“Assuming that he is, how far does he know it? Some very earnest people have fantastic ideas about who they are and what they’ve got coming to them.”
I expected him to flare up again. He surprised me by saying: “I know, it’s what I was scared of, that I was hipped on the subject. I really used to be hipped when I was a boy. I imagined I was the prince in the poorhouse, and so on. My mother encouraged me. She used to dress me up in velvet suits and tell me I was different from the other kids.
“Even before that, though, long before, she had a story that she used to tell me. She was a young woman then. I remember her face was thin, and her hair hadn’t turned gray. I was only a toddler, and I used to think it was a fairytale. I realize now it was a story about myself. She wanted me to know about myself, but she was afraid to come right out with it.
“She said that I was a king’s son, and we used to live in a palace in the sun. But the young king died and the bogeyman stole us away to the caves of ice where nothing was nice. She made a sort of rhyme of it. And she showed me a gold ring with a little red stone set in it that the king had left her for a remembrance.”
He gave me a curious questioning look. Our eyes met solidly for the first time. I think the reality formed between us then.
“A ruby?” I said.
“It must have been. I talked to a woman named Matheson yesterday in Redwood City. You know her, don’t you, and you’ve heard her story? It made sense of some of the things that had puzzled me, and it confirmed what Culligan told me long before. He said that my stepfather was an ex-convict whose real name was Fred Nelson. He had taken my mother out of a place called the Red Horse Inn and made her his – lover. She married my father after Nelson was sent to prison. But he escaped, and found them, and murdered my father.” His voice had sunk almost out of hearing.
“When did Culligan tell you this?”
“The day I ran away with him. He’d just had a fight with Fredericks about his board bill. I listened to it from the cellar stairs. They were always fighting. Fredericks was older than Culligan, but he gave him an awful lacing, worse than usual, and left him unconscious on the kitchen floor. I poured water on Culligan’s face and brought him to. It was then he told me that Fredericks killed my father. I got a butcher knife out of the drawer, and hid it upstairs in my room. When Fredericks tried to lock me in, I stabbed him in the guts.
“I thought I’d killed him. By the time I saw a newspaper and found out that I hadn’t, I was across the border. I rode through the Detroit tunnel under the burlaps in an empty truck-trailer. The border police didn’t find me, but they caught Culligan. I didn’t see him again until last winter. Then he claimed that he’d been lying to me. He said that Fredericks had nothing to do with my father’s death, that he’d simply blamed Fredericks to get back at him, through me.
“You can see why I decided to play along with Culligan and his scheme. I didn’t know which of his stories was true, or if the truth was something else again. I even suspected that Culligan had killed my father himself. How else would he know about the murder?”
“He was involved in it,” I said. “It’s why he changed his story when he wanted to use you again. It’s also the reason he couldn’t admit to other people, even Sable, that he knew who you were.”
“How was he involved?”
How wasn’t he? I thought. His life ran through the case like a dirty piece of cord. He had marked Anthony Galton for the ax and Anthony Galton’s murderer for the knife. He had helped a half-sane woman to lose her money, then sold her husband a half-sane dream of wealth. Which brought him to the ironic day when his half-realities came together in a final reality, and Gordon Sable killed him to preserve a lie.
“I don’t understand,” John said. “What did Culligan have to do with my father’s death?”
“Apparently he was the finger man. Have you talked to your mother about the circumstances of the killing? She was probably a witness.”
“She was more than that.” The words almost strangled him.
Sheila turned to him anxiously. “John?” she said. “Johnny?”
He made no response to her. His gaze was dark and inward:
“Even last night she was lying to me, trying to pretend that I was Fredericks’s son, that I never had another father. She’s stolen half my life away already. Isn’t she satisfied?”
“You haven’t seen Fredericks?”
“Fredericks has gone away, she wouldn’t tell me where. But I’ll find him.”
“He can’t be far. He was at home an hour ago.”
“Damn you! Why didn’t you say so?”
“I just did. I’m wondering now if I made a mistake.”
John got the message. He didn’t speak again until we were a few blocks from his mother’s house. Then he turned in the seat and said across Sheila:
“Don’t worry about me. There’s been enough death and violence. I don’t want any more of it.”
Along the riverside street the rooftops thrust their dark angles up against a whitening sky. I watched the boy as he got out of the car. His face was pinched and pale as a revenant’s. Sheila held his arm, slowing his abrupt movements.
I knocked on the front door. After a long minute, the door was unlocked from the inside. Mrs. Fredericks peered out at us.
“Yes? What now?”
John brushed past me, and faced her on the threshold:
“Where is he?”
“He went away.”
“You’re a liar. You’ve lied to me all your life.” His voice broke, and then resumed on a different, higher note. “You knew he killed my father, you probably helped him. I know you helped him to hush it up. You left the country with him, changed your name when he did.”
“I’m not denying that much,” she said levelly.
His whole body heaved as if in nausea. He called her an ugly name. In spite of his promise to me, he was on the thin edge of violence. I laid one hand on his shoulder, heavily:
“Don’t be too hard on your mother. Even the law admits mitigation, when a woman is dominated or threatened by a man.”
“But that isn’t the case. She’s still trying to protect him.”
“Am I?” the woman said. “Protect him from what?”
“From punishment for murder.”
She shook her head solemnly. “It’s too late for that, son. Fredericks has took his punishment. He said he would rather have digger get him than go back behind walls. Fredericks hung himself, and I didn’t try to argue him out of doing it.”
We found him in a back room on the second floor. He was on an old brass bed, in a half-sitting position. A piece of heavy electrical cord was tied to the head of the bed and wrapped several times around his neck. The free end of the cord was clenched in his right hand. There was no doubt that he had been his own executioner.
“Get Sheila out of here,” I said to John.
She stood close to him. “I’m all right. I’m not afraid.”
Mrs. Fredericks came into the doorway, heavy and panting. She looked at her son with her head up:
“This is the end of it. I told him it was him or you, and which it was going to be. I couldn’t go on lying for him, and let you get arrested instead of him.”
He faced her, still the accuser. “Why did you lie for so long? You stayed with him after he killed my father.”
“You got no call to judge me for doing that. It was to save your life that I married him. I saw him cut off your daddy’s head with an ax, fill it with stones, and chunk it in the sea. He said that if I ever told a living soul, that he would kill you, too. You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him. He held up the bloody ax over your crib and made me swear to marry him and keep my lips shut forever. Which I have done until now.”