After several more steps, Colin said, “Wait.”
Roy looked back and grinned. “Scared?”
“No.”
“Ha!”
“I just have some questions.”
“So hurry up and ask them.”
“You said a lot of people were killed here.”
“Seven,” Roy said. “Six murders, one suicide.”
“Tell me about it.”
During the past twenty years, the very real tragedy of the Kingman murders had evolved into a highly embellished tale, a grisly Santa Leona legend, recalled most often at Halloween, composed of myth and truth, perhaps more of the former than the latter, depending on who was telling it. But the basic facts of the case were simple, and Roy stuck close to them when he told the story.
The Kingmans had been wealthy. Robert Kingman was the only child of Judith and Big Jim Kingman; but Robert’s mother died of massive hemorrhaging while delivering him. Big Jim was even then a rich man, and he grew continually richer over the years. He made millions from California real estate, farming, oil, and water rights. He was a tall, barrel-chested man, as was his son, and Big Jim liked to boast that there was no one west of the Mississippi who could eat more steak, drink more whiskey, or make more money than he could. Shortly before Robert’s twenty-second birthday, he inherited the entire estate when Big Jim, having drunk too much whiskey, choked to death on a large, inadequately chewed chunk of filet mignon. He lost that eating contest to a man who had yet to make a million dollars in plumbing supplies, but who could at least boast of having lived through the feast. Robert had not developed his father’s competitive attitude toward food and beverage, but he had acquired the old man’s business sense, and although he was quite young, he made even more money with the funds that had been left to him.
When he was twenty-five, Robert married a woman named Alana Lee, built the Victorian house on Hawk Hill, just for her, and began fathering a new generation of Kingmans. Alana was not from a wealthy family, but she was said to be the most beautiful girl in the county, with the sweetest temper in the state. The children came fast, five of them in eight years-three boys and two girls. Theirs was the most respected family in town, envied, but also liked and admired. The Kingmans were churchgoers, friendly, graced with the common touch in spite of their high station, charitable, involved in their community. Robert obviously loved Alana, and everyone could see that she adored him; and the children returned the affection their parents lavished upon them.
On a night in August, a few days before the Kingmans’ twelfth wedding anniversary, Robert secretly ground up two dozen sleeping tablets that a physician had prescribed for Alana’s periodic insomnia, and sprinkled the powder in drink and food that his family shared for a bedtime snack, as well as in various items consumed by the live-in maid, cook, and butler. He neither ate nor drank anything he had contaminated. When his wife, children, and servants were soundly asleep, he went out to the garage and fetched an ax that was used to chop wood for the mansion’s nine fireplaces. He spared the maid, cook, and butler, but no one else. He killed Alana first, then his two young daughters, then his three sons. Every member of the family was dispatched in the same hideously brutal, gory fashion: with two sharp and powerful blows of the ax blade, one vertical and one horizontal, in the form of a cross, either on the back or on the chest, depending on the position in which each was sleeping when attacked. That done, Robert visited his victims a second time and crudely decapitated all of them. He carried their dripping heads downstairs and lined them up on the long mantel above the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a shockingly gruesome tableau: six lifeless, blood-splashed faces observing him as if they were a jury or judges in the court of Hell. With his beloved dead watching him, Robert Kingman wrote a brief note to those who would find him and his maniacal handiwork the following morning: “My father always said that I entered the world in a river of blood, my dying mother’s blood. And now I will shortly leave on another such river.” When he had written that curious good-bye, he loaded a.38-caliber Colt revolver, put the barrel in his mouth, turned toward the death-shocked faces of his family, and blew his brains out.
As Roy finished the story, Colin grew cold all the way through to his bones. He hugged himself and shivered violently.
“The cook was the first to wake up,” Roy said. “She found blood all over the hallway and stairs, followed the trail to the drawing room, and saw the heads on the mantel. She ran out of the house, down the hill, screaming at the top of her lungs. Went almost a mile before anyone stopped her. They say she nearly lost her mind over it.”
The night seemed darker than it had been when Roy had begun the story. The moon appeared to be smaller, farther away than it had been earlier.
On a distant highway a big truck shifted gears and accelerated. It sounded like the cry of a prehistoric animal.
Colin’s mouth was as dry as ashes. He worked up enough saliva to speak, but his voice was thin. “For God’s sake, why? Why did he kill them?”
Roy shrugged. “No reason.”
“There had to be a reason.”
“If there was, nobody ever figured it out.”
“Maybe he made some bad investments and lost all of his money.”
“Nah. He left a fortune.”
“Maybe his wife was going to leave him.”
“All of her friends said she was, very happy with her marriage.”
A dog barking.
A train whistling.
Wind whispering in the trees.
The stealthy movement of unseen things.
The night was speaking all around him.
“A brain tumor,” Colin said.
“A lot of people thought the same thing.”
“I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet Kingman had a brain tumor, something like that, something that made him act crazy.”
“At the time it was the most popular theory. But the autopsy didn’t turn up any signs of a brain disease.”
Colin frowned. “You seem to have filed away every single fact about the case.”
“I know it almost as well as if it had happened to me.”
“But how do you know what the autopsy uncovered?”
“I read about it.”
“Where?”
“The library has all the back issues of the Santa Leona News Register on microfilm,” Roy said.
“You researched the case?”
“Yeah. It’s exactly the kind of thing that interests me. Remember? Death. I’m fascinated by death. As soon as I heard the Kingman story, I wanted to know more. A whole lot more. I wanted to know every last bit and piece of it. You understand? I mean, wouldn’t it have been terrific to be in that house on that night, the night it happened, just sort of observing, just hiding in a comer, on that night, hiding and watching him do it, watching him do it to all of them and then to himself? Think of it! Blood everywhere. You’ve never seen so much goddamned blood in your life! Blood on the walls, soaked and clotted in the bedclothes, slick puddles of blood on the floor, blood on the stairs, and blood splashed over the furniture…. And those six heads on the mantel! Jesus, what a popper! What a terrific popper!”
“You’re being weird again,” Colin said.
“Would you like to have been there?”
“No thanks. And neither would you.”
“I sure as hell would!”
“If you saw all that blood, you’d puke.”
“Not me.”
“You’re just trying to gross me out.”
“Wrong again.”
Roy started toward the house.
“Wait a minute,” Colin said.
Roy didn’t turn back this time. He climbed the sagging steps and walked onto the porch.
Rather than stand alone, Colin joined him. “Tell me about the ghosts.”