by Edwin Hill
“It was,” Gabe said.
“She still lives in the same house. It’s not far from here. We could walk there, I bet. She’d be glad to see you.”
“Does she still have the braid?” he asked.
“Still there.”
“She had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen.”
“Those are still there too,” Hester said. “I don’t think much has changed for her since you left. Let’s go see her. Let’s ask.”
Gabe smiled. “We’re not going to see Lila,” he said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”
“How about Cheryl or Bobby?”
Gabe’s face went blank, a flash of anger in his eyes. He dug in his bag. He tossed her a granola bar, and she tore at the wrapper. Her fingers were too numb to rip the plastic. Gabe opened it for her, and she ate it in two bites. “I have water too,” he said. “Don’t eat snow. It’ll give you hypothermia.”
“You know what else gives you hypothermia?” Hester said. “Being stuck in the woods in the middle of the winter in your pajamas.”
Gabe laughed, and then Hester did too. But she also hung on to that anger she’d seen. She could use that. She could use every bit of sadness and rage and confusion Gabe had bottled up.
He led her into the cabin. They took their snowshoes off and leaned them up by the door, and then broke apart a few wooden chairs and pulled some pine panels from the walls to add to the sticks piled by the fireplace. Once the fire blazed, Gabe handed her blankets from one of the duffel bags. He also balanced a small tin kettle on the fire and made tea, and by the time Hester had wrapped her hands around a matching tin mug, she felt cared for, almost warm. “I wish we could be friends,” she said. It didn’t hurt to play the game.
“I guess I messed that up,” Gabe said.
“A bit,” Hester said.
Gabe crouched by the fire and rubbed his hands together. “Are you scared?” he asked.
“I’m scared shitless.”
He added another piece of wood to the fire. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“What are we doing here?” Hester asked.
“I’m ending it.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“You’re not giving me a lot of confidence here, Gabe,” Hester said, with a force she hardly felt. “I don’t want to end everything.”
“Sam says …”
“Sam can go to hell. Let me go. We’ll walk up to the road, and you can take the car and disappear. You can become someone new all over again. Go to Manchester or Portland or Miami. I don’t care. But go, and do it on your own this time. Be your own person.”
What would happen if she stood and walked away? What if she headed up to the road without looking back? But Gabe seemed to read her mind. “Don’t,” he said.
“I have to find my kid!” Hester shouted, and then she was horrified to feel sobs welling up.
She pushed them away, but tears fell down her cheeks anyway. A stream of snot flowed from her nose. And then Gabe was next to her, pulling her head to his chest, and what horrified her even more than the sobs was that she took comfort in his touch. She wanted to pull him even closer and for him to assure her that things would be okay. She’d believe it if she let herself.
“You must be exhausted,” Gabe said softly. “Go to sleep.”
“Not in a million years.” She had to push away from him. She had to get these tears to stop.
“You’ll need your strength. I’ll watch over you.”
She wiped her face with her fists, and then closed one nostril and blew snot from the other onto Gabe’s thigh. He didn’t flinch. She’d give him that. He looked at her as she retreated, and she imagined what he saw: a tiny woman huddled in the corner of a decrepit cabin surrounded by blankets and scared out of her mind. How could he possibly believe he wouldn’t win this in the end? How could she believe that she would?
“Tell me something,” he said. “A story. Tell me something I don’t already know about you.”
“There’s nothing worth knowing,” she said. “At least nothing you don’t already know.”
“Everyone has a story,” Gabe said.
“Not me,” Hester said. “I’m like you. I recreated myself.”
“Where did you grow up?”
Hester shook her head.
“Tell me.”
“In a little town near the Cape,” she said. “It had a beach and a yacht club and cranberry bogs and lots of rich people.”
“It must have been nice.”
“It wasn’t. Not for me, at least.”
“Why?”
Hester shrugged. “Because nobody wanted me. Just like you. And maybe we do all have a story, but I like to forget mine. I got myself out of there, and I got out of there all by myself. I live in the present. And every choice I make is about now, not then. I have Waffles and Kate and Morgan and Daphne. And I don’t care about anything or anyone but them.”
Gabe walked to the cabin’s doorway, where he sat on the steps with his back to her. It was still snowing, and a weak sun had reached its highest point for the day yet still struggled to light up the steely sky. “I wish I could do that,” he said. “Forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Have you ever been invisible?”
“Most of my life,” Hester said. “Until I met Daphne. That’s Morgan’s sister. She saved me. Sometimes I don’t even know if she knows that. It’s why I’m saving her now, and she doesn’t know that either.”
“Sam was the first person to see me,” Gabe said. “And he chose me, even after Lila wanted to send me away. I told her what had happened. I told her what they were doing, and she couldn’t even look at me. I won’t ever feel helpless like that again.”
“Gabe,” Hester said. “Sam tells you that he’s smart and that he creates these new and exciting worlds and invites you to live in them with him, but where does it get you? He hasn’t succeeded once, has he? Despite everything he promises. Even now he thinks he’ll somehow be part of that world on Beacon Hill. Do you know how long it took me to find you? Two days, and that was using the Internet and common sense. Wendy’s father will hire a much better private investigator than me to find out everything he can about ‘Aaron Gewirtzman,’ and when he does the whole game will be up.”
“I think the game may already be up,” Gabe said.
“Sam’s a serial killer. Can’t you see that? And he controls you.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Gabe said, but without conviction.
“He chose you because he can manipulate you. He can make you do things most people wouldn’t. He can trust you to be quiet.”
The fire crackled as embers fell in on one another. Gabe turned toward the lake. Hester could smell him, even from across the room, even over the smoke from the fire. He reeked of sweat and desperation and regret. And fear. Even more, she realized, than she did.
CHAPTER 26
Sam closed the door to the motel behind him. Nothing had changed here in twelve years. The motel sign was still missing a “T,” and the roof still looked as though it might cave in at any second. The vacancy sign hung askew from a single hook, and the “No” had probably been lost years ago due to lack of use. He wiped his freshly scrubbed hands on his jeans. He glanced to where Bobby’s hatchback and Cheryl’s little Civic were parked. He nearly got into Cheryl’s car and turned off the ignition but thought better of it. The dead couldn’t undo their mistakes.
He’d been lucky to find them both here together, and it had been fun to make Bobby tie Cheryl to the chair, to watch him stuff the socks in her mouth, to listen to the gasps as he’d tied the gag at the nape of her neck. They both searched for an escape, and Bobby didn’t go down without a fight. He tried to be macho, or not so much macho, but to make his own escape, shoving Sam aside and trying to run to his car. Sam drove the screwdriver into his thigh before he was even out the door.
“Try that again,” Sam said as the man writhed at his feet, “and I’ll slit your throat.” He
turned to Cheryl. “I’d threaten you, but I doubt he’d care. He was going to leave you behind and take care of himself.”
Cheryl looked to Bobby for help, those birdlike eyes beseeching him to do something, anything, to get them out of this. Sam walked over to her and tested the bindings. He ran the bloody end of the screwdriver across her cheek. It would be good to have some blood on her in the end.
“Are they tight?” Sam asked. “Try to move.”
“I should have shot that woman in the head when I had the chance,” Bobby said, in a voice that Sam was sure had terrified plenty of boys over the years. “Why are you doing this?”
“For Gabe,” Sam said. “Why else would I do it? I’d do anything for Gabe. How much money did you make off those kids anyway? A couple of grand? A hundred grand? Was it worth it? It’s not like it changed your life. You still live in this dump.”
He thrust the screwdriver into Bobby’s side and gave it a twist. Bobby gasped. He tried to stand, and then fell to one knee and collapsed. Cheryl struggled to free herself till she toppled over and lay on her side, looking at Bobby while the life drained from his eyes. A pool of blood spread across the floor till eventually it reached the side of her face, lapping at her cheek like water at the lakeshore.
“A murder-suicide always needs a suicide,” Sam said. “And I’m afraid it’ll have to be you. It’s not a great way to be remembered.”
He wondered how long it had taken her to figure out what was happening while he fitted the garden hose to the Civic’s exhaust pipe and snaked it through the window. He was lucky the room was small and that it only took a few moments to fill it with carbon monoxide. When it was done, when he untied Cheryl from the chair, and put the screwdriver in her hand, and took the socks from her mouth, he hoped the state police would be too dumb to notice the bruises around her wrists. He took the sock with him in case they found fibers in her windpipe.
Now, he climbed into his own car, which he’d left parked out of sight behind the motel. “Two more stops,” he said to Kate, who sat in the backseat chatting with Monkey. “Then we can go home.”
“Aunt Hester miss Kate?”
“Aunt Hester?” Sam said. “Who’s that? Is she from one of your stories?”
Kate’s face twisted into what Sam guessed was the verge of a tantrum. “I’m only joking,” he said.
How long it would be before Hester became a shadowy memory? He wondered if he could erase her completely in the end.
His phone rang. It was Wendy. He clicked the phone off, took the battery out, and tossed it through the window. He almost immediately felt lighter, freer. Things were over with Wendy, and a call from her was most likely a call from the police. Besides, it was time to be someone new. It was time to look forward.
A few miles from the motel, right where the road to Little Comfort used to be, he pulled up along the curb and looked into the trees. It took a moment for him to find the car parked there, hidden beneath snow. Gabe was here after all.
“Climb over. Come with me,” he said to Kate, who scrambled over the backseat. “I’ll carry you, okay? I don’t want you to walk in the snow. Not with those slippers.”
He lifted the girl with him and then walked to the tree line and stood with Kate balanced on his hip. He saw the remnants of snowshoe prints leading through the trees.
“It’s nice here,” he said.
Kate nodded and said, “Kate like trees.”
“I bet Monkey likes trees too,” he said.
“Monkey like trees!” Kate said with a giggle.
“Are you cold, sweetie?” he asked.
She shook her head and buried it in his shoulder, and he felt a warmth spread through him that he’d never felt in his life. He wondered if it was love.
“What should we do?” he asked. “Where should we go?”
“The aquarium!” Kate said.
“I like that idea.”
Maybe they’d head to the Caribbean—the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico. The whole world was an aquarium when you lived on an island. It was time to go. It was time to explore new possibilities. All he had to do was clean up the loose ends.
*
The sun had begun to set on the winter afternoon. Gabe paced the cabin floor, glancing toward where Hester watched him from the corner. Outside, he heard a noise. Or at least he thought he did. He poked his head out and searched the trees. The dimming light had turned the entire world to shades of gray. “Sam?” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Sam?” he said again, but this time he shouted. “Is that you?”
“Is he here?” Hester asked.
“No,” he said. “He’ll be here soon.”
“What happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
Gabe had returned to this place so many times in his mind, and it had stayed intact and dappled in summer sun in his memory, so that he’d been surprised when they arrived by how much the cabin had changed, and how different the landscape was in winter. And yet he still felt a certain comfort being here. It was important to him to know that Sam felt the same way. It would make the last twelve years mean something.
“Gabe,” Hester said, “I’m hungry. We’ll need something to eat soon.”
Gabe had doled out the last of the granola bars for lunch. Now, they were running out of wood too. They’d have to go out together soon and see what they could dig from under the snow. Gabe pulled the last of the paneling from the wall and added it to the embers, watching as the dry wood caught the flame. He opened his bag and took out the stacks of postcards that he’d taken from Hester’s bed. He fed one of them into the fire. It was a photo of Ellen’s house in Pacific Heights. He watched as the flame caught the edge of the card and then engulfed the entire image. He added another card to the fire, and then another. He clicked through the weeks and months and years since he’d left the lake. He thought about what Hester had said, about why Sam had chosen him. She was wrong, wasn’t she?
Sam should have been here by now.
“Gabe?” Hester said.
He looked away from the fire.
“Remember when you asked for a story,” she said. “I do have one. You’re right. We all do. And you get what you get, right? And you can make it into whatever you want it to be. I grew up in a house with a mentally ill mother who drank. Her parents were dead. She didn’t have any siblings or friends. I have no idea who my father is or was. We got a disability check in the mail once a month and had to make it last. I read a lot to escape. I watched General Hospital every afternoon. I dreamed of being in the CIA. I didn’t have a single friend. I didn’t know that I was lonely—or that I was alone—till after I knew people, till after someone cared about me. The only person who pulled me through that was me, and the thing I carry with me through life is that I’m resilient. I never give up.”
Gabe sat in the doorway and felt the wind from the storm blow around him and flakes of snow stinging his cheeks. “Before I came to the lake,” Gabe said, “I moved around.”
“I know,” Hester said.
“I remember little things,” he said. “In flashes. I remember a woman with hair parted in the middle, and a house with a rosebush deep in the woods. I remember a necklace made of candy, a jungle gym in someone’s backyard, a pool party. But before here, before I came to the lake, it’s all shadows, no firm details.”
“What happened on the lake?” Hester asked. “What happened with the man who was killed?”
“Lila wanted to send me to Cheryl’s house. I begged her not to, but she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I told her about Cheryl, about what happened there, and she said that it was my own fault. She said I had to leave. I told Sam about the house, about the motel. He kept asking me how much they paid, if we could get a grand out of one of them. He told me we’d take photos and use them for blackmail. But then everything went wrong. The guy showed up. And we killed him. I killed him.”
“How many people have you killed?” Hester asked.
�
�Six,” Gabe said, surprised by how easily that number slipped off his tongue. “It never gets easier, even though I guess it should. I’m not like Sam.” Hester was right. Sam was a serial killer, but if Sam was a serial killer, what did that make him? “I’m supposed to kill you too.”
“Okay,” Hester said slowly. Deliberately. And when she spoke again, he could hear her choosing her words. “Why didn’t you? Why haven’t you?”
Gabe had tried to do what Sam asked. He’d even wanted to, in a way—it would be easier, wouldn’t it? He could run away again. He could be with Sam. But he couldn’t because he loved her. And he loved Kate, whom he should have protected. And he loved their home and their dog and their unborn son. He loved the whole dream. Images of running through these woods flashed through his mind. Images of the man, of retreating through that house. Of losing control. Couldn’t he be better than he was?
He wanted to turn to Hester, but he didn’t dare. He couldn’t see the way she looked at him anymore because, despite everything, despite what had happened to Kate, he’d saved Hester. She had to know that he’d saved her. He’d protected her from everything bad and evil that could happen. Or at the very least, he’d tried. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “You’d think I was crazy.”
“Try,” she said.
He dared himself. He counted to five. “Because I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He heard her stand, and he imagined her coming up behind him and wrapping her arms around him. He imagined the warm touch of her skin. Kissing her was the very best thing that had ever happened in his whole life, a feeling he’d treasure for as long as he lived. Did she know what that kiss meant? Did she know that it had saved her? He imagined believing she’d still be here later. He closed his eyes, and he could smell her, not now, with the scent of smoke clinging to everything, but later, when she smelled of cinnamon and vanilla and joy. When dog hair clung to her sweater, and he brought her a glass of wine because he knew she’d had a long day.
“You’re a good person,” Hester said. “And I don’t think you know it. Sam saw you, but for the wrong reasons. He saw how he could use you.”