“I know,” I said. At last I turned on the ignition and as we backed out of the lot, I started to say more, but stopped and so we drove back through town, past the harbor, a charged stillness between us, thick with all that had remained unspoken. I dropped him at his house. Again he was the one to break the silence. “I’m sorry, Mr. Light.” We locked eyes then, just the once as he got out of the car, but in that moment an understanding, a knowing without words, passed between us and an agreement was struck. We would not tell anyone what had happened. I knew that someday I would ask him how he had come to have Lucy’s Yoda, why he had lied to the police, questions that didn’t matter at that moment, just as perhaps someday I would be able to tell Sophie how often those months I had been wondering what we were capable of and what we were not, of the time in those woods with Duane, my Saint Sebastian, of how close I had come to destroying everything. Of course, before the day ended, I was to learn so much more about what we truly are capable of and what we can endure. Of what we are willing to risk. To destroy.
I watched Duane as he disappeared through the front door and then, with nowhere else to go, I headed toward home.
These thoughts were in my mind as I drove onto Governors Street and turned into our drive and saw Rain LaBrea running from the house next door. She was crying, but between sobs she managed to get the words out. “It’s Mr. Hayes,” she cried. “He killed Lucy.”
I couldn’t process the words, my brain slowed.
“He did. Look.” She held out her hand and the sun glinted on the silver chain. “He had this. He had Lucy’s Lucky Strike stone. The one I gave to her.”
I took the gun from my pocket and walked across his front yard. I followed their voices to the bedroom. Father Gervase saw me first.
“Will,” he said.
Payton saw me then, and his eyes widened as I raised the gun and aimed at his heart. “Christ,” he said.
Father Gervase stood between us, his hands raised palms upturned toward me.
“Get out of the way, Father,” I said.
“You’re not going to shoot me, are you?” he said and smiled.
“That’s not my intention. But I need to you to step out of the way.”
“You don’t want to do this, Will.”
Hayes made a sound, started to speak.
“Shut up,” I said. “Don’t say a fucking word.” Vengeance was mine. All the months of being paralyzed by inaction and impotence lifted, and it felt so good. Try to understand that. One shot, I thought, one single shot in the chest. If justice were true, before his body was found our daughter’s killer should rot on the ground, abandoned and alone as she had, but I would have to settle for his death. And then it would be over.
“You need to think this through,” the priest said.
“I’m done thinking.”
He smiled again, that gentle smile I remembered from the first time he came to the house in May, as if we shared a secret. “This isn’t you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Vengeance is not yours, Will.”
“I’ll shoot, I swear I will, Father. I have nothing to lose.”
“There is always something more to lose, Will.”
“Why do you care?”
He didn’t answer, but took a step toward me. “Stay back,” I said.
But he continued walking to me, slowly but without hesitation. He reached for the gun, but I held it steady on him, and behind him, on Payton Hayes.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“This is not your business,” I said to the priest. “It has nothing to do with you.”
Father Gervase started to speak but Payton cut him off. “You can relax, Father. He won’t shoot me.”
At the smugness in his voice, my finger tightened on the trigger.
Even now the weeks that immediately followed remain a blur, a filmy distortion of one man crumpled on the carpet, a circle of crimson, and later, the blurry confusion of the trial. Some parts of memory I am relieved to have blocked, details that cannot be borne or I would not be able to walk upright.
I do remember how Payton had laughed when I pointed the gun, his arrogance. “Go ahead, shoot. You’ll be the one facing a murder charge, not me.”
I did shoot him then. The report echoed, muffling the cry from Father Gervase, reverberating in my ears.
“Jesus,” Payton said. He stared at his thigh, at the spread of blood on his clothes. “Are you crazy?”
I was satisfied to hear all the smugness gone, saw fear in his eyes.
“Give me the gun, Will,” Father Gervase said.
I brushed aside his words. No one existed in that room except Payton Hayes and me. “Tell me why,” I said, my voice steady, my purpose clear. “Tell me why or I swear to God, the next shot will go straight through your chest.”
I saw him weighing his options. Saw the moment he believed me and then, instantly, trusted his own ability to save himself, to say what he needed to now and later deal with whatever the future held and, believed in his power to avoid answering to his sins.
“It was her fault,” he said. “Your daughter should have minded her own business. Such a meddler.”
He talked then as if he couldn’t wait to get it out. How Gabi Russell had told Lucy about her secret affair with him, how he, and not one of the high school boys, was the father of Gabi’s child. Lucy, trusting Lucy, who wanted only to help a friend and make things right, had taken it upon herself to confront him, to make him take responsibility.
I could see it, so true of our Lucy, so innocent, so confident of the goodness in everyone that she held not a speck of suspicion when she arranged to meet him when she should have been at the hockey scrimmage, not even suspicious when she got in his car and he had driven to Dogtown. What was his plan? Had he known even then that he was going to kill her?
“She said if I didn’t confess about everything, she would do it herself,” Payton was saying. “Who the hell was she to say that? I told her it wasn’t her business, that it would ruin my life. I told her that but she wouldn’t listen. Just kept insisting. Do the right thing she kept saying. As if it were that simple. It was the way she kept insisting, the way she wouldn’t even consider my side of things that made me strike her. And when she started to run, of course, I had no choice but to kill her.”
The way he spoke, the details told in such a matter-of-fact manner chilled me. In the relating of the story, his confidence had returned and with it his arrogance. “You should have taught your daughter to mind her own business,” he said. “Then none of this would have happened.”
There was a buzzing in my ears, blocking out sound for a moment, the sound of water rushing as if I were swimming in the sea. I raised the barrel and aimed true.
Beside me, Father Gervase cried out. Justice was served. The trial was a sideshow as I’m sure you can imagine.