“What do you know about that hatred?”
“He was abusive, both towards O’Connell’s mother and O’Connell. He was the sort of guy that drank too much and then used his fists liberally. No one in the entire neighborhood likes him. And he was probably hell for any kid, much less one like O’Connell.”
Sally inhaled sharply, trying to impress reason upon the words she was speaking when she knew they had a particular kind of insanity. “Would you say,” she spoke cautiously, “would you say that this man was in some regards the reason, psychologically speaking, of course, that Michael O’Connell is who he is?”
Scott nodded. “Of course. I mean, even the most simple armchair Freud amongst us knows that.”
“Violence breeds violence,” Sally said.
“Yes.”
“The reason Ashley is threatened is because this man years ago created in his own child an unhealthy, probably murderous and obsessive need to be loved, to possess someone else, I don’t know, to ruin or be ruined, however you want to put it.”
“That was my impression.” Scott’s own voice was gathering some momentum. “And there’s something else. The mother-who wasn’t any bouquet of flowers, either-died under questionable circumstances. He might have killed her. He just couldn’t be charged.”
“So, in addition to maybe creating a killer, maybe he is one, as well?” Sally asked.
“Yes. I guess you could say that.”
“If you step back, for just a second here,” Sally continued, weighting her language with desperation, “would you not agree that whatever danger Michael O’Connell threatens our Ashley with, it was established in his psyche by his father?”
“Yes.”
“So,” she said abruptly. “It’s simple then.”
“What’s simple?” Hope said.
Sally smiled, but there was absolutely no humor in anything she said. “Instead of killing Michael O’Connell ourselves, we kill the father. And find a way to blame the son for the murder.”
Silence again filled the room.
“It makes sense,” Sally said quickly. “The son hates the father. The father hates the son. So, if they were brought together, death is not an unlikely result, right?”
Scott nodded slowly.
“Aren’t the two of them, in a pretty clear way, the basis for the threat to Ashley?”
This time Sally turned to Hope, who also nodded.
“Can we be killers?” Sally asked. “Could we murder someone-even for the best of reasons-and then wake up the next day and start life up again just as if nothing of any great importance had taken place?”
Hope looked over at Scott. No easy answer from him right then, she thought.
Sally was harsh with every word. “Murder, you see, inevitably changes everything. But the point of killing is to restore Ashley’s life to its pre-Michael O’Connell status. We can probably manage that-if she is excluded from almost the entirety of the process. Which is a difficult enough aspect to manage. But the three of us, we’re the conspirators in this. It will change us, will it not? I think profoundly. Because right now, with this conversation right here, we’re taking a step. Up to this point, we’ve been the good guys, trying to protect our daughter from evil. But we take this step-even a small one-and we’re suddenly the bad guys. Because, no matter what Michael O’Connell might have done, or whatever Michael O’Connell might be planning to do, we are somewhere beyond him. He’s being driven by recognizable psychological forces; his evil stems from his upbringing, his background, whatever. He’s probably not to blame for the bad guy he’s become. He’s the unconscious product of deprivation and pain. So, whatever he’s done to us, and whatever he might do to Ashley, it at the very least has some sort of moral or emotional basis. Maybe it’s all wrong, but it has an explanation to it. Us, on the other hand, well, what I’m saying is that we’re going to have to be cold-blooded, selfish, and without any redeeming aspects. Save perhaps one.”
Both Hope and Scott had listened intently to Sally’s speech. She had writhed about in her chair, as if tortured by every word she spoke, until finally coming to a frozen halt.
“What’s that?” Hope asked cautiously.
“Ashley will be safe.”
Again they were all silent.
Sally caught her breath with a sharp gasping sound.
“This is assuming one critical detail,” she said almost in a whisper.
“What detail is that?” Scott demanded.
“That we can get away with it.”
Night had descended, and we sat in two wooden Adirondack chairs on her stone patio. Hard seats for hard thoughts. I was flush with questions, more insistent than ever about speaking with the principals, or, at the very least, one of them who could fill me in on the moment when they changed from victims to conspirators. But infuriatingly, she wasn’t willing to be bulldozed. Instead, she stared out into the humid summer darkness.
“Remarkable, isn’t it, what one will consider doing, when pushed to a limit?” she said.
“Well,” I replied cautiously, “when one’s back is up against the wall…”
She laughed, but humorlessly. “But that’s just it,” she said abruptly. “They thought their backs were up against that proverbial wall. How can you be certain?”
“They had legitimate fears. The threat O’Connell posed was obvious. They just didn’t know. And so given the choice between unknowns, they took charge of their own circumstances.”
She smiled again. “You make it sound so easy and so convincing. Why don’t you turn it around?”
“How?”
“Well, imagine looking at the problem from the law enforcement point of view. You have a young man who has fallen in love, pursuing the girl of his dreams. Happens all the time. You and I know that his pursuit is truly an obsession-but what could a police detective actually prove? Do you not think that Michael O’Connell effectively hid his computer sorties into all their lives so they couldn’t be traced? And what had they done in response? Tried to bribe him. Tried to threaten him. Had him beaten up. If you were a policeman, coming upon this situation, which do you think would be the easier case to prosecute? My guess is, Scott, Sally, and even Hope. They have already lied. They have already been duplicitous. Even Ashley has skirted the law, with the revolver she obtained. And now they were conspiring to commit murder. Of an innocent man. Perhaps he wasn’t innocent in some psychological or moral sense, but still…And they wanted to get away with it. What claim did they have for the ethical high ground?”
I didn’t answer this question.
My own imagination was churning: How did they manage?
“Do you remember who told them that saying and doing are different things altogether? Who pointed out how hard it actually is to pull a trigger?”
I smiled. “Yes. It was O’Connell.”
She laughed bitterly. “Yes. That was what he said to the toughest of them all, the one with the least to lose by firing that shotgun’s load into his chest, who had seen most of her life already pass by and would be risking the least by shooting. At that critical moment, she failed, didn’t she?”
She paused, staring up into the darkness. “But someone would have to be brave enough.”
39
Sally spoke first. “We will need to identify and divide up the responsibilities. We must create a plan. And then we must stick to it. Religiously.”
She was surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. They were so harshly calculating, it sounded to her as if they were being spoken by someone she didn’t know. The three of them seemed to be the least likely of murderers, she thought. She had immense doubts whether they could actually pull off something like what she had proposed.
Hope looked up. “I don’t know anything about this. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. I hardly ever read mystery novels or thrillers, except back when I was in college I read Crime and Punishment in one course, and In Cold Blood in another.”