by Lee Thompson
He laughed sadly. “I’m afraid I’m not built for hiking anymore.”
I wanted to ask him, If you could go back and change that thing that you’re so ashamed of, would you? Could you? If you had your youth back, would you fight harder? Or only repeat the same sorrows?
He patted my knee. “You can use my phone to call the boss lady. Tell her you fell ill.”
“I can’t.”
He studied me a moment and then nodded. “Don’t wait too long to do the right thing.” He stood and moved into the little kitchen and pulled coffee from a cupboard and made a fresh pot as I sat on the worn couch, waiting for some inner voice to scream in my ear to heed his advice. But none came. I felt hollow. I thanked him and headed for the door and he waved as I closed it. Out front, I saw Mike’s empty Jaguar across the road at Division’s police station. So, I thought, he’s talking to Wylie. That’s good. The more the merrier. I thought about what Mike had said as I climbed into my Jeep.
No use in dying alone.
* * *
Kim waited at the office wearing a slim black suit that hugged her curves, a pressed purple dress shirt, and black leather shoes that also served as mirrors. I blushed and tried to keep my eyes on her face. She smiled easily, something I liked more about her all the time, because it took a lot of strength to smile like that when you saw the worst parents did to torture their children, their spouses, and themselves.
She said, “I was worried you wouldn’t show up.” She glanced at her gold watch. “You’re five minutes late though.”
“Be punctual. Got it.” It’d never been my strong suit, but maybe if I impressed her with my work ethic she’d forgive me the times when I’d repeat the mistake.
“I appreciate your help, John. To be honest, if I was in your shoes I would have told me to get bent.” Always with that smile, like the best women, making you second guess yourself so you could decide if you made the right choice.
I said, “I still might tell you to get bent.”
She smiled. “Good to see you’re a morning person. Stick with the jokes; they’ll help you make it through the day.” We walked outside and the air was crisp enough to require a jacket but Kim didn’t seem to mind it. She intrigued me in many ways and I didn’t like how she made me feel because I still wrestled so much love and hate for April—for all she’d done and all she hadn’t.
Kim led me to her car, saying, “We’ll stick together until noon, then I’ll bring you back for your Jeep and you can strike out on your own. Sound good?”
The back of my neck crawled with heat. I turned, pausing by the passenger door, and scanned the mostly empty lots, the darkened entryways of alleys, convinced someone watched us. I imagined Lucas in bloodstained clothing with part of his ruined skull still spurting his life against century-old brick, his dead eyes following our progress. But I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Kim tapped the roof with her keys and said, “John? What’s wrong?”
I closed my hands, rubbed my knuckles, and wondered how much risk I had put her in by sharing space and laughter, carrying on with life when deep inside it had ground to a halt the moment I’d stepped into Nutley’s compound.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just keep your eyes peeled for anything suspicious.”
“Like what?” She glanced over her shoulder and looked back, face pale, one hand on the open driver’s door.
“In case any of the sick assholes who kidnapped Duncan show up.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and quickly climbed into her car. I followed suit, wishing she’d just let me drive, but unable to ask her because she might take it as an insult. She locked the doors and started the engine. “I doubt they’d know where you are when they’re running from the police.” After she pulled onto the road and I didn’t answer, she said, “Why would they come looking for you?”
Some people always ask hard questions. I think it’s why most conversations stick to weather and work. To hit the things you really wonder about leave you open to judgment, strange looks, disconnection. I said, “They want something from me.”
“Like?” She hit the turn signal and took a left. LaPorte was a lot larger than Division. The streets were dirtier, crowded with people on their way to work and bums settling down to protect themselves from the coming Pennsylvania winter.
“Their leader, Nutley, he thinks I can bend dimensions or something, bring his god into our world.” I laughed at how ridiculous it sounded, even though I’d felt Proserpine’s touch and watched One of Three of Seven tear holes in Mike’s shoulder that exposed black nothingness instead of blood, sinew, and meat.
Kim gripped the wheel tighter as if she shared my remembering. “So, he’s from New Wave.” She shook her head. “I should have known.”
“He might have spent time in the nut house, but…” I thought of them in the forest, carried away by mist like Isaiah had been swept up within the fiery chariot of God. “Whatever he believes, whether real or imagined, he’s dangerous.”
“The cops will catch him.”
“I don’t think they will.”
“Well, you need to clear your head because you need to learn procedure for this job, okay? I know it’s not easy. I’m worried about Doug too.” Her voice trailed off and the car’s tires hummed, enveloping us, as she swerved around potholes in the road and the business section gave way to small, dark houses with dying lawns. The air grew bittersweet with the stench of stagnant water that seeped into the car. We pulled into a gravel driveway. The house had peeling gray siding, a worn top like a balding man, part of it hidden by a scraggly blue tarp. Kim said, “Rule number one: if a child clings to you, don’t cling back. Number two: if a parent gets physical, which happens sometimes, call the police immediately. To protect the children we have to build a case against who’s threatening them.”
I wanted to tell her I could handle myself but it felt like senseless swagger of some nineteen-year-old kid who had to let those in authority know it. I simply nodded. “Okay.” We exited the car and Kim pulled a manila folder from a black bag in the backseat. She said, “You seem pretty laid back.”
“For the most part.”
“What gets you riled up?”
The list was long. Liars and thieves and cheats annoyed me. But the deeper things were more akin to betrayals by those who claimed to love me, abuse of children, a lack of empathy. As we rounded the front of her car, I said, “More than anything, people who sit by and do nothing while others are destroyed right in front of them.”
We ascended the steps. Kim said, “You’re going to see that a lot on this job. Are you certain you can handle it?”
I resisted the urge to grip the pistol beneath my coat, resisted the impulse to tell her what I thought I would do if I caught some parent burning their kid with cigarettes or selling them for sex.
I said, “I’ll do my best to keep my cool.”
She looked at me skeptically for a moment, then squared her shoulders and rang the doorbell. A man in a polo shirt and thick glasses answered the door. He wore a smile so fake I wanted to break his nose. Kim said, “Mr. Richards.” He nodded and led us inside. A girl, maybe six-years-old, small for her age, and pale, sat at the dining room table with her head bowed and her hands in her lap. Stacks of old magazines crowded the walls. The air was stuffy and musty.
While I worked my first case with Kimberly, doing my best to learn the ropes, Mike and Wylie found a good way to spend some of that Johnston fortune.
NINE
Wylie had his feet on the desk, head tilted back and hat pulled over his eyes. He snored loudly. Mike smelled the booze and sweat emanating from him the moment he came in the door. The two of them had never been best friends, but Wylie was very close to my brother Mark when they were kids, and both of them looked out for me and Mike in our teens. Mike woke him, said, “We gotta move.”
Wylie wiped sleep from his eyes, straightened his shirt and squinted. “What time is it?”
“Time to move y
our ass.”
“What happened?”
“Are you hung over?”
Wylie grabbed his jacket from a coat rack by the front door and pulled it on. “I can handle myself. What’s going on?”
Mike grabbed a shotgun from the gun rack behind the desk and held it out for Wylie to take. He said, “I need you sober for the next few days. You going to manage?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“On what’s at stake.”
“Your life, mine, John’s.”
Wylie’s eyes darkened. He wiped his mouth and said, “I’ll do my best. You want to fill me in now?”
Mike told him about my encounter with Nutley’s group of freaks, Duncan’s abduction, and our experience with Nutley and Lucas in the forest.
Wylie smirked as he grabbed the shotgun and let it dangle by his side. He said, “That it?”
“No.”
“Do I want to know the rest?”
Mike pointed to the door, telling him about the sisters as they walked outside. “That’s as much as I know, but it’s enough, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe a word of it, but what are we supposed to do?”
They climbed into Mike’s Jaguar. Wylie placed the shotgun between his legs. Mike scanned the street and alley. He said, “The sister could have killed us in the forest, like she did the cop. Since she didn’t we can assume they need us for some purpose.”
“That’s a lot to assume.”
“No shit. But it’s a start.”
Wylie said, “Your car smells nice. Is that coconut?”
Mike said, “The cops don’t want me in the woods. But you just deputized me.”
“Okay.”
“And I made a quick call after John left this morning. We’ve got a stop to make before we walk into the mouth of the beast.”
“Where?”
“A place my mom called home for a short while after she killed my sister.”
“The nut house?”
“Yeah. It’s unnerving. But we won’t be there long.”
“The guy running this outfit used to be a patient there?”
“Yes. I made a few calls this morning.”
“And you think they’ll give you information about him without a court order?”
Mike said, “Not enough time to jump through hoops. I want this fast and clean,” thinking that if this trip proved worth it, he’d return for more information later, part of him curious about his mother’s time here, and what they could tell him about his father. “People will do just about anything for enough money.”
Wylie nodded, not asking how much.
They drove north as clouds darkened.
Mike turned on the radio and they talked about old times. Division was like most other small towns, but they’d been privileged kids since Mike’s family was one of the richest in Pennsylvania and Wylie’s dad, like his father before him, had owned the sawmill that helped the original Division rise in the valley in what seemed to the outlying towns as if overnight.
The sky kept growing darker. Mike’s skin crawled. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not even Doug, but the old cop had been like a surrogate father to him and knowing that the man was in serious trouble unnerved him more than he’d let on. Rain tapped the windshield and the tops of trees swayed alongside the road.
Wylie said, “We might be in for a helluva storm judging by that. It’s going to wash away any trace of the people we’re hunting. The police dogs will never be able to track them.”
“It was raining when we ran across Nutley and the kid, Lucas.”
“Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“The weather?”
“No, what you told me about them and the mist.”
“Welcome to the real world.”
“Shit like this doesn’t happen every day.”
“Not that we see. I think most battles are fought behind the curtain.” Mike slowed for the turn into New Wave’s parking lot. Roughly thirty cars were packed tight near the front doors as if the people who drove them had the sense to check the weather. The building was roughly the size of the manor, carved of the same type of stone. Chills ran down Mike’s back. It felt like coming home. When he was in his mid-teens he’d visited his mother there when she’d had her breakdown. His father, whom he still partly hated to this day because of the lie he told to cover her, hardly ever wept and Mike had leaned into his side then, confused and afraid.
He parked halfway out. Heavier rain rapped the windshield. He said, “When Mom came here we always thought it was because of my father, but it’d never been anything more than the guilt she carried over killing Nat.”
“How long was she here?”
“A year. Self-admitted. But in all that time I don’t think she ever once mentioned to the psychiatrist what led her down this path. They would have thrown her in prison and we would have dug Natalie up and given her a proper burial.” He chewed on his lip and shut the Jag’s engine off. “I’m not looking forward to going in there.”
“All of that happened a long time ago.”
Wylie was right, but finding Natalie’s bones buried in the back garden had happened only months ago. Much in the way that it’d take years, and many other heartaches, to heal and even begin to understand how lonely and helpless April must have been to kill her son and take her own life, Mike’s demons would carve their sigils in his chest, the past would charm him with moments of sweetness and joy and then strip them away with screams and anger and blood.
They exited the car, crossed the lot as rain darkened asphalt, and entered New Wave Hospital. Cold air crowded the entryway. A blonde nurse in her late twenties sat at the front desk. Mike told her they were there to see Dr. Kerr. While she used the phone to take calls, laughter and sorrow banged along the hall like a demented band. A few moments later a large white man with a shaved head and penetrating blue eyes like an oncoming bus waved for them to follow him. The walls were white, the floors industrial gray and stained. Mike thought, There’s more heartache here than most anyone could ever imagine.
He’d known people who’d been driven out of their minds by one swipe after another. Life was crueler to some than others, but usually it boiled down to how cruel a person could be to themselves. Many pinched themselves daily, normal people who worked and raised families, but there were others who fashioned a world of cellars without windows, sharp instruments of death, cutting into promises they’ve made themselves, that others made to them, and one too many expectations never met.
The nurse rapped on a door at the end of the hall. A buzzer beeped. They entered Kerr’s office and found him behind his desk—this pudgy little man with white hair, thin designer glasses, and trimmed goatee. He pressed fingers to his lips, studied Wylie, and said, “Who is this? You didn’t tell me you were bringing anyone.”
“He’s a friend and this is a personal matter.”
Kerr studied Wylie’s uniform, his eyes dancing nervously, mind jogging and skipping because he probably thought it was all a set-up, someone had found out he sold information to those who paid the right price and here he was living out a sting, and these jokers had the gall to walk right in and expect him to fall for it. Mike pulled a thick envelope from his coat and watched the doctor’s eyes lock onto it. Mike said, “Thirty thousand dollars.”
Wylie threw Mike a look that said, You’re fucking insane, but Mike knew there would come a time when the investment, which is what it was, would pay off.
Kerr giggled softly, eyes on the prize, said, “A friend in this personal matter, you say. Have a seat.”
Wylie shifted nervously.
Mike said, “Tell us about Nutley.”
Kerr’s eyes stayed on the money a moment and his lips upturned slightly, satisfied with himself. He shook his head and chuckled to himself.
Mike said, “We haven’t got all day.”
Kerr rubbed his chin and stared at the ceiling. “Abraham Nutley. He’s sixty-two. Caucasian. Grew up
in a Catholic home. His father was a steelworker, spent most of his life with the wind and god. His mother was a seamstress. They did not have the warmest home,” Kerr said, “if you can imagine that.”
“What brought him here?”
“In 1977 he had a breakdown.”
“What happened?”
Kerr snatched a cup of coffee from his desk and sipped. He held the cup on his lumpy stomach and laughed. “What do you mean what happened? He went bat-shit crazy.”
Wylie said, “You talk about all your patients that way?”
Kerr turned his head slowly, as if just noticing Wylie or having forgotten he was there. He said, “Forgive me,” but a warning laced his tone. He turned back to Mike who was leaning forward so much that it unsettled the good doctor and he spilled a bit of coffee on his shirt. He set the mug down.
Kerr cleared his throat and said, “Abraham was never all there. Even as a child he’d done bad things, evil things. He confessed them as time passed, and one of the underlying things that defined his actions was the lack of attention his parents gave him. He made up imaginary friends, as many lonely people do, and one of them was a mother—Sonnelion. Only she served as his father too, and his god. A hermaphroditic deity that filled the hole he thought his life had. And she sometimes commanded him to do things.” He lifted a finger. “This is a typical pattern many exhibit. He followed her commands, of course. He gave her what she said she needed to be with him forever. Sacrifice. Cats, dogs, birds, wild animals, then one day he got it into his head to give her more, something to guarantee that she would always love him and never leave him. He gave her his best friend, Lucas. He was seventeen at the time, and a strong young man, though you couldn’t tell it from looking at him. He took to wearing baggy clothes so that he could hide weapons, and formed the habit of duct-taping long-dried bones to his flesh, over his nipples, to his penis and buttocks.”