by Paul Cleave
He drives through the intersection and pulls over. He knows the one thing that may help the situation. He opens another jar of baby food and shovels a spoon toward Octavia, who manages to get it into her mouth and swallow it all while still carrying on. Soon he’s going to be dealing with a fat baby. At least it hasn’t crapped itself today. He finishes off the bottle, then realizes he’s left the plastic cup back at the slaughterhouse. He has nothing to give Octavia, and it takes her two seconds to realize the same thing and the crying gets louder. He looks in the backseat and sees nothing, then checks the glove compartment. There’s a small bottle of water in there that’s half empty. He unscrews the lid and takes a sniff-it smells okay, it could only be a few days old. Or it could be a year old. He tosses it back. Octavia is throwing her arms around, really starting to wind up.
He starts the car. Like with Jessica, the movement and engine noise calms her. He knows this area. There is a dairy a few blocks from here, he drives to it and pulls up outside. He locks the car and runs inside and buys a small box of orange juice and runs back out, telling the owner to keep the change. He punches the straw into it and hands it to Octavia who, in an instant, forgets all about crying as she stares at it, making a smacking noise with her lips before sucking on the straw.
“Good?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer, but stares at him while drinking. Her eyelashes are clumped together and look like starfish appendages.
He starts the car. Katy is moving around a little more. The doctor will be waking soon too. He can’t keep driving. He needs to make a decision and he has to find a location. Somewhere the police won’t think to look, which means a location that has no relevance to him. Somewhere abandoned. Somewhere he can get some sleep and refuel on energy and where he can think about Mrs. Whitby and the judge and how he can get them. There have to be plenty of abandoned places in Christchurch. There are industrial buildings shut down because people have gone bankrupt. Empty houses in every neighborhood where people have packed their stuff together and gotten the hell out. He can’t just pull over at a park somewhere and sleep in the car.
He passes a liquor store, one he used to come to on the way home from work sometimes when he’d pick up a bottle of wine to share with Lara over dinner. He slows down, trying to remember the last time he was here but he can’t, not specifically, all he can remember are images of the years of different visits. Why would he remember? It’s just a liquor store. He hasn’t even thought about this place in fifteen years. There are four cars parked out front. He drives past, slows down, does a U-turn, and parks on the street. All the cars are empty, all the people inside the store. He takes the knife and steps out of the car and runs to the closest one, a purple one with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door. He crouches down and slides the knife into the back tire, and then crawls along and slides it into the front one. He doesn’t move around to the other side, but he does start to carve the word asshole on the hood. It’s more difficult than he would have thought-he can’t form the curves in the s, not with his fucked-up hands, so it ends up looking like a backward z. He gives up halfway through the e when he sees people getting ready to exit the shop.
He carries on driving. It dawns on him that he isn’t driving as randomly as he first thought. That’s why he knew about the dairy. It’s why he recognized the liquor store. He’s been homing in on the house he lived in back when things were the way they were meant to be. The house was sold not long after he went into prison. None of the money went to him. The mortgage was big enough as it was, and what was left went into funeral costs and lawyers’ fees. He came out of it with nothing. All the furniture was sold. His clothes, his possessions, everything he owned was sold or dumped and back then he didn’t care. It was just stuff. His family was dead, and who really cared about your TV or favorite sofa finding a new home?
His house comes into view, only it’s not his house anymore. Last time he saw it, it was, but last time was from the back of a police car. His hands were cuffed behind him and his hair was still damp from the shower and there was blood under his fingernails. He knew he would be going away but he also thought he’d be coming back-he didn’t know then that the policeman he’d hurt was dead.
The policeman. For the first few years he used to think about him all the time. Sometimes he’d scream out at night, other times he’d wake up in a cold sweat, lean over, and throw up on the cell floor. When he had access to the Internet in jail, he used to sit in front of the computer with his fingers over the keys ready to type that cop’s name into it, but he never did. He didn’t want to know if he had a family, if he left behind children. It was too hard. Reason he stopped trying to kill himself was because of that cop-Caleb knew he himself deserved to be punished for what he did, like everybody else. Killing himself fifteen years ago-no, he owed the cop more than that. He owed it to him to suffer, but now he has suffered enough. Like Jessica and Lara and his unborn son, that cop died because Dr. Stanton stood up for the wrong man.
He has no idea whether the people in his house are the ones who bought it fifteen years ago. The fence is new, the roof has been painted, and the garden looks nothing like it did back then, a few of the established trees are still there but the other ninety percent has been ripped out and replaced. However the essence of the house is still the same. There are lights on inside. He wants to knock on the door and ask to take a look through. There are memories locked away within those walls, small moments from his life, insignificant days that will come back to him. For a moment, even if only for a second, the world would feel quite okay.
“Where are we?”
Katy’s voice pulls him out of the thought. He turns around and watches as she wipes her eyes with the back of her knuckles the same way Jessica used to when she fell asleep in the car whenever the drive was longer than thirty minutes. She leans forward and entwines her other hand with her sister’s, who is still asleep.
“Go back to sleep,” he tells her, keeping his voice low.
“I’m not tired. Where’s Melanie?”
“She not here.”
“Where is she?”
“Melanie was a good girl so I let her go. She didn’t keep talking, and she was quiet when I told her to be and she didn’t keep asking questions.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“You’re off to a bad start, Katy,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re not very good at being quiet.”
“I’ll be quiet once I know where Daddy is.”
He rolls his eyes. Jessica used to be the same way. It was always quicker just to answer her questions. “He’s in the trunk.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want him back there with you.”
“Why?”
“Because there wasn’t enough room.”
“He could have sat in the front seat and Octavia could have sat back here.”
“I didn’t want him in the front seat. I wanted him in the trunk, and that’s where he went.”
“He could have fit back here too.”
“You’re not listening to me,” he says.
“Is that your house?”
Maybe it’s not quicker this way. “Do you know what quiet means?”
She nods.
He nods too. Then he sighs. “Yes, I used to live here.”
“With your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And your daughter?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Until a bad man took them away.” She bites her knuckle and sucks on it for a few seconds, then pulls it away but rests it on her lower lip. “Are you a bad man?”
“Yes,” he says, but he’s not a monster.
“Did you hurt Melanie?”
“No.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to hurt Octavia?”
“No.”
“Are you going to hurt my dad?”
�
��Yes.”
“Bu. . bu. . but you can’t,” she says.
He tries to feel something for this kid, some empathy. Is he that far gone that he feels nothing? He searches, he really searches, he wants there to be something, and there must be if she reminds him of Jessica.
Only he’s not that man anymore.
Katy is starting to cry so hard that she has to cover her face. Stanton starts banging from the trunk of the car. The bastard is awake. Katy looks up, her eyes are red, and yes, he does feel bad for her. None of this is her fault. Her father brought this on her, but she is a tool, a tool that is a means to an end.
He would be best to remember that.
“Daddy,” she cries out.
“Shut up,” Caleb says, the words low and harsh. “If you say one more word, just one more, I’m going to hurt you. Okay?”
She goes quiet. The banging in the trunk gets louder. Last thing he needs is to be driving around and have somebody hear it. He looks at the knife with the flecks of purple paint on the end of it but leaves it on the seat. He gets out of the car and pops the trunk. Stanton is still bound, and he stops kicking against the wall when Caleb looks down at him.
“You keep doing that,” he says, repeating the speech to Stanton that he just gave a few seconds earlier, “and I’m going to take it out on your remaining daughters. I’ll do to Katy what was done to mine. I’ll do everything to her that was done to mine. Then I’m going cut them into tiny pieces and jam them down your throat. You get my drift?”
The doctor mumbles something for a few seconds, and then nods. Caleb slams the trunk down. One of the neighbors is staring out the window at him. Derek Templeton, fifteen years older and fifteen years fatter than the last time he saw him. Once he helped Derek install a kitchen. They did most of the work but had to have the countertop made by professionals. They used plenty of power tools and hammered everything into place and the process was a mess but the end result was fantastic. Derek bought them pizza and beer and they sat outside on the deck with their wives and made a toast to good times. Right now Derek has a look on his face that suggests he can’t quite believe who he’s looking at. His waves are slow and jerky with no arm movement, all side to side from the wrist, the wave of a man confused by what he’s seeing. Caleb finds himself waving back, the human instinct kicking in, both men reacting to it, each of them moving like marionettes.
Caleb lowers his arm. Derek stops waving. They stare at each other from across the street like gunslingers ready to draw down on each other. Then Derek disappears. Caleb gets back into the car.
He doesn’t even know why he came here. Part of him, at least subconsciously, must have been aware of where he was driving. He supposes he was hoping the house would be as he left it, the furniture would have been returned, every surface covered in dust, the smells of his wife’s perfumes and the scent of her body clinging to the air. The house would be empty but inviting him back to a part of his life long since gone. Whatever piece of him thought he could return home couldn’t have been any more mistaken. The past is the past, you can’t change it, and Caleb Cole knows that better than anybody.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Before we can say anything, Benson Barlow puts his hand up the same way a publicist will to a news crew before running off a statement about why their client was caught naked outside a restaurant in town. He moves toward us and we take a few steps back so Melanie’s mother and her boyfriend can slip into the office behind him. We can hear Erin gushing over Melanie, while the boyfriend doesn’t seem to know what to say. We can almost hear the mother’s tight hugs being thrown around her. We don’t hear anything coming from Melanie.
“She’s struggling,” Barlow tells us, “I’ve got her talking but, well, things for her are going to be tough moving forward.”
“What-” I start, but he interrupts me.
“I believe I can give you the answers to your questions. You want to know what Cole said to the girls, and you want to know if they went anywhere else, or if she knew where else they were going.”
“And?” Schroder asks.
“She says he told them a story about a little girl named Tabitha. She says Caleb told them a bad man named James hurt her, and that her dad told the world James was okay and wouldn’t hurt anybody else. Evidently, Caleb explained a great deal to her. She understands that Tabitha was attacked, and she understands the man who did that went free because of her father, though she isn’t sure exactly how. She knows that man went on to kill Jessica Cole. She said Caleb made both her and Katy drink some cola and that it tasted funny, that he was really insistent they drink it, and then they fell asleep.”
“Why leave Melanie behind?” I ask.
“This is where it gets tough,” Barlow says, and his voice has a small waver to it. “You both have children,” he says, then looks at me and shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t think.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him.
He pauses for a few seconds, what I’m thinking he thinks must be an appropriate time, then carries on. “Melanie said,” he says, then pauses again, this time to compose himself. He smiles, one of those trying smiles people give when something is just too tough to mention. “Melanie said Cole told her father this morning that he was going to kill her and her sisters.”
Barlow plays with the collar of his shirt and isn’t looking either of us in the eye.
“She said it was going to happen tonight, out at the slaughterhouse. She said Caleb was keeping his voice down low so they couldn’t hear him, but she still heard bits of it anyway. She said he was going out for the day, but then he came rushing back in the afternoon and he seemed panicked. That’s when he gave them the drink.”
“He drugged them,” Schroder says.
Barlow nods. “Melanie could feel herself getting sleepy, so she knew she had been drugged, so she pretended to fall asleep. She heard part of the conversation Cole had with her dad before she actually did fall asleep. He told Stanton that they were going to leave one of the daughters behind, and the one left behind was going to have to die. It was up to Stanton to decide which one.”
We all take a moment with that idea. All three of us put ourselves into that impossible situation of having to choose who lives and who dies. My stomach and chest suddenly feel very empty. The back of my neck breaks out in a cold sweat. What would you make the decision on? How could you make it? You couldn’t-only it seems as though Caleb would have threatened violence or death to all of the children until Stanton made a decision. Even then an impossible decision. How do you choose?
You can’t.
You just can’t.
And yet somehow Stanton made it. He was strong enough to pick a name to save the others. Stronger than I could ever have been, perhaps stronger than anybody in this room. He chose a name to save the other two girls.
Nicholas Stanton is a man breaking down.
“Melanie cried out when she heard that, but continued to pretend to sleep. Cole said if one of them was pretending he would punish them, but she kept pretending anyway. She said she doesn’t remember much after that, just that she was really scared, then next thing she knew she was waking up in a hospital.”
“Poor bastard,” Schroder says.
Barlow nods. “You’re seeing it from his point of view, and of course you would since you’re a father. But look at it from Melanie’s point of view. She’s connected all the dots. The fake blood. The drugging. She knows Cole faked her death. Which means she knows she was the one her father chose to be left behind. She survived, but her world has fallen apart. She’s the one her father chose to die.”
“Bloody hell,” Schroder says. “Will she be okay?”
“Would you?”
“I guess not.”
“You think Cole is going to hurt the other daughters?” I ask.
Barlow stares at me for a few seconds while thinking about it. His head bobs up and down from left to right and back again. “Unlikely. He wrote I’m sor
ry across Melanie’s forehead. She said he was mean to her father, but kept trying to be friendly to her and her sisters, and he would only snap at them when he was really stressed. I think he genuinely feels bad for those children. But he’ll use them to get what he wants.”
“Which is?” I ask.
Barlow shrugs. “If it were just about killing Stanton, he’d have done it already. If it were just about making him think all three girls were dead, he’d have done that already too. He has an endgame, I don’t doubt that-I just don’t have any idea what it’s going to be, other than making Stanton suffer for as much of it as he can. Maybe he wants Dr. Stanton to get a little taste of what he went through all those years ago when he lost his daughter.”
“To what end?” Schroder asks.
Just then Melanie comes out of the office. She slams the door behind her and looks up at Barlow and Schroder and me. She’s crying. “I want to go home,” she says.
“You should-” Barlow says, then he’s interrupted by Erin Stanton coming out of the office.
“Melanie-” Erin says.
“You’re not my mother,” Melanie says, looking back, then to us she repeats “I want to go home. Only I don’t even know what home is anymore.”
“Melanie,” Erin says, lowering herself down to hug her daughter.
Melanie turns her back on her mother, and her mother sobs into her hands and stands back up. The boyfriend stands a few feet into Schroder’s office watching uncomfortably. He’s holding on to his helmet, probably thinking that this is all just too much for him.
“I want to go home.”
“Soon,” Barlow says, taking her hand. “I promise. But for now you need to wait with your mother.”
“She walked out on us.”
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Erin says.
“I don’t like her.”
“Don’t say that, baby,” Erin says.