“She never hurt me.”
“Sometimes things can happen that don’t feel like hurt, but they are.”
“Gross!” Isaac protests. “I was kidding about the date night, dad. Ms. Iverson wasn’t
like that. I mean, she liked us, I guess, but not like that.”
The tension falls out of his father’s face. He picks up his fork and Isaac follows his lead.
“Why do you ask?”
“Police business.”
“What did you find?”
“More police business.”
“Please,” Isaac protests. “I’ll know about it by morning. No one can keep a secret in King’s Ferry.”
“We’re not advertising,” Isaac’s father says.
“I can probably help you,” Isaac insists. “I did know her a whole year.”
His father considers that, then says, “Did Ms. Iverson ever ask you to work at her house?”
“No. That was for the bad kids. You know, for the kids who tore up books or just lost them.
One time a couple of kids got caught writing in permanent marker on her windows. They had to scrape the windows and work in her yard.”
“Everyone knew about that?”
Isaac nods. “We all knew what would happen if we broke the rules. And there was no getting out of a consequence. If a kid had trouble showing up for duty, the principal went and got them.”
His father thinks about that, then looks at Isaac for a long time before saying, “We
found some boys’ clothing at her place.”
Isaac feels like a pinned Monarch, his father’s stare is so intense. It’s hard for him to think. Why would Ms. Iverson have kids’ clothing in her house? Why would it be such a bad thing? And then he gets it and realizes how far off the mark his father is.
“Jeans?” Isaac asks. When his father nods, he says, laughing, “Those are loaners. She takes kids from Mr. Riley’s class. Those are the kids with emotional issues. They don’t always make it to the bathroom in time.”
The lines on his father’s face smooth out and he nods. “Thanks.”
“Ms. Iverson isn’t like that,” Isaac says.
“Good.”
“So did I help?” Isaac probes.
“You were helpful,” his father agrees. “You’re right. Information has a way of getting out, but I don’t want you to talk about this. To anyone.”
Isaac tries to take the “duh” out of his voice, “Of course.”
He wants to tell his father that he has a lot more to worry about than the time Ms. Iverson spent with her students. Saul Doss is trouble. The whole time the old man was sitting on the deck, with the wall between them, he was trying to gain entrance into Isaac’s mind. He doesn’t know how else to describe the feeling, the sense, that the old guy was looking for something, that he was desperate to find it.
Doss is a dark stain on the earth. Isaac is sure of that. It comes with the gift, his ability to recognize good and bad. Some people are both and they shine, like they’re backlit; some appear almost featureless in their darkness. Even in pure daylight. Doss appeared as neither. And real evil comes with a heaviness, a sharpness that pricks at the skin of the innocent, that draws blood. He didn’t sense this in Doss, either.
He’s more like an eraser mark. Like he’s been shaded in with gray charcoal.
So, what does that make the man? Not of Heaven but not of Hell either? Is there a middle world where men like Doss wander, looking for redemption?
“So, you’ve never been to Ms. Iverson’s house?” his father asks and Isaac feels a cold hand slid down his back. “I would know it if you got into that kind of trouble?”
Isaac grabs his glass of milk and tries to swallow. He uses the time to look for an answer that isn’t a lie.
“Parents have to give their permission,” Isaac confirms. His words are as thin as the air in his lungs. “Can we talk about something else?”
“In a minute,” his father says. “Are you doing OK with this? You knew Ms. Iverson pretty well.”
But Isaac no longer thinks about life as linear or death as permanent.
“I’m OK,” he says. “It was the King’s Ferry Killer, wasn’t it?”
“That’s what we think.”
“It’s a man.”
“Looks that way.” His father takes a second helping of chicken and potatoes. “Did you do your homework?”
Changing the subject. Good.
“All of it.” Isaac pushes the plastic container holding the slaw closer to his father. “Don’t
forget your veggies, dad.”
“They’re for growing boys.”
“Please.” Isaac rolls his eyes. “The green stuff is good for everyone.”
Isaac feels a gradual shift in his perception. The air around him begins to simmer and he feels a little lightheaded. He’s going to transition.
Isaac pushes back his chair. “I need a shower,” he says, because it’s too early for bed and he can’t think right away of a better place to stash himself.
“Finish your dinner,” his father says.
There’s a chicken wing on his plate and some scraps of slaw.
“This is my second helping.” He tosses the untouched chicken back into the bucket and takes his plate to the sink. Then he heads out of the kitchen, calling back to his dad, “Thanks for dinner.”
When Isaac surfaces on the other side he is in a field of tall, yellow grass. He searches the darkness for life. The wind stirs and the grass flows like water under a silver moon. The night is cold but there’s no fog, no mist. Northwest of where he stands is an old Victorian house with purple trim; the lights are on in every window and the back door is thrown open. Even from here, at least two hundred feet from the yard proper and another hundred from the porch, Isaac can hear a sharp, thin ribbon of loss. It’s almost like the caw of a bird.
He begins walking in the direction of the house, parting the grass with his arms. In some places it reaches as high as his shoulders and Isaac uses them to plow through the dry stalks. The crackling they make covers the insistent calling from inside the home and Isaac worries about what he’ll find. The voice is strong. Never before have the dying truly lingered. Never has he been able to save someone.
He increases his pace anyway; the grass cuts through his skin and Isaac wonders if he’ll carry the marks back to the natural world with him. It happened with Shelley Iverson. He hopes this isn’t another murder.
He emerges from the field and the grass beneath his feet is spongy, thick. He passes a swing set, a wagon stuffed with dolls, and a blue tricycle. Dread builds in his gut, spreads through his blood. He hopes it’s not a kid. He never had to attend a kid. He would rather it be a murder. He feels better when it’s an old person. It’s easier on him when it’s a woman. He thought the opposite until he worked with the gift a few months, and then he realized that men, more often than women, refuse to accept their fate. Some are angry or agitated.
He looks up at the house. He doesn’t recognize it. From the open space that stretches away from the property, he can make a good guess on what part of King’s Ferry he’s standing: Callen’s Cross. It’s upwind of the ocean, in the seat of prime farm land.
He steps into the light spilling out from the house and hears again the voice take a stab at the night. The wooden stairs protest his weight. He ducks through the door and into a kitchen; the refrigerator is open; water is running in the sink; the table is littered with the remains of dinner.
The dying isn’t in this room, but somewhere deeper in the house, and Isaac leaves the kitchen behind for a dark hall that runs straight then makes a sharp left turn into a small living room. The ceiling fan is on, top speed, and the breeze turns the pages of a magazine. The heavy fronds of an indoor tree stir. The room is empty. Isaac passes through an arch and into another hall where he encounters several open doors. All rooms are lit within. He listens for the call, one beat, two, and follows it to the last room, pushes at the door. It’s a d
en. The computer is up, the screen filled with the broadcast of a rock concert. Isaac realizes the voice he’s been following belongs to the winnowing call of an electric guitar.
Somewhere else in the house a clock chimes the hour. Beyond that, silence.
Since finding Ms. Iverson, the discovery part of his job is harder. He is grateful that he wanders through this realm invisible to all but the dying. When he attended Shelley Iverson, with the murderer still in her house, breathing heavily as he walked through the rooms touching the teacher’s belongings, he felt exposed. The skin on the back of his neck and his arms crawled with spiders; at least that’s what it felt like. He wanted her to hurry up and die so he could fade back to his bedroom, to safety. But she stayed, longer than most. She touched her hand to his face and told him she always thought she was surrounded by a bunch of angels. She told him sometimes we fear the new when we should really fear what we know.
Isaac didn’t know what to make of that. Still doesn’t. And he can’t think about it now.
The man who murdered Ms. Iverson is here. Isaac feels him, in the heaviness in the air, in the sour stink that remains in the room.
And the dying needs him.
Lying on his back on the floor, a boy of about seventeen watches Isaac with sad eyes. He wears jeans and a flannel shirt and looks so much like normal, except his wounds, that Isaac feels a fist of sorrow uncurl in his stomach. The boy tries to lift his hands, but it takes too much effort.
“I’m dying,” he says.
“I know.”
The boy’s throat is cut and blood oozes out in heavy streams. Isaac kneels beside him. He takes one of the boy’s hands in his own and squeezes it.
“Did God send you?” he asks.
“I think so. I haven’t worked that part out yet.” Isaac tries to smile a little; he wants the boy to know it’s going to be OK.
“Have you been to heaven?”
“Not that I remember.”
“I hope that’s where I’m going.” Blood begins to drain from the corner of his mouth. “I think I’ve been good enough. I ... hope...”
Isaac can clearly see the radiance surrounding this boy. As the blood drains from his body the light dims and when the boy leaves he’ll take it with him.
“You’re going to heaven,” Isaac promises.
He doesn’t know for sure, of course. But he feels it inside, in that part of him that never lies. This boy is going to Heaven. So he says it again.
“My name is Jeremy.”
It’s the last thing the boy says. Isaac remains at his side, waiting for the change, to suddenly find himself in his shower at home, fully clothed and drenched. He wants out. The killer is still here. In the house. Isaac feels him and he wants to get as far away as he can. He looks for the rippling in the air around him, but nothing happens. He always leaves after the dying. He looks again at Jeremy, at his flat, vacant stare, and then places his hand under the boy’s nose. He isn’t breathing. The boy is definitely dead.
Isaac gets to his feet and catches his reflection in the window. He expects to find a dark image hovering behind him, perhaps, now, able to see Isaac, able to make of him another sacrifice. It would explain why his heart is beating its way through his ribcage, why sweat is sliding down his face, why his skin is crawling.
But no one is there.
He rubs his arms, the back of his neck and then is pulled past his fear, past the body of the boy Jeremy and back into the hall. The sharp taste of iron is on his tongue, or maybe he just smells it, so strong, it seems like he’s tasting it. Sometimes, at the most destructive car pile-ups, when the blood is everywhere, the smell is like that. Like touching your tongue to an iron pole.
He is pulled from the inside out, lead through the house like he’s familiar with the layout. He comes upon a staircase and climbs it, finding himself in the dark shadows of a corridor. There are several rooms with their doors thrown open, and every one of them is well-lit and waiting to be explored.
Chapter Fourteen
Sunday, 7:15 pm
Graham scrapes his plate into the trash then rinses it and places it in the dishwasher. The shower is still running, so he loads the soap but doesn’t turn on the appliance. They need a new hot water heater; the one they have now limits a person to a ten minute shower and never are they able to run the washing machine at the same time as the dishwasher. Turning on either one when someone is in the shower is a guaranteed dash for rinse and run.
Shelley Iverson didn’t take advantage of his son. She didn’t take advantage of any of the boys in her care. Her crime, as far as the KFK is concerned, was self-inflicted. Maybe the killer knew she was a woman who got around too much; maybe she was pregnant and the killer knew it and didn’t approve. Out of wedlock pregnancies are no longer a social stigma, but they’re dealing with an unhealthy mind and a damaged perspective. Graham goes through a mental list of notes and regroups what he knows about the victims’ behaviors. So far, they have a pair of adulterers, an alleged date rape, a lesbian couple and a woman who may have changed partners as often as she changed her underwear. Sometimes when he’s investigating a case, dark secrets are uncovered along with evidence. Some are criminal activities, others are quirks not punishable by law, but are frightening in their intensity for self-destruction. He has come upon situations that challenged him as a man, images that remain with him, testing his resilience. Crimes against children are the worst and he’s relieved he was wrong about Iverson.
He worries more now than he ever did about the time his son spends on his own. Twelve is such a between age. Isaac is too old for a baby-sitter, but too young to recognize and fight off some of the dangers of the world. He’s more vulnerable than kids from a two parent home and shouldn’t have to rely on himself as much as does. And it doesn’t give Graham one lick of comfort, knowing that divorced families are the social norm.
He rubs a hand over his face and eases back into the comfort of knowing, for now at least, that Isaac is safe. He doesn’t torture himself with thoughts of ‘for how long,’ though he feels them crouching inside his mind, ready to pounce. His time now, his attention, must be focused outward on the King’s Ferry Killer.
The telephone rings, knocking Graham from his thoughts. He grabs up the receiver from the kitchen extension and announces himself.
“Hey, Chief, it’s Carter. The prelim is back. Confirms everything we already knew, which is nothing. The guy left the body clean. All except that strand of brown hair, which did not belong to Iverson. It’s male.”
“Great. What else do we know about it?”
“Blood type B positive. Caucasian. There’s an abnormality in the blood, like the guy might suffer from some kind of disease. I faxed the results to Oakes, hoping he can tell us something about that. Genetics sent the sample to the lab in Ontario for more complex tests.”
“Did forensics give any indication of what it might be?”
If the hair belongs to the King’s Ferry Killer, then the guy is ill. Graham hopes that means their killer is dying. He wonders if the disease is, in part, what drives him to kill. Some physical illnesses lead to mental deterioration.
“None. The report states that an abnormality exists with the red blood cells which
indicates a possible illness.”
“Thanks, Carter. You find anything else?”
“Nada. Still waiting to hear from the coroner.”
“I’m finishing up here,” Graham says. “I’ll see you in twenty.”
Graham hangs up the phone and props his shoulder against the wall. Until this break, their hard evidence amounted to very little. Really, only what the killer chose to leave behind—the mementos that condemned the victims. He wonders why a change in the MO now. The kneeling, the hair. Their murderer is scrupulous with details. He managed for sixteen years to leave not so much as one viable epithelia at the scene, and suddenly, they have shoe impressions in the victim’s blood and a strand of hair with the cuticle intact.
Could il
lness be making their killer careless? This Graham can believe. And if so, then more errors will follow, making capture eminent, if death doesn’t find the KFK first.
Graham pushes away from the wall and heads down the hall, toward the back part of the house where Isaac’s bedroom and bathroom are located. The shower is still running and it’s going on twenty minutes. Unusual, for his son, who has the two minute shower down to an art.
Isaac’s bedroom door is closed and Graham knocks twice before he opens it and pops his head inside.
Isaac is not in the shower. He is standing in the middle of his bedroom in the jeans and flannel shirt he was wearing at dinner. Only he’s not really standing, he’s suspended inches off the floor. His head is tipped back, baring his neck. No noose and nothing to hang it from anyway.
Still, Grahams heart slams against his ribcage.
“Isaac!”
No response. No movement.
Graham takes Isaac’s hand, feels for a pulse in his son’s wrist, but can’t count past the thundering of blood in his head.
Chapter Fifteen
Sunday, 7:15 pm
Isaac wavers at the top of the narrow staircase, listens for movement in the rooms along the hall, and waits for the pull that always guides him to the side of the dying. Nothing comes to him. But the smell. Blood.
Panic, as dense as cloud cover, settles on his brain, makes it hard for him to think. This is new. When he’s in this reality, knowing comes to him. He never has to work for it.
It was like this at Ms. Iverson’s house. Isaac felt the fear like it had a pulse.
Why isn’t he back home already?
He really wants to go home. Wishes he could just think his way there. But it doesn’t work like that. At the Iverson house, when Isaac felt the darkness, the shadow of evil, he wanted to turn back. But he’s never alone when he seeks the dying. Always a greater strength moves through him. Propels him forward when his feet refuse to move. Calms him. Like now, he feels it, warm and malleable, pulsing under his skin. An energy that keeps him standing, moving, acting.
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