"Hello," he said.
Harnes stood and approached him. "Hello, Nicodemus.”
“No need to get up on my account."
"You shouldn't have returned."
"You shouldn't have gone after my brother."
"He murdered my son."
"No, he didn't."
Nick had proven to be the wild card, somehow a part of all that had transpired, and yet not really of it. He remained too far outside the rest of us. He'd saved my life but I didn't know what that might mean anymore. Jocelyn drifted back into a darkened comer of the room. I quickly checked around. There wasn't much to grab, not even a bottle of wine, a letter opener, nothing.
"What are you doing here, Nick?" Anna asked.
My grandmother had been right: sometimes all you had to do was ask. I suddenly realized with an awful clarity that no one, so far, whom I'd spoken with since Teddy's murder, had actually lied to me.
"I had an affair with his wife, Marie, a long time ago," Nick said, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a hardened piece of cheese. He swallowed it in one bite and proceeded to look so relaxed and untroubled in Harnes' home that I was beginning to feel extremely uneasy.
"And you, I presume," Anna said. "Are Teddy's biological father?"
He grimaced and shook his head. "Hell, no. Vasectomy when I was twelve. There are places that still do that to orphans." He went through his pockets, found the stub of a cigarette, and stuck it in his mouth. "I used to work for him. I was his chauffeur once upon a time, back when I wasn't much more than a kid." When he couldn't find any matches he dropped the butt back in his coat. “By the way, you need a new driver. The one outside is dead."
Jocelyn descended through the ink trails of the room and reappeared like a dark angel landing. I spun toward her and we met face-to-face, as if about to kiss. She pressed a silver .32 she'd probably bought from Oscar Kinion hard above my heart as I looked deeply at the dragon that Crummler had seen murdering a boy in his cemetery.
"You'd do anything to protect him, wouldn't you?" I asked. "But you don't have his light touch or his patience. He enjoys the slow drag and you like the quick finish. That's why you had Shanks kill Brian Frost. What are you after?"
"You ordered Freddy to do such a thing?" Harnes asked.
"Yes," she answered.
Nobody seemed too concerned about the gun jammed into my chest except me.
Harms' brows drew together in a scowl of disappointment. "That is not my way."
No, he had his own methods. Theodore Harnes enjoyed a standoff, the panic and passion and dismay of others he could leech to fill his own vacant shell, but she clearly hated all of us; everybody.
"Have we not dealt with these pretentious American fools long enough?" Jocelyn asked. Something displaced beneath her face, like the slow but irrevocable movement of a leviathan thrashing from the depths toward the surface. "A moronic, arrogant brute daring to demand money for a weak, simpleminded girl? Attempting to disrupt our lives with lawyers and reporters? And you abide their impudent threats instead of putting a stop to such insolence?"
"Empty threats mean nothing."
"They are an affront to honor. America is unbearable. A wasteland of privilege without principal."
"It is that, and more. My son wanted to come home, and so did I."
"It is not my home."
The timing had to be right. Ten minutes had gone by, but Nick hadn't made any mention of the woman. Had she run off? Jocelyn dug the barrel of the .38 along the groove of my ribs. It hurt like hell, but I did my best to keep my face as straight as hers. I didn't do so well. Anna wheeled forward and my heart sank even lower. If she could have seen what I'd seen in the wake of the dragon-the elimination of a boy's face in the name of hate-she would have stayed back. Or perhaps not.
Anna said, "There is no need for this."
"Quiet, you foolish, nosy old woman."
From the doorway came, "Fuckit."
Jocelyn drew back out of my range before she would even turn her head. Then she glared at the woman. Neither she nor Harnes showed any change of composure. Harnes said, "Li Tai." I finally knew what to call the woman. Her mouth fell open for a second and then she closed it. Jocelyn said something to her in Chinese. They began a slow chattering that rapidly built to a singsong quarrel. Harnes put in a few words himself, and they all fell silent.
"Jocelyn is your daughter," Anna said.
"Yes," Harnes admitted.
"And you had her mother confined to a mental institution? Why?"
"I did not want her in my life any longer and she threatened to cause a stir with Chinese officials. She managed several of my factories overseas, and had a great many political affiliations in Hong Kong. This course proved to be most beneficial for me."
"So long as you had her you could control these politicians."
"No, money did that, until Hong Kong reverted back to mainland China's rule. Then it became more advantageous to simply leave."
Anna's lips flattened and went white until she found the air to say, "That was nearly two years ago. Why not release her?"
He looked mildly amused. "And why should I?"
I made eye contact with Nick Crummler but couldn't read anything. Jocelyn hadn't pointed the gun at him at all, I'd noticed. Harnes sat, crossed his legs, and straightened the seam of his pants leg.
I said, "You returned from Asia two years ago and left her imprisoned that long for no reason?"
"No, it has been over twelve years." he confessed with the cool alacrity I wanted to set fire to. "I brought her from Hong Kong under the auspices of visiting Disneyland long before my son and I stopped traveling the world and settled back in America."
At the word Disneyland Li Tai squeezed her eyes shut and one massive shiver ran through her body.
"And Teddy didn't know."
"He believed her to be dead. My son was. . . a benevolent soul. He would not have understood."
"It was stupid of you to bring her here," Jocelyn hissed at me. "What could you possibly have hoped to accomplish?"
"This." I unfolded Teddy's sketches and showed them to Harnes. "You didn't know that Teddy volunteered at the hospital, did you? He drew murals in the group therapy rooms. He must've spotted Li Tai there several weeks ago. She was your wife in China, wasn't she? He'd been raised by her."
"For some years, yes."
I turned to Jocelyn, watching all that had laid coiled and under control for so long rising and struggling to get free. I shoved my chest against the gun, hoping it would make her feel empowered enough not to pull the trigger.
"A woman he hardly remembered, and believed to be dead. He came to you, didn't he? He finally realized the kind of man his father was, and he came to you, hoping you'd side with him. How he must have loved you to have trusted you. His sister. He thought you hadn't known your own mother was still alive. But you did know. And you didn't care. That's what Crummler saw that day he came out into the hailstorm. He saw you two arguing. He knew what you were capable of. You terrified him."
"Shut up about that brain-damaged caretaker. He means nothing," she said. "Teddy never understood the man our father was. If he had, he would not have acted so intolerably."
"What did he want to do? Go to the police? Try to get your mother out on his own? He chose to talk with you alone while he visited his own mother. He must've gone to the cemetery every day for a while. He respected the dead."
"He did not respect father."
"And you'd do anything to protect your father," I said. "So you murdered Teddy."
Harnes cocked his head and said, "What?"
"Father . . ."