Tommy didn’t bother to pick up either the manuscript or the pen. There would be no writing. Besides, he wanted to know what else was in the bag.
He didn’t have to wait more than a few seconds to find out. He and Stykes followed Elizabeth’s movements as she reached back into the bag again, this time extracting from it a black hand towel. She unfolded the towel and spread it out neatly on the dirt.
Then she pulled a knife from the bag. Eight-inch chef’s knife, cherry-red handle, full tang. As she placed it on the towel, Tommy briefly saw her distorted reflection in the blade. To him, in that instant, he saw the face of a clown, pulled in all directions, smiling and frowning at the same time. Laughing and crying.
‘Option number one,’ she said. ‘Messy, but if you do it right, relatively painless. Over in seconds. But doing it right requires full commitment. You have to really stab, and stab hard. Can you do that, Tommy? Can you look at him and push this blade into his chest?’
Stykes coughed up more blood. ‘Cunt,’ he said.
Elizabeth reached in the bag again.
Tommy recognized the object immediately. He had one at home.
A jump rope.
‘Option number two, if you prefer to strangle. Not messy, but again, requires commitment. Takes a bit longer, and you’ll be tempted to let go, but if you release too early you’ll just have to start all over again. You’re strong, Tommy. Big muscles. But it’s not so much the strength you need with this. It’s the will.’ She placed the jump rope on the towel. ‘By the way, don’t get your hopes up for a gun, Tommy.’
Into the bag she went again, dipping into it like a child searching for her favorite candy from her Halloween-night plunder.
Tommy looked up as she pulled out a small aluminum-brushed canister. It had a red nozzle on top, and the thing looked like a small unlabeled can of aerosol deodorant. She pulled out two sets of rubber gloves and face masks.
‘Hydrogen cyanide,’ she said. ‘Not easy to make, I can assure you. I’ve never used this but I was inspired by one of your books. I have an attachment, and all you have to do is spray it in his face. But—’
‘Apnea, coma, cardiac arrest within minutes,’ Tommy said. His female villain Adrienne had used hydrogen cyanide in The Blood of the Willing. ‘I’m familiar with it. Horrible agony.’
Stykes began to shake. ‘You can’t do this to me.’
‘That’s right,’ Elizabeth said, talking to Tommy and ignoring Stykes. ‘Not so much dirty work for you – just a quick spray in his face. But you’d have to watch him suffering. Hear the screams. If you choose this method, I have masks and gloves for the two of us.’ She turned the canister over in her fingers as she studied it. ‘Wouldn’t want to breathe any of this lovely stuff in accidentally. In my bag I also have a Cyanokit IV bag, just in case. Can never be too careful.’
She set the canister on the towel.
‘So those are my options?’ Tommy asked.
‘Not quite. One left.’
Stykes’s eyes followed as he watched her go back into the bag one last time.
The final item she extracted was a rock. It was about the size of a softball and its surface looked to have been smoothed over the years by water. River rock, Tommy thought.
‘Option four,’ she said. ‘Rock to the skull, just like Rade. Relatively painless for him if you do it with the right amount of force. Very, very primitive. Brutal.’ She placed the rock on the towel next to the other items. ‘You can use one of the four items here before you to kill this man.’ She turned her head and flashed her blue eyes at Tommy. ‘So what’s it going to be, Tommy?’
Tommy stared at the items on the towel and tried to picture himself using any of them. Could he really kill?
‘Don’t do it, Tommy.’ It was Stykes, whose face had lost all color.
Elizabeth turned to him. ‘Would you rather me do it, Alan? Because if it’s up to me, it’s not going to be quick.’
‘Monster.’ The blood seemed to have stopped clogging Stykes’s nose so much, though the word still sounded like monstug.
With a sudden move of her arms, Elizabeth pushed Stykes over. Unable to brace himself, Stykes crashed to the ground on the dolly, the impact knocking the wind out of him.
He laid on his back, gasping for air through a wide mouth, fishlike. Elizabeth stood over him, looking down.
‘I’m a monster? I’m a monster?’
He spit up at her, and more blood sprayed on her pants. ‘You are a monster, Elizabeth. You weren’t supposed to be this way.’
Way? Tommy wondered what that meant.
Then Elizabeth kicked him in the ribs. It was a child’s kick. An angry, tantrum-throwing child who can’t reason, so resorts to aggression instead. Tommy had never seen her lash out like this; even in the killing of the homeless man in Charleston she seemed controlled, scripted. But this was anger. Real anger.
She leaned over him. ‘How the hell was I supposed to turn out?’ she yelled. ‘Tell me! How was I supposed to turn out? Normal? Normal like you?’
Another kick, this time to the face. Stykes’s face swung to the side.
What the hell is going on?
Stykes grimaced before looking back at her. ‘That’s right, Lizzie. That’s right. Take it out on me. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? You ungrateful bitch. After all I’ve done for you.’
Tommy felt himself stepping back. One step. Two. Three.
‘Done for me?’ She dropped on top of him, straddling his waist. His hands remained firmly pinned against his sides by the rope and he was defenseless to absorb her blows, which she alternated between her right and left fists, each one landing with equal strength and precision on each side of his face. One. Two. Three. Stykes’s head twisted back and forth like a speed bag under the punishment of well-trained knuckles.
She paused after the sixth or seventh blow, gasping with exhaustion and anger. Stykes’s face began to swell, and blood oozed from the corner of his left eye.
‘Done for me?’ She raised her arm and smashed her elbow into his already broken nose, caving it deeper into his face. Tommy heard a smashing sound so sickening he almost thought he imagined it.
He took another step back, uncertain of what he was witnessing. Elizabeth had snapped, of that much he was certain. What he didn’t know was why, but Stykes did. Stykes knew exactly what he was doing, and Tommy could only assume he was provoking her in hopes of a quick death.
She leaned over Stykes, who seemed barely conscious, and spat in his face.
Tommy held still, straining to hear what she said to Stykes as she leaned closer to him.
‘You made me,’ she said, panting. ‘I am you.’
He wheezed his words out slowly through a swollen mouth. ‘You were born this way, Lizzie.’ Stykes’s eyes were now closed from the swelling and his lids puffed with blood. He faced Elizabeth’s voice but did not see her. ‘Even as a little girl. Remember? Remember the cat? That was you. That was all you.’
‘I’m this way because of you.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘The only thing you have of mine is blood,’ he said. His speech was slow, his voice raspy. ‘And if killing is in my blood, then that’s why it’s in yours. But you could have done something different. You wanted me to teach you. You begged me to teach you.’
‘I wanted a normal life,’ she said.
‘There is no normal.’ His breathing slowed. ‘There’s only what we know.’
Elizabeth, still straddling him, leaned to the side to the towel on the ground. She picked up the rock.
She held it high above her head with both hands, and Tommy suddenly saw her and Rade, thirty years ago.
She was going to kill him.
‘You tell me,’ she said, her words growled through tight teeth. ‘You tell me why you killed her.’
‘You know why I killed her.’
‘Tell me,’ she repeated, hoisting the rock even higher.
‘Because I had to,’ Stykes said. ‘She found
out what I was. I had to.’
‘She was my mother!’
Tommy blinked. Elizabeth screamed.
Stykes turned his head and waited for the end.
FORTY-NINE
The rock came down, but not on to Stykes’s skull. Elizabeth’s long, muscular arms squeezed the rock above her head for a few more seconds, and then, as if someone pulled a plug from her, her body simply began to crumple, bending down, her arms collapsing, the rock falling uneventfully to the ground. She put her bloodied and swelling hands on Stykes’s chest, supporting herself.
Tommy watched from a distance, detached, as if watching everything unfold on his living room flat screen. None of it seemed real.
Stykes said nothing, and he kept his head turned to the side, expecting, perhaps hoping, that she would kill him at any second. But she didn’t. Instead, she slowly lifted herself off him and stood, turning toward the weak sunlight and closing her eyes, then running her fingers through her hair and putting herself back in place. She ran her hands over her blood-stained pants, smoothing them. She stood straight, her posture perfect, her breasts round and large, pushing up tight against her blouse. She kept her eyes closed a few seconds longer and Tommy could see her taking deep, slow breaths, composing herself.
She opened her eyes and walked over to Tommy. A small part of him screamed at him to just run away, but he knew that would accomplish nothing.
Tommy stared in her eyes, the deep denim softness, and for the first time he saw the resemblance. It wasn’t strong, and he wasn’t surprised he hadn’t seen it before, but it was there.
‘He’s your father.’
Elizabeth nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘It’s irrelevant,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Your job is unchanged and unaffected by this,’ she said.
‘Your name is Elizabeth Stykes.’
‘I haven’t used that last name in a long time.’
‘He molested you. You said you were molested as a child.’
‘No, you asked if I was abused, and I said you can’t call it abuse if you like it.’
‘He killed your mother. How old were you?’
‘That information isn’t relevant either.’
But it was relevant, Tommy knew. Elizabeth the monster had always been just that. A monster with no context around who she was. Yes, she had given Tommy some idea about why she was who she was, but only in a controlled, staged interview back in the Oregon motel room. This was the barest he had ever seen her. The most vulnerable. She was stripped down to her core, and if Tommy could use this moment to really understand her nature, then maybe he could do something with that information.
Tommy nodded to the manuscript on the ground. ‘You might not think it’s relevant, but I’m the writer, not you. I need this information for the story. This is the last scene, isn’t it? How can I write this scene without understanding your relationship with … with the victim?’
‘Tommy, we can’t waste time here. We’ve already been too loud. Someone could come along any moment.’
‘They won’t. You picked this location. You must have scouted it for some time. You would make sure we had plenty of alone time here. Elizabeth, you want this to be a bestseller, don’t you? I need to know these details.’
She flicked her gaze away for just a second.
‘Quickly.’
FIFTY
‘He molested you,’ Tommy said.
‘Yes.’
‘How old were you?’
‘It started when I was five.’
‘When did it end?’
‘Who said it ended?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘How do you think I got him into the van?’
Tommy shuddered.
‘What about your mother?’
She blinked and tried to look defiant, but to Tommy she looked scared.
‘Back in the motel, you suggested she had abused you as well.’
‘She … she wasn’t like him. She was just too scared to do anything about it.’
‘So she never laid a hand on you?’
Elizabeth shook her head.
‘But she knew?’
Stykes’s wheezing breaths became the soundtrack for the conversation. Tommy tried to ignore them.
‘She knew.’
‘For how long?’
She took a moment to answer. ‘Years.’
Tommy sensed she wanted to talk more, so he remained silent.
Finally she spoke. ‘If you must know, we tried to run away once. I was seven. It was just my mother and me. I don’t have any other siblings. My mother was so fucking scared but she finally came in my room when he was at work and said, “We’re leaving.” I remember … I remember putting everything I loved in one suitcase. That was all she said I could take. One suitcase. I put some clothes in it, but mostly pictures. Polaroids. I had taken all these pictures of my stuffed animals. I had spent hours arranging them, pretending they were holding parties, and had taken so many pictures of them. I don’t know why, but I loved those pictures. The expression on the animals’ faces never changed. They were always happy. They were the only faces they had, and those faces always smiled. And I remember filling up the suitcase with the photos and my clothes.’
Polaroids. The same Polaroids Tommy saw in the picture frame in Stykes’s home. Stykes kept them as a souvenir, Tommy thought.
‘You only took the pictures with you? You didn’t take any of the animals?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would I do that?’
Tommy then saw how detached she was. She didn’t care about the things themselves. She only cared about how she could arrange them. How she could set the scene just the way she wanted. Her control was all that mattered, and she cared nothing for the thing she was controlling.
‘Where did you go?’ he asked.
‘At the time, we were in Portland. We didn’t have much money, so we just went to a cheap motel.’
Stykes now turned his head and watched her as she spoke. Tommy realized it was probably the first time the man had ever heard this story told.
‘But Daddy was a cop,’ Elizabeth continued, looking at her father. ‘And it wasn’t too hard for him to find us. And then he brought us home.’
At that moment Tommy heard a soft crackling in the distance, the sound of weight on fallen leaves. He turned his head and saw a small deer about a hundred feet away. It had just made its way into a small clearing and was pushing its nose into a pile of leaves, foraging. It brought its head up once and looked over in their direction but seemed to care little for the humans. Behind the deer another soon emerged, and then a third, the last one the largest of all. They cautiously walked forward, fanning out in formation, like soldiers on patrol in high grass.
‘And then he killed her in front of me.’
Tommy snapped his head back around to Elizabeth, who seemed to care as little for the deer as they did for her.
‘In front of you?’
‘He beat her to death with a golf club in the basement. Funny thing is, he didn’t even play golf. I don’t even know why he had the club.’
Stykes finally spoke, his voice weak. ‘It was a gift.’
Tommy remembered the ancient-looking golf club sitting in the corner of the man’s living room. That was the club he beat his wife to death with, and he just kept it in plain view for all the years after he did it.
She ignored him. ‘He made me watch, and when it was over he told me the same thing would happen to me if I ever tried to leave again.’
‘Bitch had it coming,’ Stykes mumbled.
Elizabeth walked over and kicked him in the head, the point of her shoe slamming into his left temple.
She walked back to Tommy as if nothing had happened. ‘It was horrible. And I was scared. Traumatized, of course. What little girl wouldn’t be?’ She moved her hair out of her face. ‘But there was a part of me that looked at my mother�
��s body and was simply fascinated by it. The blood. The damage. The life that had simply … vanished. And the power that was associated with that, you know?’ Elizabeth began to pace back and forth, looking at the ground as she spoke. ‘Here was this woman I had known for all my existence, and she was simply and suddenly no more. I didn’t feel so much a sense of loss as I did a wonderment at the vulnerability of life. How easily it can go away. I think even then I knew that wasn’t a normal feeling to have.’
‘He did create you,’ Tommy muttered. He did the math and realized Stykes must have become a father at a young age, maybe twenty.
She nodded. ‘If you got me on a psychiatrist’s couch, they would probably tell you my mother’s murder and the repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her killer made me what I am today. But I think I was already wired for the kind of life I was destined to lead. My experiences just made sure I didn’t have a chance for something normal.’
She kept pacing, a panther in a city zoo. She no longer seemed to care about the time, the urgency of what they were all there to accomplish. Elizabeth had probably never said any of this out loud before, Tommy realized, and now that she’d started it was difficult to stop.
‘So he buried her God-knows-where,’ she said. ‘Probably under the basement floor or something macabre like that.’
Stykes looked up at her but said nothing.
‘And then we quickly got out of Portland. I think the fact that he was … is … a police officer is the only reason he was never really investigated. You know, blue code of silence and all that cop bullshit. We moved around a lot in those next few years, always staying in Oregon. Each time we moved, it was always suddenly and without any kind of warning. I got used to it. Later I discovered our departures always coincided with a young boy going missing.’
‘He was already killing,’ Tommy said.
‘Oh, goodness yes,’ she replied. ‘Though I didn’t know that until later. Until he decided I needed some training.’
‘Training,’ Tommy said, nodding, seeing where this was headed. ‘You never wanted to leave him, did you?’
She laughed, and it was such a soft, gentle laugh. But Tommy had quickly learned nothing about Elizabeth was either soft or gentle.
The Boy in the Woods Page 24