Page 52 of Again with Feeling

“We decided to live together,” Jane said.

(I couldn’t even be mad about the interruption.)

“After a few years,” she continued, “when it was obvious neither one of us was going to…to move on, I suppose, it seemed the obvious thing to do.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why?” Jane met my question with a blank expression. When I turned to Neil, I thought I heard him draw in a breath. “You were going to come out. I thought you were done hiding. Why didn’t you—” I almost saidfind someone else, but I heard how callous it sounded, and I managed to stop myself.

Neil must have heard the words anyway, though, because he said, as though stating a simple fact, “Richard was gone. There wasn’t anyone else.”

In the distance, an engine rumbled through the night.

Jane reached over her shoulder to pat Neil’s hand, but her eyes stayed on me. “There you go, Mr. Dane. Did you ask what you wanted to ask?”

I nodded, but I said, “Richard wasn’t murdered, was he? Richard—”

“Say one more word—” a crusty voice said, and then a footfall came from the hall, and Arlen stepped into the room. He leveled the old shotgun at me. “—and I’ll blow your head off.”

Chapter 17

I sat there, staring down the barrels of Arlen’s ancient shotgun. Arlen himself looked like something dragged out of the grave: his stringy white hair in a frenzy, his face gaunt and pale, a tic working restlessly in his eye. The smell of the slough was so thick it was almost suffocating, but under it, I caught a hint of body odor and liniment.

“What’s wrong with you?” Arlen asked. The shotgun trembled in his hands. “Why can’t you leave decent people alone? You had to come snooping around, stirring things up. Why couldn’t you take a hint?”

“Arlen,” Neil said, “put that down.”

“Don’t move,” Arlen barked at him. “I know about you. I know about all of you. You think you could keep it a secret, hide it, make a fool out of me. Laughing at me all these years.”

“No one was laughing at you, Arlen,” Jane said.

“He was my son! He was gone!” And then Arlen’s voice quavered, and he sounded his age. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“He wasn’t gone,” I said. My brain was racing, trying to put together the final piece of the puzzle. Someone had wanted to stop me. Someone had wanted the truth of Richard’s death to remain a secret. And now I knew it had been Arlen who had run me off the road. Arlen who had wanted to bury the past. But why? I tried to remember what I knew about this man. He’d been furious about Candy’s relationships with men, including Zane. He’d been head of the Astoria lodge of the Sons of Sweden. He’d fought incessantly with Richard. “Richard wasn’t gone,” I said again. “He—”

But Arlen braced the shotgun against his shoulder, steadying his aim, and I cut off.

“He didn’t run away, Arlen,” Jane said.

Neil breathed out hard and said, “He killed himself.”

A spasm of pain contorted Arlen’s body. Pure, raw grief—undiluted by the passage of the years. A distant part of me wondered if, twisted by the physical agony of the loss, Arlen might pull the trigger without even realizing it. But another part of me realized that whatever happened, it was beyond my control.

“No,” Arlen managed to say. “No. Not my son. Not my son. No, he wouldn’t. I saw him—”

And then I knew.

Jane and Richard had fought.

Jane had left.

Vivienne and Candy had both been gone.

And Arlen had been home, tending to his sick wife.

“Richard told you,” I said. My voice sounded scratchy even to me. “After the fight with Jane. He walked next door and told you—”

“What?” Neil asked.

Arlen shouted, “No!”

---