Joanna took a step back from the footstool, but she was unable to retreat farther, for she was transfixed by Jimmy’s mismatched eyes. Auntie Kat had said that one was like the eye of an angel, the other like that of a demon, but at the moment, both glittered with what seemed to be demonic rage. His mouth, half again as wide as a normal mouth, was like a saber slash, his teeth a snarl of bones revealed in a wound.
“He dragged her down the gangway,” Jimmy continued. “Dragged her to the boat slip, and pulled her into the water and held her under. The lake chill revived her. She struggled, but your father was stronger, and he held her underwater until she drowned. He got in the belayed skiff, pulled her body in after him, untied, and rowed her out to the middle of the lake. The moon had set, and the sun hadn’t risen, so no one saw him heave her dead body overboard. He left the boat adrift and swam ashore, and still no one saw him.”
Joanna flinched as if she had been spat on. For a moment she couldn’t get her breath, as though her grief, which had long ago become a light and settled sorrow, now pressed on her with greater weight. She knew at once that renewed grief was only part of what she felt, that horror was an element of it, too.
When she could breathe, she quickened to her father’s defense, but in the weakness of her voice, she heard doubt that she was loath to admit. “You’re lying. You must be lying. If no one saw him, how could you know such a thing?”
Cocking his head, regarding her particularly with his bloodshot eye, like some accursed soothsayer in a gothic fantasy, he said, “I didn’t need to see. I knew his heart, his mind, as I knew yours when you were young, as I know it now that you are changed.”
“He loved my mother,” she declared, and realized as she spoke that she did not know whether that was true.
“He was given a successful cattle ranch, but fattening cattle has no glamour. He was vain. He wanted to be an admired horseman, breeding and selling them to race and to show. But he wasn’t any good at that, and lost money year by year. The large whole-life insurance policy on your mother, which your grandfather purchased for her at her birth, as an investment he thought would accrue in value—that death benefit was your father’s one hope of saving Rustling Willows, and he seized his chance. Oh, yes, he seized it with both hands and swung that oar like a big-league baseball star.”
She thought of what Auntie Kat said about her father: He was not an outgoing man. Your mother said shy, but I thought . . . well, something else. I believe he married your mother because he was unsure and somehow empty, while she was so centered and complete.
This angry and aggressive Jimmy was ugly, but Joanna wondered if he seemed even uglier than he actually was because he was telling the truth. Truths we don’t want to hear always make the teller ugly to us.
She was compelled to further defend her father. “My mom’s death was investigated. The police said it was accidental. No one had the slightest reason to suspect my dad.”
Even though Jimmy’s face did the Phantom of the Opera one better, making his expressions difficult to read, the sneer in his voice was unmistakable, sharp and meant to cut. “The sheriff, who owned quarter horses, bought his racing stock from your father—and was always given a discount. They went hunting together. The county had no medical examiner in those days, only an incompetent coroner whose main job was as an undertaker, and he had a drinking problem. There was no one to give your mother justice, no one—except me.”
“You?” Her puzzlement lasted only an instant, and then she understood. Like a benign bruin in a fable, the grizzly bear had welcomed young Joanna into an enchanted forest, its ferocity repressed by whatever spell Jimmy had cast upon it. In some strange way the bear had been Jimmy, his avatar, as the many animals on the ranch were his to control and perhaps inhabit. If he could use all creatures great and small, furred and feathered and scaled, to charm and entertain her, he could surely use the most formidable of them to slaughter Samuel Chase.
“You killed my father.”
He received the accusation as though it had been praise. “Yes. But I executed him. He was the murderer, not me.”
Whether this was a lie piled upon a lie or in fact revelation upon revelation, she felt assaulted, the past on which she’d built a life cracking under her as if it were a frozen lake of unstable ice. “What right had you to be his judge and jury?”
He startled her by springing up from the armchair and onto the footstool, so that in spite of his stature, he could be eye to eye with her. He had moved in a hitch and hobble when he’d been a boy, and though he looked less limber now than he’d been then, his anger granted him this unexpected and unsettling agility.