Charlie's Key (21 page)

“And you figure the cops would believe us?”

“I figure Sullivan’d be worried they might—worried enough that he’d spend a few thousand to shut us up.”

“And what if he ain’t worried?” I say. “What if he tells us to go screw ourselves, to tell the cops whatever we wants, because there’s no way they’re gonna believe a couple of Sykeses?”

“Then I’d let you work on convincin’ him,” says Mikey.

“All right,” I say.

Next weekend, we was ready. It were a Saturday night— movie night, when most of the boys and the Brothers were down to the common room. Sullivan, though, he stayed in his apartment, which is where he’s to when we knocks on the door.

“Evening, Brother,” says I, pushing my way inside, Mikey following behind. Mikey, he gets right to business, telling Sullivan we knows what he’s up to. At first he tells us to go to hell—tells us the cops’ll never believe a couple of ne’er-do-wells from Cook Street whose parents were crooked as a dog’s hind leg. But Mikey, he gives him a few details of what we know—’bout how he got one of the kids to come down and say Brother so-and-so is diddlin’ him, how one a the Brothers got so scared he keeled over on Sullivan’s floor. Right away you can see Sullivan’s rattled.

“We knows it all, b’y,” I chimes in. “We even knows who the kid is. Who d’ya think told us all this, anyways?”

That rattles him good, I can tell, because he turns white as five pounds of flour. He’s close to breaking, I knows it.

“Mikey,” I says, “go out now and grab up that kid and bring him back here.” Mikey looks like he don’t want to go at first, but I gives him a hard look and says it again, slow. “Go on, now, b’y. Shouldn’t take you more’n five minutes to find him. Go on.”

Soon as me and Sullivan is alone, I get to work, giving him a smack on the head, then another. I grabs his arm behind his back then and starts pulling up—the old cop move. He’s weak—can’t put up no fight, I can tell right away—so I push hard, feeling the arm starting to give.

“C’mon, you old bastard,” I says. “Open the drawer you got locked.”

He pulls out a key from his pants and unlocks it with his free arm. I slides it open but there’s nothing there ’cept a black scribbler with a bunch of writing and numbers in it.

“What’s this?” I say, shaking it in his face.

“It’s nothing.”

“So why’s it locked in a drawer?”

I give his arm another yank and he starts crying.

“It’s names,” he says. “Names of Brothers I was blackmailing.”

“And the numbers?”

“What they paid,” he says.

“And where’s the money to? Tell me or I’ll break yer friggin’ arm.”

“It’s not here—it’s off out to the country.”

“Show me,” I says, flipping the scribbler to an open page. “Draw a map.”

I lets go of his arm and it flops down like it’s broke, but I can’t tell if it is because I don’t hear no snap. It don’t matter— it’s his left arm, so the right one’s still good, and that’s the one he uses to draw the map.

“It’s here,” Sullivan says. “Out beyond Trepassey. There’s a road, right here—a path—that runs out to the family chapel, built by the old ones when they first came over. It’s abandoned, but part of it’s still standing. There’s a crypt underneath—my family’s buried there. The money’s there, in a cash box, in a coffin.”

I looks at the map and sure enough, he’s got a road drawed out and a path leading off it to the coast, but it ain’t too clear on directions, I can see.

“Details,” I says. “I needs to know exactly where it’s to,” and I gives him another slap and he starts writing underneath the drawing. Then he’s finishes and looks up at me, still crying.

“Please,” he says, “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

And then…

Nick stops talking for a long while. The wind outside the car is strong now, moaning through the open window.

“Then you killed him,” I say.

“I guess,” says Nick, looking past me, out at the dust. “I guess—I don’t remember much, just him begging me not to hurt him no more, and me thinking about all them little kids, and how they musta looked up at them grown men and begged the same thing, and how it didn’t do them no good. And something snapped—something I didn’t even know was there to break.”

“And my dad?”

“He never seen Sullivan after he left the room to get the kid. Once I knowed Sullivan were dead, I tore out the map from the scribbler, locked the apartment door from inside and took off out through the back window, off the fire escape. Twenty minutes later I was thumbing my way toward Trepassey.”

“But you never found the money.”

“Not for lack of trying. For three days I looked. Followed a dozen rabbits tracks from the road out to the coast, nothing at the end of any a them. Not a gravestone, not a pile of rocks, nothing.”

“You think Sullivan was lying?”

“I wondered, but I don’t know. He coulda been. But he were one scared bastard when he drawed out that map. He knew I’d come back for him if I didn’t find nothing. Anyways, wherever it was I couldn’t find a hint of it after three days’ hard slog. And it were hard—nothing to eat but blueberries and only pond water to drink, so I had the shits by the second day. Come the third day I couldn’t stand no more. I knowed I had to turn myself in or die in the country.”

“That’s when you mailed the letter,” I say.

Nick nods. “Back to me old aunt Esther. Bit of a boozer, but smart enough to hold on to a map what comes in the mail.”

“How’d my dad know she had it?”

“I told him,” says Nick. “After I got arrested they hauled me back to St. John’s, to the Pen. I had a visit or two with Mikey—even Sykeses get visits with their family—and I told him to go by Aunt Ester’s in a while, once all this had settled down, and she’d have something for him. Which he didn’t want to hear. He was all panicked, with the murder and all, and didn’t want to have anything to do with the map nor me nor anything else. ‘That’s fine,’ I says. ‘Just get it, put it in the safety deposit box.’ The old man—Dick—had rented it out in Mikey’s name.”

“My dad had a safety deposit box?”

“Sure, we all did,” says Nick. “The old man rented half a dozen, all across the island—places to stash stuff what he didn’t want the cops to find. Anyways, I told Mikey to shove it in his box and forget about it till I got out. Then I’d get back in touch and we’d have a real good look without the cops breathing down our necks.”

“But my dad, he testified against you.”

Nick gives a smile. “Part of the plan. See, once my lawyer told me the prosecution had a witness what seen me leaving the room, I figured I were done for—they had me for killing Sullivan, no doubt. But they didn’t have no motive, because as far as they knowed, I took nothing from the room—didn’t rob him, didn’t steal from him, nothing. So what would happen, I thought to myself, if I supplied the motive?”

“How do you mean?”

“Listen—they knows I killed Sullivan, right? But they don’t know why. So they figure…what? I was trying to rob him, and maybe got scared? So that’s murder—life sentence, at least twenty-five years in prison. But what if I tells them Sullivan was trying it on with me, that he abused me? Then I could plead self-defence, saying I was only trying to protect myself. Except that would be a bit too obvious, right? The cops would figure I was just making up a story to save meself. But if Mikey told them I’d been abused—if he agreed to testify against me, saying I killed Sullivan because he assaulted me back when I were living at Cliffside—they might believe that. Mikey tells his story and all of a sudden I go from being some criminal kid who kills an innocent Brother to some poor orphan who were getting revenge for being abused at the hands of a pervert. And it worked, b’y. Five years, they give me, the jury practically crying at my story. And I’d a been out in four if it weren’t for that bit of bother while I was inside.”

Nick sits smoking for a long time before he says, “Now you knows.”

“And what happens now?”

“Now,” says Nick, “you gives me a hand, tracking this down.”

He taps the map with his claw.

“But how can I help find anything? I don’t even know where I am.”

“You’re young, you got fresh eyes. You could spot something I missed, see something I didn’t when I were studying on that map. No question, you can help me out. Big time.”

He starts the car up and moves back onto the highway.

“Once I find the stash, I’ll drop you off somewheres on the way back to town, no harm done. But for now, you can help me find this place. The sooner that’s done, the sooner you can be off with Dez or Frankie or that cute one what lives down the Gut.”

The main road’s nothing to see but rocks and rain. We drive for a long while with nobody talking. I look at my dad’s watch; it’s almost
4
:
00
PM
. The rain’s stopped, but it’s still gray and dark, the sun shut up behind clouds that go as far as I can see. The road’s swinging down close to the ocean more often now, and there’s flecks of spray coming off the white waves. Once we see a little fishing boat, going up and down and sideways on the waves. A couple of cars go by, headed for town, and once a pickup passes us, with Nick telling me to lean down in the seat when he spots it coming in the rearview mirror. But that’s all the cars we see. And that little boat.

“Here,” says Nick after a while, passing me the map. “See that line marked
Number 10
? That’s the road we’re on now. Just coming up on Trepassey.”

“I see it.”

“Now,” says Nick. He’s looking between me and the road. “Just before Trepassey, that’s where Sullivan drawed the path off from the main road. See the little line? He’s got it branching off right by the church what he drawed in. But that’s what I couldn’t find. I mean, I found the church—it’s right up here.”

Nick slows the car down and turns off the road up toward a little white church. He drives in behind it, so you can can’t see the car from the highway, then shuts it off.

“See?” he says. “No trouble finding the church, but where’s the path? I couldn’t find nothing going off behind it— leastways, nothing that led to no graveyard. What’s he got written there, about where to look?”

I look at Sullivan’s map. The writing’s messy, scrawly, like mine would be if somebody just tried to snap my arm off. Some bits are so messy that they’re crossed out and printed again, neater.

“Path starts behind church,” I read.

“Right,” says Nick. “I got that part.”

“But it’s not this church,” I say. “See?”

I read the directions Sullivan wrote out twenty years ago. “Path runs behind St. Giles Anglican—just off Natches Road.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Nick. “Not this church?”

“Nope,” I say, nodding at the sign in front of the church. “This is St. Mary’s Catholic. We need to keep looking—to find that Natches Road.”

“Christ,” says Nick. “No wonder I couldn’t find the right friggin’ path.”

He starts the car.

“You’re pretty good with that reading,” he says, once we’re back on the main road.

“Guess so.”

“That’s good. That’s good. Yer old man was like that too— always reading stuff, even went to the library. Bringing books home. That’s good.”

“Sign coming up,” I say after a bit. It’s a little green one, on a pole:
Natches Road
.

“This is it,” I say.

Nick turns left onto it.

“See?” he says. “Good eyes. Me, I wouldn’t a been able to read that till we was well down the road.”

A couple secs later we’re pulling into St. Giles’s mud parking lot.

“Okay, Charlie,” says Nick, parking behind the church. “Let’s have a walk-round and see if we can spot that path. You okay on those crutches?”

“Pretty good.”

“Good. Put that urn in your backpack. We’ll take it along in case we bump into anybody—we can say we’re out to scatter yer old man’s ashes. No crime in that.”

He opens the trunk and pulls his own pack outta the car.

“Church is tucked away in here pretty good,” he says. “No wonder I couldn’t find it back in ’
89
.”

“But it’s just what Sullivan wrote,” I say, unfolding the map to read the directions. “Path to crypt runs up from behind St. Giles…see?”

I hold the letter up for Nick to read. He doesn’t bother looking, so I say it again.

“See?”

I point at the stuff Sullivan wrote about St. Giles. Nick studies it for a minute, then heads off toward the woods behind the church, turning left when he reaches the trees.

“Where you going?” I call out. “You turn right—he’s got it written here—turn right behind the church. I just showed you. You just read it…”

Then I know—he didn’t just read it, because he can’t read. And right when I figure that out another bit of the truth slides into place, a little bit I don’t really want to know, a little bit that makes me dizzy, pulls me back to the edge of that black hole.

Nick comes back toward me, telling me to hurry up.

“C’mon, Charlie, b’y. We’re close—we just got to scout around a bit and find that path. Then we’ll—”

“Nick,” I butt in, serious—so serious that he stops talking. “You can’t read, can you?”

He gives a laugh. “Funny time to be asking about readin’.”