“Get out,” he said to me. The tone suggested he was not in a mood to debate it.
I slipped out the door with Lawrence. We started walking, with no particular destination in mind.
“Well,” said Lawrence. “I don’t know whether I’ve had a chance yet to thank you for inviting me up here. I’ve only been here for, what, three hours, and we’ve already had a guy killed by a bear and you’re having a family meltdown. What’s happening after dinner?”
I picked up a stone from the gravel lane that led up to the highway, threw it into the trees. “I think I have a right to know about these things,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I’m sure that right is enshrined somewhere,” Lawrence Jones said.
“Don’t you think, if Orville Thorne is my half brother, that I have a right to know that?”
Lawrence raised his face to the sun. “I don’t honestly know whether I’d want to find out Orville Thorne was related to me. Although, from what I’ve seen and what you’ve told me, he’s inept, easily intimidated, and totally unsure of himself. So I guess it’s possible.”
We were coming to the bend, where the lane branched off to the Wickens place.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t ask you up here to get in the middle of a dispute between me and my father. I didn’t expect that e-mail from Sarah, what she’d say, but when I read it, pieces started fitting together.”
“What sort of pieces?” Lawrence asked.
“There’s the whole thing with my mother, how she was so angry with Dad that she left home when I was twelve. Then, Lana and her husband moving out of the neighborhood, after they’d been so close to my parents. And now, years later, with her husband dead and my mother passed on, it’s like they’re picking up where they left off years ago. And look at Orville, he’s about twelve, thirteen years younger than I am. It’s been bugging me from the first moment I saw him, thinking that he looked like somebody I knew. He looks like me, Lawrence. The son of a bitch looks like me.”
Lawrence thought about that. “Yeah, there’s a passing resemblance, I admit. It’s not really obvious, but if you know there’s a connection, you can see it.”
“No wonder I’ve been wanting to give him a wedgie since the moment I first met him,” I said. “I just want to put him a headlock and run my knuckles over his head.”
We were twenty feet away from the Wickens gate. Lawrence took in all the threatening signs. No Trespassing. Beware of Dogs. “So these are your friends,” he said. He looked into the yard, at the abandoned appliances, the piles of wood, the old white van with blacked-out windows, a couple of beat-up trucks, an old four-door Pontiac economy car.
“Looks like they’re going to open a used-car dealership,” he quipped.
“Dad’s got so much work ahead of him, if he ever gets them out of there.”
We’d been spotted. Gristle and Bone appeared from around the far side of the house and were running toward the gate, their paws pounding the dirt, propelling them forward, their hackles raised. Their chorus of angry growls sounded like broken gears trying to mesh together. They locked their jaws on a gate board, went berserk chewing on it, splinters of wood dropping to the ground. They seemed to think they could eat their way through to get to us, and given enough time, probably could.
“Cute,” Lawrence said. “What do you think you’d have to do to dogs to make them this mean?”
“Let’s walk back,” I said.
The dogs remained in their frenzied state until we’d disappeared behind the trees. “Think they could eat someone?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “But then, so could a bear. Actually, those dogs could probably eat a bear.”
We headed down to the lake and perched ourselves on a large rock at the water’s edge, upwind from the fish bucket.
“What should I do, Lawrence?” I asked.
“About your dad, or about everything else?”
“My dad is my problem. How about everything else?”
“Well, even if there really is a bear, and Morton Dewart was killed by one and not by Satan’s puppies up there, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve still got a bunch of McVeigh worshippers living on your dad’s property. You’ve got another dead guy and a shitload of missing fertilizer that’s ideal for making things blow up good, your mayor’s getting death threats, and you’ve got a public event coming up, what, tomorrow, that has a lot of people riled.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s like when they issue a tornado watch. It’s not a warning. There’s no tornado on the horizon. But all the conditions are right for one.”
“You think there might be a tornado coming.”
“The conditions are right.”
“So, what next?”
“I guess we start doing a little surveillance, talk to the people involved. I need to get to know these Wickenses a little better.”