Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

they got my son.”
    “They got your wife, too.”
    His face lit up. I hadn’t thought such a thing could happen in the circumstances. “I could kill two birds with one stone.”
    I smiled. At least I worked my face in smile-like fashion; I can’t vouch for the effect. “Let the boy go, okay?”
    “You come over here.”
    My legs shook, but I did. He shoved the boy aside and grabbed me in one motion. “Let’s get out of here.”
    And then we were running, running past horrified onlookers, our fellow Conservatory visitors, then just running, toward his car, I supposed. Sirens were starting somewhere in the distance.
    A little too late, I thought. Just a little too late.
    Since then I’ve wondered often if I should have struggled at that point, tried to break away, but my only thought was to get him out of the park. He had shot his own daughter and might shoot anyone, I thought, anyone or everyone, child or adult. I just wanted him out of there.
    And yet we had to go somewhere. It didn’t occur to me that no matter where he took me, people would still be in danger.
    He found a baseball cap in his car and jerked it on. It changed his appearance just enough, perhaps. He made me drive so that he could keep the gun trained on me, giving directions at every corner.
    I was less afraid for the moment, and my heart slowed a little, knowing he probably wouldn’t shoot me now, not while his own life depended on my being alive.
    I had time now to think, and I couldn’t get something he’d said off my mind: “I got the reporter.”
    How was I supposed to interpret that? I shivered and tried to get it out of my mind. I needed to focus.
    The man sitting next to me was so crazy he’d shot his only daughter, but perhaps there was some ounce of sanity left in him, some tiny speck of conscience that I could appeal to. I said, “Adrienne’s dead, I think.”
    “Bullshit. I wouldn’t kill Adrienne.”
    “But there’s a very good chance you did. You shot her in the chest.”
    “Shut up!”
    He broke the silence every now and then to give me directions. Once we were safely on the Bay Bridge, heading back to the East Bay, I tried again. “How did your wife die?”
    “Suicide, goddammit. You know that.”
    “After Sean died?”
    He shook his head, but not, I realized, to signify a negative. It was the shake of sadness that people give. “It damn near killed her.” And then, realizing what he had said, he gave a mirthless hoot. “It did kill her. We had an old gun I kept around just in case. One day she ate it for lunch, right in front of me.” His head went from side to side— shake, shake, shake— as if the horror of it had loosened his neck bones.
    “McKendrick killed Sean, and he killed Carlene. Bastard!”
    “He deserved to die, I guess.”
    “Damn right he did!”
    “You must have gotten the keys to my partner’s car when you went to visit Adrienne at her office.”
    “Of course I did. It was the perfect setup.”
    “But my partner was innocent. She could have gone to prison for a murder you committed.”
    “First of all, you just said it yourself— it wasn’t fuckin’ murder. It was an execution. He killed my son, I killed him; that simple. And so what about your damned partner? I lost Sean, and then I lost Carlene. Why shouldn’t the inside lose two of theirs?”
    “The inside?”
    “Yeah, the inside. You know what it’s like to have a vegetable for a son? To spend every fuckin’ nickel you make trying to keep him alive when he’s never going to talk or think or do anything except shit his pants? Carlene insisted on that. That’s why it hit her so hard when he died. She got born again after the accident, and she just knew Jesus wasn’t going to let her down. He was going to come right down from heaven and make her baby well again. Instead, he sent a lifetime of seizures and a case of pneumonia.”
    I was losing the thread. “But what’s the inside?”
    “Everything but us, missy. That’s the inside. Having Sean like that, having to live like that made us outsiders. Look at Adrienne! The girl dresses in black all the time. She’s not normal. There’s nothing normal about that girl. How could there be? Her little brother’s skull got cracked when she was five years old. How the fuck was she supposed to be normal?”
    “Adrienne’s dead, Mr. Dunson. You got one on the outside too.”
    “Adrienne is not dead! I wouldn’t kill my own daughter.”
    Would you kill my friend Rob?
    I