Then, as I glanced at her, turning down Brady toward downtown, I noticed something about her I’d never noticed before. She had just the slightest resemblance to somebody, somebody I used to know. And some things suddenly made a crazy kind of sense to me, or maybe I was crazy, but I thought about the two college guys who, back east some years ago, had loved the same woman; and then one of them evidently faded away for a time, for some reason or other, while the other married the girl, partially for money, partially perhaps because she was pregnant with Carrie, which according to Carrie’s age would have been about right; and then the mother had developed a drinking problem and sad, sad eyes and died; after which the father, Curtis Brooks, couldn’t stand the sight of his daughter, because she reminded him of his wife, the resemblance was that striking, and yet Brooks had kept the wife’s portrait hanging in his office…
He’d said something strange to me, before I killed him.
“I wasn’t even her father…”
Then who was?
I never did see the inside of that brown brick castle. Just as I never would understand what had gone on in there. I didn’t know what the furniture was like, whether the colors were lively or somber; I didn’t know what the relationship was like, whose personality dominated, or did they share and share alike. I didn’t want to know, either.
Maybe it was just my imagination that made me suddenly see a resemblance between the Broker and Carrie; anyway I kind of hope it was.
But before I dropped her off at the Concort, where her car was still in the lot, she said, “Maybe… maybe in his own way, my father did love me.”
Maybe she didn’t know how right she was.