Very calmly, Emerson said, “I have to warn you, Miss Thompson, that you’re dangerously close to making a public threat.”
“That’s not a threat, that’s an answer to your question, that’s how I feel as a mother who is never, ever going to hold her little girl’s hands again! Now let me ask you one question, Detective—where the hell do we draw the line?”
Emerson blinked. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“The line, you politicking talking head! At what point do we say to monsters like Beals, ‘Our system will let you go this far but no farther. You go beyond this point and you automatically lose your right to walk safely upon the earth.’”
“There are rules and procedures and constitutionally guaranteed channels that a person charged with a crime is entitled to, and—”
“And no one has the balls to draw that line. I know.” She rose from her seat; if anyone noticed the way she had trouble getting her balance, they showed no sign of it. “So we can log on to the web and find sites of babies having sex, or being fucked by animals, or even tortured. And there is no punishment severe enough for people like that. And I will not be back here again, not if Beals is to be part of this group.” She started toward the doorway, stopped, and turned to face Emerson and Astbury. “Earlier you accused me of coming close to making a threat. That was not a threat, Detective, but this is: If it were in my power, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d kill that worthless bastard with my bare hands. And to hell with his remorse. What good does his remorse do his daughter now? What good will his remorse do the next little kid who has to suffer at the hands of a monster?”
Before anyone could reply or even attempt to stop her, she ran out of the room.
But not in tears.
She often wondered if she had any left.
Chapter Two
When Sarah Thompson was two years old, her mother and father took her to the first of many parking-lot carnivals. This particular carnival featured a “freak show” which consisted of a bearded lady, a goon calling himself The Strongest Man in the World, a woman who was only two-and-a-half feet tall, and Thalidomide Man.
Born with only fleshy, boneless stumps where legs should have been, Thalidomide Man walked around on his larger-than-average hands which he protected with thick, heavy gloves. Upon his back he kept a quiver filled not with arrows but little hand-carved figures: horses, soldiers, tiny dolls, and a small batch of gourd-shaped figures that had only stumps for legs, incredibly long arms, and almost ridiculously large hands. He joked with passersby that these last figures were “…cartoon versions of myself—or the way a lot of people see me.” Why a cartoon version of himself? “Because,” he’d said to Lucy, “I wanted to work for Disney once, but they never took to the idea of an animated character named Dickey Dildo. Life is so unfair.”
He’d given Sarah one of each figure he carried in his quiver, but the one she loved the most was gourd-shaped carving with the long arms and large hands that was supposed to be the “cartoon version” of himself.
“It’s Misserhands,” she said, proud to have named it.
“Take good care of him,” said Thalidomide Man, “and he’ll take care of you.”
From that day on, whenever Lucy and Eric had taken her to a carnival, Sarah would inevitably ask where “Mr. Hands” was, thinking that they were bound to run into Thalidomide Man again.
Regardless of never having seen Thalidomide Man again, Sarah always carried her little carved Mr. Hands with her at all times whenever she went out. “Mr. Hands is good luck,” she’d say. “He won’t ever let anything happen to me.”
That figure was the thing Lucy had found the night her daughter vanished forever. It had been covered by mud a few feet from where Sarah’s first shoe was found. The figure—like all the other items of Sarah’s found that night—had been spattered with blood.
Lucy never reported finding it to the police or FBI, nor did she tell anyone else—even Eric, her husband of almost ten years—that she had it.
And she never washed the blood from its body. Somehow, she came to believe (with more than a little help from her ever-present friend, Crown Royal Scotch) that because the figure had part of Sarah on it, maybe Mr. Hands was watching over her, wherever she was, and doing his best to keep her safe.
She thought then of her secret room back at the house, the one where she kept all the clippings taped to the walls. Newspaper and magazine stories detailing parents who had brutally killed their children, or tortured them, or raped and mutilated them, a shrine to the monsters of this world. She had begun collecting them a few months after Sarah’s disappearance, much to Eric’s dismay. At first there had only been a small file filled with the stories, but as the months went on, she became obsessed by the sheer amount of stories detailing the abuse, neglect, and murder of children. She’d even gone so far as to do some math and was sickened to discover that at least five children were murdered or found murdered every month.
And that was just from the stories in the Ohio papers.
That’s how she’d had the information about Tim Beals so readily available to her. She had read each story taped to her walls so many times that she had the facts in at least seventy different cases memorized; the age of the children, the parents, the method of the child’s abuse and/or death, and the punishment bestowed—or, in too many cases, not bestowed—on the killers, the abusers, the torturers and rapists.
Knowing full well that all of that didn’t even take into account the number of cases that were never reported, the bodies never discovered, or the fates suffered by the little ones like Sarah who’d been snatched away by one of the countless filthy Monsters out there.
It was a fucking miserable world. She often wondered why she bothered sticking around.
She thought of the hand-carved figure Thalidomide Man had given to Sarah.
(“It’s Misserhands!”)
Now that figure was all she had left to remind her that she once had a family.
That, and her memories; of a family that now could never be, of a daughter gone forever, of a husband now living apart from her in another city because he could no longer stand to be around her bitterness, anger, and never-ending grief. “We have to move on, honey,” he’d said a few days before moving out. “And you won’t. I miss her, too, and the thought of what might have happened to her makes me sick, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives cut off from the world moaning and groaning over our loss. And drinking won’t help bring her back. It only makes you ugly.”
Right. Very practical, was Eric. Like losing his daughter to some monster was no different from losing money on a bad stock investment—but, of course, Eric never made any bad investments, which is why Lucy was left so well-off in the divorce settlement. If she were careful, frugal, she could afford to never work again.
Guilt money, that’s what his generous settlement amounted to.
She never touched it unless she had to.
After leaving the meeting, Lucy stopped off for a few drinks at some dive between Heath and Cedar Hill, and those few drinks turned into a few more, then one more, then one for the road.
She was quite drunk by the time she got behind the wheel of her car.
And didn’t give a tinker’s damn about it.
It was a little after nine p.m. The late September weather had taken one of its many unexpected turns (“If you don’t like the weather in Ohio, come back in twenty minutes,” as the saying went) and what had been a balmy but not unpleasant evening was now gearing up for a strong storm. Already the rain was getting fairly heavy and flashes of lightning could be seen in the distance. The low rumbles of thunder, like the growl of a starved beast creeping stealthily up behind you, were getting louder and more threatening.
She had maybe fifteen minutes before things really ripped loose.
Since early afternoon, a front of cold air nearly five-hundred miles long had been pushing its way down from Canada and crawling its way across severa
l regions of the Midwest that had, until this evening, been dry for this time of year. As the front moved into Ohio, rising air began picking up particles of dirt and sections of small, fallen branches, eventually creating a spiraling vortex of debris that rose churning into the night air. As the front moved closer to central Ohio, it grew in intensity, picking up more of Nature’s debris and feeding on itself until it formed a massive, whistling, rolling wall that mounted to a height of four thousand feet. On the ground, visibility was decreased to less than half a mile.
This was what greeted Lucy as she left the bar and ran, stumbling and cursing, to her car.
As it bulldozed forward, the cold front drove itself like a spike into the remaining dry air. As they collided, the air masses of differing density struggled to overpower one another. This disturbance caused a massive low-pressure system to form, wheeling counter-clockwise of most of the center of the state. Ultimately, the warmer air rising from the ground penetrated the colder mass above, boiling into towering cumulonimbus clouds that rose taller and wider until they appeared to be dark angry mountains against the sky, as large as Everest but not quite as friendly-looking. The great mountain chain of clouds flattened against the tropopause, spreading out and breaking up into a series of massive, anvil-shaped thunderheads.
As the storm matured and gathered strength, it separated into several furious cells that moved together as a disorganized and unfocused yet single unit: mature cells forming at the storm’s center, with newer ones developing on the periphery. In the cells that approached Licking County, the anvil-shaped top of one of the cells began to bulge upward, creating what meteorologists would, the following morning, refer to as an “overshoot”—an augury of sorts, an indication that the rising torrents of air at the storm’s center had become so powerful so quickly that they had broken through the tropopause and moved into the stratosphere. On the underside of the storm, ugly, bulging, pulsating pouches appeared, bellwethers for massive, heavy rainfall and damaging hail, possibly even windbursts or tornadoes.
Massive cells of rain were hovering over the county, evaporating as quickly as they fell, blasting the area with localized microbursts that uprooted smaller trees and peeled shingles from roofs still sporting them. Hailstones spilled from the sky, shattering windows and pounding dents into the hoods of automobiles. Drivers on their way home from work had to pull over because visibility was reduced to damn near nothing, then throw themselves prone across the car seats in the event their windshields shattered.
As the world exploded in bursts of lightning and screaming wind and flying debris, Lucy drove on, taking almost no notice. The weather seemed to have kept everyone but her inside; she hadn’t passed another car since pulling out of the bar’s parking lot—which was a blessing because she crossed the center line three times her first five minutes on the road. Probably should have eaten something earlier, she thought. No matter. If she ran off the road and wrapped her car around a tree, she might cheer in the moments before death.
The world was too full of monsters for her taste.
By the time she pulled up to the stop light by the entrance to Moundbuilders Park, the booze-buzz had kicked into full gear, and the storm was practically right on top of her. Even sober, Lucy hated driving through rainstorms. You could never tell what might jump out into the middle of the road.
So she sat at the stop light, hoping a police car didn’t happen by and trying not to nod off while waiting for the green.
She rubbed her eyes as she at last took full notice of the monstrous storm falling down like a curse from Heaven—Jesus but the wind suddenly sounded like the way she imagined Sarah must have screamed at the hands of the monster who took her away.
A sputtering strobe of light from above illuminated the large sculpture just beyond the now-closed entrance gates to the park; it was so bright, in fact, that Lucy thought it looked something like a spotlight designed to draw her attention to it.
The piece, carved from a series of stones, was entitled Things Left Behind and had been commissioned from a Cincinnati artist by the Cedar Hill city council to memorialize the victims of a mass shooting some fifteen years ago. A kid named Andy-Something-or-Other had gone nuts one July Fourth and mowed down over thirty people, many of them right here in Moundbuilders Park. The artist had chosen to memorialize the victims by carving rows upon rows of faces into the gigantic circular stones, then setting the rows atop one another, creating a crowded stack of faces that went around and around and around. Depending on your mood, the faces looked either cherubic or shroud-like, sometimes a disturbing combination of both. The artist claimed that by walking around the piece—which stood well over twelve feet high and was hollow in the center, like a gigantic candle holder—one would feel the lasting effects of the “cycle of suffering.” Almost everyone praised it as brilliant. Lucy thought it was pretentious bullshit, but kept that opinion to herself.
But now...
Now, in the jagged, stroboscopic lightning, sheened in rain and covered with dead, drenched, wind-blown leaves that obscured many of the faces’ features, she found something sadly compelling about it.
She pulled over to the side of the road and sat staring at it. She had no idea of how long she stared, only that something about it was so mesmerizing that she couldn’t turn away. It were as if something from deep inside the sculpture was reaching out to her, calling to her, begging her to come closer, closer, closer…
Chapter Three
The trucker dropped off Ronnie in Heath, just on the outskirts of Cedar Hill, wishing him luck and driving off with a friendly wave. At first, standing by the side of the road, Ronnie felt a twinge of panic, wondering if he’d be able to thumb a ride into Cedar Hill or if he’d have to walk over to the Southgate Shopping Center and call for a cab.
The years on the run had taught Ronnie many important lessons in survival, one of the most important being: when you’re not sure whether to stay put or move, the best thing is to move.
So he turned, found the silver thread only he could sense, and began walking toward Cedar Hill.
The walk didn’t take nearly as long as he’d feared—just under forty-five minutes—and he found himself in Cedar Hill proper when he realized he was on Eleventh Street and White’s Field was to his left. But instead of continuing uphill on Eleventh, he backtracked half a block to the intersection of Union Street and West Main, turned left, and started toward downtown. He didn’t know why he was going this way, only that the thrumming in the silver thread became stronger as he did so.
He tried not to look too closely at the cheerless houses that sat along the street; tried not to count how many of them were in need of new paint, or roof repair, windows, front porches, doors, and—in one case—all of the wood surrounding the front window. Rolls of insulation were piled up next to the exposed area, and something—a dog or cat, or so Ronnie hoped—had torn through the protective plastic covering and yanked large pink chunks of the material out into the yard. Recent rains had turned it into soggy cotton candy. He hoped none of the children in the neighborhood had actually thought it was cotton candy and eaten the material.
A few houses later, an old, decrepit-looking dog raised its head from where it had been resting on the arm of a discarded sofa on the curb. It blinked a pair of nearly-white eyes in Ronnie’s direction and growled, then went back to its nap.
Children in dirty clothes playing in dirtier front yards with broken toys stopped their activity to watch in silence as Ronnie walked by.
He was really starting to wish he’d gone another direction.
In every city in every state, there are always one or two particular sections of town that never change, regardless of how fast or deliberate the march of progress affects everything around them. In Cedar Hill those two sections were this strip of houses along West Main Street, and the area known as “Coffin County” just over the East Main Street Bridge. Oh, the faces might change, the cars parked in front of the houses or in the yards might be differe
nt, but one thing remained constant; the hopelessness that hung over every house like a shroud.
Even as a child it had made no sense to Ronnie. The few people he’d known who’d lived on West Main or in Coffin County weren’t lazy or ignorant; they were hard-working people who did their best to take care of their families and maybe get ahead a little…but somehow the “getting ahead” part never seemed to become a reality. Sometimes people were laid off and had to apply for food stamps; sometimes they were hurt on the job—nothing crippling, but enough to keep them off work longer than the unemployment would pay for—and they’d have to apply for further government assistance; and sometimes people simply lost their jobs and their luck ran out faster than the money. Oh, sure, there were people who were just irresponsible drunks who somehow could muster enough brains to find a way to take advantage of the system, but most weren’t. But it didn’t stop this area from garnering the nickname “Welfare Row.”
It made Ronnie sad, and he didn’t want to feel sad right now. He had to stay focused on the thread and the lady who would be waiting at the end of it and the (pleaseGod, pleasepleasePLEASE) little girl who would be with her.
He left Welfare Row and continued on, passing the library, a flower shop, a pool hall, a bar called the Wagon Wheel, the big faded-blue building that housed the offices of The Cedar Hill Ally, and the Sparta Restaurant (he thought about going in for a cheeseburger—the Sparta made the best cheeseburgers in the world—but knew he couldn’t, despite being hungry).
He slowed down as he passed a sign taped to the inside window of a card store: LAST WEEKEND! THE LAND OF LEGEND FESTIVAL AND CARNIVAL! BRING THE FAMILY! RIDES! GAMES! LIVE MUSIC! AND GREAT FOOD!
As he stood staring at the sign, he felt the silver thread pull taut once again, and vibrate so violently he could feel it all the way to the center of his bones.
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