1
Mortal fear is knowing you've been poisoned. I sagged against the fine oak paneling, agony vying with numbness for control of my body. My heart raced with the knowledge that it was pounding its last rhythm, like the beat of a runner's shoes against the road as he surges toward the finish line, toward blessed rest. Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed, trying to steady my breathing. I slid down to the floor, dizziness and nausea washing across my body like an obscene tide. I tried to cry for help and my throat felt dead. Raising one leaden arm, I managed to focus my vision on the blurred figures in the room.
And blinking, saw murder done before my eyes.
Step back with me two months.
My name is Jordan Poteet, and I'm the library director for the small Texas town of Mirabeau. This sometimes quiet hamlet lies on a crook of the Colorado River in the rolling countryside between Houston and Austin. Mostly the houses are tidy, the flower beds edged with a draftsman's precision, the street loud with the laughter of playing children. But don't be fooled by Mirabeau's tranquillity. I've been back home for a little over a year and the past months have shocked me to the core of my being. I've seen death, and suffering, and loyalty, and love the likes of which I'd never known. But finally, my life had mellowed into a fairly easy ride-easy despite dealing with my mother's increasingly severe Alzheimer's and the unnerving fact that the man I forever thought was my father… wasn't. And just when I thought I'd sailed into relative calmness, ordering my life into a semblance of normalcy, my biological father, Bob Don Goertz, upset my boat. By issuing the invitation from hell.
My girlfriend Candace Tully did not react in the way I'd hoped.
“Of course you're going,” Candace said, brushing my hair out of my eyes.
We sat on the back-porch swing, sipping wine and watching the evening slide into purples and oranges as the sun set brilliantly against the hills. The loblolly pines were etched in darkness as light fled below the horizon.
“I am not going to this stupid reunion. All those people are Bob Don's family, not mine.” I gulped at my wine. I can be as stubborn as a government mule when I set my mind to it and I could feel my brain encasing in concrete recalcitrance.
“Jordan. I think you could show Bob Don some consideration.”
I hate it when Candace is entirely reasonable. Especially when I'm trying my darnedest to be difficult.
“I know. I don't want to hurt his feelings. But going to his family reunion; I'd feel like a total freak.”
“You're his son, Jordan. He's proud of you. He wants you in his life and he wants his family to know you. That's not unusual.”
“No, the unusual part is I didn't know he was my father for the first thirty-odd years of my life.” I stood and paced out to the yard.
The house, with my family relocated out to the horse farm we'd recently acquired, had taken on an air of abandonment and desolation. The garden, usually thick with tomatoes and other vegetables, lay barren. Empty wire circles and wooden stakes stood in forlorn disuse. Flower beds, denuded of blossoms, looked fashioned of lunar soil, bereft of life.
I missed the gentle swish of the broom while my mother, her mind rotted with Alzheimer's, moved back and forth across the porch, caught in an empty repetition that was only broken by taking the broom from her hands. I missed my sister's gentle nagging and teasing as she attempted daily to dictate the course of my life. I missed my nephew Mark's energy and sarcasm, his reliance on me that I never appreciated until he'd moved out of the house. My family was only a few miles away, but it felt as though they'd voyaged to the other side of the planet.
“There's nothing that we can do to change how you found out about your parentage,” Candace reminded me, grinding away in reasonable mode. “The Goertzes are your family as well.”
“I have a family, thank you kindly,” I said. “I feel no burning need for a bunch of new relatives. Lord knows the ones I have are trouble enough. If I want to shimmy up unexplored branches of my family tree, I'll call a genealogist and ask for the bastard discount rate.”
Candace came up behind me and tapped me firmly on the shoulder. I turned to face her. God, she was everything I had ever wanted, with her kind smile, logical mind, thick chestnut-colored hair, and intelligent lake-blue eyes. She was nearly too petite for a tall fellow like me, but strength radiated out of her and I'd always been drawn to it like metal to magnet. She stood on tiptoe, put her hands on my shoulders-her signal for a kiss. I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers. When the tender embrace broke, she cupped my face in her hands and gently pecked at my closed eyelids. Her palms felt warm and soft against my face.
“Jordan,” she breathed softly, “these people are part of you. They will want to know about you and you will want to know about them, even if you don't believe that right now. Go. Meet them. Otherwise, you're always going to wonder if you don't. And Bob Don-”
“I know. It's important to Bob Don. But as much as he's done for me, I still find it hard to think of him as my father. I mean, to say it aloud, to see him in my daddy's place-”
“He's not trying to replace your father,” Candace whispered, her breath soft against my chest. I'm sure we made quite a gossipmongering sight for the neighbors, locked in this long cuddle. Not that I cared. Talking to her, holding her this way, felt far more intimate than our ardent lovemaking had. I'd been scared of the deepening closeness between us, but I'd resolved not to let fear turn me away from Candace.
“He could never replace my dad,” I answered, resting my chin in her soft-smelling hair.
“He doesn't want to. But he wants to be a father to you- he's not trying to be a clone of your daddy that raised you. Don't you see the difference, hon?”
“No. I've just been fitted for my emotional blinders.” I leaned back and smiled down into her face. “I'm just being stubborn. It's my specialty.”
“Yet I still love you.” She punched me in the shoulder. “You know Bob Don's wanted to claim you as his own son for years. Give him the chance, Jordy. He didn't have a choice in not acknowledging you.”
Yes, he did, I thought bitterly, but I kept this most selfish musing to myself.
Candace continued: “He did everything that he thought was best for you. He let you grow up in a healthy, loving home. He could have made you a pawn, used you against your own parents. He never would have been hurtful. Give him this, please. Think-think of what you might lose if you don't try. He's your biological father. He matters.”
“The things I let you talk me into.”
She nestled close to me and I felt her face smile against my chest. “It's just 'cause I love you.”
“Will you go with me? Don't leave me alone with the Goertzes. I don't know how delighted the rest of his family will be with the new bastard son.”
“Of course. So it's settled?”
“Yes.” I nodded, smiling.
She kissed me again, with fervor, and ran her fingernail deliciously along the bare skin of my arm. “Then let's go upstairs.”
She took my hand and we retired to my bedroom. I lost myself in her, in the warm tangle of her arms, in the delectable slide of skin against skin, the soft wonder of her lips against mine.
***
“An island? Your uncle lives on an island?” I lowered my fork (replete with a goodly chunk of my sister's chicken-fried steak) back to my plate.
“It ain't a big one, Jordan, but it's all his.” Bob Don Goertz beamed witii pride. “Uncle Mutt's done real well for himself. He gave me the seed money for my car lots.”
“Uncle Mutt?”
“His Christian name's Emmett, but when me and my brother and my sister were little we couldn't say Emmett- we said Em-mutt. It got shortened to Mutt.”
“Do you have an Uncle Jeff to go along with this Uncle Mutt?”
Bob Don guffawed. “God, you're funny, son!”
I could recite the Magna Carta and he'd think it was amusing. I don't like it a bit when he starts edging the pedestal over for me to climb up on.
“Naw, no Uncle Jeff. But they're all just gonna love you, Jordan, I can tell already-”
“I'm sure.” I was more than willing to let the assembled Goertzes devise their own opinions about me. I certainly planned on forming my own judgments regarding them. “And how did-excuse me-Uncle Mutt acquire this island?”
“Won it in a poker game.”
I managed to keep hold of my fork, but barely. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my big sister Arlene hovering, pretending to wipe down a table. I'd had a grueling day running the Mirabeau Public Library, and I'd offered to take Bob Don to lunch. Of course I picked the Sit-a-Spell, the downtown cafe co-owned by my sister and Candace. To be seen dining elsewhere in Mirabeau would have been to invite retribution the likes of which I cannot imagine. Of course, Sister isn't exactly kind-minded toward Bob Don. He would forever be the man who nearly ended our parents' marriage. If I told her I was accompanying Bob Don to visit his uncle who'd won offshore real estate while gambling, she'd have a conniption fit.
“I hope I won't be expected to play poker wim him. I don't believe I could ante up.”
“Oh, Uncle Mutt doesn't gamble much anymore. Says he's older and wiser. Plus it's harder for him to hold his cards since his middle fingers got shot off.” Bob Don popped a potato pancake into his mouth and chewed with a grin.
“Shot off? During a poker game?” I asked faintly.
“Oh, no. That was over a woman. A fellow caught Uncle Mutt in bed with his wife.” Bob Don seemed amused at this family trait.
“Oh.”
“And his ex-wife.”
I swallowed my food-untasted. The rough edge of the fried meat left a burning trail down my throat. I coughed and gulped water. “Uncle Mutt was in bed with this man's wife and ex-wife-at the same time?”
“Yeah. Uncle Mutt's always had what you'd call a fair amount of energy. I always figured I got my initiative from him.”
“I sincerely hope you're referring to selling cars, Bob Don, and not bedding women.” I prefer not to dwell overmuch on the sex life that my mother and Bob Don shared.
“Oh, yeah.” He quickly tucked into his green-bean casserole. (It was what Sister termed “the fancy kind,” made with fried onions and mushroom soup.) He never wanted to talk about his relationship with my mother either, except the never-ending litany of how he had loved her. I wondered if he still did. And as for Bob Don's wife Gretchen-well, her husband's emotional investment in my mother couldn't be comforting.
“And just how old is Uncle Mutt now?” Considering Bob Don was in his fifties, Uncle Mutt could hardly still be giving new meaning to simultaneous orgasm.
“Oh, he's around seventy. Still got a lot of gumption. 'Course he's not the oldest member of the family. That'd be Uncle Jake.”
“Older brother to Uncle Mutt?”
“No, he's Uncle Mutt's uncle. Sort of. You see, Uncle Mutt's daddy, Thomas Goertz-he was my granddaddy- he had two wives. The first was named Mildred, and she was my grandmother. Uncle Jake's her bachelor brother and he's nearly a hundred now. Anyway, Jake always lived with Papaw Tommy and his family. Mama Mildred had two children with Papaw Tommy, then she died in the flu epidemic in 1918. Papaw Tommy remarried-we called his second wife Mama Claudia-and she was mother to Uncle Mutt and Aunt Lolly.”
“Aunt Lolly?” I felt the need for a scorecard and resisted the urge to jot notes down on a napkin.
“Uncle Mutt's younger sister. Her real name's Louisa, but we all call her Lolly. She's widowed, so she takes care of Uncle Jake.” He picked at his food, suddenly ill at ease. “Aunt Lolly's sweet, but she's gettin' nuttier than a pecan tree. I don't think she'll be able to take care of Uncle Jake too much longer.”
“But”-I counted on my fingers, retracing the convoluted Goertz family tree-”Jake's not really Lolly's kin, right? He's the brother of her father's first wife, right?”
“Yep. But Uncle Jake was forever part of the family, even after his sister died.” Bob Don appeared horrified at the suggestion Uncle Jake be turned out from the hearth simply because his sister had been dead for nearly eighty years. “And then there's the twins, Philip and Tom-except they don't look alike, ain't that a kicker?-and then your aunt Sass and your cousin Aubrey-”
I held up my hand. “Please, no more. I'll chart the tree when I meet the clan.” If the Goertz family history was as twisty as it sounded, I'd need the services of a genealogist whose hobby was contortionism. I smiled at Bob Don. “I'm sure they're all fine folks.”
He snorted. “Well, I guess I love 'em. But I'm particularly partial to Uncle Mutt. He's my favorite. Aside from you.”
I smiled. I could see now just how much this reunion meant to Bob Don. He was proud of being my father and wanted to share his happiness with his loved ones.
I couldn't help but wonder-would I have invited him to a family reunion of my mother's kin? I wasn't exactly trumpeting from the rooftops that my surname should be, by all rights, a little further up the alphabet. He took more pride in me than I did in him-after all, he'd known I belonged to him since the day I was born. He'd had thirty years to get used to the notion; I had barely a year. It's still not enough time. But shame at the thought that I was treating Bob Don unkindly colored my face.
“As long as Uncle Mutt doesn't challenge me to cards, I'll be fine.”
“He won't. Probably. Of course it's a bit hard to foretell exactly what Uncle Mutt's going to do-” The further misadventures of Bob Don's kinsman were delayed by the arrival of my sister, setting big bowls of banana pudding crowned with vanilla wafers on the table. If you've never had this, it's God's own treat.
“I don't think we'd ordered dessert quite yet.” I smiled. Sister favored me with a wry scowl.
“On the house.” She plopped a third bowl down and scooted into the booth, next to Bob Don. “Gretchen says that y'all are heading out to a-family reunion soon.”
Sister never took the news of my paternity very well. I believe she's grateful to Bob Don for his many kindnesses to us, but his new position in my life rankles her. You don't like to regard your adored little brother as a constant reminder of your own mama's unfaithfulness. I'd become a symbol of my mother's imperfections.
“Well, yes, Arlene, I have asked Jordan to come with me to my family reunion in July. I'd really like for him to know his Goertz relations.”
Sister smiled a smile that said, He already has a family, thank you kindly. Fortunately Bob Don lacks a Berlitz book for Sister's various eyebrow raises and gleaming stares, so he plunged on in happy ignorance. “I'm just so pleased that he's decided to come, 'cause everyone's gonna be thrilled to meet him.”
“Sister-” I started, but she didn't let me finish.
“I just don't know if July's a good time for Jordan to be away from the horse farm,” she said airily.
“Why? Has Mark forgotten how to shovel manure?” Let me be the first to say how minimal my contributions to the horse farm are. I modernized the software; I did most of the hiring, although most of the folks working there stayed on when my nephew inherited the farm from an old family friend. I told Mark he could not spend any of the large amounts of money bequeathed to him. (That part I particularly enjoyed. Mark is fourteen and I love telling him no. Uncle's rights, you know.) “I imagine, Sister, that the farm will not slip into a crack in the earth if I'm gone for a few days.”
Sister framed her lips in a familiar combative stance when her eyes widened and I saw Candace gesturing to her from the kitchen. “Just a sec,” she muttered to me, and retreated to the roiling steam to consult with her partner.
“That girl is just never going to cotton to me.” Bob Don twirled his spoon in the creamy pudding. Disappointment curdled his normally kind features into a frown.
“Sure she will. If I can get along with Gretchen, you can get along with my sister.” I tapped my finger against the back of his hand. I don't touch Bob Don often (and no, I don't know why) and he brightened with a smile.
“Well, son, I'm glad to hear you and Gretchen are mending fences.”
“Yes. It's been much easier since we cleared the minefields away.” I stuck a spoonful of pudding and cookie into my mouth, not really wanting to discuss Bob Don's wife Gretchen. I'd made as much peace as possible with that woman, all for Bob Don's sake. He had the easier reconciliation to make; after all, Sister wasn't a crazily mean bitch. Tidying up my discord with Gretchen required the patience of a saint, which I fortunately have. Usually. Okay, occasionally. At least during leap years.
Sister returned to the table, toying with her blonde pony-tail and smiling like the grin had been pasted on with fancy glue. She sat down next to Bob Don and squeezed his arm in affection. I tried not to choke on my pudding.
“I think this reunion idea is just wonderful,” Sister purred. “Bob Don, of course you should get Jordan to go. Far be it from me to suggest otherwise. And Jordy, it's just absolutely necessary that you bond with your Goertz kin-folk. After all, they're your people, too.”
“Are y'all nipping cooking sherry back there?” I craned my neck for a better view into the kitchen. Candace ducked out of sight, presumably to go flour a chicken for frying. I suspected my butt'd been dusted as well. I narrowed my gaze at Sister, who replied with a cherubic smile. (The last angel to sport that grin was Lucifer immediately before he took the down elevator.)
“Jordy, your hypersuspicious mind is certainly one of your least attractive assets.” Sister sniffed. She patted Bob Don's arm. “I know that I've not always been-entirely kind to you, Bob Don. I'm sorry. I'm gonna work on that.”
He patted her arm back and gave her his warm smile. “I appreciate that, Arlene. After all, we're all family now.”
“And it's so important for us to keep that truth foremost in our minds,” Sister concurred. She sounded like a United Nations ambassador working the floor.
“I believe I've had enough sugar for today,” I said, clunking my spoon in my scraped-clean pudding bowl. I'd hoped for a summit between Sister and Bob Don, but this smacked of backdoor diplomacy.
“So when do you leave?” Sister asked brightly.
“Not soon enough for you, apparently,” I teased. “Would you like to go pack my bags for me?”
“One just can't ignore opportunities like this, Jordy,” Sister said, then coughed with a sidelong glance at Bob Don. “I mean-a chance to meet your long-lost family.”
“Or a chance to escape from your currently existing relatives,” I parried. Sister has never advocated sudden mood swings. I, of course, relegated her attempt at detente with Bob Don to consideration of my long-wounded feelings.
More fool I.
2
The first letter arrived in early June. it lay nestled, like a snake in high grass, among the inevitable bills, a long, funny letter from my college roommate now living in Nashville, and a men's-health magazine brimming with advice I gleefully ignore. I thought at first it was just a card of some sort, noting only the Corpus Christi postmark and wondering who the hell did I know down on the coast.
I sat at the kitchen table, still laughing from my friend's letter, and pulled the card out of the envelope. I dropped it immediately when I saw the blood.
A dried X of crimson gore splattered the front, obscuring a cartoon cat's knowing leer. The envelope fell nervelessly from my hands. My stomach churned.
I gulped a couple of long, steadying breaths, then retrieved a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer. Using them, I pried the card open-the paper resisted for a moment, because the blood gummed the edges closed. Redness lined the missive, like the dark signature of the devil. I saw first the preprinted salutation on the card: THINKING ONLY OF YOU. A scarlet spatter scored the wish. On the other side of the card, letters cut from a magazine spelled out a cheerless message:
STAY AWAY BASTARD
YOU'RE NOT WANTED
DON'T MAKE ME PROVE IT
I sat for a long while, breathing through my mouth, reading the hateful words again. Cursive, dainty letters formed the PROVE and they looked incongruous in the hurtful context. Bile rose in my throat, along with a hard, burning anger. I balled my hand into a fist.
Stay away bastard.
The phone rang, jarring me out of my reverie. I scooped the receiver up with a shaking hand. “Hello?” My own voice sounded dank and rheumy, as if I'd just surfaced from some deep darkness.
“Hey, son, how you?” Bob Don's voice revved along, probably fresh from having closed a sweet deal on a fine preowned vehicle. “Hadn't talked to you in a couple of days and I missed you. What's up?”
I swallowed hard during his flurry of words. My heart pounded in my chest, and when I spoke, my voice cracked on my first assurance that I was well. “Doing fine. How are you?”
He regaled me with a funny story about one of his salesmen that normally would have had me laughing com-panionably. Instead I forced a weak titter. He asked about Mama and I answered I'd been out to the horse farm and she was well. The dance of words, meaningless to me at the moment, continued until I could stand it no more.
“Bob Don, let me ask you a question. Did you tell the rest of your family about my coming to this reunion next month?”
“Oh, sure, son. I weren't hardly gonna surprise them with you and make everybody uncomfortable. I told Uncle Mutt I was bringing you, and my sister Sass, and I'm sure they've informed the rest of the folks. You're big news to the Goertzes. Everybody's real eager to meet you.”
“I see.” I stared at the blood-smirched card. Someone had not taken the news of my arrival kindly.
“That's all right, isn't it?” Bob Don sounded concerned. “Son?”
“Yes, of course it is. I just wondered.”
“Well, I'm so looking forward to the reunion. I can't wait to show off my boy.”
Pleasure and pride laced his voice, and I smiled despite myself. I glanced back on the obscenity on the kitchen table. “I'm looking forward to meeting them, Bob Don.”
We made small talk for a while, and he invited Candace and me to dinner the following Friday night. I hung up the phone and turned back toward the table.
I resisted the urge to destroy the card. I got my camera, snapped a couple of pictures of the perverse mail, and carefully slid the card into a plastic Baggie. Telling Bob Don would upset him no end, and I felt furious at the idea of being warned off the reunion by someone so cowardly they veiled their hate in blood and anonymous threats. I stored the card carefully in an antique wooden box in my room, loath to eye it again. I stared down at the shut box and imagined the evil on the other side made the carved lid tremble, ever so slightly.
I wondered who might hate me so, sight unseen.
Two weeks later, rich hickory smoke perfumed the air as Bob Don flipped steaks on his backyard grill. Gretchen had flown on her broom to Brenham to visit her aunt and Can-dace was having dinner with her folks. We were bache-loring dinner together, but I had scant appetite for blood-rare steak and a loaded, buttery baked potato, fluffed with salt and pepper. My secret admirer had mailed me good wishes again.
The second bit of correspondence was more direct in its threat. He or she had opted for another mass-market greeting card, the kind that women buy for other women on birthdays, dripping with sexual innuendo. A handsome blond fellow leaned against a column, bare belly rippling with muscle, jeans faded and strategically torn. Vanilla frosting was lightly smeared across his well-defined chest and gut and his puckered lips held a small, lit candle. The inside, preprinted message said
HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
The outward message, though, was of greater interest. The man's visage had been carefully sliced in an X with a razor, and inside my well-wisher had pasted in stolen script:
THIS IS YOUR FACE IF YOU DARE TO SHOW IT STAY AWAY FROM OUR FAMILY
Cold chilled my bones. I could never be handsome enough to be a model, but the fellow on the card was lanky, a thick-haired blond, and green-eyed-like me. I couldn't imagine that the hate-mailer had gotten lucky in choosing a countenance and coloring like my own. And the vandalism on the card had been minutely done, careful to preserve some semblance of the model's face.
This person knew what I looked like.
Thickness coated my throat. My glance had gone to my windows, my door. Were they watching me now? Did they know my face, or was it a lucky guess based on Bob Don's own looks? I checked again for the postmark-this time it was Beaumont, much further up the long, curving Texas coast from Corpus Christi. So my admirer traveled, or had an accomplice. I sealed the second harassing missive in another Baggie and stored it with the first. And spent a long, sleepless night, listening to Candace's soft breathing in the darkness.
I hadn't told a soul.
Now, watching Bob Don cheerfully grill dinner, the soft voice of the Rangers baseball announcer chronicling a home game, the chirp of crickets in the trees, the hate felt far away. I sipped at my Shiner Bock and listened to the soporific drone of the bugs, singing away their short lives.
“Earth to Jordan,” Bob Don boomed out after I'd been idling moments away in my own world. I looked up at him with surprise.
“Something's got you out of gear, son. The Rangers ain't losing that badly.”
I smiled. Son. Despite my ambivalence about Bob Don as a parent, I have to admit the endearment had a nice ring. When my father died from his bout with cancer and my mother forgot who I was, I'd thought son would be a word dropped from usage in connection with me. But here was Bob Don, ready to pick up the reins. Ready to love me like a father, like the one I'd lost. I stood suddenly and walked through the smoke wafting from the grill.
“You and Candace crossways?” he asked my back.
“No.” How, how to do this? “I need to ask you a question. Is anyone in your family considered-dangerous?”
“Good Lord.” He blinked at me with honest surprise. “What on earth would make you ask such a thing?”
I felt torn about revealing the poison-pen letters. Part of me wanted him to know, to tell me I didn't have to go to the reunion, that he'd find out who was terrorizing me. Another half of me wanted to entirely ignore the epistles, not give in to the foul bullying they represented. But I was swimming into unknown waters here, and I needed to know where the sharks lay.
I ran my tongue along my lips. “I just would like for you to answer the question, Bob Don.”
“I will, when I know why you're asking.” He swallowed another long swig from his Shiner longneck.
“I'm just wondering if everyone in your family is going to be delighted by my presence. There could be some resentment against me. After all, I'm somewhat of an unwelcome addition.”
“Why unwelcome? They're just going to love you-”
“If you say so,” I interrupted, cutting off his extrovert's flow of words and tasting my beer. I'd been giving some thought as to why I-as the newest member of the Goertz family-might merit vituperative messages. And I'd concocted a theory. “Uncle Mutt's rich, right?”
I asked this while Bob Don was in mid-gulp and he nodded his assent. “Yeah, rolling in it.”
“Are we talking millions here?”
“Mutt's probably worth about ten million or so.”
Ten million. No wonder someone didn't want another claimant to the family fortune around.
“And he's in good health? Not expected to kick off anytime soon?”
Bob Don gave me a long, measuring stare. “I don't like where this conversation's heading. I hope you want to go to meet my family because it matters to us both, not to hit Uncle Mutt up for cash or get on the beneficiary list.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” I hemmed. “Not at all, Bob Don. It just occurs to me that some of your relatives might not be overly thrilled at another potential heir.”
He didn't answer me immediately, the smoke from the grill...