Easy, maybe?
Close enough.
Davy still had a job to do, though. Sentiment and business—or afterlife mystical contracts—didn’t mix.
“Do you ever wonder if my Dad would have done a better job?” Davy asked.
Fraser drew on the end of his cigar. He held the smoke in his lungs as he flicked the ash onto the wet grass.
“No,” he said, the word escaping on gray wisps that filtered up into the leaves of the tree. “What would be the point?”
“I’ve been thinking about him,” Davy poked at what was hopefully a sore spot. “About why he’d do what he did.”
Fraser glanced over at him, his face unreadable. “Is that why you were at the graveyard on the Solstice?”
Davy ducked his head, scrubbing one hand through his hair as he glanced around for Hill. There was still no sign of him. Davy’s tentacles picked fretfully at the grass and foliage as his unease soaked down into them.
With no one to consult on a Hill-approved response, Davy had to try and improvise.
“I guess?” he said. “I suppose I thought about it, but what if I didn’t like his answer? What if I had to do something about it?”
Fraser gave him a confused look. “Like, what?” he asked. “Therapy, so you don’t--?”
He trailed off as he pointed the cigar at his forehead and mimed pulling the trigger. It wasn’t like Davy was that socially astute, but even he was pretty sure that was a bit inappropriate.
“No,” he was. He reached up and hooked his finger into the collar of his shirt to tug it loose as he thought. “I mean, what if he was pushed to it? If there was someone who made him do it?”
Fraser dropped the cigar to the ground and stood on it. He twisted his foot from the ankle to grind it out. “You should have asked me if that’s what you were worried about,” he said. “After the funeral, I had my people go through his life with a fine-tooth comb. There were no irregularities, no unexplained absences or travel, no new people in his life, no unexplained money in or out. None of the pressure points I’d have used.”
“Then maybe he did something that drove him to it,” Davy said. He hesitated—worried he was going to be too obvious—but there wasn’t much time left. If Fraser was going to learn some sort of lesson from this, he needed to get on with it. “Or someone helped him along. When I was a kid…after you’d married mom…sometimes I wondered if you’d done it.”
Fraser stared at him for a moment. The corner of his mouth twitched, and then he started to laugh, a snorted, rusty cackle of amusement.
“So I could have had dead Albie Rosen to contend with?” he said and tipped his head back to look skyward. “What’s wrong with that? Too easy?”
They both waited a beat. Just in case. If there would ever be an answer to that question, it was this time of year. Not this time, though. Fraser wiped under his eyes with his thumbs and composed himself.
“I have never had any truck with…feeling bad about things you’ve done,” Fraser said. “What’s the point? I knew what I wasgoing to do, and I did it anyhow. Who am I trying to fool crying about it in the aftermath?”
“I’ve noticed,” Davy said. That was a safe answer to run with. Hill wouldn’t have reached out to the dead to get his stepfather to change his ways if he’d believed Fraser’s conscience worked.
“But you were meant to be a younger brother, like me,” Fraser said. “And it’s my fault we aren’t anymore. That…that’s always felt like guilt? I think”
Davy hesitated, caught off guard by the confession. Had the haunting actually worked?
He fumbled for a noncommittal answer that would encourage Fraser to keep talking.
“I don’t understand what—”
“It was a long time ago,” Fraser said dismissively. “One of our rivals tried to wipe us out during a business trip. Your mother was there and pregnant at the time; she lost the baby. Your brother. It nearly destroyed Albie. For a while he wanted to leave the company and go straight. But…what they didn’t know was that I’d incited the attack so I’d have an excuse to wipe out our rival. We all knew it was necessary, but Albie and Mark wanted to try and find a peaceful solution first. So, I took matters into my own hands. And the thing is, I didn’t feel bad about it then. It worked, and pregnancies are lost all the time.”
Davy bit the inside of his cheek. The pain helped him keep his temper. Habit made him run his tongue over the inside of his mouth to feel the old scarred lumps his teeth had left over the years. The smooth skin he felt instead reminded him of the odds. He swallowed the thirty-plus years ‘I fucking knew it’ and ‘you could have killed us all’ and went with,
“Why tell me this now?”
Fraser pushed himself up off the tree and brushed his hands together.
“Because when you were born, I realized what I’d cost you,” he said. “What I’d cost myself. Your brother is the only person who’s stuck with you. No matter what’s wrong with you or the things you do. Friends can cut ties, spouses can divorce you, but your brother will always share your blood and bone. They’ve no way out of it, except to die. I felt bad you’d never have that, for what I’d taken away from you. I didn’t care for that. Guilt’s an awful feeling. So I wouldn’t take anything else from you. I didn’t kill Albie, so if you’d dug him up…he’d have no bone to pick with me.”
