The Julius House

"So the ax-man," she said, "must be Harley Dimmoch?"

"Yep."

Charity tried to get up, gripping one of the cheap pine night tables, but she collapsed back on the floor with a white face and sobs of pain. I was far from wanting to comfort her, and she would have been glad if I'd been in her place, but still, I felt uncomfortable, to say the least. Angel left the room for a minute and reappeared with some heavy, silvery duct tape and a pair of scissors. She used the tape efficiently on Harley Dimmoch's ankles and Charity Julius's wrists. I held Charity up while Angel worked, shrinking from touching her but having to.

The gunshot had attracted no attention, apparently. No one pulled up, or called, or knocked on the door. We three women gradually calmed down. Charity regained control of herself. Her wide dark eyes stared at us assessingly. "What now?" she asked.

"We're thinking," Angel answered. I was glad she had. I had no idea what would come next. But obeying an irresistible impulse, I leaned forward and looked into her face and asked, "Who is the third body?"

She closed her eyes for a minute. She must be twenty-one now; she looked older.

"My grandmother," she said.

"Then who is the woman living in Lawrenceton?"

"My great-aunt, Alicia."

"Tell me," I said intently. "Tell me what happened that day." Finally, finally, first among all the people who had wondered, I would be the one who knew. It was almost like being the only one to discover Jack the Ripper's true identity, or getting the opportunity to be a fly on the wall on a hot, hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892.

"My aunt was visiting. She was staying over in Grandmother's apartment with Grandmother."

"How did she get there?"

"She came by bus. My dad picked her up in Atlanta. She had been there three days."

"How come nobody knew?"

"Who was to know? Who was to care? We didn't have many visitors, mostly because Mom was so sick. I didn't talk about it at school. Why would I? And Daddy had been working on the roof for three days, trying to get it finished. Going to pick her up was a pain in the butt, an interruption, but since Mother and Grandmother wanted her to be there, he did it.

"Harley had come to visit me and to help Daddy. I said I was sick and stayed home from school. I don't think they believed me, but they knew how much I missed Harley and they were willing to give me a little slack." Her face was flinty when she said this. She was willing herself not to feel, as she'd been willing herself not to for all these years. "Harley—lady, do you think he's okay? He looks awful bad; you should call an ambulance." She had asked Angel, not me.

"He's okay. He's breathing," Angel said with apparent unconcern. But I noticed she was taking his pulse when Charity looked away. "Harley was up on the roof with Daddy, hammering away. It was the day the patio was going to be poured; they'd spent the morning building the form. Daddy just insisted Harley help him, and Harley didn't really mind, but he had come to see me, and he was going to have to go back home without having talked to me very much. Daddy just didn't seem to understand, it was like when we lived close to Harley and Harley would help Daddy all the time, but then we could go out on a date and be away from them. But up on the roof, Daddy starts this heavy churchy stuff, about how Harley was going to have to stop drinking and learn how to control his temper if he was going to marry me, which was what Harley and I wanted. And he reminded Harley, all this Bible stuff, about keeping his hands off me until we were married, was what it boiled down to." She sighed deeply, shifted to try to make herself more comfortable. "Listen, can't you get me a pillow, or something?"

Angel got a pillow from the bed and eased it under Charity's shoulders. Charity was as striking as the newspaper picture had suggested, but even stronger looking, with the large dark eyes and the jawline giving her face character. What kind of character, I was finding out.

"So," she resumed, "Harley decides that up on the roof with my dad is a good time and place to tell him we've already slept together." She rolled her eyes, the very portrait of an exasperated teenager. Silly old Harley. "My dad went nuts. He was yelling and screaming and swinging his hammer around, and said Harley had to leave and not see me anymore. Harley got scared and mad, and he swung his hammer, and it hit my dad in the head, and he died. Right up there on the roof."

I closed my eyes.

"Then Harley climbed down and told me. Mama had been over visiting with Grandmama and Alicia in the apartment, and she hadn't heard anything." Her face twisted with pain, and I felt another pang of guilt. What were we going to do with these people? But she rallied and plowed on, and I could tell she was feeling a certain degree of relief in the telling. "I knew that Mama would tell. And Harley would go to jail. I'd never see him again. So I told Harley to go back up on the roof, and when Mama came back I told her to go up to the bedroom, lean out the window, Daddy and Harley had something they wanted her to see. So when she leaned out the window, Harley hit her, too." She must have read something in my face, because she said, "Mama was really sick, anyway, she was going to die."

And no traces of the murders had been found in the house, because they had actually taken place on the roof.

"What about your grandmother?" Angel said.

"Well, I knew she would tell about Mama," Charity said pettishly. "It just seemed to grow and grow. I'd always felt closer to Alicia, anyway. Me and Harley couldn't think of what to do, so I told Great-aunt Alicia what had happened. She and my grandmother had never gotten along good, and sharing that house in Metairie had just made it worse. They had hardly any money, and they didn't have many friends, and she had forged Grandmother's name before, once or twice, and not gotten caught. She said people couldn't tell old women apart anyway. What she told us to do—she thought about the money right away—she said we might as well get it and have a life, rather than going to jail, that Mama and Daddy wouldn't have wanted me to go to jail. So she called Grandmama, and told her Mama was up in her bedroom and was feeling very bad, and Grandmama hurried up those stairs, and when she was in the bedroom looking around, I sort of wrapped my arms around her and stuck her head out the window, and Harley... took care of her."

My stomach lurched.

I would just as soon not have heard more, but by then I couldn't have stopped her.

"We sat down in the kitchen and talked. Harley was kind of crazy by that time. We couldn't decide what to do with the bodies, or what to tell Mr. Engle, who was coming to pour the concrete in two hours. Then we thought... just leave them where they are. Harley said we should cover them with lime, that's what his dad did when the family dog died and they didn't want other animals coming in the yard to dig at the grave. And up on the roof, we'd get turkey buzzards if we didn't do it ... so he went into Atlanta and bought the lime and a gray tarp ... he had gotten some blood on his clothes so he borrowed some of my daddy's. Harley got back and fixed them up on the roof, and then he waited. "Alicia had realized by then that no one knew she was there, so she could pretend to be Grandmama. And she said if I put on Mama's wig, Mr. Engel wouldn't know from a distance it wasn't Mama. And he had to see me as me, too. We'd just tell him Daddy had had to go off on an errand. So Harley drove the truck around behind the garage and hid it while Mr. Engle was there, and I went out and talked to him, and then I ran upstairs and put on Mama's Sunday wig, because she was wearing the other one." For a second the toughness cracked in Charity Julius's face and I could see the horror underneath. "And I went and rattled round in the kitchen so Mr. Engle could see me, and Alicia pretended to be Grandmama."