet. “Foster,” he says finally. “That’s what you used Foster for.”
Parson makes a curtsey.
“Why didn’t you use me? I’d have killed him for you gladly.”
“Of course you would,” Parson says dotingly. He hushes a moment. “I had a notion to, at first. But Kennedy was a dangerous man—; and you were precious to me, Oliver.” He bats his eyes at Delamare. “Can you not imagine why?”
Delamare bunches his face together. “And Foster? Did Virgil strangle him?” He glances toward Clementine. “She told me that he did.”
Parson only clucks.
Delamare curses him hoarsely. “How in hell did you manage it?”
“Come now, Oliver! Ball was never hard to manage.” Parson cocks his head at me. “Ball was a believer to the bone.”
“It must break your heart to lose him.”
Parson sucks in a sorrowful breath. “It does.”
Delamare says nothing. His face is hid from me now—; Parson, however, can still see it. He looks well pleased by what he finds there.
“It was a way I hit on,” Parson purrs. “No more than that. But it worked wonderfully well. The slack ones fell away.”
Delamare sits forward with a cough. “Fell away, did they? Dropped like peaches from the bough?”
Parson considers this a moment. “Not unlike peaches,” he says, delighted with the notion.
“What about Dodds?”
“I put Dodds to rest myself,” Parson says. “That is to say, I furnished him with poison.”
“And D’Ancourt?”
“Ah! The Colonel is a mystery.” Parson waves a hand, as if the question were a trifling one. “I suppose he must have doddered off somewhere.”
“Obliging of him,” says Delamare.
Parson nods solemnly. “I was left, in the end, with just you three. But you were devilish hard, Oliver, to choose between. I needed a believer, you understand. A modicum of faith. And each of you cherished certain doubts.” He looks down at Clementine. “In the end, to my great relief, one of you chose me.”
“Liar!” I shriek with my last breath. “Liar! Pharisee!”
But neither of them hear. Parson watches Delamare, humming quietly to himself—; Delamare fidgets under his bedding as though he were struggling to fall asleep. His skin has turned the color of wet paper.
“So now you’re down to none,” he says.
“Your reckoning is o f, dear boy,” Parson replies. He glides up to the bed. “Now, after no end of trouble, I’m finally down to one.”
An instant goes by before Delamare takes his meaning. He gives a low whimper. “If you calculate on using me—”
“Reflect a moment, Oliver! If you weren’t a believer, you’d never have brought out that Colt. You believed that poor tart had the Redeemer in her—; I couldn’t ask for better proof.”
“I could fire again,” Delamare croaks, burrowing back under the quilts. “I’ve got two bullets left.”
Parson cackles at this. The fear has gone out of him so utterly that I wonder whether it was ever there. “You do, sirrah. But why squander them? Your point’s already made!”
Delamare sinks lower still. All that’s left of him is the Colt. “Why explain the game, if you love belief so dearly?” he says, so faintly that I can barely hear. “Why reveal your hand to me?”
“Because the hand is played, Oliver. It’s played—; and you have won it.” Parson stands at the foot of the bed now, grinning like a lynx, his arms propped comfortably on the quilts. “What were your first nineteen years of life, after all, but an apprenticeship to the Trade? Have your hopes and ambitions — to say nothing of your lusts— ever had a life outside it? Now that tiresome apprenticeship is done. The Trade is ready to receive you, in body and in spirit, as you’ve so long desired.” Slowly, coaxingly, he pulls the quilts aside. “Put your revolver by. Leave the peace-making, dear boy, to those better qualified —”
All at once Parson hushes. A shiver runs the length of his body and he jerks his head sharply to one side. He has heard a noise, and no sooner do I harken than I hear it, too—:
Boards are bending down on the verandah.
I drink the sound in, gratefully and slowly, as I would a cup of beer. The hinges of the house-door creak emphatically open. A whispering begins, building on itself and on the silence, and the echo is pushed back before it like water before a broom. The whispers — low, capable commands — slip through clear as notes of music. As the echo recedes I take note of two things—: (I) Delamare’s Peacemaker has fallen to the floor, and (II) Parson is taking off his clothes.