The Boy in the Woods

by Carter Wilson

  ‘Try to come home earlier,’ Becky said. ‘I don’t like the way you left. I don’t like any of this. And having this goon here just creeps me out. I feel like a prisoner.’

  Tommy looked around, searching for something that didn’t seem right. ‘I know. I know. Just … just trust me, OK?’ She’s here, he thought. She followed me to Charleston.

  ‘The more you ask me to do that the less I want to.’

  ‘Listen, I have to go. I’ll call later to say good night to everyone, OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  He pressed the phone hard against his ear. ‘I love you.’

  She was gone.

  Tommy stood in the terminal, phone still pressed to his ear, and realized it wasn’t really empty, not really. It just felt that way. The white noise of humanity he usually heard in an airport was replaced by a thick silence, which was all the more pronounced because of the fact that he did see people moving about, talking on the phones, greeting loved ones. But there was no life to any of it, and Tommy felt suspended, as if in a dream.

  Tommy lowered his phone. He turned his head, to the left, and then to the right, and in a flash he saw the bounce of blond hair – attached to a tall woman – behind a row of books in the store near the rental car counter.

  Tommy hesitated, then walked over to the bookstore. Upon entering, he found only two other people inside: the clerk, and an Asian woman browsing the magazines.

  The clerk looked up, offered a smile and a faint hint of recognition, as if perhaps she had seen his image on many book jackets before.

  Elizabeth was here. Maybe not in the airport, but she was here. In Charleston. He could feel it.

  The thought didn’t chill him. If anything, it was what he had expected. And if she was here, then it meant she wasn’t in Denver, near his family. But there was something else.

  It was exciting.

  As much as he hated to admit it, and as much as he wished he could change the past, there was a kind of macabre thrill about Elizabeth being back in his life. For Tommy, it was almost like one of his characters had come to life.

  He walked out of the store and dialed his agent.

  ‘Dominic, listen, I need you to extend the deadline.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘I’m serious. I want to go in a new direction.’

  Silence. Then: ‘Please tell me you’re fucking with me.’

  ‘Six months. I need six months.’

  There was a moment of silence before the explosion.

  ‘Six months?’

  ‘I know. I know. But we have to. It’ll be a better book.’

  ‘Screw that.’ Tommy could picture Dominic’s puffy cheeks turning a darker shade of crimson. Whispers of sweat growing on his forehead. ‘Tommy, you could end your book with a goddamn haiku for all they care. All the artwork is done – it’s ready to roll. It’s no longer about it being a good book. It’s about it being a timely book.’

  Tommy squeezed the phone.

  ‘It’s not about the ending,’ Tommy said. ‘The whole book is wrong. The characters … they turned out not to be who I thought they were.’

  ‘Jesus, Tommy, how did three weeks become six months?’

  ‘I’m Tommy Devereaux, goddamnit. And you know I never pull that card. OK, maybe every now and then I do, but I’m sure as hell justified in pulling it now. I write good books, sell millions of ’em, and never demand shit. I’m a publisher’s dream. But not now. Now I’m going to be the pain-in-the-ass prima donna that I’ve earned the right to be. I need six months to finish this book. End of discussion, Dominic. Now go do your goddamn job.’

  It was Tommy’s turn to hang up. He felt guilty, but it had to be done. The book was wrong and making it right had suddenly become second in importance to keeping Elizabeth quiet. And the two things were intricately entwined. Tommy sensed that getting the book right might just be the thing to rid him of Elizabeth. It was a sense he hadn’t quite figured out, but that was the beauty of such things: senses fed on instinct and feeling, needing no logic to let them grow.

  Tommy went outside and found the taxi stand. One pulled up, and he half-expected Elizabeth to be driving, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and blood-red lipstick. She wasn’t. He gave the cabbie the address Mark had e-mailed earlier. The cabbie nodded without speaking and pulled into the traffic.

  Tommy closed his eyes and thought about his book. He wondered what it would feel like to delete the existing draft of the book completely from his hard drive and his backup, erasing it forever. Would that free him, or would it make him feel like he wasted the last year-and-a-half of his professional life? He couldn’t decide, so he let the rhythm of the cab’s movements take over, and minutes later he felt himself drifting to sleep.

  ‘—home?’

  Tommy jolted, realizing the cab driver was talking to him. He straightened in his seat.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nice address,’ the cabbie repeated, his gaze ricocheting off the rear-view mirror, directly at Tommy. ‘That your home?’

  ‘Um, no. No. I’m just renting the place for a few days.’

  ‘Pretty expensive, I’m guessing.’

  It’s free, actually. ‘Yes. It is. Hope it’s worth it.’

  ‘Oh, it will be. You’re right in the thick of it there. Been to Charleston before?’

  Tommy looked out his window as they passed what was surely an ancient cemetery. Tombstones leaned in different directions, teeth loosened in a fight.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Best city in the country, you ask me.’

  Tommy felt the gentle rumble of the cab as it slowed from a smooth asphalt street to cobblestone. Out the window, dusk approached. A three-story Italianate house loomed above him, its intricate wrought iron fencing adorning the exterior balcony on the second level. Three dormers poked out from the third level, like eyes scanning the street below. It was a house suited for nighttime, gas lamps, and Victorian vampires.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ he told the cabbie. Tommy suddenly wished he was here on vacation rather than to see Mark.

  The taxi slowed a few houses past the vampire house to one different in appearance yet identical in spirit.

  Three stories of white clapboard rose to the sky. Three windows per floor on the street side, with black shutters encasing each of them. Porches extended from the left side of the massive house on all three levels, the bottom porch fully enclosed. The house was almost perfectly square, and the symmetry of it was somehow beautiful and unnerving.

  ‘Twenty-seven King Street,’ the cabbie said. ‘Knew it would be a nice place.’

  Tommy looked up at his home for the next few days. ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Didn’t know it was a rental.’

  Tommy opened the door and paid the driver. As the taxi rolled away, he climbed the four stone steps leading to the enclosed porch.

  ‘Goddamn Tommy Devereaux,’ a voice said. Mark Singletary was reclined in a wicker high-back chair, a hardback of one of Tommy’s books in his hand.

  Tommy opened the screen door and smiled. ‘Goddamn Mark Singletary.’

  Mark stood and Tommy walked up to him. If this was Jason – poor Jason, dead at the end of a rope – Tommy would have hugged his old friend, but there was something about Mark that didn’t make such a gesture feel welcome. Tommy reached out his hand. Mark’s grip was strong but not overbearing. The grip of a politician.

  Mark smiled and Tommy took his old friend in, absorbing thirty years of changes in seconds. The man looked just like his web-page photo. He looked … practiced.

  Thick, styled black hair had replaced dark unwashed hair. Shoulders and dimples had equally broadened, a testament to practiced exercise and smiling, no doubt. The man stood straighter, taller, and yet somehow more falsely than the old friend he knew. There was no substance to his bearing, and no bearing to his substance.

  Though there were some similarities to his old self, the only constant from thirty years ago, from the
boy Tommy once knew, were Mark Singletary’s eyes. They were exactly the same as they had been back then. Small, discreet orbs, the color a bottomless brown, radiating an altogether different sense than the smile just below them. There was a malevolent intensity in those eyes, so well disguised you would have had to look at the mug shots of a thousand killers to recognize it.

  Tommy recognized it.

  Frustrated. The word from the day in the woods came back to him.

  ‘You look great, Tommy,’ Mark said. ‘You were such a scrawny kid.’

  ‘I spend a lot of time in the gym. Weights. Cardio. Some boxing.’

  ‘Just like your old man. How is he?’

  ‘Dead. Both my parents. Alzheimer’s and cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He said it with a trace of smile still remaining on his face.

  ‘How are your parents, Mark?’

  ‘They’re still hanging on.’ Mark slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come inside, I’ll show you around.’

  Tommy leaned down and picked up his bag, noticing the last sliver of the sun dip below the peak of the ancient house across the street.

  He followed his old friend into the house.

  Night was coming.

  THIRTEEN

  The house had a substantial library, rivaling even Tommy’s. Tommy scanned the book titles and they seemed just random enough to have been put there by an interior designer. The two men sat in leather chairs, drinking Scotch as darkness crept behind the creamy sheer curtains.

  ‘So what now?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A silence uncomfortable to Tommy and likely not so to Mark settled between them, and Tommy got the sense Mark wasn’t quite ready to talk about the real reason Tommy flew halfway across the country.

  Mark was already halfway through his first drink before Tommy had even touched his. ‘I’m really proud of you, Tommy,’ he continued. ‘Of what you did with your life.’ Mark said it as if Tommy had been on the verge of being a meth addict.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘The world needs storytellers. World’s second-oldest profession.’ He gave Tommy a wink.

  ‘Looks like you’ve done a lot with yourself as well.’

  ‘Oh, I have. I have. But this is just the beginning. State Senate is just a stepping stone.’

  ‘To what?’

  A shrug. Sip of the drink. ‘Something bigger.’ Mark looked around the room. ‘I’ll be honest, I was fortunate to marry into serious Southern money. This house is Mara’s – that’s my wife. Been in her family for over a century. Built sometime in the early eighteenth century. Rent it out from time to time, but use it mostly for friends and family coming into town.’ He tilted his head back and he gazed at the punched-tin ceiling. ‘Lots of ghosts here,’ he mumbled. Then back to Tommy and back in focus. ‘Point is, I married into money, and I know how to use that money. I financed my first campaign and won in a landslide. Re-election is looking certain. One more term here and then I’ll do something on a national level.’

  ‘Senate?’

  ‘Wherever the people need me most,’ he said. Tommy sensed the man actually believed what he was saying. ‘Country is changing and we need to change it back.’

  ‘We?’

  Mark shook his head and smiled. ‘I know, I know. Not a lot of your kind in our party.’

  ‘My kind?’

  ‘You know. Artsy-fartsy types.’ Another wink, this one less playful somehow.

  ‘You mean creative free-thinkers and successful business people?’

  More insincere laughter. ‘Same old Tommy. Scrappy to the end.’

  What the hell did that mean?

  Mark dipped the tip of his index finger into his Scotch and stirred it before sticking his finger in his mouth. ‘Truth be told,’ he said after a stretch of silence, ‘Mara’s family isn’t as keen on financing my career as they once were.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Her mother thinks I’ve become … too severe in some of my views. What she calls severe I simply call God-fearing, and I won’t change my views.’ Mark sipped at his drink and kept his mouth on the glass for an extra moment, as if by not doing so he would reveal his fangs.

  Tommy looked at the man who once was his friend. He wasn’t sure what he was to him now, other than a direct connection to the worst day of his life. ‘When did you get so religious, Mark?’

  A heavy sigh. ‘After.’

  Tommy nodded, knowing what after referred to. It was the same in his own life. There was a before, an after, and a single, brilliant line of demarcation separating them. In Mark’s after, the man found God and power. In Tommy’s after, he wrote horror stories to keep the demons from burrowing too deeply.

  It seemed Mark was ready to talk.

  ‘Did you ever tell anyone?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Of course not. Never.’ Mark leaned in with a trace of panic on his face. ‘You?’

  ‘No,’ Tommy said. Except the whole world. ‘Except … except my new book talks about it. As fiction, of course.’

  Mark nodded over to Tommy’s book, which rested on an antique wood table between them. The brilliant red cover shone with the intensity of its title. The Blood of the Willing. That was Tommy’s last book. The first chapter of his new book debuted at the end of the paperback version.

  ‘Tommy, you didn’t even change her name.’

  ‘I thought she was gone forever. She was dead, for all I knew.’

  ‘But she isn’t. She isn’t dead at all. And she can ruin everything. You should have known better.’ Mark gulped down the last of his drink. ‘How did you figure out Jason was dead?’

  ‘My assistant did some research,’ Tommy said.

  ‘You’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

  Mark looked at his empty tumbler, as if it would suddenly reveal secrets to him. ‘It seems strange. To have killed himself. I wonder …’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  Mark turned his head and looked out the window to the street. Tommy followed his gaze, seeing nothing of interest.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mark said, turning back to Tommy. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Mark, what am I doing here?’

  ‘You’re here because you’re scared,’ Mark said. ‘She told you to come here and you did. You’re scared of the truth coming out, so you’re doing what you’re told.’

  Tommy didn’t like being told he was scared of anything, whether it was the truth or not. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Are you scared, Mark?’

  Mark looked at the floor. ‘Like a little boy lost in the forest,’ he said.

  Tommy didn’t believe Mark knew what that felt like at all.

  ‘We all have things to lose, Tommy. We’re just trying to hold on to them as long as we can. I’m not in a place where I can afford for any of this to come out.’

  Tommy asked him the question he was used to only asking himself. ‘Will you ever reach that place, Mark? Where you’re ready to tell the world what happened, no matter the consequences?’

  Mark walked around him and headed for the bottle of Scotch. ‘I don’t know, Tommy. I just don’t know.’

  ‘We were just kids, Mark. We didn’t have a choice. He … the Watcher … would have killed us.’ Tommy had told himself the same thing every day for the past thirty years. ‘But we could have said something, Mark. Even a few years later. Given comfort to Rade’s parents.’

  Mark poured himself another drink, the Scotch splashing off the bottom of the crystal tumbler and sprinkling the silver serving tray. ‘Tell me, Tommy. What do you lose if she reveals everything about that day?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone would believe her,’ Tommy said.

  ‘That’s not what I asked. I asked what would you lose.’

  ‘Hell, Mark. I can’t even imagine.’

  ‘Yes, you can. And you have. Say it out loud.’

  Tommy felt a chill like a cold hand on his neck as he spoke. ‘Assuming nothing could be definitely proven, I would l
ose a lot of respect from everyone I care about. I’d lose readership for sure. And if it could be proven … that I helped kill that boy …’

  ‘You didn’t kill him. She did the killing.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Tommy said. ‘It won’t look like that. We all left our blood on the knife, remember? If they get a positive DNA match from the knife, then I could certainly go to prison.’

  ‘Would your wife leave you?’

  Tommy had wondered this as well. ‘I’m not sure. I’d like to think she wouldn’t, but I really don’t know. We almost split up once before. And this … I mean. Shit, Mark. I just don’t know.’

  Mark leaned back against his chair and pointed at him. ‘Exactly. You would lose everything. The moment you lose your family, you’ve lost everything. I feel the same way, Tommy. The same way. So the next question is, what would you do to prevent the truth from coming out?’

  Tommy scrutinized the man in front of him, trying to find traces of the childhood friend he once knew.

  ‘I’m not the only one at risk here.’

  ‘You most certainly are not. I’ve got everything to lose as well. But there’s a difference.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Mark took another sip. ‘She’s not interested in me.’

  The cold hand now seemed to squeeze Tommy’s whole body. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We spoke.’ Mark’s face betrayed the slightest of grins. ‘Right here, actually. She sat where you’re sitting right now.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Couple of weeks ago. Before she contacted you. I didn’t tell you that on the phone … I don’t know why. Maybe afraid you wouldn’t come out here, I suppose.’

  ‘What did she tell you, Mark?’

  Mark shrugged, as if sitting down for a drink with a killer was part of his everyday routine. ‘She wants you to do something for her. I don’t know the specifics, but her only interest in me is to help convince you to do what she says. The first step was getting you out here to Charleston. Mission accomplished.’

  ‘So you’re collaborating with her.’

  ‘Not collaborating. Obeying. Just like you were when she told you to find me. I’m a proud man, Tommy, but I know when I’m backed in a corner. I don’t have a choice. And neither do you.’