“You’re crazy.”
“I’m not.” He sat there on his bed looking up at me but he didn’t look angry or worried. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“I didn’t want you to get into trouble. Look, Jake, I was there but I didn’t paint that word.”
“What did you do?”
‘‘‘Mom asked me to put an envelope on the windshield of Karl’s car.”
“What was in it?”
“I don’t know. She made me promise not to open it.”
“Who spray-painted the gate?”
“I don’t know. It was that way when I got there.”
I was about to tell Jake the whole story when I heard the feisty growl of a little automobile engine and when I looked out the window Karl Brandt drove up in his sports car. Jake and I both went downstairs where our mother was finally up and eating some toast and drinking coffee. My father had gone to his office in the church but he must have seen Karl arrive because he came quickly home.
Karl knocked on the front screen door and I opened it. As he walked in, Dad bounded up the porch steps behind him. Karl looked like death. He stood in the house with his shoulders slumped and his eyes downcast and there came from him, as if it held an actual scent, the air of despair. My mother stepped in from the kitchen with her coffee in her hand. She didn’t seem surprised at all. Karl’s dark eyes lit briefly on each of us then settled at last on my mother. He held up the envelope which I recognized. Not a word passed between them yet my mother came forward and put her coffee cup on the dining room table, took the envelope, and walked to the living room. Karl followed her. The rest of us watched as if it was a silent play being performed. Mother sat down at the piano. She opened the envelope, took out a couple of pages of sheet music, settled them on the music rack above the keyboard, and began to play and to sing.
The song was Unforgettable, the great Nat King Cole standard. She played flawlessly and sang in a way that was like a pillow inviting you to rest all the weariness of your heart upon it. Karl had sung this same song with Ariel at the Senior Frolics in the spring, a duet that had brought down the house. We’d all been there and after I had heard them sing together I’d figured I knew pretty well what love was all about.
Karl Brandt stood with his hand on the piano and I thought if he hadn’t had that great instrument to lean against he might have collapsed. He’d always seemed to me to be old and mature and sophisticated but at that moment he looked like a child and like he was going to cry.
When my mother finished he whispered, “I didn’t kill Ariel. I could never hurt Ariel.”
“I never thought for a moment that you did, Karl,” my father replied.
Karl turned and said, “Everyone else in town does. I can’t even leave the house anymore. Everyone stares at me like I’m a monster.”
From where she sat on the piano bench my mother looked up at Karl and said, “You got my daughter pregnant.”
“It wasn’t me,” Karl said. “I swear it wasn’t me.”
“You’re telling me my daughter slept around?”
“No. But I never slept with her.”
“That’s not what you told your friends.”
“That was just talk, Mrs. Drum.”
“Hateful, hurtful talk.”
“I know. I know. I wish I’d never said those things. But all the guys say them.”
“Then all the guys should be ashamed of themselves.”
“I didn’t kill her. I swear to God, I didn’t touch her.”
We heard the pound of steps on the front porch and the hammer of a fist on our door and there were Mr. and Mrs. Brandt looking at us with their faces dark through the mesh of the screen.
My father let them in and Mrs. Brandt rushed to her son and put herself between him and my mother and said to Karl, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I had to tell them,” he said.
“You had to do nothing of the sort. You owe no one an explanation.”
“Oh, but he does, Julia.”
Mrs. Brandt turned on my mother. “He had nothing to do with your daughter’s death.”
“What about her pregnancy?”
“Or that.”
“He’s been telling two different stories, Julia.”
I couldn’t believe how calm my mother seemed, how solid, like cold iron.
Mrs. Brandt said to her son, “Karl, you go home and wait for us there. We’ll take care of this.”
“But they need to understand,” he pleaded.
“I told you, we’ll take care of this.”
“Go on home, Son,” Axel Brandt said. He sounded tired and some of Karl’s despair was in his voice.
Karl slowly crossed the room, cowering, and I saw him in the same way the sheriff and Doyle must have seen him when they called him the Brandt boy. He reached the front door and paused a moment and I thought he was going to turn back and say something more. Instead he simply pushed out into the morning light. A minute later I heard the sound of his car pulling away.
“Now,” Julia Brandt said returning her attention to my mother. “Is there something you want to say to me, Ruth?”
“Just one question, Julia: What are you afraid of?”
“What makes you think I’m afraid?”
“Because you’ve been hiding. Nathan and I have been trying to talk to you and Axel and Karl, but you’ve refused to see us. Why is that?”
“Our lawyer,” Axel Brandt said. “He advised us against speaking with anyone.”
“Given the circumstances,” my father said, “I think the least you could have done was to have agreed to see us.”
“I wanted to, but . . .” Mr. Brandt didn’t finish. Instead he cast an accusing glare at his wife.
“I saw no reason,” Julia Brandt said. “Karl didn’t hurt your daughter. Nor did he impregnate her. Nor, despite speculation to the contrary, did he ever intend to marry her.”
“And how do you know all this, Julia?” My mother stood up from the piano bench. “You’re privy to Karl’s every action and every thought?”
“I know my son.”
“I thought I knew my daughter.”
“We all know about your daughter, don’t we?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“She’s had her eye on Karl for a long time. Why do you think she got herself pregnant?”