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Just because he couldn't scare Isaiah anymore didn't mean he couldn't end this now. With that in mind, a plan slowly formed in his mind. Seth dismissed the Reel, sending it back through the fissure to Glass Town, and followed Boone to the memorial.
He watched him for an hour, talking with his friends, trading his stories, and chinking glasses as they drank another one down. Music played in the background. No one was singing. Finally, when the old man had drunk enough, he wandered over to introduce himself, a spare glass of diluted whiskey in his hand. "Sorry for your loss," he said, holding out the second glass.
It was as easy as that.
They shared a drink, face-to-face with the blood of his blood, in the smoke-filled bar of the workingman's club, no flicker of recognition passing between them. He was almost disappointed. He listened to the son tell tall stories about his old man, unable to tell truth from lie as the exaggerated life of a man he never really knew took life around him. He waited for the story of Eleanor to come up, knowing it would. How could any night in honor of Isaiah Lockwood--though he'd taken the name Raines, it would seem, from the order of service someone had left lying on the table amid the beer rings and ashtrays--not revolve around the great tragedy of his life?
"Did he ever come close, do you think? To finding her?"
Boone shook his head. "It was a fool's errand. She's dead. They both are. Long gone. You ask me, the magician was behind it. Look at the stuff we know. He canceled his last ever show, disappeared the night they vanished. What you've got to remember is it was different back then. Much easier to get away with things. I always figured they were dumped somewhere like the Hackney Marshes or Leyton Marshes, Rainham or Erith, plenty of places you could make a couple of bodies disappear with little risk of them turning up to haunt you."
"So, you're not going to carry on looking for the truth? I thought you said--"
"The old man was only ever looking for the truth. He knew they were dead. He wasn't an idiot. Well, not until his last days, at least. He left me this." He took an envelope from inside his jacket pocket. Seth assumed it was his eulogy. "I'm not sure what to do with it."
"What is it?"
"His dying declaration. It's all in here, his story, everything that happened to him, everything he'd worked out about what happened, all of it."
"That's got to be some read," Seth said, measuring his words carefully.
"He swears that only a couple of weeks ago he'd finally seen her, in the same red dress she'd been wearing the day she disappeared. He swore she hadn't aged a day."
"Well, that's hardly likely, is it?"
"I don't know what to think anymore."
"You want my opinion? Sometimes things are better left forgotten," Seth said.
"Maybe. I just can't shake the feeling there's something . . ."
"May I?"
Boone shook his head. "I don't think so." And then his brow furrowed. "You know, I don't recognize you. I feel like I should. . . . How did you say you knew my father again?"
"We go way back. We were like brothers once upon a time." The other man looked at him then, and he realized he'd said too much. "He looked after me when I needed looking after. He was a good man."
"He was anything but," Boone disagreed. "He was obsessed with finding Eleanor, with seeing his brother, Seth, brought to justice. Nothing else mattered. He ignored my mother. He only married her because she was Eleanor's sister, and if he couldn't have her, then he'd have the next best thing. He didn't care about us. He didn't care about anything in the end. And judging by his letter, it damned near drove him crazy by the end. That one night tore his life apart. He never got over it."
Which is music to my ears, Seth thought. But that wasn't what he said. "So, why do that to yourself? Do you really want your boy looking at you the way you obviously looked at your father?" Seth turned to look across the room at Barclay Raines, young, handsome, and almost a twin for Isaiah, proving the apple didn't fall far from the biological tree. "Walk away while you can. Make a clean break from the past. Do what's right for your family."
Boone took a swig from the half-empty pint glass in his hand, knocking back more than half of what remained.
"He looks like a good kid," Seth said.
"He's hurting. He worshipped his grandfather."
"Most boys do."
"He didn't deserve it."
"Can I be frank, Boone? I feel like I can be. We're talking man to man here. We're both men of the world."
"Spit it out," Boone said with an amused smile.
"Here's the thing. Take a good look at that boy of yours and ask yourself this: if you knew that chasing this fool's errand of your father's would end up getting him hurt, would you still be hell-bent on doing it?"
