He sighed.
“Talk to you?” he said. “Talk to you? To talk about these old events… no, these old suspicions… that would be almost the same as to shake a sleeping fiend, Dennis. Please, I know nothing.”
I could have told him that the fiend was already awake, but he knew that.
“Tell me what you suspect.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Mr LeBay… please…”
“I’ll call you back,” he said. “I’ve got to call my sister Marcia in Colorado.”
“If it will help, I’ll call—”
“No, she would never talk to you. We’ve only talked of it to each other once or twice, if that. I hope your conscience is clear on this matter, Dennis. Because you are asking us to rip open old scars and make them bleed again. So I’ll ask you once more: how sure are you?”
“Sure,” I whispered.
“I’ll call you back,” he said, and hung up.
Fifteen minutes went past, then twenty. I went around the room on my crutches, unable to sit still. I looked out the window at the wintry street, a study in blacks and whites. Twice I went to the telephone and didn’t pick it up, afraid he would be trying to get me at the same time, even more afraid that he wouldn’t call back at all. The third time, just as I put my hand on it, it rang. I jerked back as if stung, and then scooped it up.
“Hi?” Ellie’s breathless voice said from downstairs. “Donna?”
“Is Dennis Guilder—” LeBay’s voice began, sounding older and more broken than ever.
“I’ve got it, Ellie,” I said.
“Well, who cares?” Ellie said pertly, and hung up.
“Hello, Mr LeBay,” I said. My heart was thudding hard.
“I spoke to her,” he said heavily. “She tells me only to use my own judgement. But she is frightened. Together, you and I have conspired to frighten an old lady who has never hurt anyone and has nothing whatever to do with this.”
“In a good cause,” I said.
“Is it?”
“If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have called you,” I said. “Are you going to talk to me or not, Mr LeBay?”
“Yes,” he said. “To you, but to no one else. If you should tell someone else, I would deny it. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” he sighed. “In our conversation last summer, Dennis, I told you one lie about what happened and one lie about what I—what Marcy and I—felt about it. We lied to ourselves. If it hadn’t been for you, I think we could have continued to lie to ourselves about that—that incident by the highway—for the rest of our lives.”
“The little girl? LeBay’s daughter?” I was holding the phone tightly, squeezing it.
“Yes,” he said heavily. “Rita.”
“What really happened when she choked?”
“My mother used to call Rollie her changeling,” Le Bay said. “Did I tell you that?”
“No.”
“No, of course not. I told you I thought your friend would be happier if he got rid of the car, but there is only so much a person can say in defence of one’s beliefs, because the irrational… it creeps in.
He paused. I didn’t prompt him. He would tell, or he wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.
“My mother said he was a perfectly good baby until he was six months old. And then… she said that was when Puck came, She said Puck took her good baby for one of his jokes and replaced him with a changeling. She laughed when she said it. But she never said it when Rollie was around to hear, and her eyes never laughed, Dennis. I think… it was her only explanation for what he was, for why he was so untouchable in his rage… so single-minded in his few simple purposes.
“There was a boy—I have forgotten his name—a bigger boy who thrashed Rollie three or four times. A bully. He would start on Rollie’s clothes and ask him if he’d worn his underpants one month or two this time. And Rollie would fight him and curse him and threaten him and the bully would laugh at him and hold him off with his longer arms and punch him until he was tired or until Rollie’s nose was bleeding. And then Rollie would sit there on the corner, smoking a cigarette and crying with blood and snot drying on his face. And if Drew or I came near him, he would beat us to within an inch of our lives.
“That bully’s house burned down one night, Dennis. The bully and the bully’s father and the bully’s little brother were killed. The bully’s sister was horribly burned. It was supposed to have been the stove in the kitchen, and maybe it was. But the fire sirens woke me up, and I was still awake when Rollie came up the ivy trellis and into the room I shared with him. There was soot on his forehead, and he smelled of gasoline. He saw me lying there with my eyes open and he said, “If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you.” And ever since that night, Dennis, I’ve tried to tell myself that he meant if I told he had been out, watching the fire. And maybe that was all it was.”
My mouth was dry. There seemed to be a lead ball in my stomach. The hairs along the nape of my neck felt like dry quills. “How old was your brother then?” I asked hoarsely.
“Not quite thirteen,” LeBay said with terrible false calm. “One winter day about a year later, there was a fight during a hockey game, and a fellow named Randy Throgmorton laid open Rollie’s head with his stick. Knocked him senseless. We got him to old Dr Farner—Rollie had come around by then, but he was still groggy—and Farner put a dozen stitches in his scalp. A week later, Randy Throgmorton fell through the ice on Palmer Pond and was drowned. He had been skating in an area clearly marked with THIN ICE signs, apparently.”
“Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?”
“Not that he killed her, Dennis—never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die.”
“You said he turned her over—punched her—tried to make her vomit.”
“That’s what Rollie told me at the funeral,” George said.
“Then what—”
“Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, “I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast.” And what Veronica told Marcia was, “Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast.” They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?”
“No.”
“It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, “If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you.”
“But… why? Why would he—?”
“Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car.” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to.
“Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?”
There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.
“Not in any conscious way, no,” LeBay said. “Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses… except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some… some intuition… or that he might have been directed to do what he did.
“My mother said he was a changeling.”
“And Veronica?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita’s death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out. If you tell, Georgie, I’ll kill you. There’s no proof one way or the other, of course. But I’ve wondered why she would do it the way she did—and I’ve wondered how a woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night.”