He fell silent again, his features troubled and brooding.
Reel noted this and said, “She wasn’t Laura anymore; you realize that, right? She wasn’t your…Juliet anymore.”
“Maybe she never was.”
“Like you said, people can rationalize anything.”
“But I keep thinking that none of this would have happened if I had just walked into the house that night and taken her with me out of Cantrell. But I just drove off to a new life and left her behind. I abandoned her. Or at least she saw it that way. And maybe she was right.”
Reel considered this for a few moments. “You can’t put that burden on your shoulders, Robie. You can’t live someone else’s life for them. Hell, it’s hard enough living your own.”
“I guess,” he said, not sounding convinced.
Reel looked down at her hands. “But what happened to her, well, it was terrible.”
He looked at her in surprise. “So now you’re defending her?”
“No. I would never do that. But I guess I can understand how all this happened. We’re not all created the same. Some are more fragile than others. And you never know which one you’re going to get. Or which among us is going to crack.”
The door opened and Taggert poked her head in.
“You guys ready?”
“Ready?” said Robie. “For what?”
“To go see your dad.”
Chapter
79
THEY WERE DRIVEN over in a transport vehicle to accommodate Reel’s wheelchair. As soon as they entered the foyer of the Willows, Robie received a shock nearly equal to that of seeing his father standing under the moonlight holding the gun he’d just used to shoot his wife.
Blue Man was emerging from the front room with Dan Robie.
As always, Blue Man was dressed in a suit and tie, but apparently in deference to his current location, and taking in the heat and humidity, he was wearing, of all things, seersucker.
“What are you doing here?” asked Robie.
Reel just looked on in amazement from her wheelchair.
“Briefing your father and getting debriefed in return. Enlightening. Quite enlightening. I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be at the airport. You two are riding back with me. Until then, I have one more person to visit.”
“Who?” demanded Reel.
“Little Bill Faulconer, I believe he’s called. We can always use talented hackers. Even more so now that the NSA’s actions have been uncovered. One agency’s loss is another agency’s gain.”
And then Blue Man was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
Robie looked at his father. Dan Robie looked like he had aged ten years. The posture wasn’t as straight, the shoulders sagged, the hair seemed less thick, the man’s energy level was not as robust.
And who could blame him?
“How are you two doing?” Dan said quietly.
Reel said, “I’ll be doing better when I can ditch the wheels.”
Dan looked at his son. “And you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Let’s go in here.”
Dan led them back into the front room. Robie rolled Reel into the room and then sat in a chair next to her and across from his father.
“Your colleague filled me in on some things,” said Dan.
“That is stunning. And possibly illegal,” noted Robie.
“Nothin’ classified, he assured me,” said Dan. “But enough to let me know what you’ve been up to generally, Will.” He looked at Reel. “Both of you.”
Robie could only gape at his father while Reel looked just as surprised but found her voice. “Were you surprised at what your son is doing?”
“I guess I am surprised that I ever found out anythin’ about it.” He looked over at Robie. “Seein’ as how I never thought I’d see you again.”
“How’s Ty?”
“He’s with some friends right now. People he knows. People he feels safe with.”
“But he’s coming back, right?” said Robie.
“I’m not abandonin’ my son,” replied Dan firmly.
As he said the words it was clear to Robie that the man was not simply talking about Tyler.
Robie said, “He saved my life, you know. If he hadn’t screamed when he did I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the drawing that Ty had done of him and Robie. Stick figures with a heart in between. “I’ve never had anything personal where I live. No photos, no mementos.” He held up the drawing. “But this one I’m framing.”
Dan smiled and nodded. “Ty spoke a few words to me and I almost fell over. But now he’s quiet again. The doctors said not to push it. He’s been through, well, through hell and back. He saw me…he saw what I did to his mother. Even though I had to…she was goin’ to…I’m not sure he’ll…”
Dan looked away, shaking his head and rubbing at his eyes.
Robie could imagine what his father was thinking right now. Having to choose between his wife and sons. Under the circumstances it hadn’t been much of a choice, he knew. But that didn’t make it any easier. He hoped to God he was never faced with such a dilemma.
“How did you know where we were?” asked Robie.
His father’s head dropped. But with an effort he lifted it and gazed at his son. “There had been rumors about that shack on Clancy’s property. I mean from many years ago. One of the clients I represented on the oil platform case had been a migrant worker for several years. He told me some things that his child had said about that old shack. It wasn’t enough for an investigation, and I wasn’t a judge back then. But I never forgot about it. And somehow Henry Barksdale’s name came up as well. And in the ambulance you told me you suspected Barksdale was involved in this and you thought he might be at a location on Clancy’s old farm. I thought if Barksdale had taken Victoria and Ty somewhere, it might be to the old shack.”
Robie looked at him closely. “So you never suspected Victoria?”
Dan wouldn’t look at him now. “If you mean did I know that my wife was Laura Barksdale, no, I didn’t.” He hesitated. “But if you mean did I suspect that somethin’ was amiss, then, yes I did.”
“Why?” asked Reel.
“The Range Rover that night. You kept askin’ me if I was drivin’ it. I wasn’t. But…”
“But you thought she might have been? Even though she was supposed to be in Biloxi?”
“I know that sometimes Ty sleeps with Priscilla when they’re travelin’. If Ty did when they were in Biloxi, then Victoria had no alibi for Sherman Clancy’s murder. She could have easily driven back here, killed him, and gotten back to Biloxi before mornin’.”
“Victoria believed that Priscilla had concluded that same thing. It’s why she killed her. But why would you suspect her of killing Clancy in the first place?” asked Robie.
“I didn’t. I thought she might have been…cheatin’ on me with someone closer to her own age.”
“Did you believe she had been sleeping with Clancy? He’s hardly her own age.”
“I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t be sure. It’s why I threatened him. Things looked so fishy. And her story made no sense. She was drinkin’ with him? Why? But I never thought that she killed the man.”
“She planted the evidence against you at the crime scene. She wanted you to be arrested and convicted of the murder.”
“I know that now,” said Dan. “It’s just hard to process that the woman I had a child with…”
“But the Range Rover was seen near where Clancy was killed,” Robie pointed out. “They thought it was you driving but it was actually Victoria.”
“At first I thought the witnesses had to be mistaken. Or else they had seen Clancy’s Rover and not mine. I must’ve been asleep when she came back and took the truck. But I never put that together, principally because I did not know the woman I had married was…what she turned out to be.”
“But you showed up in time to save us. How?”
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“I got there just as she was runnin’ into the woods. I followed her. I saw that she had a gun. Somethin’ was off, way off.”
“And when you saw her on the banks of the Pearl?”
“I heard the exchange between you two. I knew then what she had done. And what she was about to do.”
“You saved my life. There was nothing I could have done. Without you there, both Ty and I would be dead.”A long silence ensued until Dan slipped his glasses from his shirt pocket, put them on, pulled out his wallet, and extracted a picture. He looked down at it for a few moments and then slid it across to Robie.
Robie gazed down at it and saw a young man with a granite jaw and a flinty expression wearing the uniform of a United States Marine.
Dan said, “That was my father. Your grandfather, Adam Robie. I know you two never met and he’s been dead for years now, but that was him. In that picture he was just back from the Pacific. Fought the Japanese all the way across the biggest ocean in the world: Guadalcanal, Kwajalein, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. All hellish. All beyond human comprehension. His company suffered a seventy percent mortality rate. He was awarded pretty much every medal they gave out to a fightin’ man. Probably killed more men than he could remember, and saw more of his buddies die than he would ever care to recall. He came home, threw all the medals in a box, and never talked about the war. I only learned later from other people what’d he done. He was a braver soldier than I ever thought of bein’.”
Robie lifted his gaze from the photo. “Okay?” he said questioningly. “But what’s the point, Dad?”
“Look, son, he didn’t just throw his medals in that box. He threw himself. Or who he used to be, which was a simple farm boy from Arkansas who wanted to play baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals and marry his childhood sweetheart. He did neither. He just killed Japanese soldiers and then he came home, got married to another woman he didn’t love, because his sweetheart had married someone else, and they had me.”
“So what are you saying happened to him?” asked Robie.
“They didn’t even have the term PTSD back then. But what those boys saw and did? Nothin’ prepared them for it. It changed them forever, and not in a good way. The soldiers who fought in World War Two never talked about that. They were expected to just get back to their civilian lives and carry on like the last four years of Hell had never even happened. Like they were supposed to hit some big reset button. And they did. With varying degrees of success. Or failure.” He reached over and tapped the photo. “Like your grandfather.”
“So he had PTSD?”
His father nodded. “That’s what they would call it now. He seemed to think I was the enemy, Will, that he had to attack. Relentlessly. With his fists and with his tongue. The mind games he played with me were just…cruel. One time he even called me by a Japanese name.” Dan took off his glasses and wicked the moisture from his eyes. “Damnedest thing,” he said hoarsely. “Like he was livin’ it all over again. The whole nightmare. A big, strong, brave man, reduced to…reduced to that.”
Reel and Robie continued to watch him, both of their faces tightly drawn, as though they could feel the older man’s pain.
“So when I turned seventeen, you’re right, I left. No, I retreated. He couldn’t touch me then. I had my life to lead and I led it. Without him. Because with him, I was done.”
“But you joined the Marines, too. Right in the middle of Vietnam. You knew you were going to be in combat.”
“I know.”
“So why? After all that?”
Dan didn’t speak for nearly a minute.
“As crazy as it sounds when I say it, I guess I wanted to show my old man that you could fight a war and not come home the way he did.”
“They really didn’t understand PTSD after Vietnam, either,” said Reel slowly.
“No, they didn’t. And we didn’t come home to tickertape parades like the World War Two boys did. We came home to hatred and disgust and…maybe even worse, indifference. After gettin’ your ass shot up for years in jungles you couldn’t find on a map, it was a little…disheartenin’.”
“So what you did to me?” said Robie slowly.
Dan leaned back in his chair. “I guess what I showed, son, is that it’s impossible to fight a war and not come home changed. At least speakin’ for Adam and Dan Robie.” He cleared his throat. “Funny how the mind works. When I was yellin’ at you or roughin’ you up I could see in my head my father doin’ the same to me. And I’m not tryin’ to make light of what I did to you, but what he did to me was even worse. And part of me was tellin’ myself I would never do that to my own boy, while the other part of me was doin’ just that.”
As his father sat forward and put his hands on the table, Robie could see that they were trembling.
Dan said, “But most vets don’t do what we did to their children. And I thank God for that. I thought I was strong, but I actually turned out to be one weak son of a bitch.”
He rubbed his nose and then took out a handkerchief and blew into it.
“And you were a popular kid here, Will. Sports star, all the girls were after you, but you were a good kid, you helped people. All you had goin’ for you, you never once thought you were better than anybody else when you sure could have.” Dan paused. “I had every reason to be proud of you. And a part of me was. You were my boy. But another part of me, at least the one that won out, wasn’t proud. Maybe I was jealous. Because you had the life I’d wanted and never had. So…so I guess I had to ruin it for you. Make it more like mine. I don’t know, son. I’m not a shrink. I can’t analyze it any more than that. You had every right to hate me. The years we…we could’ve been…a family. Wasted. All gone.”
Several moments of silence passed before Robie said, “Why are you telling me all this now?”
Dan glanced at his son’s arm and then up at his face. “Talk is cheap, but actions…actions, son, are the real deal. You came back to help me. Nearly got killed doin’ it.” He paused. He held up one finger. “And when you came back here you asked me for one thing. You asked me for the truth. So I guess it was time.” He took out his wallet again, slid out another picture, and handed it to Robie.
“I have two regrets in life, son. That was the first.”
Robie looked down at the photo of his mother.
“And the second?” asked Robie as he stared at his mother’s image.
“That would be losing you.”
Robie lifted his gaze to meet his father’s.
The older man’s eyes were filled with tears.
And then Robie’s eyes filled, too.
Another first.
Robie said, “You don’t have to look back anymore. Just look forward.”
His father shook his head. “What do I have left?”
“Well, you have Ty.” Robie drew a breath and added, with an encouraging glance from Reel, “And you have me.”
His father gripped his hand even as the tears trickled onto his cheeks. “I’m sorry, son. I’m so damn sorry.”
“We’re all sorry for something. But we need to move on, both of us. And we’ll do it together.”
Robie put his good arm more tightly around his dad’s broad shoulders and the two men just held on to each other.
Jessica Reel put a hand up to her eyes, rubbed the moistness away, and then looked away, giving the two men a respectful privacy.
Chapter
80
HOURS LATER THE small jet lifted off into a clear sky over southern Mississippi.
Robie, Reel, and Blue Man were the only passengers on board.
Robie looked out the window as the rugged terrain of the Magnolia State fell away.
He silently said good-bye to the forests, the abundance of chickens, and the Pearl River. And the gators lying in wait therein.
And to the ghosts of his past that had haunted him so, but a bit less now.
As the plane leveled out Blue Man rose and poured out three drinks from the small bar. He handed g
lasses to Robie and Reel before retaking his seat.
Robie said, “You never did say why you came down here.”
“Didn’t I? Well, perhaps I didn’t.”
“And?” said Reel expectantly.
“It’s all about asset management,” said Blue Man, taking a sip of his drink. “You are my assets and it’s my job to manage you properly. That