Lineage(88)

“You can’t carry it all on your shoulders. The world has too many avenues to pinpoint one as the wrong choice. My father might have been a lunatic even if he had a good family life, you never know,” Lance said, staring across the kitchen at the ticking hand of the clock over the stove.

“Yes, that’s what kills me sometimes, never knowing,” John said.

The oppressive stillness surrounded them, huddled close, until Lance asked the question he had been wondering since he first heard Harold speak his family’s name. “What happened to them, my grandparents?”

John shifted in his chair and seemed to come out of the fog the past had enveloped him in. “Your father moved out the year he turned eighteen, wasn’t a surprise to anyone in the area. Erwin and Annette kept on like they had all along; they were considered recluses by most. They didn’t socialize much on account of how Erwin looked, I imagine. No, they kept to themselves until a man by the name of Aaron Haff came to town. He just showed up one day—no one saw him arrive or how he got here—and he started asking a few questions around town.” John turned his head and looked at Lance, his eyes showing no signs of the whiskey coursing through him. “Asking about your grandfather. He stayed about a week, befriended Harold and Josie’s daughter actually, before he went up to your grandparents’ house one afternoon, walked in the front door, and shot Erwin through the head.”

The clock’s ticking became the loudest sound in the house as Lance leaned forward, sure he hadn’t heard the old man correctly. “Someone murdered him?” he asked.

John nodded again, sipping more genially out of his cup. “From what the police gathered, he came in, pointed a gun at Annette and Erwin, and made Erwin kneel down on the floor of the living room. Blew his brains out with a forty-five.”

The silvery stain on the living-room floor surfaced in Lance’s mind. He could see the speckles radiating out around the main mass—the splatters. Lance felt like he might be sick. All at once he felt too hot, his light clothes clinging to him, suffocating him. He almost told John he needed to use the bathroom when the caretaker continued.

“Annette saw the whole thing. She shut right down, never spoke again as far as I heard. Couldn’t do much for herself after that. Your father came back for the funeral but didn’t stay. Annette ended up at the retirement home just south of town, needed care and medication, I believe. They buried Erwin at the place there, just like he wanted. Said so in his will, as much as I gathered. His grave is off on the north side of the property, just a little trail leading into the woods. You can see the lake from there. Not a bad place to rest.”

Lance sat absorbing everything that had flooded into his life in the past two hours. It became a mountainous pile of intermingling information. As soon as he began to climb, trying to unthread a single strain of reckoning from it, he would fall back to the bottom. As he fumbled within his mind, another aspect began to take flight in the midst of all the confusion. Something whispered to him that everything that had happened since he had moved into the house now had an explanation. He was meant to come here. Something had pulled him to the house and had shown him things. The locked door, the opalescent stain, the night visitations, Andy’s trance, and now the revelation that the estate had been in his family before. He had finally come home. No matter what, you always come home.

Lance’s eyes fluttered and he felt John’s hand on his forearm.

“Thought I lost you there for a minute.”

Lance tried to smile and drank the last of his whiskey. “Just a lot to comprehend.”

“I can’t even imagine, son. I know it’s a shock to you, and that’s why I had such a hard time coming out with it. That, and the guilt I felt every time I looked at you.”

Lance sighed and bowed his head. “It’s not your fault, and thank you for telling me. It wasn’t easy on you, either. When did this happen?”

“Nineteen-eighty,” John replied.

Lance closed his eyes, the number already having formed itself in his mind. The year he had been born. Of course.

“And what happened to this Aaron, the murderer?”

John rubbed his brow. “The police caught him. In fact, he sat right down on the sofa after he killed Erwin, like he was spent. They put him in prison but never got a reason out of him, wouldn’t talk to anyone. He died a few years back down in Illinois—that’s where they shipped him after the trial.”

Lance exhaled. Another dead end. He had been hoping that the man could’ve possibly answered some more questions that would inevitably pop up when all this sunk in. “So is my grandmother buried next to my grandfather?” Lance asked.