Dear Irene

Jimmy looked into the mirror on his side.

“What about Maggie Robinson?” I asked, trying to distract him. “She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”

He turned to glare at me. “She was a rotten bitch who did nothing but punish me for her son’s death for years. She was a little worried at first, afraid the Social Service people would come around, check on her. Afraid they hadn’t made me disappear.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Your detective friend was looking into it. You know what he learned. I was just so much lost paperwork. When my stepmother began to realize that she and J.D. had pulled it off, she started beating me. She used to tie me up and burn me with cigarettes. Look!” He pulled back a sleeve. There were rounded scars all along the inside of his arm. “I’d scream bloody murder, but did anyone ever help me? No. I was that poor Mrs. Davis’s problem child.”

He was silent for a moment, brooding. “I learned from her, though. I learned how to be invisible. It was the only way to be safe. I learned how to avoid attracting attention. She needed attention – couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t. It made me stronger than her. No one knew what I was thinking, what I was feeling.”

“Why didn’t you just kill her?”

“I thought about it,” he said. “Especially after my mother died. Peggy wouldn’t let me grieve for my own mother. She’d tell me over and over how glad she was that my mother was dead. ‘Now we’re even,’ she’d say. But I didn’t let her know what I felt. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. She was mean, she was greedy, she was selfish – but she wasn’t the one who caused the problem in the first place. The little liars caused it. Not her. Peggy Davis. Pathetic. She wasn’t any more real than I was. She made sure I wasn’t. Made me change my name. My name! My father was a war hero and I couldn’t use his name!”

“So Margaret Robinson became Margaret Davis,” I said softly, trying to get him to lower his own voice, to calm down. “It took me awhile to make the co

He was looking in the mirror again and didn’t answer me.

“Jimmy,” I asked, trying to get his attention away from it, “why now? Why did you wait all these years?”

He looked back at me. “She would have told on me.”

“Who, Edna?”

“No, no. Peggy. I used to be afraid of her. Not now. Not now… but before, before I learned that she was weak, she knew how to scare me. She was in control. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Being in control. She knew about me, so she was in charge. The person in control has to know everything. That’s why I’m in control now. I know you. I’ve studied you. I know your secrets. Peggy… she knew all kinds of things. We had…” his eyes darted away from me for a moment. “We had secrets,” he said, watching me again, as if looking for some reaction. When I said nothing, he went on. “But then the fu

He smiled at me. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile for more than a few seconds. A big, gentle smile. It transformed him somehow, and oddly, for a brief moment, he wasn’t so frightening. There was a small boy there, an eight-year-old, perhaps. What kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? he once asked me. There was a killer beneath his smile, yes – but I wondered who he might have become if someone as monstrous as Peggy Davis hadn’t been allowed to raise him.

He looked over at the side mirror.

The smile was gone.

“You bitch! You had us followed. It’s your boyfriend, isn’t it? Step on it – go on, speed up!”

“The road is muddy here-”

“Goddamn it! I said speed up!”

I stepped down on the accelerator. It was all I could do to keep the van under control.

“Damn you! Why did you have to ruin everything! It could have been so wonderful! I would have been good to you, you know.” He rolled down his window and leaned out with the gun. “Say good-bye to Mr. Harriman. He’s about to die, Cassandra.”

Suddenly I didn’t care what Jimmy Grant might do to me. I only knew that I wouldn’t let him kill Frank. I used the only weapon I had on hand. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the right.

27

FOR A FEW SECONDS, it was dream like; an unreal combination of motion and time that didn’t fit in the usual order of either. The van went into a spin, the mud from the construction removing all friction from beneath the wheels. We glided along at an amazing speed. With a deafening bang, we tore through a chain-link fence, then suddenly there was a sensation of moving through space. Which, of course, is exactly what we were doing.

For an instant I saw the concrete walls of the flood control cha

I don’t know how long I was out. When I came to, I thought for a moment that I had been blinded – it was pitch black. I hurt like hell all over – but my right side was killing me. The left side of my head throbbed, and I couldn’t even figure out what I had hit it on. I could hear the roar of water rushing by me. Jimmy Grant was groaning and pleading for help. I had no idea where he was. I had no idea where I was. I had never felt such an utterly complete sense of disorientation.

My eyes began adjusting to the darkness – no, not adjusting. The moon was coming out. But my perspective on my surroundings seemed odd to me. Gradually, I realized that the van had landed on its side in the cha

It was then that I got my first look at Jimmy Grant. His face was a bloody mess, and it was the only part of him that was above water. A mask, eyes wide with fright. “Help me,” he said. I was still dazed, and couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong. Then I saw that he was being pressed against the seat by the force of the current, and that he had somehow tangled himself in his seat belt. The moon went behind a cloud, and I lost sight of him.

I tried reaching down to him with my right hand. He must have somehow worked a hand free, because I felt his left hand grasp on to mine, skin chilled and wet. “Help,” he said again, as if he expected none.

I pulled him up a little farther. The water was cold, and he had heavier clothes on than I did. They were weighing him down. Debris from the cha

“I can’t,” he said weakly. “I can’t hang on.”

The moon came out again and I took another look at him. With horror, I saw that his right arm was almost completely severed. He had to be losing a lot of blood from it. His grip was weakening, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold him by myself. Panic filled his face. Suddenly a large dark object rocketed against him; there was a loud cracking sound as it rammed into his head with an awful force. A tree limb, I realized, as it spun back out into the current. He suddenly released his grip and fell back into the water, his head at an odd angle.

There was a creaking sound, and I felt the van move. Every few minutes, objects from the cha