“I hate his guts,” Leeds said.
“Why?”
“I’m a farmer and he’s a convicted felon. That’d be reason enough, even if there weren’t other things.”
“Why’d you hire him?”
“Jessica wanted him here.”
“Why?”
“To keep him out of trouble, was what she said. If you ask me, he’s the kind who’ll always be in trouble of one sort or another. That bank robbery wasn’t the first crime he committed, you know. It was just the first one he got sent away for.”
“What were the others?”
“You name them, he did them,”
“Like what?”
“Drugs, assault, rape, burgla—”
“Rape?”
“Rape.”
“When was this?”
“Which?”
“Start from the beginning.”
“The first dope arrest was when he was thirteen, fourteen, in there. Judge took pity on him, gave him a suspended sentence. He looks so damn clean-cut, you know, so apple pie, American boy next door, it’s hard to believe he’s a vicious son of a bitch.”
“Tell me about the assault and the rape.”
“The assault was when he was sixteen. He mugged an old lady in the park, ran off with her purse. Jessie says the old lady identified the wrong man. Maybe she did. They searched high and low for her handbag, threw the apartment and especially Ned’s room upside down, but they never did find it.”
“How about the rape?”
“Ned was seventeen, the girl was thirteen. And retarded.”
“And he got away with it?” Matthew asked.
“Jessie says he didn’t do it. The jury said so, too. His lawyer had five witnesses who claimed Ned was out bowling with them at the time of the rape, and the jury believed them.”
Wheels within wheels, Warren had said.
Ned Weaver charged with rape when he was seventeen years old. And an acquittal.
His sister the victim of multiple rape all these years later. And another acquittal.
“He wasn’t so lucky the next time around,” Leeds said. “That was the bank holdup. Jessie claims he was forced into it. Ned owed this Italian fellow some money, the man forced him to go along on the robbery, to square matters, you know? That’s what Jessie says it was. Just a matter of trying to settle a bad debt. Which doesn’t explain why Ned shot that bank guard, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“He shot him because he’s a vicious son of a bitch, is why. But even so, look at the sentence he got. Out in nine years. He’s been lucky all his life when it comes to kindhearted judges and pushover juries.”
“But your wife doesn’t feel that way, does she?”
“Oh, no, according to her, he’s Mr. Clean. Just had a string of bad luck, is all. He’ll get in trouble again, though, you wait and see. And next time I hope they lock him up for good.”
“Were all of these arrests in California?” Matthew asked.
He was wondering why the computer had located only the one arrest and conviction.
“The early ones were in South Dakota,” Leeds said, “while he was growing up. Growing up rotten. It’s hard to believe him and Jessie are from the same stock. She’s seven years older than he is, you know, she’s thirty-six. Her parents were killed in a car crash, she’s like a mother to him. Which I guess is why she wanted him here on the farm. But they didn’t move to San Diego till he was eighteen, after the rape episode. Just in time to get in trouble all over again, right? Clean slate in a new town, might as well shit all over it.”
“Is that where you met her? In San Diego?”
“No, no, we met right here in Florida. She used to model, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. She was doing a trunk show here at the Hyatt. We started talking, I asked her out… and that was it, I guess.”
“When was this?”
“We’ve been married for almost six years now.”
The gloom settled over his face again.
Marriage. Memories. A shining past.
And a future that seemed as dark as the rain outside.
“Didn’t even know she had a brother,” he said. “He was in prison when I met her, she never once mentioned him. The first I knew of him was when he showed up on our doorstep last summer. It was one of the hottest days of the year, I remember…”
… the sun sitting in the sky like a ball of fire, the sprinklers going in the fields, a Yellow Cab from town coming up the road and throwing dust a mile into the sky. Leeds is in the barn doing something, he doesn’t remember what just now, perhaps stitching a torn cinch on a saddle, he has always been very good with his hands, even when he was a kid, and he loves repairing things. He can’t imagine why a taxi has come out here to Timucuan Point Road, and he has no idea who the man getting out of the cab might be.
He puts down the saddle girth — that’s what he’d been working on, he now remembers clearly — and goes out to where the young man is paying the driver, the driver making change, the dust still rising on the air around them. It occurs to him that the young man has the same coloring as his wife. Green eyes, red hair — well, hers is a bit more on the brown side, a reddish-brown. But this is just a fleeting observation, and he makes no real connection, he never once thinks they might be brother and sister.
The young man turns and extends his hand.
He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt open at the throat, blue jeans, Western boots.
There is a mermaid tattoo on his right forearm.
The mermaid has long yellow hair and blue eyes and bright red lips and red-nippled breasts and a blue-scaled tail.
I’m Ned Weaver, the stranger says, hand still extended.
Which, of course, is Jessica’s maiden name, Jessica Welles Weaver, the Welles for her mother’s maiden name — is this young man a cousin or something?
But no, he is not a cousin.
Because a cry of joy sounds from within the house, and Jessica comes bounding out in cutoff shorts and a green T-shirt, barefooted, running toward the young man, who drops the duffel he’s been holding in his left hand, and turns to her and opens both arms wide to her, and clasps her to him, her long reddish hair — she was wearing her hair long then — cascading over his arms behind her back, showering the mermaid’s yellow hair and red-nippled breasts. Oh, Ned, she cries, oh God, how happy I am to see you!
“She’d been writing to him all the while he was in prison,” Leeds said now. “Had herself a P.O. box in town, he’d send his letters to her there. I didn’t know she’d offered him a job till all the introductions and the laughing and the oh my Gods were out of the way and we were sitting around the pool drinking. I didn’t know he was a jailbird until that night in bed when she told me his sad, sad history. Always the innocent victim, that brother of hers, dear little Ned, pure as the driven snow. Norton Albert Weaver, named for Jessica’s father, who’d been lucky enough to die long before his only son turned rotten. Norton Albert Weaver, a vicious son of a bitch if ever there was one, but I didn’t know that until the day with the dog. This must’ve been…”