“Hawkins?” the man asked. Jim nodded. “Thank God,” said the man, waving an imaginary flag in the air in weary triumph. “I been drivin’ around these back roads for near forty-five minutes looking for you.” He hopped out of the van with a package addressed to Iris Hawkins.
“She’s not here,” said Jim.
“But she’s coming back, right?” said the man, looking panicky. “She didn’t move away or nothin’?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jim. “I mean, no. She’ll be back.”
“You her secretary?”
Jim smiled. “Sure,” he said.
It was all the courier needed to hear. He thrust a clipboard at Jim and showed him where to sign his name. He handed him the package — a shiny plastic FedEx envelope. Then he tipped his hat.
“Pleased to do business with you,” he said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get home in time for my son’s graduation.”
Jim scrinched up his face. “Fall convocation isn’t for weeks,” he said.
The man winked at him. “Boy, my son is only three.” Laughing heartily, he jumped back into the van and wheeled out of the yard the way he had come, but a lot faster.
Jim looked the package over, stared at the return address. It was from Nancy Fisher. By the time he reached the house, he knew he was going to open it.
The stepladder stood alone in the centre of the kitchen. Jim perched on it and tore open the envelope. Inside he found two sheets of cream-coloured stationery written on both sides in purple ink. There were flowers around the border. Forget-me-nots. The letter was signed, “Yours most truly, Nancy,” and dated the previous day. Attached to it with a purple paper clip was a business-sized envelope, torn open, but with a letter folded inside. The stamp was American, the return address Baton Rouge. The letter was addressed to Father Fisher.
With his heart pounding, Jim read Nancy’s note first.
My Dear Iris;
I have always thought of you as a good and kind and brave person.
I am not brave. It has been very hard to bring myself to do what I am doing. I hope you will not think ill of me for intruding on your life or adding to the misery you have already suffered.
The letter attached was written to Father, as you will see. I cannot face the consequences of what it reveals. I am running away. You will think me a feeble and stupid woman, to be passing the buck. I just don’t know where to turn! Believe me, it took all my courage to even do this much.
I have tried so hard to believe that the enclosed letter is just a mean and evil lie. I have sat many times by the telephone about to call the author of this letter, but I could not bring myself to do it.
But I cannot go on like this. I am afraid all the time now. May God be with you for taking in Ruth Rose. She is such a difficult soul. Life has never been easy for her. She needed me and I failed her. Please let her know that I love her very much and that I pray we can be reunited someday, God willing.
Jim could scarcely breathe. He laid Nancy’s letter aside on the step of the ladder, carefully, as if it were an explosive device. He opened the envelope. It was typed on off-white bond in lowercase letters. The message was not long.
fisher:
that does it, scumbag. as if thirty-five thou could buy back my son. hawkins has already paid up the hard way. are we happy? no. it isn’t what we wanted. we want justice and we’ll get it. your time is up.
Jim placed the letter on the step but his hand was shaking so badly it fluttered to the newly sanded floor. He picked it up, brushed off the wood dust, read it again, placed it carefully beside the companion letter.
He whimpered. It was just as Ruth Rose had said. But it was worse. Way worse. His father reduced like that to “hawkins.” The glorious hub of his life whose disappearance had almost killed him and yet was not enough to satisfy the blood thirst of Tuffy’s mother.
They had been in it together. They had killed Tuffy.
He leaned his face against the cool metal rail of the ladder. If this was the truth, he didn’t want anything to do with it. He hated Ruth Rose for dragging him down into this. He hated Nancy. He hated Fisher. He hated Laverne Roncelier and Stanley and Francis Tufts — hated him for dying. And he hated his father, too, for leaving him alone to handle all this.
He clung to the ladder and closed his eyes. But a sound — a short, sharp metallic click-slide-click — brought him reeling back to the present.
At the door stood Father Fisher with a rifle in his hands. He had just engaged the bolt action to put a shell into the firing chamber. The rifle was aimed at Jim.
22
Fisher was smiling. “My, but the Lord does go on answering my prayers,” he said. “That’s the power of faith, Jim Hawkins.”
Jim knew the rifle. It was a Cooie bolt action .22. It usually sat in a rack above the door in the back room. It was for varmints — raccoons with a taste for the hen house, groundhogs who set up shop in the vegetable garden, beavers that couldn’t be persuaded to build elsewhere.
Jim stared at Father Fisher defiantly. Fisher raised the rifle to his shoulder, expertly looking down the sights.
“I grew up in the country, Jim. I know how to use this thing.” Jim flinched. It was enough to make Fisher lower the firearm to rest in the crook of his arm. But he didn’t engage the safety.
He glanced around the half-painted room. “What a difference a day makes,” he said.
“You did it, didn’t you?”
Fisher held Jim’s angry gaze as if it were a wasp in a jar. “If that’s what you care to believe.”
“It’s what’s true.”
“It’s what you believe to be true, jimbo. That doesn’t quite make it the Gospel Truth.”
“Don’t talk to me about the Gospel,” said Jim. “You’ve got red paint all over your hands.”
Fisher glanced at the fingers of his hand, unperturbed. “Who’s to say it isn’t blood?”
“You killed my father,” shouted Jim.
Fisher showed no emotion. “Only a lunatic would think to say such a thing.” He spoke softly. “Start spreading it around and people just might think you’re as crazy as Ruth Rose.”
“You killed Francis Tufts,” said Jim. “And you killed my father because he was going to tell on you.”
“Really?” said Fisher placidly. “You must tell me all about it. Sometime. But right now, I’m on a tight schedule.” His eyes wandered again to the letters.
“If this is what you came for, take it,” rasped Jim. He threw the letters, which fluttered to the floor in front of the pastor.
Fisher kneeled to retrieve the little bundle. “Thank you,” he said. “It would have been far better had I found it last night,” he added wearily.
“Ruth Rose didn’t have it,” said Jim.
Fisher was reading the letter from Laverne, his gaze darting back and forth from the page to his captor.
“I know,” he said. “When I didn’t have any luck here, I put two and two together and went home again.” He folded up the letters and put them in the back pocket of his jeans. He was wearing a denim jacket over a work shirt. He wasn’t wearing his dog collar. Jim couldn’t recall ever seeing him without it. On his feet were sneakers, wet and speckled with greyish grit. Jim had never seen him dressed in normal clothes.
“Nancy was gone, of course, but I was able to reconstruct her treachery,” he said. His eyes invited Jim to ask him how and it gave Jim a certain amount of pleasure not to. But Fisher could not resist a captive audience.