It wouldn’t take long to get to the store at this hour, but it still seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlke’s old truck and do it there. But she didn’t want to splatter her painfully written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering all the bloodshed detailed within it, and so She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now selling a robot floorwasher), and dropped them in Strehlke’s lap. “Hold that for me, Les,” she said.
“No problem,” he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony naked shoulder. That was all right.
Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the driver’s door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadn’t she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one—he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. “I didn’t want his battery to run down,” she said, and laughed.
She put the short barrel of the .38 against her temple, then reconsidered. A shot like that wasn’t always effective. She wanted her money to help women who had been hurt, not to pay for her care as she lay unconscious year after year in some home for human vegetables.
The mouth, that was better. Surer.
The barrel was oily against her tongue, and she could feel the small nub of the sight digging into the roof of her mouth.
I’ve had a good life—pretty good, anyway—and although I made a terrible mistake at the end of it, maybe that won’t be held against me if there’s something after this.
Ah, but the night wind was very sweet. So were the fragile fragrances it carried through the half-open driver’s side window. It was a shame to leave, but what choice? It was time to go.
Tess closed her eyes, tightened her finger on the trigger, and that was when Tom spoke up. It was strange that he could do that, because Tom was in her Expedition, and the Expedition was at the other brother’s house, almost a mile down the road from here. Also, the voice she heard was nothing like the one she usually manufactured for Tom. Nor did it sound like her own. It was a cold voice. And she—she had a gun in her mouth. She couldn’t talk at all.
“She was never a very good detective, was she?”
She took it out. “Who? Doreen?”
In spite of everything, she was shocked.
“Who else, Tessa Jean? And why would she be a good one? She came from the old you. Didn’t she?”
Tess supposed that was true.
“Doreen believes Big Driver didn’t rape and kill those other women. Isn’t that what you wrote?”
“Me,” Tess said. “I’m sure. I was just tired, that’s all. And shocked, I suppose.”
“Also guilty.”
“Yes. Also guilty.”
“Do guilty people make good deductions, do you think?”
No. Perhaps they didn’t.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“That you only solved part of the mystery. Before you could solve all of it—you, not some cliché-ridden old lady detective—something admittedly unfortunate happened.”
“Unfortunate? Is that what you call it?” From a great distance, Tess heard herself laugh. Somewhere the wind was making a loose gutter click against an eave. It sounded like the 7Up sign at the deserted store.
“Before you shoot yourself,” the new, strange Tom said (he was sounding more female all the time), “why don’t you think for yourself? But not here.”
“Where, then?”
Tom didn’t answer this question, and didn’t have to. What he said was, “And take that fucking confession with you.”
Tess got out of the truck and went back inside Lester Strehlke’s house. She stood in the dead man’s kitchen, thinking. She did it aloud, in Tom’s voice (which sounded more like her own all the time). Doreen seemed to have taken a hike.
“Al’s housekey will be on the ring with his ignition key,” Tom said, “but there’s the dog. You don’t want to forget the dog.”
No, that would be bad. Tess went to Lester’s refrigerator. After a little rummaging, she found a package of hamburger at the back of the bottom shelf. She used an issue of Uncle Henry’s to double-wrap it, then went back into the living room. She plucked the confession from Strehlke’s lap, doing it gingerly, very aware that the part of him that had hurt her—the part that had gotten three people killed tonight—lay just beneath the pages. “I’m taking your ground chuck, but don’t hold it against me. I’m doing you a favor. It smells spunky-going-on-rotten.”
“A thief as well as a murderer,” Little Driver said in his droning deadvoice. “Isn’t that nice.”
“Shut up, Les,” she said, and left.
– 43 –
Before you shoot yourself, why don’t you think for yourself?
As she drove the old pickup back down the windy road to Alvin Strehlke’s house, she tried to do that. She was starting to think Tom, even when he wasn’t in the vehicle with her, was a better detective than Doreen Marquis on her best day.
“I’ll keep it short,” Tom said. “If you don’t think Al Strehlke was part of it—and I mean a big part—you’re crazy.”
“Of course I’m crazy,” she replied. “Why else would I be trying to convince myself that I didn’t shoot the wrong man when I know I did?”
“That’s guilt talking, not logic,” Tom replied. He sounded maddeningly smug. “He was no innocent little lamb, not even a half-black sheep. Wake up, Tessa Jean. They weren’t just brothers, they were partners.”
“Business partners.”
“Brothers are never just business partners. It’s always more complicated than that. Especially when you’ve got a woman like Ramona for a mother.”
Tess turned up Al Strehlke’s smoothly paved driveway. She supposed Tom could be right about that. She knew one thing: Doreen and her Knitting Society friends had never met a woman like Ramona Norville.
The pole light went on. The dog started up: yark-yark, yarkyarkyark. Tess waited for the light to go out and the dog to quiet down.
“There’s no way I’ll ever know for sure, Tom.”
“You can’t be certain of that unless you look.”
“Even if he knew, he wasn’t the one who raped me.”
Tom was silent for a moment. She thought he’d given up. Then he said, “When a person does a bad thing and another person knows but doesn’t stop it, they’re equally guilty.”
“In the eyes of the law?”
“Also in the eyes of me. Say it was just Lester who did the hunting, the raping, and the killing. I don’t think so, but say it was. If big brother knew and said nothing, that makes him worth killing. In fact, I’d say bullets were too good for him. Impaling on a hot poker would be closer to justice.”
Tess shook her head wearily and touched the gun on the seat. One bullet left. If she had to use it on the dog (and really, what was one more killing among friends), she would have to hunt for another gun, unless she meant to try and hang herself, or something. But guys like the Strehlkes usually had firearms. That was the beauty part, as Ramona would have said.
“If he knew, yes. But an if that big didn’t deserve a bullet in the head. The mother, yes—on that score, the earrings were all the proof I needed. But there’s no proof here.”
“Really?” Tom’s voice was so low Tess could barely hear it. “Go see.”
– 44 –
The dog didn’t bark when she clumped up the steps, but she could picture it standing just inside the door with its head down and its teeth bared.
“Goober?” What the hell, it was as good a name for a country dog as any. “My name’s Tess. I have some hamburger for you. I also have a gun with one bullet in it. I’m going to open the door now. If I were you, I’d choose the meat. Okay? Is it a deal?”
Still no barking. Maybe it took the pole light to set him off. Or a juicy female burglar. Tess tried one key, then another. No good. Those two were probably for the trucking office. The third one turned in the lock, and she opened the door before she could lose her courage. She had been visualizing a bulldog or a Rottweiler or a pit bull with red eyes and slavering jaws. What she saw was a Jack Russell terrier who was looking at her hopefully and thumping its tail.
Tess put the gun in her jacket pocket and stroked the dog’s head. “Good God,” she said. “To think I was terrified of you.”