Set This House In Order Part 46

"Is Gordon Bradley still in Seven Lakes?"

Officer Cahill pauses, thrown off track by the question. "Chief Bradley? Yes, he's still here."

"I need to talk to him."

Starting up again: "Sam --"

"I need to talk to him," Andrew interrupts, "because I think I may have killed someone."

Another pause, longer this time. "What?"

"I think I may have killed someone. I'm not sure I did, I hope not, but I need to talk to Chief Bradley about it."

"Killed who?" Officer Cahill says, incredulous.

"Officer --"

"Sam, if you're in trouble --"

"I'm not Sam," Andrew says, losing his temper. "Maybe Sam will agree to talk to you later, but not until I talk to Chief Bradley. So could you take us to him? Please?"

"All right," Officer Cahill says, still with a look of disbelief on his face. "You want to ride back with me in the cruiser?"

"No," says Andrew. "We'll follow you in our car."

"All right. . ." He starts to walk away, stops, turns back, says "Sam . . ." and then gives up. For the moment.

Meanwhile Andrew tilts his head, and says angrily to someone inside: "What did you want me to tell him? I'm going to have to talk about it if I want to find out. . . You be quiet!"

"Your Aunt Sam," says Mouse, a few moments later in the car. "She and Officer Cahill had a. . .

relationship?"

"I don't really know," says Andrew. "Aunt Sam always talked about having a 'sweetheart,' and I guess this might be the guy. But I don't know the story, and Sam's not talking right now."

"He called you Andrea, too."

"Andrea Samantha Gage. That's my legal name."

"Your mother named you Andrea?"

"Yes," Andrew tells her, his voice sullen. "The body is female." He looks at her expectantly, but all Mouse can think to say is: "Oh. . . OK."

"OK?" says Andrew. "You're not freaked out?"

Mouse shakes her head. "I'm. . . surprised, I guess. But freaked out? No." She waves an arm, trying to encompa.s.s, in a gesture, everything that has happened since she started work at the Reality Factory three weeks ago. "You know, at this point. . ."

"Right!" Andrew says, as if he's been waiting for someone to see things this way. "Right, exactly, it's not that big a deal. I never thought it was. But Julie. . ." He stops and thrusts his hands out, as if pushing something away. "No. . . I'm not going to get going on that again."

The inside of the Seven Lakes police station looks more like a real estate office than a bastion of law enforcement. The front door opens into a veneer-paneled reception area, one wall of which is covered by an enormous surveyor's map of the town, marked off into individual property lots. At the rear of the room, past a pair of messy desks, the barred door of the station's main holding cell has been propped open, and partially concealed, by a big potted fern; the cell itself is being used to store stacks of brown-and-white file-folder boxes. Mouse deduces they do not see many felons in here; she wonders whether that bodes well or ill for Andrew's situation.

"Mortimer," Officer Cahill says to a man sitting at one of the desks. "Is the chief around?"

Mortimer shakes his head. "He should be in soon, though. He radioed a while ago and said he was just going to grab a slice of pie at Winch.e.l.l's."

"All right," Officer Cahill says. "When he gets in, tell him I need to see him." He looks around at Andrew and Mouse. "We'll wait for him in the break room. This way."

Officer Cahill leads them to a kitchenette in a back corner of the building. Shutting the door, he starts in on Andrew again: "All right, Sam, what's going on?"

"I'm not --"

"Listen, Sam: you may want to pretend that you don't know me, but I do still care about you, and if this business about killing someone isn't just a joke, you're going to need someone who cares about you. So before the chief gets here and things go too far, why don't you tell me what happened. Did you and" -- he shoots a suspicious glance at Mouse -- "your friend here get into some kind of trouble on the road?"

"No." Andrew shakes his head. "Penny had nothing to do with it. This is an old murder, if it was a murder. It's the stepfather -- my stepfather."

"Horace?"

"Yes, Horace Rollins. Did he --"

"Horace wasn't murdered, Sam," Officer Cahill says, sounding confused. "He killed himself."

"The stepfather committed suicide?"

"Well, it was an accident. . . but everybody knows it was his own d.a.m.n fault."

"What kind of accident?"

"You really don't know?" the officer says, and then shrugs. "He was drunk. He tripped and fell on some kind of gla.s.s table. Cut himself really bad. . . You didn't know this?"

Andrew ignores the question. "Are you sure he tripped?"

"Am I --"

"You say everybody knows it was his fault. But did you investigate the accident personally?"

"No," Officer Cahill says. "No, I wasn't on the force then. . . I was in West Virginia." There's a heavy note of shame in his voice as he makes the latter admission, as though living in West Virginia were some kind of sin.

"What is it?" Andrew says.

"I was married," the officer blurts out. "Till just last year. . . After I got out of the service, I got married." He gives Andrew the same expectant look that Andrew gave Mouse in the car.

Andrew's reaction is the same as Mouse's was: he couldn't care less. "Oh," he says. "OK."

Then the room telescopes unexpectedly, as Maledicta yanks Mouse back into the cave mouth and storms forward to take her place. "You f.u.c.ker!" she explodes. "After that line of bulls.h.i.t you fed Sam about not wanting to be f.u.c.king tied down, you went and f.u.c.king got married? How long was this after you f.u.c.king dumped her, two days?"

Officer Cahill flinches -- he'd been braced for a rebuke, but not from this direction. He defends himself, speaking to Andrew but keeping his eyes on Maledicta: "Sam, it wasn't like that -- what I wrote you in that last letter, it was wrong of me, but I meant it at the time."

"I'm sorry, Officer Cahill," Andrew says, "but I really don't care about that. I --"

"Well Sam's going to f.u.c.king care," Maledicta interrupts. "Let her out for a minute, I bet she takes a f.u.c.king bat to this c.o.c.ksucker. . ."

"Maledicta!" says Andrew. "This isn't helpful." Ignoring him, Maledicta opens her mouth to say something else, and that's when Mouse cuts back in, wrestles the body away from her.

"Sorry," Mouse apologizes. "This is none of my business, of course."

Officer Cahill just stands there, perplexed into speechlessness.

"Getting back to the stepfather," Andrew says. "Are you sure his death was an accident, or is it possible that someone else --"

"Sam," the officer sputters, "Sam, I don't know what the heck is going on here, but --"

The door opens, and another officer -- an older man, with graying temples -- enters the room.

He is carrying a fishing pole, and has a wide-brimmed straw hat tucked under his arm. His ruddy face is fixed in a scowl. "What's this now?" he demands of them, his voice loud enough to make Mouse jump.

"Chief!" exclaims Officer Cahill. "Uh. . . this is" -- he points to Andrew -- "this is. . ."

"Althea Gage's daughter Andrea," Chief Bradley says. "I know." He glances at Mouse. "You I haven't met." Mouse can't tell whether this is a simple statement of fact or a solicitation for an introduction; but before she can say anything, the chief shifts his gaze back to Officer Cahill. "Why are they here?"

"Sam -- Andrea -- has some, uh, questions about her stepfather's death."

"Does she." Chief Bradley purses his lips. Then he says to Officer Cahill: "Coming in, I saw Dave Brierson had his truck blocking the hydrant out front of his store again. Why don't you go talk to him about it -- tell him if I have to warn him one more time I'm impounding the vehicle."

"Sure, I can go talk to Dave," Officer Cahill says. "But if you don't mind, I'd like to stay here while Andrea --"

"Now would be a good time to get on it, actually," the chief interrupts him. "Before Dave moves the truck on his own and tries to pretend I was just seeing things."

"Right," Officer Cahill says. "Right, well. . ." He looks at Andrew. "Hope to see you later, Sam. .

Chief Bradley waits until he is gone and then says: "Let's go to my office."

Mouse doesn't think the invitation extends to her, but Andrew takes her by the hand and pulls her along with him. They all go into Chief Bradley's office. Once there, the chief takes his time about putting away the fishing pole and hanging up his straw hat and his jacket.

"Well, Andrea," he finally says. "I didn't expect to ever see you back here, after our last conversation. I thought you were out of this town for good."

"I thought I was too," Andrew says. "But the thing is, Chief Bradley," he continues haltingly, probably worried that the chief isn't going to get it any more than Officer Cahill did, "the thing is, it's complicated, but the person you spoke to on the phone after my mother died, that wasn't me exactly. I mean it was, but it wasn't. . ."

"Uh-huh," says Chief Bradley. "And this would be your multiple personality disorder, I suppose?"

Andrew blinks. "You know? Did my father -- did I -- tell you about that when. . . no, I didn't."

"Your doctor told me."

"Dr. Eddington called you?" Andrew gets excited. "What about Mrs. Winslow? Does she know I'm --"

"Slow down, Andrea." Chief Bradley raises a hand. "I don't know any Mrs. Winslow. And the doctor I spoke to was named Kroft, not Eddington."

"Dr. Kroft. . . but why would he be calling? There's no way he'd know I was coming here. We haven't been in touch with him since --"

"This was six years ago," the chief explains. "May of '91, I got a call from this Kroft fellow saying that Andrea Gage had escaped from a psychiatric ward in Ann Arbor, and she might be coming back home to do some mischief. He also said that you'd probably be dressed as a man, and going by the name Aaron or Gideon. . . and that wasn't the strangest part of the conversation. I'll tell you honestly, I thought the man was a crank at first, either a mental patient himself or a prankster with a grudge against you. But I did some checking, and found out that at least he wasn't crazy. The Ann Arbor police had a report filed on your escape from the Psychiatric Center.

"So I called the doctor back, and we spoke some more -- and at the end, I was still left with the impression that he was a man with a grudge. I was almost glad when you didn't show up; I was concerned for your safety, of course, but for that very reason I would have been reluctant to return you to that doctor's care."

"So you're saying I didn't come back here?" Andrew says.

"Is that what this is about?" asks the chief. "You're worried you killed Horace?"

"Yes. . . I know everyone thinks he had an accident, but --"

"I don't just think it, I know it. I was there when it happened."

"You saw it?"

Chief Bradley nods. "During my follow-up conversation with Dr. Kroft, he made some. . .

allegations about your stepfather." His eyes flick briefly to Mouse and then back to Andrew. "I a.s.sume I don't have to spell out what those allegations were?"

"No," Andrew says. "Penny already knows, but no, you don't have to say it."

"All right then. . . the doctor made these allegations, and my first thought was, more craziness. . .

but then after I'd hung up the phone I remembered another odd conversation I'd had, with you, back when you were ten or eleven. You'd been trying to tell me something about Horace, but you were so vague that at the time I had no idea what you were getting at. But suddenly, in light of what the doctor had alleged, the conversation made sense.

"And then I started recalling some other things. You remember a girl named Kristin Williams?"

Andrew starts to shake his head, stops, concentrates, then says: "She baby-sat me a few times when I was in grade school."

"I arrested her for a DUI on her sixteenth birthday," Chief Bradley says.

"She drove her father's Plymouth into Greenwater Lake. When I tried to take her statement at the lakeside, she made a crack about Horace."

"What kind of crack? Did she say he'd done something to her?"

"It was nothing that made any sense at the time -- she was half out of her head. And after she sobered up, she wouldn't explain herself, so I wrote it off as drunken rambling. . . until I had that talk with your doctor.

"I mulled all this over for a day or so, and decided I'd better go talk to Horace about it. Your mother was out of town at the time, visiting her sister, so it seemed like a good opportunity. But when I got up to the house, Horace was drunk. He didn't want to talk -- and when I insisted he let me in, and explained what I'd come about, he got very agitated. He started pacing, all up and down the house, and that's when he had his accident. He was crossing the living room, and he tripped over your mother's gla.s.s coffee table." Chief Bradley points to the scar above Andrew's eye. "The same table you got that on, as I recall. . . only in Horace's case, being a two-hundred-fifty-pound man, and falling square on it, he shattered the gla.s.s, and cut himself in a dozen places. I did what I could to help him, but by the time the ambulance arrived he'd bled to death."

As the chief finishes his account, Andrew's shoulders slump in relief. "So it wasn't me," he says.

"No," Chief Bradley confirms. "You've been carrying that around with you?" Andrew nods.

"Well," says the chief, "I'm glad to finally set your mind at ease."

All this time they've been standing. Now the chief sits down behind his desk, and indicates that Andrew and Mouse should help themselves to a pair of folding chairs that are leaning against the wall.

But Andrew stays on his feet, and Mouse, still feeling like an outsider here, does the same.