“Are you asking?” Donald gazed into what was left of his drink. “Or only hopeful?”
“A little of both.”
“Missing your youth, Alan?”
“Almost.”
“Don’t worry, we’re not old yet,” he said softly. “We’re just not young anymore.”
Rick leaned forward. “I hate to interrupt you two and your stroll down memory-fucking-lane over here, but we got some important shit to talk about.”
“So talk,” I said. “You’re the one who called the meeting.”
Rick’s eyes swept across me, sized me up. He opened his mouth to say something but the waitress appeared with my beer and asked if he and Donald wanted anything else. Donald ordered another vodka and tonic. “All set, sweetie, thanks,” Rick said.
The waitress hesitated just long enough to give him a flirtatious smile then vanished.
“We need to decide what to do,” Donald said.
“Do?” I looked at him, then at Rick. “What’s there to do?”
Eventually Donald said, “Could Bernard have really done this? Could he have killed that girl?”
My immediate inclination was to tell him to keep his voice down, but the din in the bar was such that I could just barely hear him myself. “We don’t know for sure that he did, but—”
“Yes we do,” Rick said. “Don’t be an idiot.”
I sighed. “Look, all I’m saying is—”
“I just can’t seem to get my mind around this,” Donald interrupted.
Rick cracked his knuckles and fired Donald a cross look. “Donny thinks we should turn the tape over to the cops.”
“I said we should consider it.”
“All that’s going to do is drag us right into the middle of this,” I said.
Donald looked at me with glazed eyes. “We’re already right in the middle of this.” He threw back the remainder of his drink just as the waitress appeared with a refill. Once she’d gone, he lit a cigarette and continued. “Look, we’re in possession of potential evidence here. We need to do the right thing, and the right thing, it seems to me, is to at least consider turning the tape over to the authorities.”
“No,” Rick snapped. “Fuck that.”
I took a gulp of beer, ran the cold bottle across my forehead. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to give it to the police. Rick has a point, with all the news coverage this thing is getting, why draw attention to ourselves?”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Donald said. “What is it with you two? The entire area is in a panic. People think a killer is on the loose in Potter’s Cove, and if what Bernard said was true, it won’t end here. More bodies will be found. We’re going to have something on our hands here the likes of which this town has never seen.”
“And eventually it’ll pass.” Rick pushed his cola aside, put his hands flat on the table between us and again leaned in close. “What’s done is done, Donny. That tape’s not gonna bring anybody back to life, it’s not gonna prove a goddamn thing, and turning it over to the cops isn’t gonna do anything except get our names in the paper. I tried to make this crystal fucking clear before. I’m an ex-con. I don’t need the cops up my ass, snooping around my personal life. I want nothing to do with any of this, you hear me? Nothing. I got no doubt Bernard told the truth on that tape, that he did this shit for real. But it’s over. It’s not like he can kill again and we can do something to stop it—that’d be different—he’s dead and buried. There won’t be no more victims.”
“Fine, what if I turn it over to them? I’ll say it came to me and—”
“No chance.”
“Look, this isn’t just your decision. This involves all three of us.”
Rick shook his head. “I’m making the final call.”
“This is absurd.” Donald gave me a pleading look. “Alan, for Christ’s sake, help me out here.”
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I’m with Rick on this one.”
His eyes searched mine. “Tell me why.”
“Because in the overall scheme of things, the tape doesn’t mean shit.”
Rick and Donald exchanged glances. “What’s that mean?”
“We all know there’s more to this than meets the eye,” I said. “The only way to get to the bottom of it, the only way we’ll ever know for sure who Bernard was and what he did is to go back to the beginning.” I powered down the rest of my beer, belched under my breath and explained my plan to construct a history of Bernard’s activities.
Donald drew on his cigarette, expression thoughtful. “I understand your desire to put all of this into some semblance of order, Alan, sincerely I do. But…”
“But what?”
“Aren’t things bad enough? The deeper we delve into this the higher the odds that we’ll begin to open doors that are almost certainly better left closed.”
“We might find even worse things,” Rick added. “Things we don’t want to know.”
“Yeah.” I nodded at him through the graceful trails of smoke weaving between us. “We just might.”
“Then what’s the point?” Rick shrugged. “We can just keep our mouths shut, lay low and wait until the storm passes, you see what I mean?”
“Are you afraid of what we might find, Rick?”
His features hardened. “I’m not the one who freaked out and saw shit that wasn’t there, now was I?”
I set the empty beer bottle on the table and pushed it closer to the edge, ignoring the desire to smash it over his head. “You do what you want. I’m going to get to the truth.”
“A young woman was butchered and left in a shallow grave in a field the town uses to bury dead animals,” Donald said flatly. “Bernard almost certainly did it to her and who knows how many others, and the entire time we never even suspected he was a psychopath. That’s the truth, Alan. How much more do we need to know?”
Rick gave an enthusiastic nod. “Finally making some goddamn sense, Donny.”
A sudden cheer from a group of young men at one of the pinball machines startled us, and we turned in unison to look. “High score!” one of them yelled.
Donald rolled his eyes. “Notify the networks.”
I laughed lightly without really thinking about it. Odd, how laughter could defy the darkness of nearly any situation. But it was out of place here, and dissipated quickly. “Are you sure we never suspected what Bernard was doing?” I let the words hang between us for a few seconds. “Or did we just ignore it, not pay particular attention? Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe there’s so much in the past we can’t remember or don’t want to remember that what really terrifies us is what we might find out about ourselves.”
Rick stabbed a finger at me. “Listen, when you had your problem with the shit you were seeing, who was there to help you out? When you were outside my apartment all freaked out and in the middle of a total fucking breakdown, who was there to get you home?”
“You were, and I appreciate it. What’s your point?”
“Yes, Bernard wasn’t who we thought he was. Yes, bad shit happened and people died. But there’s a limit to how much of this heebie-jeebies bullshit I can deal with. That’s my fucking point, OK?”
“You said yourself something more was happening here,” I reminded him. “Didn’t you have the nightmares too? Didn’t you have the dark thoughts, the fear, just like Donald and I had? That is what you said, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Oh, so now that a body shows up and all this becomes something real, all bets are off? Time to go hide under the bed, is that it?”
“What the fuck are you trying to prove, Alan? That shit goes bump in the night? That maybe there’s stuff at work here that we never asked to know about and don’t want any part of anyway?” He looked to Donald for support but got none. “Remember on the tape when Bernard talked about waking up in the middle of the night and hearing something, a sound that’s not supposed to be there? Remember how he said we usually just roll back over and go to
sleep? Well, I say that’s the smart move here, OK? I say we just roll over, go back to sleep and wait for morning.”
“You do what you want,” I said again. “But I’m telling you that whatever it is out there in the dark making those noises isn’t going to just go away, Rick. Bernard was connected to it, and we were connected to Bernard. Bernard’s gone, but it’s still here.”
Donald tilted his glass, slid some ice cubes into his mouth and crunched them. “And what would ‘It’ be, precisely?”
“I don’t know yet,” I answered. “But I’m going to find out.”
“Could be a Pandora’s Box.”
“This goes back years,” I told them. “Things happened in the neighborhood, in that house, and later, when we were all adults. Dark things. And somehow they all tie together.”
Rick leaned back against the booth, pulled his money clip from his pocket and fired some bills onto the table. “Tell you what, you decide to start making some fucking sense, you let me know.”
“Evil.”
The word froze him. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He swallowed so hard I saw his throat bob. “What about evil?”
“I think Bernard conjured it. I think he was responsible for it.”
“Yeah, real magical bastard, Bernard,” he snorted. “I wish you could sit over here so you could hear yourself saying this shit. You sound like a fucking mental case.”
“Stop it, Rick,” Donald said suddenly.
“Well, for Christ’s sake—”
“Just stop it.” Donald rubbed his eyes. “Don’t do that to him.”
Rick waved his hands, dismissing us. “Whatever.”
“I’m hearing those noises in the night and I’m going to go see what they are,” I said. “Now are you coming with me or are you going back to sleep? We’re either in this together or we’re not. In or out, Rick? What’s it going to be?”
Anger, maybe something more, simmered in his eyes. “I’m in. OK, you fuck? I’m in.”
I looked to Donald. He answered with a slow nod.
“I’ll be in touch.” With the solemn faces of the dead still congregated in my mind, I slid from the booth and crossed the bar.
CHAPTER 13
The days were becoming longer, the nights shorter. In winter, night fell prior to six p.m., but with spring came a more gradual darkness that allowed daylight to linger. With my newfound anxiety, I welcomed the change, and had spent the early evening in the bedroom, sitting on a stool in the closet doorway rummaging through a storage box filled with old stories I’d written years before. It was only when reading became more difficult that I glanced at a window and realized the sun had finally gone down. Still, I continued to paw through the stacks of stories, there in the near dark, and although silly and often juvenile both technically and in content, the old tales seemed irrefutable evidence of whom I had once been, and that a dream had existed within me, a dream that in many ways had defined me. Or maybe still did.
The feeling that I had been joined by someone else in the room crept along my spine as Bernard’s taped voice played back in my mind. Do you ever go through your old stories? Shit, do you even still have them? Do you ever think about what might have been?
My eyes searched the room. Nothing.
The slam of a door nearly sent my heart out through my mouth, and I sprang from the stool so quickly I lost my balance. After staggering about I regained my footing and looked to the bedroom doorway. Toni stood there with a baffled expression.
“Are you all right?” It was all she ever asked anymore, and I couldn’t blame her.
I nodded, drew a deep breath and struck a casual pose.
“Did you get the message I left on the answering machine?”
“Yeah.” I glanced at my watch. “I didn’t realize you’d be so late.”
“Hadn’t planned to be, I was just going to work late for a bit, but then Martha called and asked if I wanted to get a bite to eat. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks so I figured, why not? Didn’t think you’d mind.”
Martha had always been exclusively Toni’s friend, not mine. We hadn’t gotten along since high school and probably never would, so we kept our distance. When Toni felt the need to socialize with her, she did so alone. “How is Martha?”
Apparently assuming it to be a rhetorical question, Toni offered no reply. I moved to the nightstand and turned on a lamp, but she remained in the doorway, just beyond its reach, a small purse dangling from one hand and the other at her side. Her skirt suit looked somewhat disheveled but I told myself that was normal since she’d been wearing it all day. “So you had to work late, huh?”
“I figured a little OT couldn’t hurt. I was behind this week anyway, had tons of paperwork to do, and Gene didn’t mind, so—”
“No, I bet he didn’t.”
I expected her to defend herself, or maybe to fight back. Instead, she said, “I saw the news earlier. Do they know anything else yet?”
“They’ve identified the woman, that’s all. Single mother from New Bedford.”
“Awful,” she said. “Just awful.”
“That it is.”
She made eye contact with me for the first time since she’d appeared in the doorway. “Do you really think Bernard had something to do with this?”
“Yes.” I sat at the foot of the bed. “And I don’t think it’s going to end here.”
“Then you have to go to the police. You have to tell them what you know.”
“I don’t have any proof. Not yet, anyway.”
She shook her head, placed a hand above her eyes. “This is beyond belief.”
I allowed a slight smile. “Tell me about it.”
“What about the tape he sent to Rick? Did it—”
“I need to ask you about that,” I interrupted. “I know you’ve spoken to Gene about all this, but I need to know if you mentioned the tape to him.”
“What I spoke to Gene about was the night you had those…problems. I never mentioned the tape or anything else we’ve discussed.”
“It’s very important that you tell me the truth about this.”
She stood perfectly still in the doorway. “I just did.”
I gave a reserved nod.
“Don’t you think you should turn the tape over to the police?”
“We decided against it.”
“Why don’t you want them to have it? I don’t understand.”
“Rick doesn’t want us involved in this anymore than we already are.”
“But—”
“And neither do I. Besides, we already put it to a vote.”
“A vote? You still behave as if you’re ten-year-olds playing in a tree fort, for God’s sake. This is a very serious situation, Alan.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what it is.” I let the words loiter awhile. “What I do need is for you to promise me that you won’t tell anyone else about the tape. Not Gene, not Martha, not anyone.” I could only hope the look on my face left no doubt as to how serious I was.
She stared at me for a time before she finally complied. “All right. I promise.”
“We’re going to handle this on our own, Rick and Donald and me. We’re going to get to the bottom of this shit pile one way or another.”
Toni wrestled with a frown. “But you just said you didn’t want to be involved.”
“We don’t want to involve or be involved with the police.”
“Sounds like something a criminal might say.”
I let it go. “We need to do this on our own, that’s all.”
“And what makes you think you’re equipped to do that?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Anger brewed just beneath the controlled exterior she was trying so furiously to sustain. “Right, what was I thinking? Not like it’s any of my business or anything.”
“A few weeks ago, I was crazy. Now a body turns up and all of a sudden—”
“I never said you were crazy, Alan
. It’s just—I mean, how could Bernard have done this? I just can’t fathom it. A man we’ve known for so many years, someone who was there at our wedding, who we had in our home, had conversations with and socialized with and ate with and laughed with and shared so much with, how could… Someone we trusted, for God’s sake. How could he have been slaughtering people at the same time? How could he be both of those things? Do you honestly believe he did this?”
I looked away. “I don’t know.”
Toni stepped into the room and noticed the box of manuscripts in the closet doorway. “Your old stories,” she said with a fondness that surprised me.
“Yeah, I was going through them before. Silly, I know.”
“No it isn’t. You should’ve never given up on your writing. You had such potential.”
“Can’t pay the rent with potential.”
“You should start again.”
“It’s the strangest thing.” I went to the closet and crouched next to the storage box. “Half the time I can’t remember what I was thinking ten minutes ago, but when I went through these stories I could remember exactly what I was feeling when I wrote every one of them, exactly what was going on in my life when I’d written them, and even what I was thinking when I’d written certain sentences.” I looked back over my shoulder at her. “Isn’t that something?”
She nodded and let her free hand rest on my shoulder. I studied it, so slender and delicate, the hand of a partner, a nursemaid, a lover, a friend, a vulnerable girl and a strong woman, victim and protector, predator and prey all residing beneath that soft skin, so many sides to the same being bound by a single soul. I turned away, packed the papers back into the box and slid the entire thing into the rear of the closet where I’d found it. By the time I’d closed the closet door and turned back in Toni’s direction she’d tossed her purse onto the bed and begun to undress.
“Look,” I said in the gravest tone I could muster, “we have to keep this tape business and any suspicions we have about Bernard quiet and strictly between us, all right?”
“You already said that.” She draped her suit jacket over the foot of the bed and unbuttoned her blouse. “I heard you the first time.”
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