She seemed in excellent spirits. That was going to change.
“I’m afraid I’m here on business,” I said.
“What kind of business?” she said.
“Your father has limited ability to answer yes-and-no questions, right?” I said. “That’s how you did the conservatorship hearing, as I understand it.”
Marlinchen glanced immediately up at the high window. “Dad’s resting right now,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“I need to ask some questions only he can answer,” I said. “About your cousin, Jacob Candeleur.”
“I don’t have a cousin named Jacob,” she said. “We don’t have any cousins, period.”
I took the birth certificate from my shoulder and gave it to Marlinchen. I saw Marlinchen absorb the names: Jacob, Paul, Brigitte.
“See the birth date?” I said. “He and you and Aidan were born only months apart.”
“How bizarre,” she said. Puzzlement had washed away the polite anxiety in her voice. “I never met him.”
“Your father didn’t like your aunt Brigitte, and kept her away from his children,” I said. “But it isn’t true that you never met your cousin Jacob. You grew up with him. He became your closest friend.”
“What are you saying?” But Marlinchen was beginning to understand. Her eyes went to the tall blond boy beneath us, who was letting Donal outrun him for a touchdown.
“That’s not your brother Aidan down there,” I said. “It’s your cousin, Jacob. Your father didn’t give him away to Brigitte when he was 12,” I said. “He gave him back. Aidan, I mean Jacob, said that Brigitte was affectionate and clingy, as if she’d always wanted to be a mother. And she did. To her own son.”
Marlinchen took off her sunglasses to make eye contact. “Is this some kind of a sick joke?” she asked. She enunciated as if speaking to a child. “There’s a rather gaping hole in your theory, you know. If that’s Jacob, where is the real Aidan?”
This was the hard part. “If I had to guess,” I said, “I’d say he’s buried under the magnolia tree.” I pointed. “I think he shot himself with your father’s gun, fourteen years ago, and your father buried him under your mother’s favorite tree. The choice of burial site was probably a misguided way of comforting her.”
“No,” Marlinchen said.
“You have memories of it: a loud noise, your mother being upset and sleeping in the same bed with you that night. For comfort.”
“It was a storm that upset her,” Marlinchen said.
“No,” I said. “You all say your father didn’t have any interest in cars or home improvement. Yet he laid the new carpet in the study himself, and he’s held on to a car for fourteen years saying he might fix it up someday. Fourteen years, Marlinchen.”
“What’s your point?”
“When Aidan shot himself, your father rushed him to the hospital in that car. The carpet in the study he simply replaced, because it was soaked in blood. The smaller splashes, in the hall carpet, he scrubbed out with bleach. But the car, where Aidan lost most of his blood? He couldn’t ever fully clean that up. That’s why he was afraid to ever get rid of the car. Afraid that a buyer might find remnants of blood, under the seats, in the carpet and floorboards. Ditching the BMW and claiming it was stolen would only have made it worse; it would have made the car of interest to the police if it was ever found. No, the safest thing was to clean it up as best he could and lock it away on his own property.”
Marlinchen glanced at the garage, but only quickly.
“None of those cover-up methods was particularly adept,” I said, “but they didn’t have to be. As long as Hugh didn’t sell the house or the car, no one would ever get a close look at what evidence remained.” Until now, I thought. “Hugh replaced Aidan with his sister-in-law’s son,” I went on. “I don’t know how he persuaded her. Maybe he played on her concern for her grieving sister. Maybe he paid her off; Brigitte was poor, and a single mother. It could be that she thought Jacob would have a better life with her older sister and Hugh. But if she hadn’t gone along with it, imagine the consequences. Hugh’s career would have been terribly compromised. Your mother might have been labeled unfit along with him. You and Liam might have been taken away by Family Services, for who knew how long?”
“Okay, okay,” Marlinchen said, holding up her hands for me to stop. “I see where you got your theory, but it’s all impossible. He couldn’t have just been switched. I was four years old. I would have known.”
“You weren’t quite four. Kids are susceptible at that age, and their parents’ word is like God’s word,” I told her. “Hugh brainwashed you. He told you that Aidan was away. He stalled for weeks. Then he brought home Jacob and said ‘This is Aidan,’ until you and Jacob both accepted it.”
“But Mother…” Her voice was very soft.
“Your mother was in on it,” I said. “I suspect it wasn’t her idea, but she went along with it.”
That had been the difficult part for me, too, acknowledging the complicity of the woman who slept under the marble angel in the cemetery. Elisabeth had also borne a share of guilt in Jacob’s fate. But where guilt had poisoned Hugh, it had softened Elisabeth. She had adored her sister’s son, sharing with him a bond between two wronged souls.
“It wouldn’t have worked at all, except that the two of you weren’t in school yet,” I said. “Aidan had no teachers, no playmates that came to the house, and no older siblings. There was no one else to trick. J. D. Campion was the only other person who’d seen both Aidan Hennessy and Jacob Candeleur. Later that year, your father inexplicably and flatly refused him entry to your home.”
Marlinchen’s lips parted very slightly, and I thought perhaps that last detail, which her own knowledge of her parents’ lives confirmed, had convinced her. Then she straightened, as if relieved. “Aidan’s missing finger,” she said, the three words like a syllogism. “If there was no attack by a dog, how do you explain that?”
“There was a dog,” I said. “His neighbors in Illinois raised pit bulls, and there was a shoddy fence in between the two properties. Jacob really did lose the finger to one of the pit bulls, which is why he’s scared of dogs to this day.”
Below us, Colm took Liam down with a hard tackle. Marlinchen appeared to watch, but I doubted she was really seeing it.
“There’s more.” I said. “This birth certificate is all the paper there is on Jacob. He never registered for school. There’s no death certificate. No adoption papers. He just drops off the grid. Because he was in Minnesota.”
“So you’ve got a piece of paper. It doesn’t prove anything,” Marlinchen said. Then her eyes lit with a new idea. “Did it occur to you that maybe Jacob was the one who died young? Maybe our aunt Brigitte let him drown or something. She was always drunk, or stoned-”
“Don’t do that,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t let your father think for you all your life. You never met your aunt Brigitte, but you never questioned your father’s account of her. You’re more willing to think ill of her, a stranger, than of your father, whom you saw firsthand hurting Aidan physically and psychologically.”
Despite all her denial, the truth of these words hit home, and she was silent.
“I’m not saying your father is a monster,” I said. “He made a mistake, probably in haste, in the hospital parking lot, and it snowballed and ruined his life. By the time he realized that guilt and grief were destroying your mother from the inside out, it was too late to fix it. Imagine how it would have looked to the world, months or years later: burying his own son in an unmarked grave on his own land? Taking someone else’s child and erasing his identity? Hugh’s esteem and career might have survived his son’s accidental death, but his behavior after that crossed all moral and legal lines.”