‘Leave him? Tommy, I wanted to be him.’
And the moment Elizabeth killed a boy, her father switched to boys as well, Tommy realized. Did Stykes molest them as he had his own daughter? Or was he simply trying to recapture what he had experienced as a Watcher in the woods?
‘And then you moved to Lind Falls and got your chance.’
‘Yes.’
‘Alan had just started work with the police department. It was summer, so no one knew you from school yet.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But after the killing, you disappeared. He stayed.’
‘I ran away. I was scared of getting caught, so I left. I’m sure Dad told anyone who asked that he shipped me off to boarding school for a few years, but I never came back to Lind Falls until now. Dad finally stayed put. Guess the town grew on him.’
‘Where have you been all these years?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘How did you live? The story … about your parents and the car crash and the insurance money. That was all bullshit. So how did you survive?’
‘Tommy, you’re stalling.’
‘I’ve been thinking about you for thirty years. Humor me for two more minutes.’
‘This is pointless.’
‘Right here, Elizabeth. This is the arc of the story. The readers won’t feel any connection to you if they don’t understand who you are.’
He could see in her face that his words made an impact. She wanted to be understood. She needed to be in control of the story. It was her weakness.
Tommy just wanted to keep her talking.
FIFTY-ONE
Elizabeth looked down at her father, who alternated between staring at her and squeezing his eyes shut, as if trying to will himself to another part of the earth. He did not speak.
‘I drifted, mostly,’ she said. ‘It’s not too hard to have a decent life if you’re good-looking and manipulative. Men came into my life.’ She shrugged. ‘I would fuck them and then take their things. Some of them I would kill. Most I didn’t. Most would wake simply to find me gone. On to the next city. Next state.’
‘Did you ever come back to Oregon?’
‘No. I stayed mostly on the East Coast. Better quality stock.’
‘Did you follow stories about your killings? Ever get an idea if you were close to being caught?’
‘Tommy, when you’re like me, you’re always close to being caught. That’s why you have to keep moving. Keep planning ahead.’
Tommy knew this was true. He also knew serial killers rarely, if ever, had the kind of career Elizabeth claimed to have. For a killer to be active over a fifteen-year period was rare. To be active for double that, and not have been caught, was almost unprecedented.
‘You’ve had help,’ Tommy said.
‘Help?’
‘You must have. An accomplice. Someone you trusted for at least some time.’
‘You don’t think I can take care of myself?’
‘I think there are things you seem to be capable of that would be far easier done with help. You haven’t lived your life as an escort. In New York, you said you were an escort. But you couldn’t have sustained that kind of life. You’ve been much more comfortable than that. You’ve needed to rely on others, haven’t you?’
‘I’ve found that relying on others only leads to heartbreak.’
‘Heartbreak? How would you even know what that meant? You’re a sociopath. You’re incapable of caring about anyone but yourself.’
Her eyes flared for the briefest of moments, a rare tell of emotion. ‘Spoken like someone who spends his time researching and not participating. You cannot understand me, Tommy, if you continue to see me for only my acts.’
‘Tell me who broke your heart. Let me understand. Have you ever loved someone, Elizabeth?’
Again she looked at her father, whose eyes were closed.
‘I have loved two men, Tommy. The first one never loved me back. The second one did, or at least he was obsessed with me.’
‘What happened to them?’
She let out a long breath, as if the words coming out of her took along with them some of her life. ‘They both killed themselves.’
Tommy took a step back and studied her face. There was pain there, and if it wasn’t real then she was a great actress.
‘Jason?’
She nodded.
‘How could you love him? He detested you.’
‘He was the first boy I ever had sex with. At least when I wasn’t being forced.’ She spat at her father. ‘That did something to me. I loved him for years without ever knowing where he was. Then I tracked him down in New York. I thought maybe … I don’t know what I thought, actually.’
‘You wanted to find someone like you.’
‘Don’t we all?’
‘But Jason wasn’t like you at all. You forced him to be a Watcher and then he killed himself.’
Another shrug, but this time she seemed to use it to help hide a deep sadness.
‘Who was the second?’
She looked up at him and her eyes were genuinely glistening.
‘He was a rising politician.’
FIFTY-TWO
‘Mark?’
She nodded.
‘How is that possible? He was married.’
‘I was the mistress. We didn’t see each other often. Once a year at the most.’
‘For how long?’
‘The past twelve years.’
‘Bullshit. He wanted you dead.’
‘I don’t doubt that. He was taking risks with me. I remained deep in the shadows, but if I had come out with what I knew about him, his life would have been over. But he couldn’t live without me. Back at Red Rocks, you were right in what you said. Mark was a lot more like me than he was like you. He had the darkness, and I was the only person he could share that with. I was his god, Tommy, but I was also his demon. When you have things like that battling inside you for too long, you have to give up at some point. Mark killed himself over it. You have a little of it in you too, Tommy. The struggle.’
Tommy wanted to deny it but couldn’t.
‘So he was there that night in Charleston. He was a Watcher when you killed that man.’
‘No, Tommy. Mark hadn’t done anything like that in a long time. It would have been too risky. But he did make time to fuck me earlier that day. Politicians never see that as too risky.’
She walked up to him, as she had so many times before in the last two weeks, and put her mouth close to his ear. A lover’s secret, hot breath inside his head. Her fingers found the buttons on his shirt, and she flicked the top one open without seeming to try.
‘Are you going to remember all of this, Tommy? After what’s going to happen here today, are you going to be able to write all this down?’
And as he had before, Tommy felt compelled by her. Enticed by her. Despite the violence around them, or perhaps even because of it, Tommy was coaxed by her voice. Her smell, the scent of excitement and anticipation. Her power.
He looked at his manuscript on the ground. ‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,’ he said. He turned his head to her, their noses almost touching. ‘You said he trained you. What does that mean?’
Instead of answering, Elizabeth went over to her father and straddled him once again, her pelvis aligned with his, her small hands resting casually on Stykes’s bulging gut.
‘Training is all about control, Tommy.’ She leaned over and peered into Stykes’s rage-filled eyes. ‘That feel good, Daddy?’ she said to him, slowly beginning to grind on him. ‘You like me like this? I’m on top, a position of power. You’re not used to that, are you?’ She leaned down and whispered something in his ear. Stykes immediately tried to bite her but she pulled her head away and laughed. He spat at her, but even that missed.
‘I thought I wanted to be you,’ she said to him. ‘But I realized I’m my own person. My own desires, not yours. And in a way, you being alive has always stopped me fr
om forming fully. But today you’re going to die, so at least I’ll have a little time to enjoy truly being my own person. I will die a happy daughter.’
Stykes looked like a cobra ready to spit again but he held back. ‘The hell you talking about? You’re not the one going to die.’
‘Oh, but you’re wrong. I have cancer, and I’ve decided not to treat it. I doubt I have a year left in me.’
Tommy watched Stykes study her. How would he react to this news, this man whose daughter faced a painful death, yet was the architect of his? He looked at her deeply, intimately. And then Stykes began to laugh.
A hearty laugh, interrupted only by wheezes of pain and clogged nasal passages.
‘You don’t have cancer,’ he said.
Elizabeth stood and moved away from him. ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said.
‘Lizzie, you think I’m just a monster, and maybe I am. But I do know my own child, despite what you think. One thing I could always tell was when you were lying and when you weren’t. And you sure as hell are lying right now.’ He chuckled some more, but it quickly faded into silence. ‘There isn’t an ounce of sickness in you.’
Tommy looked over and studied her face. She brought her gaze to his and he could tell she was struggling to keep eye contact. But she did, and those blue eyes didn’t blink.
‘He’s a fool,’ she said. Elizabeth walked over to the weapons on the ground and stood over them.
‘Choose,’ she said, turning back to Tommy.
Stykes warily eyed the weapons from his position on the ground.
‘Convince me you’re sick,’ Tommy said.
‘Choose … your … weapon.’
Tommy looked down at the killing tools on the towel. The time was soon. Minutes away. Maybe seconds. He felt the greasy sweat on his palms as he dug his fingers inward. He had to kill before the day was over. He wanted to feel the rage he thought he would need to do it, but more than anything he just felt scared. Could he do it? Could he pick up a weapon on the ground and attack with it? Tommy knew it would have to be the knife. The knife was the only thing on the ground that he could use quickly and with any degree of confidence. The cyanide would also be effective, assuming that was what was inside there. But Tommy wanted nothing to do with that canister. Way too unpredictable.
‘Tommy.’ Her voice was that of a school teacher correcting an errant student. ‘Tommy. Darling. I’m going to tell you again. There is only one thing you need to believe, and that is what’s going to happen if you don’t kill this man. I will ruin your life, and I will do it with so much commitment and dedication you might even get more prison time than me. You will lose everything, just because you refused to dispatch a child killer. Is that what you want?’
‘I’m thinking. Jesus, just … just let me think.’ Another minute of silence passed. Stykes’s groans of pain had softened, or at least had become so regular Tommy barely noticed them.
‘Tommy,’ she said, ‘You came all the way out here. You came committed. Ready to end all of this. Ready to get your life back. Your only hope of doing that is to kill this man.’ Another half-step toward him. ‘So I’m going to tell you again: choose a weapon.’
Tommy stared at her in silence, his mind racing. Just choose a weapon, he told himself. Do it now. You can do it. You can end this.
She walked up to him and stood only a foot away, her gaze burrowing deep into him. Tommy felt his eyes search for the ground, but Elizabeth put a finger under his chin, lifting it up, demanding that he look at her. She looked at him quizzically, as if trying to solve a math problem written on his forehead. Then her face relaxed, she smiled and dropped her hand. She seemed to have solved the problem.
‘I see. Now I understand,’ she said. ‘You never cease to amuse me, Tommy.’
Tommy blinked. ‘Understand what?’
Elizabeth put her hand on Tommy’s chest and pushed back lightly with long, blood-red nails. With a graceful pivot she turned from him, walked a few feet, then dropped to one knee next to her father. She reached out to the pile of potential murder weapons on the ground and grabbed the jump rope.
Stykes twisted his head just in time to watch her wrap the jump rope around his throat.
FIFTY-THREE
‘No!’ Stykes’s eyes bulged.
Elizabeth slowly raised herself, holding one handle from the rope in both her hands, and standing on the other handle on the ground. As she lifted her body, the rope grew taut around Stykes’s throat.
‘No,’ Stykes said again, the word becoming a choke this time.
Tommy felt his weight shifting toward them. His mind told him to do something. But there was nothing to be done.
‘Is this what you want, Tommy?’ She lifted more, and Tommy could see the thin veins pulse in her strong arms. Stykes began to thrash, his arms useless bound against his body. Halibut gasping in the throes of death. ‘Can you do this?’ she asked Tommy. Stykes’s eyes now bulged beyond what Tommy would have thought possible. ‘This is how you do it, Tommy. The question is: can you do it?’
Tommy had no real answer to the question. Was Elizabeth really going to kill her father? If so, what did she see in Tommy’s eyes that made her change her perfectly planned afternoon?
He got a quick answer to the first question. Tommy stood still and watched the man on the ground die, choked to death by his daughter. It took a couple more minutes, the sounds of gagging nearly making Tommy vomit. He watched it all happen. It was the third person he saw die at her hands, and Tommy knew whether he lived for only one more day or another fifty years, he would never forget the sight of Alan Stykes being strangled on the floor of the woods.
Tommy had finally become Elizabeth’s Watcher, just as Jason and Mark had been before him, and Alan Stykes before that, and here she was, completing the cycle. The sight of the death and the ritual transfixed him, and before Tommy could think about his next move, her orgasm ended. Elizabeth’s body gave one last shudder, then she dipped her head down and brought her eyes up to his.
‘I know you want to kill me, Tommy. It’s written all over your face. You’re just trying to figure out how to do it. If that’s why you really came here today, I suppose it’s time to get about it.’
Tommy looked over to the knife on the towel.
FIFTY-FOUR
Tommy’s decision to kill Elizabeth and not Stykes had come to him in the days before boarding the plane for Portland, culminating just hours before he left. The realization came from the slow trickles of moral intuition finally breaching the dam walls he’d constructed, thick walls of logic buttressed by ego and fear. Gradually, over the course of that last day, Tommy had been consumed by a profound sense of what it was all about.
Elizabeth wasn’t sick. Tommy realized that even before Stykes said as much. Elizabeth didn’t give a shit about a book written about her. Elizabeth just wanted to control him, and she would never go away until either Tommy destroyed her or she destroyed him.
It took Tommy being alone in his house for the dam to crumble behind the booming silence of his absent family. Alone, in his bedroom, Tommy had closed his eyes and had seen Becky’s face. In his mind, she looked at him with the one expression that always tore deep into his belly: crushing disappointment. He saw the lick of crow’s feet around her eyes as she looked at him, studying the man who had lied to her, the man who had desperately tried to plead his case, insisting that everything he did he did for them. He saw a hesitant love in her, a changed love, the kind that could be redeemed but only with great effort, humility, and selflessness on his part. He’d been able to redeem that love once, but now didn’t know if Becky would ever give him the chance to do it again. Then Becky’s face fell from his mind and was replaced by an image of his little girl. Evie was smiling at him, the innocence in her face so profound it seemed impossible someone like Elizabeth could ever have emerged from a child. Finally, his eyes still closed, Tommy saw his boy, Chance, throwing a football toward him, the pass a wobbly spiral, the laces on
the dusty brown leather worn from use. Chance wore a crooked grin, cocksure but seeking approval. Was that a good one, Dad? Tommy could hear the words as sure as if Chance were right there in front of him. In that moment, alone, on the bed, Tommy knew the truth of everything. It was so simple and so pure and so goddamn obvious. But the truth had eluded him all his life until this moment, lurking just beneath the surface of his own wants and desires. For up until that point, Tommy had always thought he was the good guy. But he wasn’t. Not the way he needed to be.
The truth was, it wasn’t about Tommy at all. It never had been. The truth was it was about everyone except Tommy.
His family needed him, but only the real Tommy. The one who not only knew the right thing to do, but actually did it. Any other Tommy they could do without. They would get by without him. But if they had the Tommy they needed, they stood a chance together. And they would all be stronger, together, because of it.
Tommy had to remind himself that Elizabeth wasn’t a person, she was a poison. Tommy wasn’t going to kill a woman, he was going to rid his system of a toxin. It was the only way. Any other way, going to the police, or just hoping Elizabeth would disappear again, was just naive and hopeful thinking. She would destroy him, and God only knew what kinds of ways she would get to his family.
No, this wasn’t going to be murder. This was war, and Tommy was going to kill an enemy combatant before it was he who was taken out. It was the only way.
‘That’s number forty for me,’ she said, nodding at the body on the ground. ‘Tied for second place.’
It took him a moment and then Tommy realized she meant her kill record. He thought back to the night in Charleston. Then she’d told him she had thirty-eight kills. The homeless man was thirty-nine. With the death of her father, Elizabeth was now tied for second place for the most prolific female serial killer in history.
Tommy was two large steps away from the towel on the ground, which still held the small canister of gas and the knife. The jump rope was firmly entrenched around Stykes’s neck, dug into his skin. The rock was a foot away from his lifeless head.
The Boy in the Woods Page 25