Bill Kte’pi’s Official Web Site

16.

“What more do I need to do with you, Castle?” Jonathan asked. The deep baritone orator voice had kicked in, the one from CSPAN and campaign stumping, the one that sounded like Peter Graves after a few whiskeys: Castle was more and more sure that was Jonathan’s default voice now, and that the friendlier one was a mask he put on just for interviewers and occasional family members. “Must I post guards, and prevent you from having visitors? Shall I arrange a more formal confinement for you, in a more supervised locale? If you’d like to get better, there are institutions which would accept you, beyond the reach of extradition. If you’d rather retain access to a television and Gamebox, it would take me all of forty-two seconds to present the relevant evidence to the relevant authorities. Forty-two seconds. I bring up the file, I type in the password, I forward it to the FAX machines with an assurance that the originals and physical evidence are available. You could spend the next twenty years of your life in prison, nephew, assuming they go easy on you. They do not often go easy on serial killers.”

“Jonathan –”

“You realize that’s what you are, don’t you? You’re a serial killer. You have both method and madness. Goddammit, boy! The Hanovers might have withstood this, but that was over a century ago, and they were a monarchy. We must be elected. We must be chosen. Our status depends on the constant and daily affirmation of the people who elevated us. How would your father feel about this? Is that why you’ve done it? Are you trying to shame him, since he’s no longer alive to give his approval? Your mother won’t stop talking about the psychology books she reads, the criminology books, one after another –”

“Jonathan, you piece of shit, listen to me. I didn’t kill the priest. I haven’t killed anyone since — since coming to Domino. And for months before that.”

“Listen to you,” Jonathan said, disgust — and maybe something like fear — in his voice. “You haven’t killed anyone lately, you say. Oh, we’re all so proud. I’m sure a man who’s strangled two women and drowned another can be trusted! After all, the priest was a man — you don’t kill men, do you, Castle? You don’t kill men.”

“Romaglio was with me the whole time. He can vouch for me. Romaglio, for God’s sake — you’ve known him longer than I have, our families go way back. If you can’t trust him, what do you expect me to do?”

“I haven’t got the interest or inclination to discourse on the lengthy topic of my expectations of you, nephew.”

“And another thing. It’s GameCube. Not Gamebox. The Nintendo GameCube. Christ, how do you keep foreign policy straight if you can’t even remember brand names?”

“Are you finished with your outburst?” The voice of oration became one of patient amusement. “I will speak to Romaglio, Castle. You may spend the next twenty hours or so wondering what will become of you, because I am not the least bit convinced that you have so much as begun to learn your lesson. In the meantime, men will come. Men will come to the house I have bought for you, in order to dispose of the corpse I am most convinced — one way or the other — would not have become a corpse if not for your presence there. They will clean up the blood. They will make the body disappear. They will erase the traces completely enough that the most advanced forensics equipment in the world would not discover their shadow nor residue: because these men work in forensics, Castle, and on the cutting edge of the technologies I employ them to subvert. I do this because our family is not simply powerful, not simply important. Do you know why I do this, Castle? Is there enough of your father in you, some echo carried in his squirt, for you to understand?”

“Spell it out for me, Uncle Jonathan.”

“The family is important, Castle. It’s family. What does family do? It gives you a place to come from, a place to learn from, and a place to come back to. It gives you a place in the world. It gives you people to watch out for you, people you have a connection to even if you haven’t met them. The Finch family isn’t just our family, Castle. It’s one of America’s families, one of the free world’s families. Other countries have their royalties and nobilities, their Windsors hiding an old German name because they don’t want people to think they’re Nazis, their princes with swords and mustaches, wearing medals from wars they only saw on paper. America just has families. Kennedy. Rockefeller. Barrymore. Maybe Trump someday. And Finch. Some men are born with silver spoons in their mouths, Castle, but you were born with history in yours, and you spat it out. You could have been part of an immortality.”

Castle could hear ice clinking in a glass on the other end of the phone, and poured a drink for himself as well, sloshing a little Scotch from the decanter on the sideboard into a rocks glass and spooning a trickle of ice water over it to bring out the tones. It was Jonathan who’d introduced him to Scotch, wasn’t it? Maybe it was Preston. “You really can’t stand me, can you Jonathan. Why is that? Because I’m my father’s heir? Because my ‘line’ is the one to the throne, not yours? For all your talk of us not being a monarchy, you wouldn’t think that’d matter any. Most of Dad’s property was part of the Finch Trust — it doesn’t go to me, it stays with the estate, and Grandpa’s the executor, not me. For all the good it does him.” Preston Finch had emphysema and most of a lung missing, and the treatments that kept him alive also kept him too doped up to enjoy it: Jonathan had had power of attorney and practical control over the Finch Trust for six years. “Is he still in the dark?”

“We will not,” Jonathan said coldly, “under any circumstances, inform my father of your recent misadventures. If you speak to him, you will bear this in mind.”

“Yeah.”

“And I don’t hate you, Castle. Lately, you are alternately a frustration and a monster. I cannot hate that. I can only regret it.”

“The hell with that, it goes back further than this. You’ve never liked me. I don’t mean hated, and I don’t mean you were a shit. You just didn’t like me.”

There was a long pause. “What bothers me, Castle, is … no, that’s too long a list for that verb. Many things bother me. Many things about you, your life, and your values bother me. One of those things is how abridged your memory is. Do you remember when you were ten, and I brought you and Melissa to the Canary Islands with me?”

“I remember walking in on you and — was it the junior Senator from Michigan?”

“That was when you were sixteen, and Kathryn was the Senator-elect, not yet the Senator. It was Christmas. The time I’m talking about, you were ten years old, Melissa was twelve, and it was just the three of us.”

Castle thought for a moment. “The summer after Aunt Becka died. Mom was on her honeymoon with Lightman.”

“Yes. Did I hate you then?”

They had spent most of the time on the beaches — which Jonathan always loved, because it gave him a chance to show that he was in better shape than most of the men in the Senate — and on tours of the ancient Mediterranean forests, which he hated. They’d jetskied and wind-surfed, and the hotel they stayed in most of the time was next to the ruins of an old monastery that had been sacked by North African pirates in the sixteenth century. “No,” he said finally. “Or if you did, you did a damn good job hiding it.”

“As I recall, that was the week you told me you saw a topless woman for the first time — God bless the sands of Europe — and asked if I was going to marry your mother next, and be your new father. Not that I suggest a connection between the two conversations.”

Castle actually laughed a little. “I forgot about that. Christ. I was ten? That sounds like something a five year old would say.”

“No — you just think it does, because you forget how young you were. Your sense of time and proportion have never been good, Castle. Perhaps it’s because you’re an only child with no children of your own. A man never grows up until he learns to appreciate children. He only remains in that twilight of adolescence, proud of his own adulthood.”

“C’mon, there were Ted and Jennifer, and your girls.”

“Jennifer was six years younger than you — Ted moreso — and you spent considerable time in different boarding schools, with no real observation of each others’ growth. Nor, I think, can we consider you to have grown up with Melissa and Trina. You have been a child, nephew, for far too long. What do you think your life would have been like, had you not been a Finch? What would you have done with it?”

“Well, I would’ve been a lot less rich.”

Jonathan waited, and then, “Is that all? Is that really the only difference you see? You’re thirty-three: have you had any real jobs, anything that wasn’t a passing fancy? Anything remotely resembling a career, a productive passion?”

“Oh Christ, Jonathan, spare me the spoiled rich boy lecture. It’s not like you’re in the Senate out of some burning need to participate in democracy and the legislative process.”

“But I do have a passion for it, boy. I enjoy my days and the activity therein: not all of it, no, and there is a great deal of the job I either dislike or would dislike if I did not delegate it. There is much of it I like less than I think Jacob did. But I still enjoy being busy. I enjoy having something to do every day as much as I enjoy the freedom to take time off from it. This is something I think you have never felt yourself — you’ve never been busy. You’ve been frantic — pursuing one fleeting interest after another, whether an occupation you were dabbling in or a woman you were seducing — but never busy.”

“Gee, I guess that’s why I went on a killing spree.” He meant it to come out sarcastic, dismissive, and realized the instant he said it that there was no way to be sarcastic and dismissive when you really had killed three people and had a fourth corpse in your basement.

“I won’t even begin to determine the causes there,” Jonathan said. “Maybe you were just born wrong. Maybe you needed a stronger male figure in your life earlier. Maybe these things can’t be plotted out that way in graphs and flowcharts. Your father always believed psychology was more art than science, no more exact or instructable than painting. I myself have not given it the same careful consideration he did.”

“Dad was a thinker.”

“Don’t be a fool. Your father was no abstract philosopher. He would have been President: and you, by now, would be a Congressman in one of the Southern states, the subject of popular gubernatorial speculation. Your father was a practical man, driven, goal-oriented. He happened to be brilliant, but that was the least of his gifts — gifts which could have been yours, if you had chosen to develop them, instead of being a — a professional couch potato. Did you decide that if you could not replace him, you would ignore his legacy? Did you worry that following in his footsteps would seem presumptuous? Every man must someday replace his father’s place in his own life — you persist in clinging to the corpse of yours, and it disgusts me as it would have him.”

“Uncle Jonathan,” Castle said, with a touch of genuine wonder, “you miss him.”

“Christ, boy, I more than miss him. I loved Jacob, more than you ever could, and looked up to him just as you should have. I’m no fool — I know his death helped the family, not the same way his life would have, nor as much — but helped it all the same. The Kennedys have their Jack. We have our Jacob.”

“They have Bobby too,” Castle murmured after a sip of Scotch. “Don’t forget Bobby.”

“It is not too late for us to even the score,” Jonathan said quietly.

Katrine came into the room at that point, looking timid and quiet and pale. “Hey,” she said quietly, and Castle waved her down. By the look of her, she’d just gotten tired of being alone in a room when there was still a dead body downstairs and no idea how it got there.

“Is that the whore?” Jonathan asked immediately. “Is that your whore?”

“Christ, Jonathan, stow it. How do you even know about Katrine?”

“I’m not entirely unaware of the goings-on, Castle.”

Castle sighed. For a moment, when Katrine had been in the other room and there’d been a house between him and death, he’d been able to lose himself in old family grievances, in the rhythms of relation. Jonathan was right: family was something to come home to, something that wasn’t just familiar but created and defined the familiar, imprinted you with the way you’d expect meatloaf to taste, with turns of phrase that never lost their resonance, with a calendar of holidays that might be penciled over or expanded but was never erased. It was a song you could enter mid-verse and you’d always know the words, always be able to shout out the “five golden rings” in the chorus.

But a house had a rhythm too. A house had a secret life. It might start out as base structure: with a bedroom here and a study there, the way a family had a father here and daughters there. But it developed a life, a habit, a system of behavior and expectation. It began to create familiarity. It took on that smell that only struck you if you didn’t live there. The things you’d only notice if they didn’t belong to you. The more familiar it became, the more alien. The more lived-in, the more possessive. The more you loved it, the less it loved the world. A house was family. A house was home.

And when he left the rhythms of family and came back to the rhythms of home, he slipped his fear back on like a housecoat, finding its pockets still had the same things in them, and the fabric still knew his shape and adopted his smell. When his bickering with Jonathan was interrupted, he remembered that something or someone had killed a man in a house he couldn’t leave, and he had no idea what it was or why he wasn’t aware of it happening. That something had spoken to him on the phone in another woman’s voice, and made him believe Katrine killed the neighbor girl. That something was lost, and it didn’t care where it came from.

“Listen Jonathan,” Castle said finally. “I need you to take this seriously. Right now I’m beyond caring what you blame me for and how you see me. You can cut off my access to the Trust. You can take me out of the house — Jesus Christ, please do, and if you want to put me in some fifth-floor walk-up in Southie, by all means, feel fucking free. I’d love to get out of here.”

“Yes,” Jonathan said, “that’s rather the point of house arrest.”

“I don’t think you understand. Something is wrong with this house. Why do you think Rommy was here? Why do you think he brought four fucking priests with him? They were exorcists. It didn’t work –”

“– and one of them is dead now.”

“– but they agreed that something is very wrong. I’ve been hearing things. I’m not the only one. There have been voices. And — seeing things that weren’t real.”

“The serial killer confesses his insanity. How novel.”

“Not to mention, did you know there’s a whole fucking house underneath this one?”

“What on Earth is that supposed to mean?”

“That’s where we found Pasmore.”

“Ah, ‘we.’ Your whore has been with you all along, then.”

“We found him in the downbelow. The basement isn’t a basement. It’s three stories of full-fledged house, and the people who lived there were goddamn crazy. Maybe they’re haunting the place. I don’t know. I don’t believe in that shit, but maybe I should.”

“You sound like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep and complains of the monster under his bed, or in his closet. The only monster in Domino is you, Castle.”

Castle sighed and downed the rest of the Scotch in the glass. “But you’ll talk to Romaglio.”

“Yes. Do you know the two of us were boys together?”

“Well, I can do the math.”

“No, you simpleton. We were friends as boys. Romaglio, your father, and I. We met at boarding school — I forget now which one, though I believe it was not in Italy. He spent a summer with us at the estate, when we were young — when Mother was still alive.”

“I never knew her.”

“Obviously not. She was a good woman, a kind woman. Demanding, but she only demanded what she knew we could give. But she let Romaglio visit, if he agreed to speak Italian with us at meals — it would keep us in our studies, she said, as well as allow her to practice her command of the tongue. The estate grew wilder then — it was not as common, as it is now, to landscape things so precisely, and we lived far enough outside Boston that there was no local landscaping company such as we use now. The wilderness came closer to the house, and I believe Mother liked it that way — she grew up in the country, you know.”

“Yes,” Castle said quietly. “I’ve heard.”

“There were wild strawberries then. They grew along the slope, a wild, gnarled patch of them that the birds would feast on, flocks of crows. They loved the strawberries. Mother was always worried they’d go after the flowers next, but they never did, and they didn’t linger long enough to shit on the lawn. We had a tennis court out there back then — just a square of grass kept neat, with a net. Manuel kept it trimmed so you could see the lines without having to lay chalk down — he hated the idea of putting chalk powder on the lawn.”

“I remember those wild strawberries.”

“No, you don’t. Manuel uprooted them at the end of that summer. Romaglio was fascinated both by the strawberries and the crows: in each case, the American sort is not present in Europe, and in particular there was one old crow, a white one, among the flock, whom Rommy would come out to see, as fascinated as a child at the lions’ cage. The crows attacked us eventually, of course — not seriously, but all three of us were pecked enough to bleed, and that was enough for Mother. She demanded Manuel destroy the plants, so the crows wouldn’t come back.”

“A white crow?” Castle asked. “Those are pretty rare.” McCall had mentioned them. Although he hadn’t actually said how rare they were, but that was sort of implied in his analogy. The coincidence of hearing a white crow mentioned twice in a few days bothered him.

“I can’t recall having seen one since.” Jonathan paused as if in thought. “I will speak to Romaglio, Castle, and I want you to understand: I have known him for considerably longer than you have been alive. He will not lie to me — and I would know if he did. Neither of us will consider you kindly if you are using his name as a shield you do not merit. Do you understand? I am giving you an opportunity to come clean.”

“I didn’t kill the priest,” Castle said. “Romaglio was with me. He freaked out — we were talking about it this morning, how the priest freaked out. For some reason I thought he’d left. But whatever it is that’s wrong with this house — that’s what killed him. Why this house, anyway? Why did you buy it?”

Jonathan snorted. “It was cheap, in large part. The Finch Trust bought out most of the assets of the Trimalchio Trust ages ago — acquiring the house was non-suspicious, should we be audited, and easy to do on short notice.”

“Did we know the Van Der Lindens? I mean, did you –”

“The previous owners? No. Their daughter, I met once or twice at social functions, fundraisers and the like. Her parents were old long before I was, though.”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Listen –” The door resounded with a hard, rapid knock, and the doorbell succeeded it. “Hang on. There’s someone at the door. I’m going to pass you over to Katrine.”

“Wonderful,” Jonathan said dryly.

Castle tossed Katrine the phone on his way to the foyer. “Tell him everything you’ve seen,” he said. “Everything you’ve heard, everything strange and bizarre and fucked up.”

The men at the door looked like plumbers, but he knew they weren’t. Even with their toolboxes and overalls, even with the plumbing company name on the dingy beige van outside, they weren’t plumbers. But they cleaned up leaks. “Jonathan Finch sent us,” the first one said, with a voice like a rusty wrench.

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Can I see some kind of — identification, or, something?”

The man unfolded a FAX with nothing on it but Domino’s address and Jonathan’s signature. “Everything else, we did in email, you understand me?”

“Got it,” Castle said. “Come on. I’ll show you the room.”

The plumber grunted. “Good pup.”

Castle bit his tongue to keep from responding to that, and led the men downstairs to the downbelow. None of them commented on the walk to the gatehouse and down the almost-hidden stairs, but he could sense them wanting to. When he brought them to Mia’s room, one of them made a strangled noise in his throat, like he was choking something down.

“Can you handle it?” Castle asked, disturbingly happy to have shaken them up.

“Yeah,” the plumber said. “Give us a few hours. We’ll let you know when we’re done.”

When Castle came back upstairs, Katrine was sitting down, looking pale and shaken herself, and she wasn’t saying anything into the phone, but that cellphone bleed mumble was audible, so Jonathan was still talking. Castle took the phone from her, and caught Jonathan in mid-speech, that amused, cruel tone.

“The third one,” Jonathan said, “he didn’t strangle. Maybe he started to — by then I wasn’t risking medical examiners. But he fucked her from behind in the bathtub, while her head was underwater. She had a gash in the back of her head where she’d hit it on the faucet, like she was struggling to get up. A four-inch gash with a lot of blood, that would’ve needed stitches if he hadn’t killed her. The water was red from all the blood — head wounds bleed considerably. There she is, bleeding, the water turning crimson, and he just kept fucking her. Maybe he kept fucking her even after she died. Maybe he fucked all of them after they died. He did it because he liked it.”

“Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” Castle said finally. “What the fuck?”

“Oh, hello again, nephew,” Jonathan said. “I was just informing our young and impressionable friend what sort of man she had exposed herself to. I know whores like to stay safe. You must be paying her a great deal — is it just cash, or coke too? — for her to be willing to fuck you in that big spooky house that’s out to get you.”

“Goddammit. What is it you want from me, Jonathan? Just to rot here? Just to suffer?”

“I want you to see how easily this all could have been avoided. I want you to see that your crimes extend far beyond the murders. I know about your father, you know.”

“Yeah, you keep saying how well you knew him and how well I didn’t.”

“Castle. I know about your father. What I can’t figure out is how you do. He didn’t keep a journal. I’m positive of that. If there were any photographs, I would have found and destroyed them long ago.”

“What are you talking about?” But Castle knew. He always told people the first memory he had was of his father dying at the circus. That’s what they wanted to hear. But he was too old for that to be his first memory.

“Your father’s ‘kink.’ His ’special thing,’ he called it. A Thai whore introduced him to it, you know. We never knew her name, or if she said it we didn’t understand. She pushed his head under the water, and another whore sucked him off while he held his breath. Back and forth, up and down, half-suffocating until he came.”

“Jesus,” Castle said.

“So?”

“I walked in on him once. In St Thomas. There was only one woman, but he was on his hands and knees in the bathtub with the water running — she was over him, straddling him –”

“Was she fucking him?” Jonathan asked, with mild curiosity.

“No. I think she was jacking him off. But his head was under the water –”

“You must have been very young.”

“I think I was four. He said she was washing his hair, like the woman at the salon did for me sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

“You foolish, foolish fuck. Of course it does, Castle. Your father liked being drowned, and then he died. You grew up refusing to live up to his shadow, and then you started killing women. Suffocating them. Drowning one.”

“It was an accident. Rachael was an accident. Jesus, you’ve been listening to too many of Mom’s psychology rambles.”

“Rachael might have been. Ingrid and Grace weren’t.”

Castle didn’t say anything.

“What I want, Castle,” Jonathan said, “is for you to grow up.”

“Fuck you, Jonathan.”

Castle flipped the phone shut, shaking angrily, and poured himself another Scotch, spilling some of it on the table. Katrine watched him with wary, wide, rabbit eyes.