by Candice Fox
‘Sure,’ the kid said, and opened up the door. Kradle dropped the dog and followed the kid into the house, let the animal in behind him and then closed the door.
It did not escape Kradle that he had just used the kind of ruse Homer Carrington employed to stun and then corner his victims; that, as he deadbolted the door and sealed himself and the young man in the little kitchen, the boy was probably experiencing the same jolt of sudden, painful clarity that men and women had felt under the North Nevada Strangler’s gaze. The kid turned towards him with a What did I just do? look on his face, the duped, the trusting, the naive, and Kradle felt bad for making the boy realise that everything he’d ever been told about strangers in vans with candy was bullshit. The real danger could come right to your house and cook up a pathetic story about a lost dog, and have you let them inside in ten seconds flat.
‘Just stay calm,’ Kradle said. ‘I’m here to talk to your dad.’
The kid was as tall as Mason had been, but not as broad or muscular. He was all sinew and veins, probably half the weight of the son Kradle had lost. Mason had died at a time when all the kids were shaving weird patterns into the backs of their heads and taking chunks out of their eyebrows with a razor, to look like rappers or fighters or something. This boy was long-haired and long-lashed, with lips so red he might have been wearing lipstick. But, aside from the physical differences, the boy and Kradle’s son could have been brothers in their wide-eyed, eager, curious expressions, the look that said they knew they were in the best years of their lives and now was the time to notice everything, taste everything, be awake as long as they could every day, be ready for whatever the world threw at them. Spirit. Energy. Kradle felt tired just thinking about it.
‘Tom? What happened? You forget your lunch?’
Shelley Frapport appeared in the doorway to the tidy kitchen in a pink fluffy robe, with a cat tucked under her arm like a football. The cat spotted Kradle’s dog, struggled out of the woman’s grasp and scrammed up the hall. Shelley took in the sight of Kradle, eased a long breath out of her lungs, and let her hands fall by her sides.
‘I hoped you’d come,’ she said.
2000
Curses. Demons. Bad omens. Mason’s birth was exactly as the pregnancy had been: a long and mildly hysterical affair infused with a kind of supernatural energy. From the beginning, when she learned of the baby growing inside her, Christine had begun to hear talk about the child’s existence being much more than an accident brought about by a boozy Sunday afternoon barbecue and Christine forgetting to take her pills. Fast, dirty, half-hearted sex on the couch, Christine sprawled on a blanket on the living floor watching The Frances Faulkner Show long into the night, Kradle dozing beside her, lifting his head now and then to read the caption at the bottom of the screen with the show’s subject. Cheating Spouses Come Clean! I Married My PlayStation! My Uncle Is My Boyfriend! Dread of the coming hangover and the roof-cleaning job Kradle had booked for the next morning, in the blazing sun. Christine’s typical Sunday afternoon moroseness about the demise of her medium and ghost-hunting business, the soulless commercialism of people like John Edward and Allison DuBois.
No – to Christine, her pregnancy was an act of malignant forces so powerful and terrifying she dared not even talk about aborting the baby, because she feared upsetting further whatever cursed thing had made her pregnant in the first place. She spent the pregnancy reading runes, saying prayers, rubbing oils and herbs and ash and smelly lotions into her growing belly to try to remove the curse. Kradle mostly ignored all the weirdness, dismissing it as the anxiety of an expectant mother, and buried himself in his work so that they could have a nice little cash bundle to buy all the fluffy toys and stripy suits he noticed babies around town possessed.
Then, in early March, Christine sat bolt upright in bed and vomited up the roast lamb dinner they’d had that night, and he drove her to the hospital, calling her sister, Audrey, on the way.
In a dark, hot room, Kradle sat sweating in a plastic chair in the corner while his wife was exorcised of their infant son.
Audrey arrived at a respectable 11 am, wearing her court suit and talking on her flip phone all the way up the busy hall. She didn’t get off the phone, even when Kradle leaned in and showed her the baby in his arms, gingerly pushing a fold of the blanket away to reveal the most beautiful face he’d ever laid eyes upon. Audrey wrinkled her nose and let her eyes flick to the ceiling.
‘You can try to take it to the DA if you want, Georgia, but I’m telling you now you won’t get any traction without Ferlich there.’
Kradle followed when Audrey jerked her thumb towards the end of the hall. She carried on the phone conversation all the time as she made them coffee in the little maternity ward common room. He sat and marvelled at his child and thought about creation and god and destiny and the universe, and Audrey tried to negotiate to get Ferlich, whoever he was, to wherever he needed to be, then snapped the phone shut partway through her own sentence, having apparently given up.
‘Idiots,’ she said, and leaned over, glancing again at her nephew.
‘What do you think?’
‘He’s pretty fat.’
‘He is.’ Kradle laughed and wiped the tears that clung to his aching, exhausted eyes. ‘He’s a big, healthy fellow.’
‘What’s the name?’
‘Mason.’
‘Urgh.’ Audrey smoothed out her skirt. ‘How obtusely masculine. As if people aren’t going to know it’s a boy from that Neanderthal brow.’
‘Christine wanted something that communicated the idea of stone, because the grinding of a stone in Wiccan mythology is—’
‘John, spare me, please.’ Audrey held up a hand. ‘She’s not here. We can avoid the idiotic blather about this kid and the mythological spiritual bullshit supposedly infused with his being. If people ask you, just say you’re a builder and you wanted something that sounded tough.’
They sat, drinking their coffee from styrofoam cups, Kradle setting his on the centre of the table between sips, far away from the baby. Now and then, midwives in sickly pink scrubs came into the room to retrieve diapers or bottles from the cupboards lining the walls. The big baby with the heavy brow slept soundly in Kradle’s arms, and Audrey leaned over to look occasionally but made no move to hold him.
‘It’s going to get worse from now on,’ Audrey said.
‘What is?’
‘The attention-seeking. Christine. All the mystical garbage. The drama. The ghosts and demons and crap. She’s been cooking up reasons why she’s special since she was a kid and she realised she didn’t have the analytical mind to go into law like everybody else in the family. But guess what? When you have a baby you’re not special anymore. The baby is special.’
They both looked at the infant.
‘Suddenly you’re not a medium,’ Audrey said. ‘You’re not a conduit. You’re not a white witch. You’re somebody’s mom, and there isn’t anything less unique in all the world. Everybody’s got a mother somewhere.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Kradle said. ‘I like her attention-seeking. Gives me something to focus my attention on.’
He didn’t voice the rest of the thoughts that flooded his mind. That Christine mightn’t have been the needy child that grew into a needy and praise-hungry adult if someone had bothered to look at her every now and then. If her parents had glanced up from their legal pads to watch her prancing around the living room at some point during their mutual race for district attorney. If someone had only listened to her fanciful tales instead of diagnosing them or relegating her to the kiddie corner at the charity balls and college fundraisers and gallery viewings her family frequented. He’d heard tales of a ten-year-old Audrey practically glued to her father’s hip, trying to chip in to conversations about tax reform, while an eight-year-old Christine drew pagan symbols with the toe of her shoe in the dirt under her chair.
Audrey’s phone rang and she took the call. Kradle stroked the single lock of blond hair stickin
g out of the top of his new son’s head. He lost himself in thoughts of how to make Christine feel special again when she woke from the thick, open-mouthed slumber he’d left her in. Then he realised a midwife was tugging on his arm.
‘Mr Kradle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your wife just left.’
CHAPTER 23
Bernie O’Leary had seen all kinds of things in his time manning the roadhouse on Cortez Gold Mine Road. There were few ordinary reasons a person would find themselves in Lander County at all. The bulk of his clientele was gold miners, the five regulars who stopped to sink a beer at the end of their shifts before heading up to their trailer homes on Battle Mountain or out on the plains. Those guys, only two of whom had ever shared their names with Bernie in the four years they’d been coming, were the predictable type. They came in and sat at the five deflated leather barstools at the counter in the otherwise featureless room, each guy to his regular stool, so that after a few years the seats had moulded to each individual ass, and swapping places for whatever reason would have just been silly. Bernie figured that down in the mines it was dark and loud, and maybe nobody had ever bothered to introduce themselves or talk over the din on the first day down the shaft. Maybe, after eight hours below the earth’s surface, not talking, not shaking hands, it seemed strange to introduce themselves in the elevator going back up, and after a while the awkward silence that settled around these men became acceptable, even natural. The five came in every day, sat down, drank their beers, and none of them ever lifted their eyes from the counter to exchange so much as a joke or a comment. Bernie had seen one nod to another once, when they announced Hillary had lost to Trump on the little television in the corner of the bar. But that was it. They all left at different times. Five in. Five out.
Aside from the five miners, Bernie had served a few geologists once. He’d listened with interest as they talked about Crescent Valley quartz deposits and fossils as he nailed fresh timber veneer around the windows of the trailer that served as the bar where the sun had baked it clean off. Some film people had come through the year before, scouting locations for a spaghetti western, their trailer full of angry pampered horses huffing in the heart. Every few months there was an Area 51 pilgrim or two who came to Bernie’s bar, having bought their share of rubber aliens and novelty T-shirts, and taken all the squinting selfies they wanted to take, before deciding to keep travelling north through the middle of the state to catalogue what wasn’t there.
Bernie didn’t know what he was dealing with when the cop arrived. The guy didn’t walk like a cop, didn’t check his five and seven when he came in the door the way Bernie knew became natural to cops after they’d passed through enough unfamiliar thresholds and received a punch in the back of the head for their trouble. The old man’s badge said Nawlet. He dusted his hands off and put them on the counter to balance himself while he climbed up onto Number Three Miner’s stool. Bernie leaned sideways and saw a police cruiser with a dent in the hood sitting at the pumps outside.
‘You want a beer?’ Bernie asked.
‘Sure,’ the old guy said.
The daily silence of the miners had set Bernie up not to feel weird when a vacuum of wordlessness descended on the bar. Nevertheless, he felt weird for some reason now, handing the guy a Bud and trying to busy himself behind the counter. The old timer’s knuckles were bone-white on top from being skinned once too many times, and when Bernie rounded the counter to open a window and let some of the weirdness out, he saw the guy had one foot on the floor, as if he was ready to shift his weight onto it in the event he needed to get up suddenly.
Bernie slipped back behind the counter, just because he felt as if he should put something between the old cop and himself. He fooled with some glasses and a cloth, not really polishing them, keeping an eye on the old guy. The cop patted all his pockets, found a wallet eventually and opened it on the counter. Bernie watched as the man fumbled through it and seemed to find it empty. He extracted a credit card and examined it, tapped it on the counter a couple of times, thinking. Bernie found himself looking then at his own wallet, for some reason, which was sitting in a bowl by the register. Emu skin. A gift from his ex.
‘How ’bout that breakout?’ Bernie said, just to stop his ears from ringing in the quiet.
‘Yeah,’ the old cop said. Bernie noticed he had to swallow a mouthful of beer he’d been holding in his cheeks, just swooshing it around his tongue like a fancy wine person.
‘Were you there?’
‘Why would I have been there?’ the old guy asked.
‘I thought you might have got called in, that’s all,’ Bernie said. ‘Thing like that, I figure they’d call everybody in.’
The old man sipped his beer again, held the liquid in his mouth while Bernie counted off seconds.
‘Cruiser is shot,’ the old man said. He gestured to the door but didn’t take his eyes off Bernie. ‘I hit a deer. Thought I’d come in and see if you knew your way around a vehicle. Help me figure out what’s been knocked loose under the hood.’
Bernie hesitated, tapped his knuckles on the bar. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about cars,’ he lied.
‘Guess I’m stranded,’ the old man said.
‘You could take my car,’ Bernie said. He put his keys on the counter.
‘Then you’ll be stuck here.’
‘I’ll have a friend bring it back.’
‘Sounds inconvenient.’
‘It is.’ Bernie nodded. ‘But you’re the law. You’ve gotta help the law.’
The cop whose name badge read Nawlet took the keys and weighed them in his scarred hands.
He rose from his stool. Bernie stepped back and gripped the counter, and felt something like a cold hand release its grip from around his innards.
The old guy dressed as a cop walked to the door, stopped and turned back.
‘One for the road?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ Bernie relented, feeling a little as if he’d been unstrapped from the electric chair only to be asked if he wanted to sit back down and take a breather before he left the building. He turned and squatted and reached into the fridge, felt its soothing breeze against his sweat-damp cheeks.
When he rose again the old man was standing just near him, by the liquor cabinet, a hand’s reach away.
2000
Celine had never been to a prison before, and it was prettier on the outside than she had imagined it would be. Where it stood on the hill, huge walls of smooth brick baked in the summer sun, cut by long geometric shadows made by iron gates, sheets of mesh, coils of wire. She stood in the parking lot and fingered the keys of the car that still smelled like her mother’s perfume, her younger brothers’ farts, the occasional box of fried chicken her father used to sneak on the way home from work. They’d all been dead a year, and the smells and sounds of them lingered everywhere in her life. She heard her mother calling her name, and if she was distracted or tired she sometimes answered. She would feel the tug of a little boy’s hand on her elbow, look down to find she was alone. Celine wanted there to be some stronger remnant of her lost family when she arrived outside Baldwin State Prison to visit her grandfather. But there was just the smell of them, and a familiar sense of impending doom as she prepared to face with the old man, the same as it had been before the massacre.
A pretty woman in shiny black high heels met her at the admission checkpoint. Everyone Celine had dealt with since the killings had been young, pretty, cheerful – people possessed of the kind of limitless enthusiasm and delusional hope required to work with traumatised, ‘at risk’ youths. The team who walked her through her deposition was a collection of grinning, laughing, toned and terrific types that looked as if they’d just stepped off a beach somewhere in Florida. The attorney who informed her that her grandfather had entered a guilty plea couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Celine followed the pretty blonde woman, whose name she had been too consumed with dread to grasp during the screening procedures, out of the bu
ilding and down the caged walkway to the huge gates of the facility.
Passing through them, Celine felt a strange sense of calm envelop her, a bubble of numbness that wrapped around her limbs, distinctly at odds with what she was seeing. She put it down to some kind of trauma response, similar to that which had stripped her completely of emotions in the first days after the killing. She glided past fenced yards of orange-jumpsuit-wearing inmates, who hooted and hollered in her direction. Passed a pair of guards changing shifts with the watchtower staff, the two men loading and checking their rifles at the bottom of a concrete stairway. She was buzzed through five sets of big, clanging iron doors and down a tight hallway, past rows of empty windows with battered phone receivers mounted beside them. They arrived in a room with a steel table and two chairs bolted to the floor. Celine baulked in the doorway like a wild horse being led into a truck.
‘He’s not coming in here with me,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ the woman said, laughing. ‘No. You’ll be behind glass. I thought you’d like a second to collect yourself.’
‘I’m collected,’ Celine said. ‘Just show me to him.’
‘Celine.’ The woman put a hand on Celine’s arm. ‘You don’t have to be brave all the time. I’m here with you. We’ll take it slow. You can just sit here a moment and—’
‘If I don’t do this now, I’m going to lose it, okay?’ Celine said through gritted teeth. She was so exhausted by speeches from the beautiful victim-liaison people about being ‘there’ for her and her ‘bravery’. Nobody was with her, not in this. And her survival for the 352 days since her family had been slaughtered was more a matter of anaesthesia and habit than bravery, the unfeeling ability to follow directions and eat and sleep and move from one minute to the next without screaming.
She was escorted to one of the glass booths with a phone receiver, and the woman who was there for her went away. Celine didn’t have to wait long before he was brought before her.