Evil Breeding

to the ground and lay motionless.
    As if she were the one who’d received a hard blow to the temple, Jocelyn groaned. “Christina, my poor Christina! He brought her back from Germany, you know. She was happy there. He brought her back to case the mansion for him, to tell him what was where! Brother and sister! Brother and sister!”
    “Pay no attention to her,” the elder Motherway said. “She came from nowhere. Her parentage is unknown. She is a nobody.” He moved to Jocelyn and held the gun to her head. The drug that was causing the compulsive babbling seemed also to have made her oblivious to the peril of her situation; she hadn’t tried to escape.
    “What is she talking about?” her son demanded. Then he asked Jocelyn directly. “What the hell are you going on about?”
    “I am cursed with women who babble! ” Motherway exploded.
    “Let her answer!” ordered Christopher, shoving his grandfather away from Jocelyn. “What’s this about a brother and sister?”
    Jocelyn’s voice was wild with melodrama. “He fell in love with her! Oh, he fell madly in love with her! She was so beautiful! Christina! He brought her back to work for the rich old lady, and then he fell in love with her! And he married her.”
    “The old lady?” Christopher asked, bewildered. “What old lady?”
    “No, no!” Jocelyn was getting groggy again. Her voice dropped. “His sister. His very own sister.”
    The grandfather raised the arm that held the gun. ‘ ‘Christopher, get out of the way!”
    Almost simultaneously, Christopher must have understood the personal implication of what Jocelyn had revealed. With a roar, he sprang on his grandfather. “You son of a bitch! You dirty son of a bitch! Parentage! Hah! Parentage! Pig! Filthy pig!” Although grandfather and grandson seemed the same man at different ages, Christopher had no difficulty in wresting the gun from his grandfather. And no apparent difficulty in shooting him, either.
     

Chapter Twenty-nine
     
    THE CRUISERS AND THE AMBULANCES arrived with sirens silent and headlights off. Still, a short distance behind me, engines hummed, and tires droned. I could have sworn that the temperature suddenly rose a degree or two, warmed by the body heat of a large, yet furtive, presence. Someone, I felt certain, had discovered the slain guard’s body; only murder could speedily have summoned a force this large.
    I saw no reason to remain at the scene. If my testimony were needed later, I would provide it. All I felt now was the primitive urge to get away and to take Rowdy with me. Rita informs me that I need feel no guilt about the impulse to flee. My horror, she claims, and my overwhelming compulsion to distance myself were normal, indeed, universal human responses to incest. “Hence,” Rita says smugly, “the taboo.” Human, maybe. But universal ? Not half so universal as it ought to be, if you want my opinion. B. Robert and Christina. Rather, B. Robert and Eva Kappe. Brother and sister.
    Also, I was scared of crossfire. Christopher’s bullet must have shattered his grandfather’s skull and penetrated the brain, and Gerhard was comatose, at least for now, but Christopher was able and armed. Having come to his mother’s rescue, he’d be unlikely to risk a gun battle that could leave Jocelyn an innocent casualty. Still, I couldn’t be sure.
    The police would certainly approach on Mount Auburn’s roads and paths. The paved streets and the trails all around the lake would be under surveillance, if not actually occupied, and there was bound to be a substantial force at the intersection where I’d found the dead guard’s body. Consequently, my spur-of-the-moment plan for evading detection called for staying off Mount Auburn’s major and minor thoroughfares; wherever possible, Rowdy and I would wend our way from monument to monument, stone to stone, tree to tree. Our destination would be the same gate through which we’d entered. It would be watched now, perhaps barred. But we’d deal with that problem when we came to it. If necessary, we’d go to some distant part of Mount Auburn and hide out until morning.
    My advantage over the arriving forces was my recently acquired familiarity with the terrain. In the daytime, visitors who studied street signs and consulted maps still found themselves disoriented. Now, at night, the police were probably unsure of exactly what was where. But in this small part of the cemetery, I knew where I was and where I was going.