Mad River

Frank, were scattered around a large living room and dining room. Jack was playing light jazz on an upright piano, sounding quite a bit like Harry Connick Jr. Virgil could imagine sitting on the front porch on a moonlit night, spooning with a young neighborhood lady, while Jack’s piano tune trickled through the screen door. . . .
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL HAD CALLED AHEAD, and Mary had met him at the door. She was a square-shouldered young woman of medium height, probably not yet twenty, with dark hair and large, dark, direct eyes, wearing two sparkly diamond studs at her ears. She had dark circles at her eyes and her nose was red, from crying. She was wearing a green blouse and jeans.
    John was sitting in an easy chair in the living room, and the four boys came in as Mary introduced Virgil to her father. All of them had curly dark hair, conservatively cut, with dark eyes and broad shoulders. They were a bunch of good-looking, athletic Irishmen in sweatshirts and jeans and moccasins, with an easy air of money about them; and an ugly bitter air of tragedy.
    “Why did this happen?” John O’Leary asked. “We’re the nicest goddamn people on the face of the earth.”
    Virgil shook his head. “I’d tell you that it happens all the time, except that it doesn’t. It’s pretty rare,” Virgil said. “Random killings are just . . . incomprehensible. We’ve got an idea now who did it, two or three loser kids from Shinder. They apparently knew your name, knew you were well-off . . . they got desperate. That’s what we think.”
    He told them what he knew about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, and the oldest three of the boys knew of Sharp and Welsh, and vaguely remembered McCall. “Didn’t really know them,” said Jack. “Jimmy Sharp was a year behind me and a year ahead of Jim, I think.”
    Jim nodded and said, “That’s right. Becky was a year younger than me. Everybody said she was kind of a punchboard, but I never knew her well enough to know that. McCall was in there somewhere. He was one of those guys you don’t remember very well . . . kind of joked around, but the jokes were always pretty lame. Maybe he was in the same grade as Becky? I don’t know. You think they really did it?”
    “It looks that way,” Virgil said. “It’s possible that it’s McCall and two others, and they killed Mr. Sharp and Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because McCall knew them . . . but I think it’s probably Sharp. And Becky Welsh.”
    The three older O’Leary boys were in college—Jack in medical school, the other two in pre-med, all at the University of Minnesota. Mary was a senior in high school, Frank a sophomore. Ag had been the oldest of them, and, they said, probably had not known any of the suspected killers.
    Frank said, “If Ag had gone to med school instead of getting married, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had that temper, if she’d just been quiet . . .” And he sobbed once, stuck a knuckle in his mouth and turned away, and his father patted him on the shoulder.
    “It’s not Dick’s fault,” John O’Leary said to Frank. Virgil hadn’t known that Ag was married; he assumed that “Dick” was her husband.
    Mary: “If he’d taken better care of her, she wouldn’t have been here.”
    “And then maybe it would have been you that got killed,” Jim snapped.
    Virgil broke in: “Trying to backtrack a trail of what-if’s . . . everybody does it, but it doesn’t help. The trail gets too twisted up, and you wind up damaging people who really don’t need it.”
    Rob said, “We know that. We’ve even said that.”
    Jim said, “But we keep doing it anyway.” He glanced at his father, then said, “Excuse the language, but it’s because Dick is such a . . . dick.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL TALKED TO them a bit more about Sharp, Welsh, and McCall, but none of them knew of any direct connection between themselves and the three suspects, except that their mother, Marsha, and Sharp and Welsh all came from Shinder. “But Mom left Shinder before they were even born.”
    Virgil nodded, but didn’t mention the diamonds worn to the reunion; it would just be another cause for unwarranted backtracking, and sleepless nights.
    Instead, he said, “So tell me about Dick.”
    Dick Murphy was a couple of years younger than Ag, but they’d both gone up to the University of Minnesota, where they’d dated, had become serious, and eventually, after Ag graduated, had