Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  “By all appearances without a care in the world.”

  “And yet he snaps.”

  “Does he?” DeMarco said.

  “It happens, Ry. It does happen. There’s never any way of knowing for sure what’s going on inside another person’s head.”

  The way she smiled at him when she said this, the dolefulness of her look, made him avert his gaze for a few moments. He considered his hands.

  “Okay, so let’s say he does,” DeMarco said. “He snaps. In a moment of, what, blind rage? He wipes out his family, one after another?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s the nature of the wounds to consider.”

  “Right. Very methodical. Deliberate. All except little Davy’s.”

  She waited while he thought it out.

  “Okay,” DeMarco finally said. “The snap theory. What could make it happen?”

  “Just about anything—finances, workload, an argument with his wife.”

  “The money was rolling in hand over fist.”

  “That can be its own kind of stress.”

  DeMarco scowled, thinking it over.

  “So maybe he thought he sold out,” Matson said. “He’s a serious writer, correct? You ever read him?”

  DeMarco only cocked his head and looked at her. She had been in his house, had perused his bookshelves. In fact, when she had rolled over in his bed that time, had turned her back to him, it had been Huston’s latest novel that she’d picked up off the nightstand. Huston’s latest novel she had flung across the room.

  As for the sell-out theory, DeMarco couldn’t buy it. He had watched the Good Morning America spot, then later, the interview with Charlie Rose. In both cases, Huston had been relaxed, confident, almost serene in his responses. “How is all this sitting with you?” Charlie Rose had asked. “Your sudden celebrity status and everything that comes with it?” Huston had said nothing for several seconds, had sat there looking down. Then a slow smile came to his lips. He had looked up at Rose and said, “This last book is the best I’ve ever written. I’m at the top of my game at last. I feel validated.”

  And DeMarco, sitting alone in his darkened living room with a glass of warm Jack in hand, had believed every word of it. He had even raised his glass to the television screen. “Good for you, brother,” he had said aloud.

  So no, fuck the sell-out theory. To Trooper Matson he said, “You know his father committed suicide.”

  “That was how long ago?”

  DeMarco thought it through, thought back to where he had been when he heard the news. Laraine had been pregnant then. He had come home at nearly midnight, a steamy night in August, a bar brawl between Reds and Pirates fans, and found her crying in bed. “That poor man,” she had told him.

  “It’s what he wanted though,” DeMarco had answered. He had undressed quickly and climbed in beside her, needing, on that hot night, the warmth of her skin against his, the soothing contact of his hand on the swell of her belly. “I can understand that.”

  “I mean his son,” she had told him. “His only child. Imagine how he must feel right now.”

  “About four years ago,” DeMarco told Matson. “So that could be a factor?”

  “His entire past is a factor, Ryan. Question is, what made him take it out on his family?”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said. “So something set him off. And then what?”

  “And then…?”

  “I mean after the fog clears. After he realizes what he’s done. What happens then? Where is he psychologically?”

  “Well,” she said, “if he’s not, in fact, a sociopath—and they can be very hard to spot, by the way.”

  DeMarco said, “Let’s assume he’s exactly what he appears. He’s a good, decent man. So when the fog clears…?”

  She thought for a moment. “He’ll be horrified. Even beyond that. In all likelihood, he would take his own life.”

  “But he didn’t. He walked outside. And he kept walking, all the way up to Lake Wilhelm. Just over three miles from his house.”

  “Then he detached. Disassociated.”

  “He just blanked it out?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “But for all intents and purposes, yes. He suppresses the knowledge of what happened because it’s just too horrific to face.”

  “So he goes walking out into the woods. And maybe he’s still walking. Doesn’t know who he is or where he’s going?”

  “Everybody is different. I mean, there are certain patterns to human behavior, sure, but I’m no expert on this…”

  “You’re the best I have at the moment.”

  “Maybe he’s amnesic,” she said. “Maybe he’s not. Maybe it all seems unreal to him. Like a bad dream he can’t quite remember.”

  “That’s sort of what I was afraid of,” DeMarco said.

  “Because it makes his movements impossible to predict.”

  DeMarco nodded.

  She waited for him to continue, but he remained motionless, eyes lowered, one thumb moving back and forth across the other hand’s knuckles.

  Softly she said, “You think he didn’t do it.”

  He looked up at her and smiled. He saw her again with her hair down the night they had gone to dinner. Penne with portobello sauce for her, pasta puttanesca for him. He had ended up eating half of her dinner while she drank too much wine, drank too much on purpose, she later admitted, so that she would have the courage to say what she had said.

  Now, looking at her and remembering, he felt his left eye begin to water. He blinked, rubbed his eye, moved his gaze just slightly to the left, over her shoulder, to a blank spot on the wall. “You advised me once that if I truly want to understand somebody’s actions, I have to get outside myself and inside that person’s head, try to see the world the way they do.”

  “I advised you a lot of things. Most of which you totally ignored.”

  “I’m just trying to understand Huston from all possible angles.”

  Her voice grew even softer. “I wish you would look at me when we talk, Ryan.”

  He moved his gaze back to her face. “I need to talk about Thomas Huston now.”

  She lifted her chin slightly higher, inhaled, and lost the melancholy smile. “So if he didn’t do it himself but…what? Saw it happen? Discovered it after it happened?”

  “Either way. Is he going to blank it out or not?”

  “Would you?”

  DeMarco put both hands on the armrests, got ready to push himself up. “That’s a big fucking help, Jayme. You sure you need only nine more credits?”

  She leaned back in her chair. “You look tired, Ryan.”

  He stood. “I’ve been spending too much time in the pool at the country club. I like to sit underwater and look at women’s legs.”

  “You still like them long and thin?”

  “Jayme,” he said.

  She said, “I could make that penne with mushroom sauce you like.”

  “Rain check,” he told her, and pulled open the door and stepped out.

  He was three steps down the hall when he thought he heard her mutter, “Fuck you and your rain checks.” Or maybe it was only inside his head.

  Eight

  In his office, DeMarco checked in with the borough police who were monitoring the Huston home on Mayfield Road. “What’s it like down there?” he asked.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the officer told him. “TV news trucks all up and down the road. It’s crazy. Half a dozen people with microphones standing in the front yard of an empty house.”

  “What are the chances you can get them out of there? Off Mayfield entirely?”

  “They’ll raise hell and start calling lawyers.”

  “Close the street,” DeMarco said. “Except for local traffic. Tell the newsies their presence is interfering with an
ongoing investigation. Tell them we’ll hold a press conference soon.”

  “Where do you want me to put them?”

  “It’s your town, Officer. You decide.”

  “That empty lot where the farmers market sets up on Saturdays, it’s only two blocks away.”

  “And no farmers market now?”

  “Maybe three, four stands altogether. Apples, late season produce.”

  “So crowd the news trucks together in the back corner, keep the main entrance free for the produce stands.”

  “That should work. When’s the press conference scheduled?”

  “I’ll let you know. Thanks for your assistance. I appreciate it.”

  He went down the hall then, to Bowen’s office. The station commander was using a hand mirror to look at the underside of his chin.

  DeMarco said, “Pimple cream not working?”

  Bowen laid the mirror atop his desk. “Something you want?”

  “Did you schedule a press conference yet?”

  “As soon as I get your report. How’s noon tomorrow for you?”

  “Count me out of any press conferences.”

  “You’re leading the investigation. At your insistence, I might add. How about you follow protocol and let your team do the legwork?”

  “We’re dealing with a celebrity here, and not just a local one. I know this man. I know more about the way he thinks than you know about the way you think.”

  “Which is yet another reason why you should handle the press conference.”

  DeMarco shook his head. “I’m way too pretty for the camera. You’re not.”

  “Listen—”

  DeMarco turned and headed back out the door. “You’ll have my report within the hour.”

  At his own desk again, DeMarco stared at the sleeping computer monitor. He envied the monitor’s ability to shut itself down from time to time, to turn off the images, extinguish the lights. You look tired, Jayme had said.

  “I am tired,” he told the monitor. He stared a while longer, then pulled himself out of it.

  “All right. If I have to stay awake, so do you.” He jerked the mouse across its pad. The monitor flickered to life.

  In the Google search box, he typed the phrase Thomas Huston parents, then read through the long list of hits. Most of the articles were reviews of Huston’s books. But two were profiles of Huston and his latest novel, The Desperate Summer, a book released three and a half years after his parents’ deaths.

  The first profile referred to The Desperate Summer as “the author’s first work following the tragic loss of both parents, one by murder, the other by suicide two weeks later.” The other profile, from Poets & Writers, recounted how a wild-eyed junkie had walked into the Hustons’ hardware store, demanded money, was refused, pulled out a Sig Sauer 9mm and shot Cynthia Huston once in the throat and twice in her chest. He then shot David Huston an inch and a half above his heart. Then emptied the magazine, with no effect, into the black Hayman MagnaVault against the wall behind the counter.

  The interview section of the profile probed even more deeply.

  P&W: I think it’s fair to say that The Desperate Summer is your darkest story to date. So is it fair to assume that the novel was colored by the circumstances of your parents’ deaths?

  TH: I had come up with the basic story line well prior to that. But I did most of the writing in the nine or ten months after. And yes, the story line changed, as they always do.

  P&W: Changed because that’s the nature of stories? Or because of your parents’ deaths?

  TH: Both, I’m sure.

  P&W: I’m thinking particularly of the protagonist. Joshua Kennedy has some very dark moments.

  TH: He does indeed.

  P&W: Do those moments reflect the author’s own state of mind at the time?

  TH: Well, every character is, in some way, the author. Some aspect of the author. So, in that case… Listen, to suddenly be orphaned, even at thirty-five years old… I mean, when are the sudden and violent deaths of people you love not a shock? So yes, of course it affected the writing. Of course some of my own thoughts at that time found their way into the novel.

  P&W: Now that you have some distance from those events, have you found some peace, some acceptance of what happened?

  TH: Distance? You’ve never lost anyone you loved, have you? There’s no such thing as distance.

  At that point in the profile, the interviewer shifted gears, moved on to a consideration of the author’s work in progress, a novel tentatively titled D. Still, DeMarco found Huston’s brief responses revealing. It was clear that Thomas Huston, like his character, suffered some very dark moments. But dark enough to cause him to slaughter his own family?

  DeMarco knew The Desperate Summer well; it was his favorite of the author’s three books. The fictional Joshua Kennedy, in anguish over his daughter’s rape and his son’s arrest for dealing drugs, vents his frustration with the judicial system and with life in general by resorting to petty crimes—first graffiti, then shoplifting, then vandalism of municipal property. He finds his son’s stash of ecstasy, but instead of destroying it, he samples the drug and spends the next three days in a motel room with a twenty-four-year-old girl, one of his son’s friends. Did that necessarily imply that Thomas Huston himself had ever resorted to crime, drug use, and infidelity as a release from his pain? Of course not. But DeMarco found it interesting that the author would conceive of those activities as emollients for his character’s anger and grief.

  The sting of his parents’ deaths was still raw in Huston after three and a half years. Maybe it was still raw last Saturday night. Maybe it had been festering in him all this time, and some trivial thing—a sarcastic comment, a telephone call—had sent the poisons coursing through Huston’s bloodstream, igniting in him a fury that literary palliatives could no longer suppress.

  DeMarco made a mental note to pull Huston’s phone records from that night. If he could get a handle on Huston’s frame of mind, maybe he could make an intelligent guess as to where to look for the writer.

  In the meantime, he returned to surfing the Internet. Forty minutes later, he came across a promising article Huston had written for The Writer magazine, “Becoming Your Fiction.” It cost DeMarco thirty dollars to subscribe online and access the article.

  In the article, Huston advised aspiring writers on the importance of honing their observational skills, of listening for nuances of speech patterns, finding the gestures and body language that reveal the nature of hidden thoughts, those small but telling physical details that reveal underlying character traits. “Get into the habit of watching people and listening,” Huston had written. “This is your research. Anywhere you can conduct it—at the mall, at a sidewalk café, on a bus or a train or a busy city street—this is your classroom.

  “Next, you must learn to translate this observational skill from real people to your characters. You have to come to know your character inside and out, know her history, her childhood, all the traumas and triumphs that made her who she is at the moment your story begins. Only then can you become that character as she makes those choices that will propel the story forward. You, the author, sitting there in your comfortable chair, typing away, must simultaneously be the character who is reacting to her lover’s betrayal, her promotion, or to that bus speeding toward her down the highway. Because only by becoming that character can you know with any authenticity how she will react to those situations. And only then will she be a credible, believable character. Only then will she be real.”

  DeMarco leaned back in his chair, stared at the blinking curser. He put himself in Huston’s place, saw himself coming to each of the bedroom doorways, tried to envision Huston’s horrific moment of recognition. Wife dead, throat slit. Son dead, throat slit. Daughter dead, throat slit. Baby dead, stabbed through the heart.

  The rage,
the grief, it would have gone off in his head like a mushroom cloud, DeMarco thought. The cloud would have blossomed and swelled and filled every crevice and crenellation in his brain. It would have seeped into every cell, numbed and choked and suffocated them.

  It was not difficult for DeMarco to imagine. He could see himself inside Huston’s house. He staggered from one room to the next. He had to see, make sure, prove wrong what he already knew. The recognition that they were gone, all gone, would be too much to bear.

  How could he bear it? DeMarco wondered. One child alone was too much to bear. You never get over something like that, can never shut out the images. The glass will always be shattering, spraying across your face. Laraine will always be screaming, always pounding her fists against your chest. He was slipping back into his own memory then, and he knew it, but he didn’t care. Sometimes he even wanted to feel sliced apart again by the pain of it, needed to go sliding down that dark, rain-slick street…

  He felt a shadow in the doorway then and looked up. Trooper Morgan was watching him. “Aerial report is negative,” Morgan said.

  “Yeah,” said DeMarco, his throat dry and hoarse. He could feel the stream of dampness on his left cheek, could taste salt in the corner of his mouth.

  “Park commissioner wants to know if they can open up the trails again.”

  DeMarco took a slow breath, swallowed hard. “Please remind the park commissioner that in all probability, there is still an armed suspect in those woods. So he can open the fucking trails when I am damn good and sure no more throats are going to be slit open.”

  Morgan nodded but otherwise did not move.

  “That’s it,” DeMarco told him. “Thanks.”

  Morgan stood motionless ten seconds longer, then finally turned away.

  DeMarco dragged a hand across his face, then wiped his hand dry on a pant leg.

  Nine

  To keep the nausea from driving him to his knees again, to keep his brain from feeling swollen too big for his skull, his heart so huge with a fiery ache that it would crush the air from his lungs, Thomas Huston struggled to focus his attention on the surroundings. These woods are ugly, dark, and deep, he thought. He was cold and his clothes still damp and sticking to his skin. He repeatedly ran a hand across his face, but he could not brush away the feeling of cobwebs.