Eight Perfect Murders(75)
When I told Gwen about my dream of killing Steven Clifton, I was telling the truth, as well. The truth as I know it. I really don’t remember a lot of what happened in that year after Claire’s death (after I ran Claire off the road, I guess I should say), but I do remember that dream, that vivid dream of hitting Clifton with my car. And there are moments, lucid moments, when I remember everything, when it all falls into place. But those moments never last.
Steven Clifton was terrified. I remember his face. It was pale as milk, almost a blur. It was Gwen’s face. I suppose it wasn’t a dream, after all.
There’s one other omission I ought to record. When Marty and I were talking in the Murrays’ house, the night he told me everything, I asked him about the comment he left on the Old Devils website, the comment he posted using the name Doctor Sheppard.
He’d looked confused when I asked him about it. “Doctor Sheppard,” I said. “He was the killer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”
Now that I think about it, I think that it is possible I was the one who left that comment. It rings a distant bell. Like I’ve said, there have been many nights in the past few years when I don’t know what is real and what is a dream. Claire, her face in darkness, turning and looking at me from her car right before I nudged her off the overpass. Norman Chaney, what was left of him, on the floor of his house in Tickhill. The jolt of the car as Steven Clifton went flying through the summery air. Beer sometimes helps, and maybe I drank so much that I left myself a message in the comments section for “Eight Perfect Murders.”
And if it was me, then it was a premonition of sorts. I am reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd now, again. I found a copy at the bottom of a stack in the corner of Elaine Johnson’s dining room. It’s the Pocket paperback edition, Ackroyd slumped over in his chair on the cover, a knife protruding from high up on his back. It’s a dull book, really, until you get to the last two chapters. I’ve already mentioned the penultimate one, the chapter titled “The Whole Truth.”
Well, the last chapter is called “Apologia” and it is the chapter that makes you realize that all along you’ve been reading a suicide note.
It is snowing outside, and the wind is battering at the windows of the house. I’ve taken a huge risk and lit a fire in the fireplace. Still, I don’t think anyone will notice a little bit of chimney smoke during a storm like this one.
It’s so nice by the fire with a glass of wine. For my last book, I am reading And Then There Were None. If it isn’t my favorite novel of all time, it’s pretty damn close. Appropriate, too, for the circumstances.
I’d like to say something here about how I’ll be with Claire again, soon, but I don’t believe any of that nonsense. When we die, we become nothing, the same nothing we were before we were born, but, of course, this time that nothingness is forever. But if it’s where Claire is, in the black, in the nothing, then that is where I should be as well.
My plan is that when the storm comes to an end, and the plows have done their job, I will fill the pockets of my winter coat with the heavy glass paperweights from the shelf in the living room. At nightfall I will walk from the house into Rockland’s center, and from there out to the jetty, the one that extends a mile out to the sea, creating a breakwater for Rockland Harbor. I will walk to the end, and just keep going. I’m not looking forward to the cold water, but I don’t suppose I’ll feel the cold for very long.
There will be some satisfaction that I’ll die by drowning, that in a sense I’ll be fulfilling one of the murders from my list. MacDonald’s The Drowner.
Maybe they’ll wonder if it wasn’t a suicide, after all. Or maybe my body will never be found.
It’s nice to think I’ll leave a mystery in my wake.
Acknowledgments
Annie’s Book Swap, Danielle Bartlett, James M. Cain, Angus Cargill, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Caspian Dennis,
Bianca Flores, Joel Gotler, Kaitlin Harri, Sara Henry, David Highfill, Patricia Highsmith, Tessa James, Bill Knott, Ira Levin, John
D. MacDonald, A. A. Milne, Kristen Pini, Sophie Portas, Nat Sobel, Virginia Stanley, Donna Tartt, Sandy Violette, Judith Weber, Adia
Wright, and Charlene Sawyer.