The Ashes (The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy Book 2)

by Vincent Zandri

  We head up the stairs. Rather, Mike jogs up the stairs, his feet slapping against the wood treads.

  I shush him.

  “Remember, Boo,” I say, in a forced whisper, “Molly and her mom go to bed early.”

  “I forgot,” he whispers back from the top of the stairs.

  I meet him at the top and follow him to his room. The second I walk in, I feel the cool air. That’s not right, I feel the cold wind. I’ll be damned, the window is wide open.

  “Hop in bed,” I say, going to the window, closing it.

  “Sorry, Trooper Dan,” I say in my head. “But I’m not about to crack open a window that’s going to end up opening wide on its own.”

  “That should do it,” I say, while Mike slides under the covers, all the way to his chin. “Must be the old weights in the window ballast,” I add, more for my benefit than his. “I’ll see if Sam can repair them.”

  “What’s window ballast?” Mike asks.

  “Never mind, Boo,” I say, going to him, giving him a kiss on the forehead. “You just get to sleep.”

  “Mom,” he says.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you like Sam? You know, like k-i-s-s-i-n-g in a tree kinda like?”

  I feel the blood fill my face. I guess I must be blushing.

  “Yes, Mike,” I say. “I do like Sam. I’m glad you like him too.”

  “It won’t be Mom versus Sam like it was Mom versus Dad a long time ago, will it?”

  His comment makes me laugh. But it also makes me sad.

  “No worries, Boo. It’s not Mom versus anyone.”

  “I’m glad that you’re happy,” he says. “Night, Mom.”

  “Night, Boo. Sweet dreams.”

  For what I pray will be the last time, I exit the bedroom.

  On my way down the hall, I check in on Molly. Her door is halfway open, so I poke my head in and take a quick look. She’s sleeping on her back, her mouth open, catching flies like my mother used to say. Her golden pigtails are spread out on her pillow like angel’s wings.

  Back out in the hall, I make my way past Robyn’s bedroom. I place one hand on the doorknob and give the wood door a gentle knock with the other. I wait for maybe four or five seconds before I decide not to push the issue. Robyn likes to get up early on weekdays while everyone else is sleeping and use the living room for her yoga.

  Walking away, I can’t help the feeling that morning can’t come fast enough.

  Back down in the kitchen, I spot Sam sitting at the far head of the table, sipping on a beer. Just seeing him sitting there, looking big, strong, and confident, makes me feel better. Pulling out a chair, I sit down, reach for his beer, steal a sip.

  “Yes, you may drink my beer,” he laughs. But I know he’s making light of the situation. “Tell me what’s going on, Bec.”

  Exhaling, then breathing in.

  “I did a little internet research,” I say. “Skinner is real.”

  He nods slowly.

  “Is it possible he’s what I shot at in the cornfield?” he says not without a cynical giggle. “Because if it is, I’m liable to be Rensselaer County’s most wanted man right about now.”

  The blood on the corn stalk . . . Don’t say anything about it to Sam. It will only freak him out . . .

  “It was a coydog, Sam. Maybe a rabid one. They’re all over the place. You did the right thing.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he says, his eyes staring into the beer. Then, “Tell me everything you’ve found out about this man, Hanover . . . Skinner.”

  I tell him.

  He takes a moment to digest what I’ve reported about the Mid-Hudson psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, about Skinner’s relationship with Joseph William Whalen down at Green Haven Prison, about the children he skinned alive and cannibalized, his escape. All of it.

  He drinks down his beer, gets up, goes to the fridge, grabs two more — what must be the last of them — before returning to the table. He gazes out onto the moonlit cornfield. When he’s through, he sits back down.

  “What’s the plan?” he says, setting down the bottles. “Think we should call in the cops?”

  Despite the circumstances, I can’t help but grin. What do they call it? Sardonically?

  “The police are obviously aware of my ordeal eight years ago. They also know that I’m now a single mother, living in an old farmhouse with another single mother. If I go to them swearing there’s a man or animal or whatever living out in the cornfield and if they don’t do something he’s going to skin us alive and eat our flesh, they’ll sic social services on us. Not only will they take away little Mike, they’ll make me have my head examined.”

  “You don’t know that,” he says, cracking open the beer, taking a drink. Maybe they’ll listen to what you have to say and, in turn, check the place out. Even if to them, anyway, you seem a little paranoid.”

  “But they will insist the children be interviewed by social services since it’s the kids who discovered Skinner in the first place.” I crack my own beer, take a drink. “Right now, it’s a risk I cannot take, Sam.”

  “But if this Skinner you described for me is the man who escaped Mid-Hudson and he is discovered to be in the area, then you must, without question, get the police involved.” He drinks some more. “If you don’t, Rebecca. I will.”

  Me, nodding. Because he’s right.

  “That’s why I’m going to that psychiatric hospital. First thing in the morning. I’m going to get the real scoop right from the mouth of Skinner’s doctor.”

  “What can he possibly reveal to you? He took an oath to preserve patient privacy even if that patient is a killer.”

  “But it’s possible he’ll tell me where Skinner might have fled too. He was born out in Berlin. That’s only twenty miles from here. But what if something brought him here, to these woods? He wouldn’t be unfamiliar with this area. What if he came back to live in the very same woods that Whalen lived in before he was killed?”

  He thinks about it for a minute. “What time you leaving tomorrow morning?”

  “It’s my turn to get the kids off to school. So right after that. Eight o’clock.”

  “How about I be the chauffer?”

  “And bodyguard?” I put my hand on his.

  “How can I resist?” he says.

  When the beers are empty, I kiss Sam on the mouth, hug him tightly. I pull a blanket and pillow from out of the wood chest in the living room and make him a temporary bed on the couch. I kiss him once more, bid him sweet dreams and head back upstairs to my own bedroom. But how I wish he could join me in my bed. How I wish to feel his big strong arms holding me, embracing me, protecting me. Just to be able to hear his deep breaths while he sleeps . . . It would be enough to put my mind at rest, at least for a little while.

  Instead, I’ll have to content myself by sleeping all alone. I’ll stare up at the dark ceiling, and I’ll jump at everything that goes bump in the night, and I’ll cringe when the wind blows and howls outside the window, and the dead corn stalks rattle together like old bones.

  I’ll try my hardest to sleep, but it will be elusive. Like any hope for peace of mind, it will be a sweet dream that is way beyond reach.

  He smells her scent through the thick mattress.

  Robyn’s sweet, organic scent. Without touching her, he feels her velvet skin and her feathery hair. He tastes her with his tongue and lips. His senses are alive. He listens to her as she sleeps, unaware of what lies beneath her, under her mattress, waiting for her. He relives the past. The events that got him here. Home, to his little kittens.

  The date is May 13, 2015. And he’s not Skinner, so much as he is a patient at the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center for the Criminally Insane. He remembers being seated in a metal chair bolted to a concrete floor. He’s dressed in baggy white pajama pants and a matching pullover shirt over psychiatric center-issued underwear. On his feet, he wears white tube socks under blue slippers. His face is covered with a muzzle constructed
of heavy duty plastic. The muzzle allows him to breathe and converse normally while negating the threat of his spitting on, and/or biting the skin and flesh of, the facility staff who must see to his daily well-being.

  The Posey straightjacket he’s been fitted with serves the same purpose. Which is none other than to protect not the patient, but in this case, the unarmed men and women who care for him.

  The windowless, concrete block room is empty. So empty the patient can hear his heart pulsing inside his temples. The patient competes with the noise by humming the tune to a nursery rhyme he’s coveted since he was a child running through the deep woods behind the family farm.

  Ring around the Rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down . . .

  The rhyme brings tears to his eyes whenever he sings it, just like it has for nearly sixty years since his daddy, the butcher, first sang it for him. But the memory of his father is broken when he hears footsteps outside in the hallway and the slide on the metal door’s access panel is suddenly pulled back.

  “It’s time, Skinner,” barks the Security Hospital Treatment Assistant. “Time to go.”

  A series of latches are sprung. Locks unlocked. The metal against metal noise reverberates throughout the cold, hard room. The steel door opens, and two men step inside. Both men are young, burly, and dressed in white uniforms that match the patients’.

  The first man is black. He is carrying a series of chains and cuffs which he drops onto the table. Reaching into his chest pocket, he produces a plastic box. Inside the plastic box is a syringe which has been pre-loaded with a clear liquid.

  The second man is white. He possesses a ring of keys which are attached to his belt by means of a retractable cable device.

  “Now, Skinner,” Key Man says, “I trust you’ll give us no trouble today?”

  “That is not my name,” Skinner says.

  “What’s that?” Syringe Man says, thumbing the syringe just enough so that a tiny portion of the drug squirts from out of the needle’s tip. “I’ve always known you as Skinner. The crazy fuck who skins people alive . . . just for fun. That is what you did to that dude down in Green Haven, am I correct? Cut his face off?”

  “Go easy, Lawrence,” Key Man says, as he begins to unlock the padlocks on the straight jacket’s metal restraints. “He’s a psycho. You know, he’s Hannibal Hopkins. You don’t want to piss him off now that we gotta transport his ass up to Albany Psychiatric.”

  “Sean, you stupid ass,” Lawrence says. “It’s Hannibal Lector. Anthony Hopkins is the real dude who played Hannibal Lector in the movie.”

  Lawrence bites down on his bottom lip like he’s piecing the equation together in his brain.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “Silence of the Lambs.” Turning to the patient. “You ever see Silence of the Lambs, Skinner? It could be about you.”

  Skinner’s eyes light up through the muzzle.

  “Come here,” he says.

  The Adam's apple in Lawrence’s neck bobs up and down. He takes a tentative step towards the seated patient. When he comes within spitting distance, Skinner says, “Closer.”

  Lawrence tentatively shifts himself closer.

  “Boo!” Skinner barks.

  Lawrence rears back quick. His partner nearly pisses himself laughing.

  “Ha,” he says. “He got your ass, Lawrence. Silence of the fucking Lambs.”

  “He don’t scare me, Sean,” Lawrence says between inhales and exhales. “He’s a hairless, pale, little white motherfucker who can’t weigh a buck twenty even when you add water to his skinny ass. Who’s he gonna hurt?”

  “Your skin,” Skinner says, his eyes focused on the big black man. “It’s very smooth. Do you apply lotion daily?”

  Syringe Man/Lawrence laughs. Nervously. “You hear this motherfucker, Sean? I think he really is trying to scare me or something.”

  “Or something,” Key Man/Sean says. “Now, help me with this jacket so we can get a move on. I don’t like being in this room alone with him.”

  Lawrence extends the hand that holds the syringe. He jabs the needle into Skinner’s arm. Does it through the material that makes up the straight jacket. He depresses the syringe. “That should keep your ass calmed down for the ride, Skinner.”

  The restraints on the straight jacket are now relieved of their padlocks. Sean carefully slips it off, then quickly grabs the shackles and cuffs from Lawrence.

  “Hands out, Skinner,” he orders.

  “My name is Lawrence Fredrick Hanover.”

  “What’d you just say, Skinner?” asks Lawrence. “You say something?”

  “That’s my name. You can call me Fred if you like.”

  “You’ve been living here for how many years, Skinner? Never once have I ever heard anyone call you, Fred. Fred ain’t no name for you. Fred’s a name for a good family man. Like Fred MacMurray. My Three Sons. You ever watch that show when you were little, Skinner? Errr, more little than you are now?”

  “I didn’t have a television where I grew up,” Skinner says.

  “You didn’t have a television. Where’d you live? In the sticks?”

  Returning the syringe to its box, Lawrence then assists his partner with fitting Skinner up with cuffs and shackles. They’re nearly finished with the task when Skinner reaches in, grabs hold of the keys attached to Sean’s belt. He pulls on the keyring, then releases it, so that it snaps back, slapping the Assistant in the waist.

  Sean stands up straight and stiff like a wasp has just landed on his bare arm. “What the fuck, Skinner. Please refrain from touching me.”

  Skinner smiles under the mask.

  “Just having a little fun is all,” he says. Then, “How about a sing-along?”

  “You go ahead and sing, Skinner,”

  “Ring around the Rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

  “Nice song, Skinner,” Lawrence says. “Last time I heard it, I crapped my diaper. Now let’s go.”

  Each man grabs hold of an arm, lift Skinner up off the chair. For a brief moment, he seems to have trouble maintaining his balance.

  “Gave the patient a little extra juice,” Lawrence says, smiling. “Not taking any chances.”

  “You’re always thinking,” Sean says. “That’s what I like about you, Lawrence. You’re a regular Dr. Oz.”

  Leading the patient through the open steel door, the men then escort him down a long, brightly lit corridor, through a series of security doors, and then out of the facility to an awaiting van. Opening the back doors on the van, they pull Skinner up inside and sit him on one of the two benches attached to each of the opposing van walls, securing the shackles to the closest bolt screwed into to the van’s metal floor.

  “Now, you sit tight and enjoy the ride, Skinner,” Lawrence says as he and Sean jump out the back. “It’s a long ride. Try and take a nap and dream your fucked-up dreams.”

  The doors then close with a resounding bang; the locks engage electronically. Skinner closes his eyes. In his head, he hears the orchestral music playing, and he silently sings his song. “Ring around the Rosie . . .” He’s transported fifty years into the past, and suddenly he’s back inside the barn behind his childhood farmhouse. He watches his father place a record on the old portable record player set out on the wood tool bench, watches the black disk drop onto the spinning turntable. When the music starts, he watches the drunk old man drag a pig into a homemade portable slaughter device, the animal’s head locked in place between two vertical metal bars. He hears the pig squealing and crying and trembling, lashing out with its short, stubby legs. He feels his own arms and legs shackled, the weight of chains and locks too much for his little boy’s body. He watches his father, as the man lifts the flaying knife off the wood bench, and brings it to the pig’s face. He watches his father cut away the pig’s face. Watches his father place the pig’s face over his own, the mask dripping dark red blood while the old man laughed and laughed . . .

  But then, just as q
uickly, the ugly memory of the pig face is replaced with a beautiful human face. Or, in this case, faces. The faces of two little girls whom he’s never before met, but whom he considers his daughters. Two girls whose faces he’d see every day inside the cell he shared with his wife, Joseph William Whalen, inside the bowels of Green Haven Maximum Security. Two, blue eyed, blonde haired girls whom he learned to love like they were his own because that’s the way Joseph wanted it. Insisted upon it. The Skinner will love them and care for them now that he is returning upstate. His little kittens. They have no idea the surprise that awaits them.

  The van motors along, but then suddenly, he feels the vehicle braking, slowing, turning just slightly. Moments later, the van comes to a complete stop.

  “It’s time,” he tells himself. Bending over so that he can access his face with his hands, he pulls the stolen key from his nasal passage. He waits. First, for the sounds of boot steps, then for the sound of the back bay doors opening. Sliding off the bench, he drops himself onto the floor, face first.

  The doors open.

  “We’re getting some coffee, Skinner. You want anything?” It’s the voice of the big dark, jumpy one. Lawrence.

  Skinner moans like he’s in great pain.

  “Skinner, what the fuck,” says Sean. “We’re talking to you. You don’t want nothing, no skin off my ass,” he laughs. “Oh, just kidding.”

  Another moan and cry. Like he needs assistance.

  “Skinner,” Lawrence repeats. “You okay?”

  “Fuck,” Sean says. “Maybe we should check on him. He’s kind of our responsibility. And you know what the governor says about the psycho killers at Mid-Hudson. We got to have compassion for them.”

  “All in the line of duty,” Lawrence says, hopping up into the van.

  With Sean on his tail, the two approach Skinner, one on each side of the prone, face-down man. When Lawrence places his big hand flat on Skinner’s back, it’s as if he’s touched off a hair trigger. Because, that’s when Skinner spins around fast, plunging the shiv into the officer’s neck. Pulling the shiv out, he then plunges it into Sean’s neck. The entire series of maneuvers is carried out in less than a second and a half. Rather, they are not a series of maneuvers but, instead, one fluid motion performed by a master butcher. A master flayer. A Skinner.