by Chaz McGee
And all I could think of as I stared back at these otherworldly witnesses was that Maggie, my Maggie, was surely in danger. I didn’t know what Alan Hayes was exactly: a human monster, something beyond human, an aberration that needed to be destroyed? I only knew that if he had been able to take such young and such lovely lives, again and again, without remorse or regret, and found pleasure in the taking of their innocence, that he would not hesitate to take Maggie. And he would find his own dark joy in destroying her.
I was filled with a foreboding. Alan Hayes was waiting, I thought to myself. He was not at a faculty dinner, blissfully unaware of her scrutiny and the invasion of his privacy. Not at all. He had known this day was coming, that it would have to come, and he already knew what his next move would be.
So did I.
He was somewhere patiently waiting for a chance to claim his ultimate victory. Waiting for his chance to claim Maggie.
Chapter 23
Maggie, unaware or uncaring of any danger to herself, had taken one look at the contents of his trophy box and known she had to stop Alan Hayes now. She left the rest of her team to catalog the intimate items spread out across the counter and went upstairs in search of Morty. He was dozing in an armchair while Elena Hayes snored on the couch. But he woke the instant Maggie touched his arm. It was clear to me that Morty would have done anything she asked, but this time all she asked for was his advice. She told him what she had found in the secret cache below, and of Sarah Hayes having led her to it, and what she wanted to do next and how it presented her with a moral dilemma.
Morty did not hesitate. A coldness welled up in him, a vein of resolve and conviction that surprised me with its strength. “Do it,” he said to her. “I’ll take care of the mother. You just do what you need to do to get this guy.”
Maggie left the room, but I stayed with Morty, curious at the hard man he had suddenly become. He roused Elena Hayes from her drug sleep, shaking her shoulder roughly and barking at her in Russian. The woman struggled to sit up, heart hammering in terror at the sound of her native language. Some memories never die. She was so relieved to find herself in America, surrounded by the comforts she had clawed her way toward and suffered to retain, that she sank back against the couch and agreed to all Morty was proposing. By the time Maggie returned with Sarah Hayes, Morty had retrieved a tape recorder from his car and was ready to play his part.
He asked Elena Hayes first in Russian, and then in English, whether she was the legal guardian of Sarah Hayes. Having established her parental rights, he secured her permission to interview Sarah as a minor, again confirming her consent on tape in both languages so there could be no question as to whether the woman understood what they were asking.
“Do you wish to be present while I interview your daughter?” Maggie asked. We all saw Sarah Hayes flinch at the question. She did not consider herself her stepmother’s daughter in any way. They were both the victims of Alan Hayes, I realized, but that did not make them allies.
The older woman’s composure faltered. She looked to Morty for advice.
“You may choose to be here, if you wish,” he said carefully. “Or, you may waive that right, perhaps out of respect for your stepdaughter’s desire for privacy.” As if he were merely stopping to check the speed of the tape, Morty halted the recorder and examined the spools carefully as he continued in a casual voice. “Of course, if you do not hear other people’s details, you cannot be called upon in court to testify to what you have learned.”
It was a mangling of the truth at best; she would not be called upon to say what she’d heard in any case. But to a woman leery of the authorities, he had offered her an out she was desperate to take.
“I will make us all tea,” she said. “Slowly. The Russian way.”
I could feel a layer of tension lift from Sarah Hayes as her stepmother left the room. The young girl was willing to reveal her shame to Maggie, and would tolerate Morty’s grandfatherly presence, but to share her shame with the woman who had surely known of it, and chosen to do nothing to stop it, would have been too much to ask.
After establishing that Sarah was talking to her voluntarily, Maggie began by getting the young girl to confirm on tape that she had been the one to tell Maggie where to find the hidden compartment in the wall. That Maggie. She was smart. There would be no question about the warrant’s parameters now.
“How did you know it was there?” Maggie asked her gently.
“Sometimes I watch him when he’s down there,” the girl whispered as Morty moved the tape recorder closer, trying to catch every word.
“Why?”
She hesitated. “I like to know where he is.”
Maggie let it go. That line of questioning was best left for the social worker whose job it would be to put the girl back together. Maggie’s job was to stop a killer. “How many times have you seen him take the plastic box from its hiding place?” she asked Sarah instead.
“I don’t know. Three or four times. But I think he does it every night. He spends a lot of time down there.”
“Doing what?’ Maggie asked.
She shrugged. “Making jewelry, I guess. It’s his workshop.”
“You’re not wearing any jewelry,” Maggie pointed out. “Yet your mother wears quite a lot.”
“Stepmother,” Sarah corrected her. “And I don’t like his presents.”
Maggie let it go again. “What does he do with the items in the box when he’s downstairs?” she asked.
“He takes them out of the box,” she said and hesitated. “He smells the things; he puts them up to his cheek and rubs his face.” She stopped abruptly.
“What else does he do?” Maggie asked softly.
The girl flushed and shook her head furiously. I felt a darkness descend over her. She had willed herself not to remember. Maggie knew enough to back off.
“Does he ever take anyone down there with him?” Maggie asked. “Guests? Other people. Maybe a student?”
“He makes my stepmother go down with him sometimes to . . . do things. I don’t watch then. Not ever.” She stared at her bare feet intently.
“But no one else? You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I don’t sleep very well. I hear when people move through the house at night. I know when he’s here. I know when he leaves. I can hear his footsteps. I can hear his voice. I keep a map of the house in my head.” She stared at Maggie, willing her to understand. “So I know where he is all the time.”
“I understand,” Maggie said, taking the girl’s hand and holding it gently. “Does he spend most of his time down there?”
She shook her head. “Not all of it. He likes to go out at night.”
Maggie stiffened. “How often?”
She shrugged. “Three, maybe four times a week. Sometimes every night.”
“When was the last time he did that?” Maggie asked.
“Last week,” Sarah said. “He was gone every night. Once he didn’t come home for breakfast. It was nice. Elena made me latkes. He doesn’t like them. He only eats one thing for breakfast, that crunchy hard cereal, and we’re not allowed to cook anything else in the mornings if he’s here. He says he doesn’t like the smell of cooking in the morning. It makes him nauseous.”
Maggie and Morty were looking at one another: last week. When Vicky Meeks had gone missing.
“Do you know where he goes when he’s not here?” Maggie asked the girl.
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t want to know,” she said.
“Have you ever been in the basement with him?” Maggie asked.
The girl turned scarlet and her hands folded automatically over her stomach.
“You can tell me,” Maggie whispered. She waited as the girl thought it over. As the silence built, I felt the room around me shift in temperature. The air grew cool. I smelled lilies. I felt a presence enter the room—and then Alissa Hayes was there with us. She had forced herself to enter the house. She had faced the lingering evil inside, to be at her l
ittle sister’s side.
She stood just behind Sarah Hayes, visible only to me, and placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder, lending her whatever strength she had to give. Sarah needed it. I could feel the fear in Sarah’s young mind, her yearning to be saved conflicting with her need to be safe, her desire to trust Maggie at odds with what she had learned about trusting other people in her life, her wanting to tell Maggie all about it at war with her certainty that some secrets had to be kept because they had the power to destroy you.
Alissa Hayes would not be enough to break through all that fear. I moved to Sarah’s side and placed my hand on her other shoulder, willing my strength to flow into her, trying to ease the turmoil inside her. I wanted to help. I needed to help. I had to right the terrible wrong I had made possible. And as I stood next to Sarah Hayes, willing myself to be an instrument of good, I believe that the first faint stirrings of my own salvation came into being. I felt connected to the child by a channel of pure, white light, by a chord of love so strong I cannot explain it except to say that it did not come from me, it only came through me, and in serving as its vessel, I had bound us together forever. Did Alissa Hayes feel the power, too? Would the two of us be enough to save her sister?
I felt the young girl’s fears and dark memories receding. I felt the flickering of courage rise in her, fueled by a faint glow of hope, dousing the power of past threats and allowing her to tap into the heroic strength I had learned that almost every human being possessed inside of them.
She would do it. She would tell. Or at least, show Maggie.
In the end, Sarah did not explain what had been done to her in the basement by her father, at least not in words. She lifted up the pajama top she was wearing and showed Maggie the neatly arrayed rows of parallel lines crisscrossing her stomach. The cuts looked as if they had been made just deep enough to scar, but not deep enough to cause her to bleed profusely. They were controlled, they were calculated—they were her father’s way of marking her as his. They were not the fatal cuts the dead girls had suffered. But they were clearly made by the same hand.
“My stepmother has them, too,” Sarah whispered to Maggie. “Only I think hers are all over her body. I think that’s why she wears all that . . . fabric.”
“I can take you to a place that’s safe,” Maggie promised as she examined the scars, knowing that while some were old enough to have healed, others were fresh. “I can take you there tonight, if you want. You can walk away and start a new life. You never have to come back here, not ever. You’ll have to show what he did to you to a few other people, but I’ll be there with you when you do. Do you think you can do that?”
The girl nodded, still staring intently at her feet.
“Do you want to go with me now?” Maggie asked more gently.
The girl nodded again.
“I’ll come upstairs with you while you pack,” Maggie told her. “We’ll take everything you want to take. I won’t let Elena stop you.”
The girl looked up, alarmed, at the mention of her stepmother’s name. “Elena will let me go with you, but she’ll never leave herself,” Sarah said with childish wisdom. “She’s afraid to go. But if she stays here, he’ll hurt her when he comes home. He’ll punish her for my leaving.”
Sarah Hayes looked to Morty for her salvation. She could not live with leaving, not if Elena’s pain was her legacy.
“I’ll stay with your stepmother tonight,” Morty said, his hand unconsciously touching his gun. “I’ll stay here for as long as I need to. I promise. I’ll stay until they take him away.”
“When will that be?” she whispered.
“Soon,” Maggie promised. “Very soon. We will come to get him soon.”
Sarah Hayes looked away, hiding her tears of relief. And I understood that, though Elena Hayes had treated her as little more than a stranger, perhaps even as her competition for survival, this beautiful, beautiful young girl had not been able to simply walk away and leave her stepmother to a terrible fate. I knew then that she would be okay in the world. I knew that, whatever happened next, Sarah Hayes would survive.
Sarah’s sister knew it, too. When I looked up, Alissa Hayes had vanished.
I would never see her again.
Chapter 24
I have come to understand, in my brief otherworldly existence, that humans have the capacity to bind themselves to one another and that, in doing so, they can become so much more than they could ever be by themselves. I did not understand the dynamics fully, only enough to know that I had missed out on something powerful and profound by not opening my heart to others when I was alive. I first realized this a few months after my death. It was spring and this dead man’s fancy had turned to love. So I took to standing in the park, grappling with my loneliness, watching lovers walk hand in hand and families playing on the lawn. I witnessed how love can strengthen, brighten, and sharpen the very core of our existence, changing it forever. I came to understand that love is a permanent strengthening of the spirit, a gift that lingered long after the love itself was gone.
Even so, I was moved that Alissa’s love for her sister had driven her to put off the easing of her earthly pain so that she could warn me of the danger to Sarah. And I was moved by a more anonymous love I witnessed when Sarah was delivered into the care of strangers whose job it was to repair the damage done by those who used the need to love as a weapon against their own children.
The woman who welcomed Sarah into her foster home had seen it all before. Her heart was hidden beneath a veneer of efficiency, but only because it had been broken too many times to count by the stories she’d heard from the children who passed through her life. She remained a loving woman, despite the overwhelming evidence she’d seen of man’s cruelty. She had felt Sarah’s fear at once, understood her pain, and welcomed her into the safety of a temporary home. I knew Sarah would be okay in the sprawling, life-filled house crammed with toys and chaos. She could begin her new life here.
Maggie was reluctant to leave her. She waited with Sarah in the front room of the foster home until the social worker could arrive, asking gentle questions about the most ordinary of topics—school—in order to help Sarah create the illusion she would need to survive: the illusion that normalcy was possible.
It was close to midnight by the time Maggie left. As she drove through the dark streets, I felt her mind switch directions and she homed in on Alan Hayes. All empathy vanished and the kindness in her hardened to a nonnegotiable resolve to stop him. Oh, but she wanted to bring him down. I sat beside her, thinking of myself as a sort of spiritual co-pilot, rooting her fury on. Her mind never stopped trying to figure him out. She retrieved her cell phone from the depths of a knapsack tossed carelessly right in my lap and made a call, despite the lateness of the hour. When she started talking, I knew it was Morty.
“Is he back yet?” She frowned. “That means he’s on the run. He knows.” She was silent. “Could be. How about her? Is she awake?” She nodded in the darkness. “He could be wherever it is he’s been going at night. I’ll keep the two men outside until dawn and get Gonzales to authorize replacements.” She listened intently. “Are you sure? Okay, then. Let’s both get some sleep.”
Maggie would not get much sleep. The phone rang as soon as she laid it back down on the seat. This time, she pulled over to the curb to take the call, pressing a palm against her free ear to muffle all other sound. “I can’t hear you,” she said loudly. “Slow down and talk louder.” Her face strained with effort as she listened—and then she paled.
“Don’t let him leave, Roger,” she shouted into the phone. “Just tell him I’m on the way. And thanks. I owe you one.” She listened again. “Yes. I can do that. Favor made, favor repaid.”
She tossed her cell phone on the seat, flipped a switch on the dashboard, slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and just like that, I was riding the lights at night again, watching the purple and blue beams sweep the traffic away from the road in front of us. God, it felt good. We flew
through town, blowing through stoplights, leaving other cars in our dust. As she took the final turn out of town and headed down the blacktop, I knew where we were going: the Double Deuce bar on the outskirts of town. Why?
Before we reached the Double Deuce, Maggie switched off the blue light, not wanting to trigger a mass exodus. We glided into the parking lot in a spray of gravel. She cut the engine and was out the door in seconds, running toward a crowd clustered near the front entrance of the bar.
It was Bobby Daniels, the man I’d put in prison for the murder of Alissa Hayes. Somehow he had been released and ended up here at the Double Deuce, the last place on earth he should have gone.
I sat on top of her car for a better view. Bobby was lying on the ground, surrounded by onlookers, his back propped up against the brick building. Roger, the well-muscled owner and bartender of the Double Deuce, was holding a cloth to the side of Bobby’s head. It was soaked with blood. The neon signs above them blinked pink and blue in a steady rhythm, rendering Bobby first a healthy pink, then a sickly blue, then pink and blue again.
The surrounding crowd was at least six people deep, each one shamelessly sipping from a beer as they enjoyed the Double Deuce’s specialty show: watching blood flow. I scanned the faces in the crowd, looking for anyone I recognized. And an odd thing happened. Every now and then, I’d find someone staring back at me—face still, eyes unblinking, but their attention undeniably on me perched atop Maggie’s car. Two were men and one was a woman. But my attention was diverted by a side scuffle that broke out and was quickly quelled, and when I tried to find the trio among the crowd again, all three were gone. They had vanished.
I thought of the way they had looked at me. I thought of the black shapes I could sometimes see out of the corner of my eye. And I decided they had been of my world, not of the living. Had they left disappointed that they were taking no one with them? I wondered if that meant Bobby Daniels would live.