I wasn’t sure whether I should broach the subject, but I decided to, anyway. “And what about Ben Clancy? How are you feeling about him?”
I heard her take in a quick breath at the mention of Clancy’s name. She turned and looked at me. “What do you mean, Darren?”
I’d been thinking about Clancy obsessively since James’s suicide, very much the way I’d thought about Frazier and Beane before I killed them. I couldn’t bear the thought that Clancy was getting up in the morning, eating meals, reading, listening to music, and living his life as though nothing had happened, while James was being consumed by worms.
“James may have done too many drugs and he may have drunk too much, but you and I both know Clancy was the cause of this. I’m wondering whether we should do something about him. Maybe I should do something about him.”
“There was a lot more going on in James’s mind than Ben Clancy,” Granny said, “but you’re right. Clancy made things much worse than they might have been. What do you propose to do about him?”
“You know my mother was killed a little while back, right?”
“I heard, and I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral. I don’t really have an excuse. I just don’t like funerals.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I barely remember it. But the reason I ask is that I was told by the police that they had a suspect in my mother’s murder. I asked some old prison friends of mine to confirm it because they have more reliable sources than the police, and it turned out the police were right. This guy named Donnie Frazier and a friend of his, Tommy Beane, put a bunch of dynamite underneath my mother’s house and blew it up and killed her. They thought I was there, but I wasn’t. So I set things right.”
She raised her eyebrows and said, “You set things right? How?”
“I went to West Virginia. Those two men won’t be bothering anybody else.”
She nodded her head slowly and looked back at the wall. “And how are you sleeping?”
“I haven’t slept well since I went to prison. That hasn’t changed much, but even if I’d been sleeping like a baby all this time, I’d still be sleeping like a baby.”
“You’re a complicated man, Darren,” she said.
“You have no idea. But back to Clancy. He sent my uncle to prison for twenty years for a crime he didn’t commit. God knows how many others he convicted by lying and cheating. He set me up using James, and I wound up in prison for two years. He tried to kill James and burned his trailer to the ground. And now he’s gotten away with everything again, and James has committed suicide. Clancy is walking around free as a bird. Something just isn’t right about that. I think I’d like to fix it.”
“And how would you go about fixing it?”
“Leave that to me. But I would like to ask you a couple of things.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the wall. “I’m listening.”
“Do you still have hogs in the pen by the barn? And if you do, can I bring him there?”
She turned her face back toward mine and nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Would you like to be there?” I asked.
“I think I would,” she said quietly, and she turned and walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 25
When we got back to Grace’s after the funeral, she said she needed to run a couple of errands. As soon as she left, I called Big Pappy on one of my throwaway phones.
“I’m going to do Ben Clancy,” I said. “An old friend of mine committed suicide because of him a few days ago. He didn’t have to answer for what he did to me or for what he did to my uncle or for what he did to anyone else. It’s time for him to pay up.”
“I knew it,” Pappy said. “You’ve developed a taste for it.”
“Maybe. Do you have a laptop with you?”
“Sure, I’ve got one right here in front of me.”
“Will you look up Clancy’s home address for me? I don’t want to do it from here in case the cops get their hands on my laptop somehow.”
“Sure, just one second.” He found the address, and I committed it to memory.
“Do you need some help?” Pappy said.
“I’m not sure yet. Let me do some surveillance and I’ll let you know.”
“Be careful, brother,” he said, and we hung up.
I put the throwaway back in my closet and went back into the kitchen. I checked my regular cell and noticed there was a call from Katie. She’d left me a voice mail that said she needed to talk to me about Sean, that it was important, and asked me to call her back.
“Can we meet somewhere?” she said when I got her on the phone.
“When?”
“Now? I’m off work today. Are you working?”
“Had to go to a funeral.”
“Are you going to be able to pay your child support?”
I felt heat rising in my chest. Money. With Katie, it was always about money.
“I can pay my child support, Katie. What do you want to talk about?”
“I’d rather talk in person. How about we meet at Dead End BBQ in an hour? You know the place, right?”
“I know the place. I’ll see you there.”
I called Grace and told her Katie wanted to meet, and I drove to the restaurant an hour later and sat in a corner in the bar. It was midafternoon, and there were fewer than ten people in the dining area. Katie walked in, wearing casual clothing—jeans and a simple, pink, button-down blouse, but I knew it was all designer and expensive. And she made everything she wore look even better than the designer intended. She could easily have been a fashion runway model. She was five feet eleven inches tall—two inches taller than I was—and had a lean, athletic build. Her sandy-blonde hair was long and wavy, her face perfectly structured, and her eyes emerald green. I’d always felt like she was far too good-looking for me, but when we’d been in college we’d had a certain sexual chemistry that had kept us together for a good while, and then Sean came along. I’d discovered she was having an affair with an older man just before I was arrested and sent off to prison, and she’d wasted no time divorcing me.
I said hello, and she sat down. She ordered a salad and a glass of water, and I ordered a beer.
“Drinking a lot these days, are we?” she said.
I was hoping the conversation would at least be civil, but that wasn’t apparently in the cards. “Drinking very rarely, actually. But then I’m not around you very often.”
She snorted in that snotty little way of hers. “There’s no point in making small talk with you because I just don’t like you. But I thought I should tell you in person. Leonard and I are getting married.”
Leonard was Leonard Bright, a man from Lexington who was fifteen years older than Katie and the man she’d been having an affair with prior to my arrest and conviction.
“Congratulations,” I said, “but I fail to see why you felt the need to tell me that in person.”
“Leonard has sold his Mercedes dealership and his development company,” Katie said. “We’ll be moving to Honolulu, Hawaii, in a month.”
It took me a second to process the information. Hawaii? Thousands of miles and half a Pacific Ocean away? The waiter set my beer and her salad on the table as I pondered the implications of what she’d just said.