for hamburgers on the way home - there were no McDonald's in those days, you know, just roadside stands. And what happened was . . . simple enough, I suppose . . . '
That silence again, as if he wondered just how much he should tell me, or how to separate what he knew from his speculations.
'She choked to death on a piece of meat,' he said finally. 'When she started to gag and put her hands to her throat, Rollie pulled over, dragged her out of the car, and thudded her on the back, trying to bring it up. Of course now they had a method - the Heimlich Manoeuvre - that works rather well in situations like that. A young girl, a student teacher, actually, saved a boy who was choking in the cafeteria at my school just last year by employing the Heimlich Manoeuvre. But in those days . . .
'My niece died by the side of the road. I imagine it was a filthy, frightening way to die.'
His voice had resumed that sleepy schoolroom cadence, but I no longer felt sleepy. Not at all.
'He tried to save her. I believe that. And I try to believe that it was only ill luck that she died. He had been in a ruthless business for a long time, and I don't believe he loved his daughter very deeply, if at all. But sometimes, in mortal matters, a lack of love can be a saving grace. Sometimes ruthlessness is what is required.'
'But not this time,' I said.
'In the end he turned her over and held her by her ankles. He punched her in the belly, hoping to make her vomit. I believe he would have tried to do a tracheotomy on her with his pocket-knife if he had even the slightest idea of how to go about it. But of course he did not. She died.
'Marcia and her husband and family came to the funeral. So did I. It was our last family reunion. I remember thinking, He will have traded the car, of course. In an odd way, I was a little disappointed. It had figured so largely in Veronica's letters and the few which Rollie wrote that I felt it was almost a member of their family. But he hadn't. They pulled up to the Libertyville Methodist Church in it, and it was polished . . . and shining . . . and hateful. It was hateful.' He turned to look at me. 'Do you believe that, Dennis?'
I had to swallow before I could answer. 'Yes,' I said. 'I believe it.'
LeBay nodded grimly. 'Veronica was sitting in the passenger seat like a wax dummy. Whatever she had been whatever there was inside her - was gone. Rollie had had the car, she had had the daughter. She didn't just grieve. She died.'
I sat there and tried to imagine it - tried to imagine what I would have done it if had been me. My daughter starts to choke and strangle in the back seat of my car and then dies by the side of the road. Would I trade the car away? Why'? It wasn't the car that killed her; it was whatever she strangled on, the bit of hamburger and bun that had blocked her windpipe. So why trade the car? Other than the small fact that I wouldn't even be able to look at it, wouldn't even be able to think of it, without horror and sorrow. Would I trade it? Man, does a bear shit in the woods?
'Did you ask him about it?'
'I asked him, all right. Marcia was with me. it was after the service. Veronica's brother had come up from Glory, West Virginia, and he took her back to the house after the graveside ceremony - she was in a kind of walking swoon, anyway.
'We got him alone, Marcia and I. That was the real reunion. I asked him if he intended to trade the car. It was parked directly behind the hearse that had brought his daughter to the cemetery - the same cemetery where Rollie himself was buried today you know. It was red and white - Chrysler never offered the 1958 Plymouth Fury in those colours; Rollie had gotten it custom-painted. We were standing about fifty feet away from it, and I had the strangest feeling . . . the strangest urge . . . to move yet farther away, as if it could hear us.'