one night, Dennis. The bully and the bully's father and the bully's little brother were killed. The bully's sister was horribly burned. It was supposed to have been the stove in the kitchen, and maybe it was. But the fire sirens woke me up, and I was still awake when Rollie came up the ivy trellis and into the room I shared with him. There was soot on his forehead, and he smelled of gasoline. He saw me lying there with my eyes open and he said, "If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you." And ever since that night, Dennis, I've tried to tell myself that he meant if I told he had been out, watching the fire. And maybe that was all it was.'
My mouth was dry. There seemed to be a lead ball in my stomach. The hairs along the nape of my neck felt like dry quills. 'How old was your brother then?' I asked hoarsely.
'Not quite thirteen,' LeBay said with terrible false calm. 'One winter day about a year later, there was a fight during a hockey game, and a fellow named Randy Throgmorton laid open Rollie's head with his stick. Knocked him senseless. We got him to old Dr Farner - Rollie had come around by then, but he was still groggy - and Farner put a dozen stitches in his scalp. A week later, Randy Throgmorton fell through the ice on Palmer Pond and was drowned. He had been skating in an area clearly marked with THIN ICE signs, apparently.'
'Are you saying your brother killed these people? Are you leading up to telling me that LeBay killed his own daughter?'
'Not that he killed her, Dennis - never think that. She choked to death. What I am suggesting is that he may have let her die.'
'You said he turned her over - punched her - tried to make her vomit
'That's what Rollie told me at the funeral,' George said.
'Then what - '
'Marcia and I talked it over later. Only that once, you understand. Over dinner that night. Rollie told me, "I picked her up by her Buster Browns and tried to whack that sonofabitch out of there, Georgie. But it was stuck down fast." And what Veronica told Marcia was, "Rollie picked her up by her shoes and tried to whack whatever was choking her out of there, but it was stuck down fast." They told exactly the same story, in exactly the same words. And do you know what that made me think of?'
'No.'
'It made me think of Rollie climbing in the bedroom window and whispering to me, "If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you."'
'But . . . why? Why would he - ?'
'Later, Veronica wrote Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car.' I didn't want to say it, but I had to.
'Are you suggesting that your brother offered his daughter up as some kind of a human sacrifice?'
There was a long, thinking, dreadful pause.
'Not in any conscious way, no,' LeBay said. 'Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered her. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses . . . except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some . . . some intuition . . . or that he might have been directed to do what he did.
'My mother said he was a changeling.'
'And Veronica?'
'I don't know,' he said. 'The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita's death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out. If you tell, Georgie, I'll kill you. There's no proof one way or the other, of course. But I've wondered why she would do it the way she did - and I've wondered how a woman who didn't know the slightest thing about cars would