Whirlwind

by Hilary Norman

  A brown paper package leaning against his cruddy front door.

  He never got packages.

  It had no label. Weighed a few pounds.

  Heart beating faster, he stuck it under his arm, opened his door, wheeled the bike inside, kicked the door shut behind him, then tore open the paper and the corrugated stuff within it.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  His laptop.

  His, for sure, knowing its scratches well.

  There was no note.

  He opened it up and turned it on, rested it on the table, got himself a glass of water, downed it in one, then pulled up his only chair and looked at it.

  His personal, familiar desktop was gone.

  Just three big, bold words in the center of the screen.

  YOURS, I BELIEVE

  Anger surged again.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.

  The thief had stolen his property and then messed with it.

  And then he’d given it back.

  For another moment, Michael regarded the words almost warily, and then he tried the startup. It worked, so he started checking over his stuff, making sure that his essay was still there, seeing if his emails were working, his free downloads there …

  Everything seemed in place except the desktop. Nothing but new junk in the emails, his Word files apparently unmodified.

  He ought to be grateful to have it back, and he was.

  But still, this was weird and more than a little creepy.

  Then again, this was Boston, and Michael had taken to hanging out in a cemetery, for fuck’s sake, so maybe someone had been watching him. Maybe this was their idea of a joke. Or who knew, maybe some Good Samaritan had witnessed the theft and gotten it back for Michael, then followed him so he could return it without fuss.

  Impossible, since the package had gotten here before him.

  More probably the thief/finder had found his address inside the PC. Not hard, since Michael didn’t bother with passwords, and he’d created a letterhead for job applications. His address was on his résumé too, so there was no mystery about where he lived, and maybe, after all, someone had done him a kindness.

  Bottom line, there seemed to be no harm done, and he had it back.

  And the fact was a real dark day had ended on an almost sunny, if quirky, note.

  So, room for hope, maybe.

  Not that he was any better off than he had been this morning. Worse, in fact, since he’d had a shitload of stress, plus he’d never even gotten to eat the dog he’d paid good bucks for.

  Life still stank.

  Like they said, it was shit, and then you died.

  And, looking around his pisshole of a ‘home’, hopelessness already weighing back down on him, that last part couldn’t come a day too soon.

  THIRTEEN

  With Thanksgiving just two days away, after which Christmas would inexorably power down on them, Liza was busy writing website updates for the season’s hard sell in between copyediting a novel for a Providence-based publisher and helping with the clean-up of the recently flooded office of a local children’s charity.

  So much for her ambitions.

  By 2003, sucked back home after her college freedom, she’d taken a reporting job with the Shiloh Weekly, while always staying on the lookout for a permanent exit. Meantime, there was local news, such as it was, to help hone her basic skills, and also access, finally, to the files on the old murder case stored in editor-proprietor Thomas Osborn’s archives. Which seemed anticlimactic after so long, because Liza had, of course, moved on. The cold truth was that people like her – borderline-mediocre journalist majors – had to grab anything they could, and there were websites paying fees to writers good enough to help them snare clients, and Liza had discovered a knack for advertorial and press release writing, so by the end of 2004 she’d been working for five websites and two Boston businesses.

  And then the Boxing Day tsunami had swept away almost a quarter of a million human beings, and yet again, Liza had reeled and wept along with the rest of the world, feeling shame, not just for the inadequacy of the words she’d written about the catastrophe, but for the fact that she could be inspired by the hideous nightmares of others.

  ‘Scum.’ Stephen Plain had resurrected his tired old insult, watching TV interviews with survivors and relatives.

  Not for the first time, Liza had wondered if he might have a point.

  It was Ben Kaminski, her best friend at college, who had saved her, telling her in 2006 about the room in his Boston apartment on Snow Hill Street that had become available. Thanks to his generously low rent, her prolific website work, plus a copyediting sideline and a dog-walking job, she’d finally been in a position to leave home for real. And since then, on the personal front, there had been plenty of dating and two long relationships with nice men – neither of them the ‘one’ – both ultimately fizzing out. Now and then, a glance up at the framed photograph of the charcoal-drawn violin on her bedroom wall caused a small dig of regret and fresh concern about what had happened to Michael Rider. Once, she’d taken the photo down and put it in a drawer, but the next day she’d hung it back up again because the fact was she liked it, and those twenty-four hours at Walden Pond were a good memory.

  She’d had enough money coming in to pay bills and shrink her outstanding loan. Occasional income from writing features for free dailies, a happy period with a trainee investigative reporting job at WHDH-TV, followed by a short-term job at NBC Universal, working out of Hartford. But then everything had ground to a shattering halt in early 2009 with her parents’ death, after which Liza had attempted for a few months to see if some kind of existence with her grandfather might work out.

  It had not, unsurprisingly and not least because, with his son gone, Stephen Plain had taken to openly blaming Joanna Plain for indulging Liza’s ambitions, for being an inadequate wife and even for the fact that, with Andrew Plain dead, the office in their house would stand forever empty, the village left without a doctor, and he left without a single caring relative.

  ‘Which will suit me well enough for the time remaining to me,’ he had told Liza. ‘And far better a housekeeper, a stranger, than the granddaughter who probably wishes I’d been in the car with my son.’

  Ben had suggested that the old man might be pushing her away for her sake, but though Liza had seriously doubted that, it had still added extra guilt and self-reproach to her grief. Both emotions self-indulgent and pointless, she’d decided after a while, impatient with herself, especially since Stephen seemed to be thriving under the care of the housekeeper in question, a local woman named Ethel Murrow, who still called her employer ‘Doctor’ and took pride in caring for him.

  Five years later, with her life back in Boston at Ben’s, her income still coming from diverse sources, journalism rather depressingly near the bottom of the heap, Liza’s brief sighting of Michael Rider in the graveyard had triggered a new impulse to write a Shiloh-based feature: the real story behind the murder case, the stuff that people had been reluctant to talk about with a young person. The story, perhaps, behind Rider and his family.

  ‘I thought you’d moved on,’ Ben said this Tuesday evening.

  It was cold outside and raining, and they were eating chowder.

  ‘It isn’t actually the murder I want to write about now,’ she said. ‘I understood Cromwell’s wife cracking up and their daughter turning to drink, obviously. But what happened to Emily’s son, to Michael, seems so crazily out of keeping with the man he seemed to be when we met.’ She shook her head. ‘I know bad things can change people, but I just can’t forget how great he was with those kids, Ben.’

  ‘I still find it hard to believe you didn’t know he was Cromwell’s grandson.’ Ben spooned out the remains of his chowder.

  Liza shrugged. ‘I guess we were both distancing ourselves from Shiloh.’

  ‘He clearly doesn’t want to talk to you now.’

  ‘Maybe if I could get him to listen, he might chan
ge his mind.’

  ‘You’ll have to find him first.’

  ‘I know where he went to college, I know he volunteered at Walden Pond, I know where he served his jail time. If I can’t dig up some point of contact, then I’m even more of a failure as a journalist than I thought.’

  Ben picked up both bowls, took them to the sink.

  ‘Maybe this is telling you it’s time to go home, visit with your granddad.’

  He was right, Liza knew, her last visit two Thanksgivings ago.

  ‘I was thinking next year,’ she said.

  ‘He’s an old man. He might not still be around next year.’

  ‘He’s a curmudgeon, and he’s never cared about Christmas.’

  ‘He’s your only family,’ Ben persisted. ‘Besides, if you want to write about Rider …’

  ‘I don’t have to go to Shiloh to do that.’

  ‘If you wait much longer, Stephen might get Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘At least if he forgets who I am, he might like me.’

  ‘Not nice, Liza,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m not sure that I am very nice,’ Liza said.

  FOURTEEN

  Michael was home when the email arrived.

  It was Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, just another lousy late November afternoon so far as he was concerned. He’d started out the day quite upbeat, checking websites for paid work, then lowering his sights for volunteer ushering opportunities at a couple of theaters, failing on all fronts; and then he’d figured that a bike ride alongside the Charles River might give his soul a boost.

  And so it might have, had a white van not cut across his lane near the Harvard Bridge. No real physical damage to him, just scratches and bruises, but his bike, that precious gift and possession, had been wrecked. Totaled. Kaput. The end.

  Bad, bad day.

  And now, a new piece of weirdness on his PC, in his mail inbox.

  From: Reaper at Whirlwind

  Are anger, hatred or bitterness destroying your life, Michael Rider? Are any or all of these emotions eating away at you, sapping your energy, ruining your personal relationships, making it hard for you to love or work successfully? Does no one understand your feelings? Has counseling failed you? Join Whirlwind in the security of anonymity, and share your problems. Lean on us and help others in similar situations. Join us in finding a way to channel negative emotions and impulses into a worthwhile, lucrative cause.

  ‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ Hosea, chapter 8, verse 7.

  Bizarrely apt, but just another piece of junk mail.

  Michael consigned it to trash.

  Even if it did pretty much fit his crappy life.

  No luck yet locating Michael Rider, though Liza felt she might be getting closer.

  She’d learned nothing either from his college or from Walden Pond, and then she’d run a logic trail leading from the Quidnick Correctional Center to Boston’s North End, trying to follow the route of a fundamentally decent ex-offender via the substantial supply of organizations set up to help former prisoners get back on their feet.

  In the process, she’d encountered mostly busy people with better things to do than talk to dubious strangers; but then she’d found a nice guy at a career center who remembered Rider, who said he knew the counselor who’d gotten him a job two or so years back – though Liza surely realized, he’d added, that no counselor would give her personal information about a client, present or past.

  ‘The thing is,’ Liza had said, ‘when I caught that glimpse of him a couple of weeks ago he didn’t look great, and all I’m hoping for is a chance to talk to him again, and most people need all the friends they can get, don’t you think?’

  ‘Some do,’ the career center man had said.

  ‘So all I’m asking is that if this counselor knows how to get hold of Michael, he could just tell him that Liza Plain would really like to speak to him.’

  Career man had seen no problem with her just leaving her phone number.

  No calls yet.

  FIFTEEN

  The motel room was more than adequate. The location vaguely interesting, the town of Danvers, Massachusetts having once been known as Salem Village and, a couple of centuries later, as the site of a psychiatric hospital known by some as the Danvers Lunatic Asylum. To him, though, at this point in his life, to the man known to a very few chosen people as ‘Reaper’, it was simply a place to sleep and work.

  His goal finally beginning to come into view.

  His own end in sight, too, for which he was grateful, the pain of his metastatic cancer becoming harder to tolerate as the weeks wore on, the limited medication that he permitted himself no longer really adequate. In a hospital, or certainly in a hospice, he would probably by now be heading into a blur, pain gradually dulled until at last …

  No real rest for him. Not yet. Not until his work was complete.

  Much to do.

  Reaper sat in the lumpy armchair, set his open MacBook on his knees and regarded the item frozen on its twelve-inch screen, downloaded courtesy of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and a minor miracle, considering that, to the world at large, this little piece of news history was of zero interest.

  Not to him.

  Or to a number of others. Not all of them appearing in this video, which he had already played many times.

  He pressed Play again now, and there was grim-faced CBS reporter Dick Rosworth again, standing outside the perimeter of RIDOC Maximum Security Prison back in 1976, microphone in hand, addressing the camera.

  ‘The trial of Donald Cromwell at the Providence County Superior Court, that has gripped the citizens of New England for more than two weeks, came to a premature end yesterday when the former president of the Shiloh town council – a man tipped for higher office until horror and scandal rocked his life – was found dead in his cell at the maximum security prison known as “steel city”.’

  The video cut to an image of Cromwell in happier times, presiding over a summer lunch in a handsome backyard, his wife, young daughter and two friends smiling at the table.

  ‘Full details have still to emerge, but sources suggest that Cromwell – who stood accused of the abduction and murder of seven-year-old Alice Millicent in the village of Shiloh, Rhode Island—’

  The report cut to a moving shot of the village.

  ‘—took his own life.’

  The camera focused on Cromwell’s home, Shiloh Oaks.

  ‘Witnesses present during the last days in court have said that Cromwell had appeared progressively more depressed as the prosecution laid out its case. It seems ironic that Mr Cromwell’s own lawyers had not yet begun the case for the defense.’

  Another shot of Cromwell with wife, Susan, vacationing in Newport.

  ‘His death leaves many unanswered questions. Was this perhaps an innocent man wanting to spare his family more pain? Or a guilty man unable to endure the shame? We may never learn the truth.’

  Now a photograph of the victim, seven candles on her cake at her last birthday party.

  ‘Just as we may now never know, beyond reasonable doubt, who brutally murdered little Alice last summer.’ Dick Rosworth paused. ‘Mr Cromwell leaves a wife and daughter. Alice Millicent left a brother and two still-grieving parents.’

  Reaper pressed the stop button, leaned back with a sigh, and closed his eyes.

  Rest first.

  Then to work.

  SIXTEEN

  On December 2, Liza was home, working on her favorite part-time job, a blog she ghost-wrote for the website of a Boston-based crime writer, a man at ease with creating his characters’ worlds but unwilling to write about his own life. When the phone rang, she picked up absently.

  ‘Liza Plain.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  The hostility in the voice startled her, yet she knew instantly who it was.

  ‘Michael.’ She sounded calm. ‘I’m so glad you’ve called.’

  ‘For one reason only
,’ he said flat out. ‘To make sure you never play a stroke like that again. That you leave me alone.’

  The words stung, but she stayed even. ‘I know it might have seemed a little sneaky.’

  ‘To hell with sneaky,’ Michael Rider said. ‘It was intrusive and low.’

  ‘And I’m sorry for that, but I couldn’t think of another way to speak to you.’

  ‘It takes two to make a conversation.’

  ‘You didn’t have to call me.’ Liza took a breath. ‘Michael, I didn’t know, when I came to Walden Pond, who you were. I didn’t even know you were from Shiloh.’

  ‘Would you actually have written your “feature” if you had known?’

  ‘I did write it,’ Liza said. ‘But then 9/11 happened, and—’

  ‘I’m aware of what happened,’ Rider said. ‘And you’re obviously more interested in me now because you’ve found out some things about me, but I stopped talking to journalists a long time ago.’ His voice was flat, hard. ‘Please don’t try to contact me again.’

  ‘When I read about what happened to—’

  He was gone.

  Caller’s number withheld.

  Liza stared at the phone, a heap of conflicting emotions stirring. Annoyance, upset, confusion, embarrassment, even shame.

  ‘Shit,’ she said.

  And went back to the blog.

  A lot to be said for fiction.

  Michael didn’t much like the way he’d spoken to her.

  Because maybe – only maybe – Liza Plain might just be what she’d seemed way back then.

  Too long ago to think about. Different times. Different world to him.

  And she was a journalist. One of them. And he hadn’t asked her to get in touch. He’d made it plain enough when he’d turned his back on her in Copp’s Hill that day that he didn’t want to talk to her, and only the most insensitive person could have failed to read that clear message.

  Only a reporter. With a nose for a story. Which had to have been what she was after when she’d persuaded his former counselor to pass on her message.