From the Chrysalis (4 page)

Of course Dace wasn’t on this page. What would he be doing there? What would he be doing anywhere in the company of a murderer? Still …
 

Her hand stopped on the reel and she glanced at the big round clock on the wall. 4:30. Almost time to leave. Her scalp prickled.
Don’t be a coward,
she admonished herself.
It’s probably nothing, nothing at all.
She scrolled to page three. The newsprint was hard to make out. Then she saw both Dace and a headline, centre page:
Maitland Man Found Guilty Of Manslaughter In Neighbour’s Death.
The photo was wallet-sized, but it was him all right. She fumbled with the focus below the screen, almost lost her place, and had to start over. Her heart hammered so loudly she could barely concentrate.

Two Maitland residents, D’Arcy James Devereux, 17, and Rick Lowery, 16, have been charged in the shooting death of Alan Turbot, 38 on May 10, 1966. Turbot died from a single gunshot to his shoulder, which stopped his heart. Although Devereux and Lowery maintain they shot in self-defence …

No
, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut.
No.
She tried and failed to reconcile this newspaper report with the memory of water sluicing off Dace’s perfect body as he shallow dove after her into the pond. She took so many deep breaths the man to her left glanced over with some alarm, but she reassured him with a flicker of a smile.
 

She drew closer, studying the grainy picture of her cousin accompanying the article. His grin tipped up the left side of his face so he looked like he was sneering, but it still felt so good to see his face. There were actually two small photos, plucked from a school yearbook. One was of Dace and the other was of his friend, Rick Lowery. They looked so young. Apparently Rick had provided Dace with an alibi after he’d fled the scene, and he might face charges of aiding and abetting a crime.
 

Her face flushed, she reversed the microfilm, forcing herself to read some earlier articles, items the indexer must have missed.
 

Accused testifies victim joked, “It feels good” … Pathologist says death caused by unattended bullet wound …

The dead man had assaulted somebody—Rick perhaps—but the testimony of the witness was unreliable. Even the Judge had said so.

Liza’s head swam, but she couldn’t stop reading. If nothing else, she had to find out
why.
The victim was a bootlegger and a drug pusher, a man in his thirties. Somehow Dace had ended up with his friend’s gun. Oh, brother. What did that matter anyway? The boys shouldn’t have been there at all.
 

She shouldn’t be here, either. She felt sick to her stomach and figured this was what she got for being so nosy. She had to go to the bathroom.
 

Except it was too late. She knew now. None of this could be undone. She glanced furtively around, wondering if anyone else could sense it, the feeling in the pit of her stomach which she realized was shame.
 

Her cousin had … Maybe. Well, who knew? Even though she had read something terrible about him, she felt sorry for him. If she hadn’t known him it might have been different, but she did. Besides, he was her kin. Her skin crawled with pity. He must never know that she knew. That she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Something he’d hoped to hide.
 

She was a private person herself and would have been horrified to be so exposed.
In the newspaper.
And what was worse, Liza had gone looking. She glanced over her right shoulder, half expecting some relation to rebuke her. Dace’s dead mother perhaps. This was none of Liza’s damn business. What on earth was wrong with her? Why was she reading such trash? Even if the man had died, it didn’t mean Dace had killed him. It didn’t mean everything in the paper was true.

She could almost hear her mother saying:
you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
For once she was powerless to refute her. Her mind stopped processing what she read while her heart raced on. Was it possible to have a heart attack at fourteen?
 

Now what? If she photocopied—

No, she’d never manage such a complicated task today. Besides, she didn’t have any change. Stupid, stupid. She couldn’t ask the snooty clerk for any, either. She just couldn’t. But wait. Her brain leapt briefly to life. She turned the crank at the side of the microfilm reader and scrolled forward, checking for an appeal.
 

There was none, but another headline on the Editorial Page a few days later caught her eye:
Tougher Jail Term Called For Teenager.
She closed her eyes and considered not reading the article, but in the end she had to know what the fool had said.

D’Arcy Devereux, who is now 18, got off lucky, some will say. Too lucky. How can a man’s life be worth only seven years?
 

Devereux, whose juvenile records have been sealed, is rumoured to have first gotten into trouble with the law when he assaulted Father Danby at St. Matthew’s School. Devereux, a vicious young punk who was only ten years old at the time, was eventually released to his father under what is now termed a conspiracy of silence. Then, as now, rather than having the decency to own up to his crime, he claimed that a man of the cloth had indecently assaulted his sister …

Liza stared at the words. Golden-haired Rosie, a little girl who could pass for a boy. Liza got to her feet and passed the Information Desk, ignoring a posted request to re-file her microfilm. Bad girl, she thought. She hadn’t turned off the reader, either. This time as she walked by, the desk clerk was openly puzzling over her document, a rather complicated looking recipe for Veal Cordon Blue. She was also getting more irate in response to demands made on her time.

“No, you can’t
borrow
a staple. How are you going to pay it back?” she snarled at a library patron. Catching sight of Liza fleeing by her desk, she said, “Excuse me, Miss, can you put—”

But Liza was on automatic. Somehow she located the front doors and walked down the wide staircase, digging her fingers into her crossed arms until she was outside on the busy street where rain dripped onto an unloved lawn. The sidewalk shook as a red and yellow streetcar lumbered by.

She felt like bawling. Now that she’d read it, the
Maitland Spectato
r had raised more questions than it had answered. Who was Rick? Not that she cared. Dace was the only one who mattered. He, that beautiful boy, was a puzzle for her and the only one she wanted to solve. His face loomed large in her mind and she could still see him, the water dripping from his body, the pond … At least now she knew why he hadn’t written. He had gone to court and lost. No doubt he was too embarrassed, not to mention angry and afraid. What else was a convicted felon supposed to feel? Guilt? She supposed so, but really she had no idea.
 

Maybe it was better if he didn’t write. What could she say? He
might
be guilty.
I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,
she heard Johnny Cash singing in her mind. Was it possible to be attracted to a killer? How far was love supposed to go?

But it had been an accident, she reminded herself. Not premeditated. That’s what manslaughter was. Accidental killing. Even so, he had killed a man and was in jail. Him and Rick Lowery. Self-defence. Could a competent lawyer have gotten them off? At the farm, Dace had obviously hated his lawyer. He hadn’t thought much of the media, either.
Don’t believe what you read in the papers,
he’d said.
 

No wonder. Those articles had obviously exaggerated the exploits of their hometown boys for the sake of news. They’d almost spoiled Dace even in
her
eyes. Even if some of the stories
were true, was she supposed to give up on Dace just because of what some stupid newspaper had said?
 

“Yes!” her father roared later that week. He licked his thumb and paged through her journal, which he’d found at the bottom of her closet. “Yes!”
 

Curiously enough, he seemed more upset by what she had written about
him
in some of her earlier journal entries than her rather complicated feelings about his nephew. Standing by his easy chair in the living room, she prayed he hadn’t read everything, that she hadn’t been completely exposed. Thank God she had felt too conflicted to write about what had happened at the pond. Watching his eyes as they scoured the pages, she thought she had never felt so naked, not even when she’d stepped out of her dress for Dace. She wanted to leave the room, but the habit of obedience was so engrained she didn’t quite dare.

“And what does
this
mean?” her father shouted, reading from her journal here and there. “
I have my books/And my poetry to protect me/I am shielded in my armour
? What the hell are you trying to protect yourself from? I haven’t laid a finger on you—yet!”

Her heart thumping, Liza backed away from her father, more frightened by the look in his eyes than anything he’d said so far.
Her life was so easy compared to his. He wished she didn’t exist.
He exactly say this, but it was implied. Similar scenes continued over the next several weeks, whenever her mother went out. Even sometimes when she was there.

* * *

Although her mother had a lot on her mind that year, the only thing she talked about was packing Liza away. First she consulted the next door neighbours who’d overheard her husband roaring, then Liza’s Sunday school teacher and a social worker recommended by a friend. It was easier than talking about the real problem: her husband’s moodiness. That was exacerbated by his drinking, which was episodic but had become rather frequent by 1966. He was in his forties and carried the attitude of someone who’d been gypped. As in:
is this all there is?
But if Liza left, her mother hoped he might settle down.
 

Besides, the girl was crying in her sleep. Liza’s mother told everybody, much to Liza’s dismay. A foster home was one option. Anything to remove her from the path of her father’s rage. It flared intermittently and unpredictably, like a wildfire never quite put out. And if sending her away also took her out of range of her cousin Dace Devereux, so much the better. That boy was nothing but trouble. He always had been, no matter what his people thought. This last bit, at least, she saved for her daughter’s ears alone.

By Thanksgiving, October 10, Liza found out they were sending her to Dublin, to live with her Granny Magill. Both mother and daughter were numb, and Liza was more than ready to go. It was supposed just be for the school year. She could go to Mount Temple Secondary School there.

Her mother would keep the boys. Her father, well, it didn’t matter, because he would do what he wanted anyway.
Men are like that, aren’t they?
her mother said. He
might
stay, but only if Liza went away. He couldn’t stand having her in his house. That’s wasn’t exactly what her Sunday school teacher, the person elected to help tell Liza, had said, but she saw it in Miss Comeau’s teary eyes. It had been cool in the church, but her cheeks felt hot. Liza was embarrassed for herself, for all of them. She had fled through the darkened vestry, running out into the street without even waiting for the woman to finish. She never went back to church as long as Miss Comeau volunteered there. The only saving grace was that at least Miss Comeau had listened to Liza’s mother’s stories. At least she was on her side. For there were many sides and many secrets.
 

Coincidentally, a real divorce—
a separation
—was taking place in Liza’s friend Linda’s family. Linda lived just down the street. Strange, because nobody else was getting divorced. Everybody else lived with both a mother and a father, unless the father were dead.
 

Liza didn’t think about what was happening to her most of the time, maybe because of the look in her mother’s soft hazel eyes. And because she couldn’t think about it, her memory of wanting to rescue her mother began to dim.
 

She thought of Dace instead and wondered what he was doing in jail. She had no idea about his routines, so she concentrated on his feelings. In a bad situation, she figured he would retreat to somewhere in his head. Like she did.

Chapter 3

Wayward Cousins