“But was it worth it? You know”—and here Whiz looked around as if under surveillance and dropped his voice to a near whisper—“S-E-X?”
As much as she wanted to drop-kick Whiz into a garbage chute most days, Connie had to admit she loved the little snot monster, who was simultaneously too grown-up and too childlike. After busting out a plethora of Dad’s four-letter words, he still felt the need to spell out sex.
“We didn’t have S-E-X,” she informed him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Well, that’s good. ’Cause Mom was really worried about that.”
“Dad wasn’t?”
“Dad was…” Whiz hesitated. “Never mind.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
Whiz shook his head defiantly.
“God, it’s more of his black/white crap, isn’t it? It’s not the nineteen-sixties. It’s not like when his parents were growing up or even when he was growing up. It’s—”
“That’s not it,” Whiz said quietly.
“What’s not it?”
“The black-and-white thing. The racial stuff.”
Connie stared at her kid brother, searching his expression for signs of one of his pranks or tricks. But he was utterly solemn, totally serious.
“What do you mean? Ever since I started dating Jazz, it’s been ‘white men this’ and ‘black women that,’ and ‘Sally Hemmings’ and—”
Whiz shook his head. “He doesn’t care. He said, ‘She can date a whole platoon of white boys, just not that one.’ ”
Connie set her jaw. She knew what was coming next. “How do you know this?”
Whiz rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Connie. I listen to them at night through the air-conditioning vents. Don’t you?”
Actually… no.
“It’s the serial-killer thing.”
Well, of course it was the serial-killer thing. Her father didn’t trust Jazz. So typical. No matter how much Jazz had proven himself—
“And,” Whiz went on, “he told Mom that the idea of you getting hurt scares him so much that he can’t even talk to you about it. And all the race stuff is just the only way he can think of to keep you guys apart without thinking about you…”
Without thinking of me raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered by my own boyfriend. Ah, crap. She couldn’t find it in her heart to stay angry at her dad. Not anymore.
“Jesus, Whiz. Talking to you is better than yoga sometimes.”
“Don’t take—”
“—the Lord’s name in vain. I know. Sorry.”
“It isn’t gonna happen, is it?” Whiz asked.
“What’s that?”
Whiz swallowed. “Jazz isn’t gonna hurt you, is he?”
Aw, man… As big of a pain in the butt as her little brother could be, she knew he loved her in that stunted way little brothers have. It killed her to see the conflicted pain in his eyes as he asked. She saw more than merely her brother’s concern; she saw Dad’s fear reflected there, too. All her life, her father had been so powerful, loomed so large, that she’d never been able to imagine him afraid of anything. Not even Jazz. Not even something…
“No one’s gonna hurt me,” she told Whiz. Seized by a rare impulse, she hugged him to her, pleasantly surprised that he didn’t pull away.
She kissed him on the exact center of the top of his head and said it again, this time louder, loud enough to convince herself, too.
CHAPTER 23
For the first time in recent memory, Jazz had the run of the house. After breakfast, Gramma had fallen into one of her periodic obsessions with Grampa’s grave. Sometimes she believed that he’d risen from the grave—“Like Jesus and Bugs Bunny!”—and could only be persuaded otherwise by a trip to the cemetery. Jazz hated those days; Gramma would spend hours crawling around the headstone, inspecting the dirt and individual blades of grass for some sort of perfidy. It was a lousy way to spend a day.
But Aunt Samantha cheerfully volunteered to take Gramma, meaning that Jazz was alone in the house without having to worry about his grandmother. He almost didn’t know how to act. It was so quiet—true quiet, without the foreboding of a potential Gramma eruption lurking. Maybe I should call Connie and we can fool around in my bedroom for a change.
It was an automatic thought, and it made him pensive almost immediately. He should call Connie. But what could he say to her? Especially after the way he’d treated her father at the airport. Combine that with the hotel-room fiasco and he’d be surprised if she ever wanted to speak to him again.
Oh, you could make her talk to you….
No. Shut up, Billy. Not Connie. I don’t do that to Connie.
He meandered around the house, straightening things here and there. Inspired, he started throwing away some of the old junk that his grandmother had accumulated over the years. The serial-killer pack-rat tendency ran strong in the Dent genetics, and Gramma would never tolerate Jazz throwing things away while she was around. But with her gone for the day, he could do some cleaning and she’d be none the wiser. It’s not like she was lucid enough to memorize her piles of crap.
He thought about Connie as he roamed the house with a garbage bag. He’d been unfair to her, he knew, but how to fix that unfairness was beyond him. He relived the night in the hotel room, running it through his damnably perfect memory over and over. Waking from the dream. Pressed deliciously and deliriously against Connie. Her turning to him, eyes wide and full and dark. Reaching for each other. Familiar touches gone explosively unfamiliar, explosively craved.
And then… pushing her away, falling backward onto the floor, lust twisted to panic, to fear.
Yeah. How could he fix that? How could he erase in Connie’s mind the memory of her boyfriend fleeing from her in terror?
He hauled the garbage outside and set it by the mailbox for pickup, then returned to the house, where he wheeled his suitcase into the spare room. He didn’t blame Samantha for not wanting to sleep here. The room had lain unused for close to two decades, its surfaces gray and textured with dust. More than that, though, the room seemed to vibrate, ever so slightly out of sync with the rest of the house, the rest of the universe, really. As though something fundamental and primitive and crucial had broken here, and never been patched.
Billy’s room. Billy’s bed. Jazz didn’t have to wonder what Billy had dreamed and fantasized, lying awake at night. He knew all too well—Billy had written his fantasies in the blood and screams of innocents from Nevada to Pennsylvania, from Texas to South Dakota. No secrets remained.
He dusted a bit, then unpacked. He needed clean clothes, so he went across the hall to his room. True to her word, Samantha had hung a sheet over the wall of Dear Old Dad’s victims. Jazz found himself liking his aunt more and more. Wouldn’t most people seeing them for the first time—most normal people—have taken down the pictures? Connie thought they were morbid. G. William thought they were a disturbing tie to the past. Howie thought they were a buzzkill.
Gramma thought they were Santa’s elves.
He fired up his computer and checked his e-mail. Other than the usual spam and porn links from Howie (delete, delete, delete…), there was nothing, which meant that no one had figured out this e-mail address yet. Good.
On the desk lay two sheets of paper. Photocopies of evidence from the sheriff’s office. The first one was the letter Billy had left at Melissa Hoover’s house:
Dear Jasper,
I can’t begin to tell you what a pleasure it was to see you at Wammaket. You’ve grown into such a strong and powerful young man. I am so proud of what you will accomplish in this life. I already know you are destined for great things. I dream of the things we’ll do together. Someday.
For now, though, I have to leave you with this. Never let it be said your old man doesn’t know how to repay a debt.
Love,
Dear Old Dad
PS Maybe one of these days we’ll get together and talk about what you did to your mother.
The PS still stabbed at him, cored him. When Jazz had point-blank asked Billy “Did you make me kill my mother?” Billy had just laughed. Later, he had said, “You’re a killer. You just ain’t killed no one yet.”