by Lee Thompson
She just stared at him. He couldn’t read her, figured her dad couldn’t either, and it might have been driving Mitch a little crazy the past couple months, trying to raise her on his own; or even worse, with Aria’s help.
Jack said, “It will get easier with time. You’ll always miss her, but other people you care about a lot will help you cope.” He chuckled and said, “Am I just talking to myself here?”
Jessica rubbed her nose and leaned back into the couch cushion. She stared at the blank, paneled wall. Jack watched her for a moment longer and then turned back toward the dining room. He didn’t know where his wife had gotten off to, couldn’t hear a peep from her, but he could hear Mitch’s muffled voice in the kitchen. Caught snippets of what he said and felt himself cringe inside, knowing that there was a person inside there after all. He didn’t like to think that, it was easier to believe that Mitch was simply Pine with more class, better social skills, more patience.
He listened, glanced over his shoulder to see if Jessica had moved at all. She hadn’t. Looked like she might never rise from the couch and set down the incident that had scarred her. Too young for such pain, Jack thought, but it happened every day. He’d meant what he’d said to Mitch about them destroying their kids as much as they destroyed themselves. He didn’t want her or Aiden to suffer due to his or Mitch’s obsessions, but he couldn’t see any way around it.
He thought: You two will be okay, you’re young enough to bounce back from anything...
• • •
Mitch figured the best way to get the kid to understand why this was important to him was to just tell him the truth. It didn’t make it easy to do though. He wasn’t sure where to start, and he didn’t like admitting his faults.
Aiden stared at him. Mitch placed his hands on the table. He said, “It’s like this... I took my daughter for granted for most of her life. My wife too. I think my main focus was on impressing my father. I was working when Rebecca fell asleep at the wheel, and I was working when they found her car, her corpse, and our daughter catatonic in the back seat.
“She wouldn’t even let me hold her at first. All she could do was cry soundlessly. It’s the worst non-sound I ever heard, worst thing I’ve ever seen. Worse than watching my brother nail your dad to that tree. Worse than seeing her mother on the side of the road with a sheet covering her.
“She didn’t understand, we never talked about death, we were too busy living. She’d never had a pet. I kept her away from other kids because I didn’t want her repeating anything she might overhear from me or Pine or Aria or my father.
“I preferred her to be seen and not heard. That’s what fucking kills me. And she has been lately. I don’t want that anymore. I want to hear her laugh, and ask me questions, any questions, even the hard ones, and I want her to smile again and giggle and for her to be able to be a normal little girl.
“She’s more important than my dad or his business, more important than all the things I used to give priority. You’re her chance. Her only chance, I think, so do that good thing, the right thing, to make her whole again, and I will give you everything I have.
“If you don’t, I will take everything you ever cared about and dash it to pieces. It’s your call. I’ll give you a little time to think about it, kid, but you don’t have all night. I want results soon, in the next few hours or I’m going to have Pine come over here and do what he does best. Do you understand?” Mitch nodded to himself. “Good. Write down everything that happened a half hour before you healed all of us. Don’t leave anything out.”
Aiden leaned back in the chair and threw the ink pen at him. It hit Mitch in the chest.
“I deserved that, and more than that, but the sooner we dissect what happened and you recreate it, the faster I’ll be out of your family’s hair, so relax, all right?”
Aiden got up and went to the fridge, his back to Mitch, his thoughts suddenly still. He could hear well again, better than before, and there were voices chanting, drawing closer, and the snow was falling heavier, the rain gone, the wind dying down.
Mitch saw his shoulders tense, and asked, “What is it?”
Aiden closed the refrigerator, grabbed the pen from the floor, and wrote on the pad quickly: A bunch of people are coming...
Mitch was confused for a second, a bit doubtful once he understood what Aiden was saying. He stood and grabbed Aiden by the arm and said, “Take Jessica into your room and lock the door.” He pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed a number.
He was waiting for Aria to answer when Jack’s wife rushed into the kitchen carrying a shotgun and leveled it on his midsection.
• • •
Aria went back to Mitch’s house. Pine wasn’t there and she had no idea where he’d gone. He didn’t drive a car; no way would any of the family let him have that much control, or range. But he had a four-wheeler and she had seen its tracks, muted, in the recently fallen snow.
She went to Pine’s room quickly. She’d never been in there, never had reason to. If she’d had to guess what it would look like, she’d have been able to do so easily and quickly. She would guess that it was packed with horrendous artifacts which reflected his chaotic mind; piles of soiled clothing, ripe with his heady funk, by the end of the bed; a hidden altar in the closet where he prayed to an insatiable deity, one with a lean face, the hard, inhuman blue eyes, a mirror image of the worshipper.
The entire room would smell of the intense musk he secreted, and the sheets on his bed would be rumpled, stained, and damp with his sweat. She had never met another person who perspired as much as that boy.
But standing in front of the closed door, she hesitated, uncertain when Pine would return and what he would do to her if he caught her in his personal space, snooping through his keepsakes. Yet she couldn’t let him go on hurting Jessica. However long the child had been a victim of his lusts was already sickening, already too long.
She listened intently for the sound of his four-wheeler. All she could hear was the steady thump of her heart and her shallow breaths. She opened the door and turned on the light. His room was clean, orderly, the bed tightly made. Besides the night table, there was only a dresser. For a second she wondered if she might have mistakenly entered the wrong room, that Mitch might have moved him to another.
She could smell him though. She went to the dresser and opened the top drawer and saw an assortment of knives laid out with equal distance between each blade, a dark piece of cloth underneath them. There were seven instruments. They gleamed dully, and all showed signs of heavy use. Their handles were worn, and the blades had been sharpened so many times they were half what she guessed was their original width. The points of each were like needles. The thought of touching any of them turned her stomach. Plus, with the attention Pine gave them she figured he’d know the instant he slid the drawer open that someone had handled them.
She wanted to leave the room undisturbed if she could.
She closed the drawer and opened another. Pants. Another: Shirts, all neatly folded; the next was full of comic books. There were only two bottom drawers left and she considered forgetting them, and instead looking under his mattress and in the closet, but she moved stiffly to the window and opened it to rid the room of Pine’s stink and to alert her if he approached the house. The air was cold against the tips of her fingers and she rubbed her hands together as she walked back to the dresser and knelt in front of the two bottom drawers. She tried the one on the left first and found it wouldn’t budge. The one on the right offered the same kind of resistance.
She stared at it for a minute and then removed the drawer above each and set them to the side. She placed her hand inside the hollow and groped for a small lever, cold steel, and found it, about the size of a quarter. She frowned and pressed the button and the bottom drawers clicked open a half inch. She teased the one on the left open slowly.
He’d collected trophies. But, as with the contrast of how she had expected him to keep his living quarters to their act
ual condition, his memorabilia was orderly despite being grotesque.
Dozens of 8x10 photos were perfectly stacked and held together by a paperclip. There were strips of clothing tacked to a 4x6 inch piece of black felt; a small Tupperware container held bits of dried gristle Aria could only assume Pine had flayed from his victims.
She could not pierce his psychology. As far as she knew he had never murdered anyone, preferring instead to make them wish that he had. He liked to make people beg, and everyone had a point where their begging ended and they accepted their fate, but then it was no longer fun for the boy.
She pulled the stack of photos out and flicked each corner, counting them. Forty. She succumbed to the impulse to peruse them although when she came to a photo of Jack LeDoux nailed to the old oak, his blood pooled and dark against the trunk of the tree and the dried leaves, her heart ached and bile rose in her throat. His face was bloodless and slack in the picture. Any fight in him had long since passed. The quality of the photo was incredible, taken just as dawn broke, the first rays illuminating Jack’s new life and his horrible, accepting face.
Aria hadn’t been aware of how they had crippled him. There were many rumors, and of course, this had been one of them. Mickey never mentioned it, neither did his boys. She thought deep inside her husband was grateful for the actions they’d taken against Jack. There had been bad blood between the two of them before she had come along.
Deep in thought, it took her a second to realize that she’d heard the front door open.
The temperature dropped in the house. The breeze coming in from the window billowed the curtains. There were many occasions when a moment’s hesitation had cost other people life or limb, but she had never experienced anything like that.
The front door shut.
She didn’t have time to put the photos back as Pine had arranged them, let alone replace the drawers and escape the room. She could leave it all as it was and dive out the window but things had been building to a head since she became part of the O’Connell clan. And seeing Pine pawing at Jessica a little over an hour ago helped her make her choice. She’d stand and face him and damn the consequences.
She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed Mitch’s number.
She heard Pine’s footsteps in the hall, headed toward the room, and she heard Mitch say to leave a message. She began to panic, took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, casting her gaze left and right for anything she could use as a weapon. Everything had changed tonight and chances were they were about to change further.
She expected Mitch to call her back at any second and clutched her cell tightly. Pine was drawn by the light, she realized; he had left it off before he went out on his four-wheeler. She wondered which knife he had on him. She wondered if he’d kill her there, and if so, how he’d be able to hide it.
No, that train of thought wouldn’t work. She’d claw his eyes out, bite him, mark him. They’d all know. He already had a lump on his forehead that she’d given him. She would give him as many more as she could before she parted ways with this life.
She dialed Mitch’s number again when she heard Pine pause in the hall, probably listening for the sound of a presence in his room.
The call went to voice mail. She said, “Pine is molesting your daughter. I love her and I love you, but you need to stop your brother...”
And then she hung up with tears in her eyes, with her hands shaking uncontrollably, and he was there in the doorway, she could see him through the mist, but it was Elroy’s voice that said, “What are you doing in here?”
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and composed herself the best she could and laughed in relief.
Elroy frowned. He said, “We have to put that stuff back before he comes home.”
• • •
After planting the bombs, Bobby snuck out of the school the way he’d entered it. The night felt heavier, colder, the rain from earlier had turned to snow and was falling so fast he couldn’t see ten feet in front of him. For a second he feared that he’d lose his sense of direction and stumble off into the ditch, or into the forest behind the school, or walk straight into the wall. But his instincts, he told himself anyway, were sharp. He had nothing to worry about. The deed was done, now all there was to do—whether inside the water tower, or out in the dead, wet night—was wait for morning.
How difficult would it be to sleep when you knew that you were finishing what others had started? He couldn’t imagine he’d sleep at all. It wasn’t like he was going to be there with them as they died. Watching, yes, waiting for the emergency responders, but that would be easy. It wouldn’t take long and it’d all be over. They’d write books about him, they’d look into his life and his father’s life, and they’d find things to feed the media frenzy. There would be outrage and tears for children and teachers.
And what would his mother think? Forget it. He knew what she’d think and he didn’t have the energy to dwell on it.
He slipped in the snow and caught himself and grew angry. Stupid weather. If it was still going like this in the morning they’d cancel school and he couldn’t have that. It was a consideration he hadn’t planned for. Should have made the bombs detonate by remote control instead of timers, but he didn’t know anything about remote controls and he would have worried that someone’s cell phone, or something else, would have set them off anyway.
The ground disappeared beneath his right foot and he pitched forward, his arms pinwheeling backwards, his breath pluming, and a short, sharp cry exploding from his throat.
He hit the ground and rolled, and snow and water wet his neck and cheeks and hands.
He lay there for a second, unhurt, but startled. The sky was a vast white nothingness.
Bobby sat up, the seat of his pants wet. He’d been going too deep into his own head, which he felt had always been one of his greatest strengths and most massive flaws.
He dug his fingers into the frozen grass beneath him and got up and shook himself off like a wet dog. The cold clung to him. He saw something in the snow straight ahead, just a dark shape. He stepped toward it cautiously, one hand out in front of him, trying to distinguish what the shape might be. It was nearly five feet tall, blurred, squared off.
His imagination led him down a path where he had stumbled into a graveyard and he knew that what he’d find was a headstone with his name on it, the date of his birth, the day of his death, the epigraph reading: He lived a bit too long...
But the shape moved and a voice said from beyond the curtain of snow Bobby was parting, ten feet away now, “You up to some kind of mischief, Bobby?”
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Pine.”
“What do you want?”
“Saw you fall, wondered if you were hurt.”
“I’m okay,” Bobby said. “Thanks.”
“What are you doing out on a night like this?”
“Just walking.”
Pine turned on the headlight of his four-wheeler and it cut through the darkness easy enough, made the snowflakes glisten and sparkle. It was kind of beautiful, Bobby thought, he thought Cindy would have liked it, but then Pine said, “You need a ride somewhere?”
“I appreciate it, but no thanks. I ain’t got far to go.”
“You hate as much as the next person, don’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“Everybody is.”
“I’m talking about you, as an individual.”
He wasn’t sure what Pine wanted him to say. All Bobby wanted was to go home and change into a dry pair of clothes and set his alarm and curl up in a blanket for a few hours before he made the trek back to the water tower. That was if the snow let up and he could find his way. He still had no idea where he was; Pine rode his four-wheeler wherever he felt like.
“You hear me, Bobby?”
“I’m afraid of you, so what?”
“Good,” Pine said, “you should be. Especially
when it’s just me and you out here, all alone, and both of us concealed. It leads a man to wonder, doesn’t it? If maybe, once we learn to keep our eyes open, how opportunities present themselves which allow us to use our gifts. Hone them, if you like. What do you think?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m saying the two of us could be here right now because God wants us here. I was just praying for something to do because I was bored out of my skull, and then you stumble down that hill like a drunk and land almost in my lap. Like destiny, you know?”
Bobby knew and it scared the hell out of him.
He figured he should try and run, but then Pine was on his four-wheeler and there wasn’t outrunning that thing even if it’d been the middle of summer and he had all the energy of youth behind him.
He swallowed hard and said, “I’m not out to cause you any problems.”
“I want to hurt someone real bad,” Pine said.
“Hurt someone else.”
“I’d like to do that, but she’s not around and you are.”
“You do that, and then you should go into the school first thing in the morning and tell everybody there about it. They love hearing your stories.”
“Do they?”
“Sure.”
“That’s funny. I don’t ever tell anybody what I do because it’s none of their business and most of all it cheapens those experiences for me.”
“I’ve gotta get home, my dad’s expecting me.”
“Your dad and my dad are friends, aren’t they?”
“Well enough,” Bobby said.
He could see Pine chewing on his lip, and it made his blood chill in his veins, that moment before reaching a life-altering decision. If anyone had been able to ask him, he would have sworn that as the older boy sat there on that four-wheeler like some kind of hound from hell, Pine rubbed two fingers against a horn trying to break the skin on the center of his forehead. Bobby wanted to say, “You ain’t human. You haven’t ever been human...” But he couldn’t even form a word because his teeth were chattering and Pine started the four-wheeler and pulled up closer, giving Bobby a better look at him.