The Mentor

by Lee Matthew Goldberg

  “This morning when he woke up, he was a different man. He looked in the mirror and was no longer the man he used to be. His hair had changed color, blond now, full of waves. He was younger, leaner, looking more like the boy who sat in the back of the classroom than the professor himself. But maybe that is who he really was all along. He realizes this as he begins the day that will define the rest of his life. The day he’ll take the girl to the shack in Devil’s Hopyard … but won’t allow her to ever leave.”

  27

  NOT HAVING EATEN lunch yet, Kyle found a spot at the bar in the Royal Wee and ordered a turkey club while he continued reading Devil’s Hopyard. The place had a publike feel, Patriots and Red Sox paraphernalia on the walls and an empty pool table in the back, its felt eroding. A few regulars were spread out at various tables and the Pixies quietly played from the jukebox. The bartender vaguely resembled William’s daughter Alicia, but Kyle had met the twins only once and that was a long time ago so he couldn’t be sure. He’d question her once he finished his lunch, since he was eager to find out what happened next in the manuscript anyway and figured he could use a break from being a detective after the weird experience with Mia’s mother. He opened the book to chapter 27.

  This morning when he woke up, he was a different man. He looked in the mirror and was no longer the man he used to be. His hair had changed color, blond now, full of waves. He was younger, leaner, looking more like the boy who sat in the back of the classroom rather than the professor himself. But maybe that is who he really was all along. He realizes this as he begins the day that will define the rest of his life. The day he’ll take the girl to the shack in Devil’s Hopyard … but won’t allow her to ever leave.

  There it was, evidence planted by William to make Kyle appear guilty, although he hadn’t used Kyle’s name yet. Evidently, this was William’s plot twist three quarters into the book—the professor no longer the villain, that title taken over by his protégé. Kyle read on as the prose, strangely, switched to first person.

  Up until now, I have imagined myself to be someone I’m not, someone I aspired to be—my professor, my mentor. Who may have guided me away from a path of drugs and crime for the time being, but the truth is that our true selves never change. Those born rotten are forever waiting to spoil. The things I wrote about Mia before were just fantasies. This is REAL.

  I see her in class, a few feet away, no one else in the room yet. We haven’t spoken since our knock-down, drag-out fight in the Commons. She will NOT look my way. I tell her I’ve hunted the campus all night looking for her. She asks if it was to apologize, and I tell her yes even though I know it’s not true. It is she who should be apologizing to me.

  “Let’s skip class,” I say. “There is a place I want to take you to.”

  “I think I might know where you mean,” she says. “But you’ll get in trouble for leaving.”

  “So will you.”

  “You’ll be in more trouble.”

  She’s wearing a crop top and has just washed her hair, not even waiting till it dried. She procures a joint from her bra and dashes out the door. I follow her down the hallway as another student watches us go, and we burst out on the quad into the pouring rain.

  “Is this place indoors?” she asks, and I nod.

  We get into my car and I’m nervous behind the wheel. I steal a kiss. I know from now on that it is the last kiss she’ll give me without being forced. But this is what she deserves. She used me and every other guy she’d been with, all of us trophies, none of us real loves. I loved her with all of my heart, so now I will take hers.

  We enter Devil’s Hopyard as the rain ramps up. It’s hard to see the trails in front of us, but I know the way. I’ve gone down these paths many times before in anticipation of today, and I could get there blindfolded. When we reach the shack, I see it’s surrounded by briar patches and overgrown weeds, hidden by nature. Nature is working with me.

  She gets out of the car and becomes swallowed by the rain, her knees knocking together as she shivers by the door to the shack. I’ve added locks and a dead bolt that only I have the keys to, and I open the door to her new home. Inside smells damp. There is a mattress with a blanket, a small CD player with batteries installed, and a pair of handcuffs attached to a clasp under the floorboards and tucked into the blanket out of sight.

  “How romantic,” she says, but she’s being sarcastic. She goes over to the CD player and pushes Play. Classical music comes out from the small speakers, Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. “Not really my taste.” She turns off the music and sits on the bed. She finds the handcuffs. “Kinky,” she says, holding up one end. She takes off her shirt and handcuffs herself, securing it tight and doing most of the work for me.

  “Come over to the bed,” she says, with a curl of her finger.

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?” she asks, pouting.

  “’Cause you’ve been bad.”

  “So give me a spanking.”

  “You deserve worse than that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t love me.”

  “I’m too young to fall in love. And that’s okay. This doesn’t have to be love, it can just be for now.”

  “But you’ll go away one day. You’ll leave me. I know it.”

  I back up toward the door and take the CD player with me. “You didn’t appreciate the music I chose anyway.”

  A worry line in the shape of a lightning bolt appears on her forehead.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she asks.

  “This is so you can see the mistake you’ve made, so you can learn from it. So you’ll know how it feels to be rejected.”

  I open the door and let in a biblical-size flood of rain. She stares at me, unsure if I’m kidding but leaning toward the fact that I’m serious.

  “I’ll scream,” she says, tears in her eyes now, her face flush with fear.

  “No you won’t,” I tell her, whipping out a dirty cloth from my pocket. I step toward her and she puts up her free hand in defense. I grab it and cuff her with the other end of the handcuffs. She snarls and tries to bite my arm, but I stuff the cloth into her mouth and tie it behind her head. Then I kiss her on the mouth, tasting cloth. Her screams are nothing more than quiet muffles. She realizes now that this is far from a game. I will leave her to think about what she’s done to me. Before I shut the door, I zero in on her rapidly beating heart and whisper, “Soon.”

  Then I slam the door and lock the dead bolt. I collect all the brushwood around the shack so it’s camouflaged even more and drive away into a rain that is finally starting to cease.

  * * *

  “YOU SURE ARE into whatever it is you’re reading,” the bartender said. She wore a tattered Ramones T-shirt, her dyed-white hair pinned up in a bun. She cleaned a glass with disdain. “What’s it about?”

  Kyle glanced up, not ready to be thrust back into reality. He had entered Devil’s Hopyard and lost all sense of place and time. He hated to admit it, but that was usually the mark of a writer with true talent.

  “It’s hard to explain the plot,” he said, making sure to cover up the title printed in italics on the top page. He didn’t know whether she had seen it or not.

  “I’m always looking for a good book,” she said. “My father’s a writer, he’s at work on his debut novel now.”

  “Your father wouldn’t happen to be William Lansing, would he?”

  She stopped cleaning the glass and poked her tongue into her cheek.

  “I’m Brett Swenson,” he said, choosing not to reveal who he really was in case she recognized the name Kyle Broder from years ago. “Your father is signing with me at Burke & Burke Publishing.”

  He extended his hand and she shook it, hers sweaty and with a powerful grip.

  “Alicia, nice to meet you.”

  He saw elements of William in her face, mostly in her smile that struggled to stay upright. She already had faint traces of jowls from frowning.


  “I’m doing a profile on Professor Lansing, it’s pretty standard for new authors who we feel will have lasting careers with us. It’s best if he doesn’t know about it.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “I don’t want the profile to be colored by his input. Do you have a few minutes?”

  She gave a laugh and gestured around. “As you can see, we’re booming.”

  A heavy-set couple sat in the back and tore into their hamburgers. At the bar, an old man sipped what looked to be milk.

  “I’d like to know more about this town, since your father spent so much of his life here.”

  “Killingworth? You got about a minute, that should cover it.”

  “Humor me.”

  “How about a beer while I’ll tell you?” she said. He nodded and she poured a pint. “Old Dad’s about to become famous, huh?”

  “Could happen. So how would you describe Killingworth?”

  She tapped her chin. “Well, let’s see. Typical small New England town, blue collar as opposed to wealthy, but we’re changing some. Got a fancy new wine and cheese shop on Main.”

  “I saw it.” He took out a notepad and pretended to scribble down some stuff. “Anything of note ever happen here?”

  “How you mean?”

  “Something that ever made the papers? Small towns like this usually have some buried secrets.”

  She placed her hand on her hip. “What’s this gotta do with my dad?”

  “It’s just to give a sense of background.”

  She popped a piece of gum in her mouth, chewing slowly. Had he pushed things too far? Was he being obvious? He had no choice but to continue pressing.

  “I heard about a girl who went missing here years ago,” he said carefully. “She was a student at Bentley College, where your father teaches.”

  Alicia took some milk from the fridge and topped off the old man at the end of the bar, who resembled William S. Burroughs. Burroughs gave an appreciative nod.

  “Her name was Mia Evans,” Kyle said.

  “Course I remember that. I had just started high school at the time. Whole town had a curfew for weeks. I remember sneaking out once, thinking I might be abducted.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Alicia shrugged her shoulders. She picked up a remote and changed the TV channel to a soccer match.

  “What’s the point of soccer?” she asked. “Score is zero to zero and it’s almost over.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” he said, ratcheting up his flirting by extending his smile. “Give me football any day. You a Pats fan?”

  “Sure am. Pats are the best team of this century, no one can argue that.”

  Even though Kyle was a die-hard Green Bay fan, he played along. “And Brady is by far the best quarterback.”

  She licked her teeth in agreement.

  “Nothing bad probably happened to that girl back then,” Alicia finally said. “She had a pill-popping mother, and she was losing her scholarship at Bentley because she was flunking out. She just ran away. It’s happened before.”

  “How do you know that for sure?”

  “She had plenty of time as the face of this town,” Alicia said, her cheeks getting red. “Fliers and posters and constant sympathy for months. People crying who didn’t even know her. And they made her into this angel. Sweet Mia Evans, what a tragedy.”

  “She wasn’t an angel?”

  “No way. By fifteen she was hanging out in truck stops, selling E, going to raves with guys she’d pick up. She went to my high school, although not when I was there. Still, she was spoken about a lot. A legend, but not for any good reasons.”

  “That doesn’t mean she deserved to go missing.”

  Alicia snarled and rubbed at a yin-yang tattoo on the side of her neck. “I didn’t say that. I just hate when someone comes off very different from who they really are.”

  “She was a student of your father’s, wasn’t she?”

  Alicia rubbed the yin-yang tattoo harder. A swelling surrounded its shape, making it look as if she’d gotten a hickey right on the tattoo.

  “My dad didn’t know her,” she mumbled.

  “Oh, I thought she was in his class—”

  “No!” She slapped the counter, causing Burroughs’s glass of milk to wobble a bit. She rubbed her forehead. “Sorry, got a bitch of a migraine coming on. That’s why a bar is a good place for me to work, barely any light all day.”

  “What else can you tell me about your father?” he asked. “I’m sorry we got off track. When I brought up that I was going to Killingworth to my boss, he mentioned the missing girl. Just had her on my brain—”

  “S’all right,” she said, waving him off and pinching the bridge of her nose. “This is a bitch of one.” She closed her eyes, grimacing.

  “You have a twin brother, don’t you?”

  One eye rose, skeptical. “Yeah, Bill. So?”

  “Is he here? Can I talk to him?”

  “I’m not his keeper,” she said flatly. “He comes and goes. Not here now, but you’re welcome to keep spending your money on beers if you want to wait for him.”

  She pointed to his half-empty glass. Kyle chugged it down and signaled for another.

  “I’ll let you get back to that book you were reading in the meantime,” she said with a smirk. “What was the title again?”

  “Doesn’t have one,” he replied. “It hasn’t been published yet.”

  “Well, from the way you couldn’t take your eyes off of it, I’m guessing it’ll be a bestseller.”

  She poured him another beer and left it foaming in front of his nose. He took a frothy sip and left a good tip as she wet a hand towel and draped it over her forehead. She leaned back, masked by the towel, and eased into the groove between the cash register and the top shelf liquors.

  Kyle plunged back into Devil’s Hopyard. Although he wished he’d been able to get more out of William’s daughter, he was satisfied by his detective abilities so far. With each subject, he was only getting better.

  He was also dying to read farther into the manuscript, about to inch closer and closer to whatever dark fantasy William dreamed up to be its end.

  28

  DEVIL’S HOPYARD—CHAPTER 28

  I made sure to head to the shack in Devil’s Hopyard every day with her favorite foods. I know she loved sour apple Blow Pops, so I left a bag in reach, among other more nutritional items. When I got there, she wouldn’t eat or drink anything. The cloth had slipped from her mouth, and her lips had become dry and started to blister and tear. She couldn’t sit up straight.

  “I’m killing myself so I won’t give you the satisfaction of doing it,” she said, a knife in my heart.

  “Who says I want to kill you?” I asked, but she was right. How else could this end but in death? First hers, eventually mine. Even if I didn’t want to admit that to myself.

  After she passed out, I raised her skirt to get a view of her heart-shaped tattoo, no bigger than a quarter. I traced it with my finger well into the middle of the night.

  Later on, I thought I remembered going to sleep in my own bed, but when I woke up I was strapped to a different one. It smelled damp. At first I thought I might have passed out in the shack, since it had been an exhausting last few days. But this dampness felt more like I was in a basement. I could turn my neck slightly and saw a tiny, rectangular window with bars, letting in the only light.

  A metal door swung open, and a massive bald man came toward me. I struggled to get out of the straps, but they were tight and made my limbs sore. The bald man removed a giant syringe and stuck me in the arm. I wanted to scream, but my voice was hoarse. A nurse walked in, metal clipboard in hand. She spoke, sounding like an echo. The drugs were coursing through my blood, but I’d set a high bar for myself ingesting everything under the sun, so whatever sedative they’d given hadn’t knocked me out yet.

  “What happened?” I managed to ask, the words slowly coming out. I could see them traveling t
hrough the air.

  The nurse looked as if she wanted to spit on me.

  “You admitted yourself,” she said.

  “That’s … impossible. Why would I do that?”

  She consulted her clipboard. “It says you were a harm to yourself.”

  “MYSELF?” I yelled. “What about her? She’s waiting for me!”

  The nurse gave the bald man a signal, and he jabbed the syringe into my arm again.

  “She’ll … die,” I said, before a whoosh battered my eardrums and I was sucked down a drain.

  * * *

  KYLE’S PHONE BUZZED. He stopped reading the manuscript only to see if it was Jamie. As much as he knew he had to come to Connecticut, he didn’t like the idea of her alone in the city, wide-open for William to possibly strike. He was surprised to see Sierra’s name on his cell instead. He went to answer, but then realized it would distract him from finishing Devil’s Hopyard. He had to know what happened next.

  So now it looked as if William was using Kyle’s time spent in an institution as a plotline. Rather clever, he thought. In reality, he wound up in one after being found naked in Devil’s Hopyard, but he never knew of a shack in the park, and Mia had already been missing for a while. And yes, he’d also quit drugs and then relapsed like the character in the book—how could he not? Losing Mia on top of being questioned by the police had been too much to handle. So he took a cocktail of bad stuff. He wandered the park thinking he was werewolf and howling at the moon. This family of hikers came across him shivering in a ditch, his skin blue. But he wasn’t strapped in when he woke up in the institution, at least not like William described. The straps were only around his wrists. And they had only given him a small sedative. Sure, there had also been an orderly who was massive and bald, but weren’t most orderlies massive and bald? More important, he never would have admitted himself because he hadn’t done anything crazy like handcuff and leave Mia Evans in a shack in Devil’s Hopyard!