Velocity

needed.
    With warm Pepsi, he washed down two more Anacin, which had some effect as an anti-inflammatory. Motrin would have been better, but what he had was Anacin.
    The right dose of caffeine could compensate somewhat for too little sleep, but too much might fray the nerves and compel him to rash action. He took another No-Doz anyway.
    Busy hours had passed since he had eaten the Hershey’s and the Planters bars. He ate another of each.
    While he ate, he considered Steve Zillis, his prime suspect. His only suspect.
    The evidence against Zillis seemed overwhelming. Yet it was all circumstantial.
    That did not mean the case was unsound. Half or more of the convictions obtained in criminal courts were based on convincing webs of circumstantial evidence, and far less than one percent of them were miscarriages of justice.
    Murderers did not obligingly leave direct evidence at the scenes of their crimes. Especially in this age of DNA comparison, any felon with a TV could catch the CSI shows and educate himself in the simple steps that he must take to avoid self-incrimination.
    Everything from antibiotics to zydeco had its downside, however, and Billy knew too well the dangers of circumstantial evidence.
    He reminded himself that the problem had not been the evidence. The problem had been John Palmer, now the sheriff, then an ambitious young lieutenant bucking for a promotion to captain.
    The night that Billy had made an orphan of himself, the truth had been horrific but clear and easily determined.
     
     
     

Chapter 57
     
    From a dream erotic, fourteen-year-old Billy Wiles is awakened by raised voices, angry shouting.
    At first he is confused. He seems to have rolled out of a fine dream into another that is less pleasing.
    He pulls one pillow over his head and buries his face in a second, trying to press himself back into the silken fantasy.
    Reality intrudes. Reality insists.
    The voices are those of his mother and father, rising from downstairs, so loud that the intervening floor hardly muffles them.
    Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymphs that sing sailors onto rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the sinister secret urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.
    Billy is his own piper, allowing himself to be drawn out of bed by the dissonant voices of his parents.
    Arguments are not common in this house, but neither are they rare. Usually disagreements remain quiet, intense, and brief. If bitterness lingers, it is expressed in sullen silences that in time heal, or seem to.
    Billy does not think of his parents as unhappy in marriage. They love each other. He knows they do.
    Barefoot, bare-chested, in pajama bottoms, waking as he walks, Billy Wiles follows the hallway, descends the stairs…
    He does not doubt that his parents love him. In their way. His father expresses a stern affection. His mother oscillates between benign neglect and raptures of maternal love that are as genuine as they are overdone.
    The nature of his mother’s and father’s frustrations with each other has always remained mysterious to Billy and seemed to be of no consequence. Until now.
    By the time that he reaches the dining room, within sight of the kitchen door, Billy is immersed against his will—or is he?—in the cold truths and secret selves of those whom he thought he knew best in the world.
    He has never imagined that his father could contain such fierce anger as this. Not just the savage volume of the voice but also the lacerating tone and the viciousness of the language reveal a long-simmering resentment boiled down to a black tar that provides the ideal fuel for anger.
    His father accuses his mother of sexual betrayal, of serial adultery. He calls her a whore, calls her worse, graduating from anger to rage.
    In the dining room, where Billy is immobilized by revelation, his mind reels at the accusations hurled at his mother. His parents have seemed to him to be asexual, attractive but indifferent to such desires.
    If he had ever wondered about his conception, he would have attributed it to marital duty and to a desire for family rather than to passion.
    More shocking than the accusations are his mother’s admission of their truth—and her countercharges, which reveal his father to be both a man and also something less than a man. In language more withering than what is directed at her, she scorns