Frantic

by Mike Dellosso

  William stared at his hands. “Do you think he could have loved me, Marnin?”

  Marnin reached over and covered William’s twisted hand. “I think he did love you, in his own way.”

  “He had a strange way of showing it.”

  “Yes, he did. And a lot of people got hurt because of it. And Esther and I would have been next.”

  “I didn’t want him to die.”

  “I know. All you did was have faith. God took care of the rest. All we can do is have faith and pray. We must agree with God’s will, not the other way around. You taught me that.”

  William’s mouth turned up in a subtle smile. “You were listening to me, Marnin?”

  “Hanging on every word.”

  Esther stood, shook the lieutenant’s hand, and made her way back to William and Marny. She slid in next to her brother and kissed him on the cheek. “Good news, little brother. You’re not going to spend one minute in jail.”

  “Did you tell him what happened, Esther?” William said.

  “Everything.”

  “Did you tell him I didn’t want Gary to die?”

  “Of course. They’re saying a micro-earthquake hit the region and opened up a cave, and Gary just fell in. That’s the story.”

  “Some story,” Marny said.

  “Stranger than fiction.”

  Marny pushed his coffee aside. “And what about the house? What about Harold?”

  For three full days the Maine State Police had combed the home and tunnels on Cranberry Road. And after tracking Gary from Massachusetts to Maine, the FBI even showed up for a day, did their thing, and got out of there. They didn’t appear to enjoy their stay in Vacationland.

  Esther reached for a sugar packet and spun it on the table. “It’s quite a story, the stuff of a weird novel.”

  “We have nothing else to do.”

  Esther took a sip of William’s chocolate milk and swallowed hard. She took a deep breath. “For starters, no one survived the shootout down there. There were ten of them. Normal guys, I guess, working men. Construction types, a lawyer, a forest ranger, even a couple state troopers. And one was Dr. Martin Finkelstine, a hematologist in Bangor who lost his license to practice medicine for tampering with blood samples and performing experiments on unknowing patients, among other things. Unseemly things. But they were all family men. And they were all murderers.”

  “The guy next door. Why is it that the normal guy next door turns out to be the creep?”

  “Their normalcy keeps them hidden, steers them away from suspicion.”

  “And they had some kind of ritual thing going on down there in the tunnels?”

  “More than that. And much worse.”

  “They were the Maine Maniac?”

  She nodded, spun the sugar packet again. “Together they formed a cult and did dark and disgusting things, things too gruesome even to talk about.” She glanced at William. “The things they did are best left unsaid. To talk about it would be to memorialize what they did. And they don’t deserve that.”

  “But the blood, type O, the victims. What was that all about?”

  Esther paused, swallowed again. Marny could tell the more she talked, the harder it was for her to go on. The story, the nightmare, didn’t get any better as it went, and though he was a monster and murderer, Harold, the man spearheading the disgusting acts, was still her father. She and he shared the same blood.

  “It seems they got it in their heads that if they replaced their own aging blood with that of the young and healthy, the pure and strong, they would live longer. The life is in the blood. So they drained their victims and transfused the blood into their own veins.”

  William shifted in his seat but said nothing. He was all ears but clearly bothered by Esther’s grisly tale.

  Marny said, “A new breed of vampires.”

  “Drinking from a dark fountain of youth.”

  “Fiction doesn’t touch this.”

  “I warned you.”

  “So what about the Maniac’s murders?”

  “Wickham said he thinks all the murders will be solved and then some.”

  “There were more?”

  “Recent ones, unsolved, as recent as a month ago in Monroe Bridge.”

  Marny was about to take a sip of coffee but set the mug down again instead. “Harold.”

  “Seems he tried to run from his sins, tried to hide from his dark past and start a new life.”

  “Building ornate cupolas in Massachusetts.”

  “But eventually his demons found him.”

  “They almost always do.”

  “They always do. Sooner or later.”

  Marny ran his finger around the rim of his coffee mug. “What do you think drove him into such a dark place? I mean, from cop to killer is quite a fall.”

  “We’ll never know now. My guess is that he was so hurt by what my mother did, and”—she paused and put her hand over William’s withered one—“so repulsed by William that he just snapped.”

  “That’s the understatement of the century.” Marny downed the rest of his coffee. “And the house? Please tell me there’s a perfectly rational explanation for what we experienced there.”

  Esther shrugged and shook her head. “Nope. They didn’t find anything. No blood, no water, the temperature was a perfectly balmy seventy-eight degrees.”

  “So I imagined the whole thing?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “And William and Gary imagined the same thing? Hardly. What would the chances of that be? There were some dark forces at work there. I saw it in the eyes of the men, the doctor, my father.”

  “I told you the house was alive, Marnin,” William said.

  “In a way, I guess it was.”

  Esther reached across the table and took Marny’s hand. “But the light pushed back the darkness.”

  “It almost always does.”

  “No,” she said. “It always does. Sooner or later.”

  Chapter 71

  SAYING GOOD-BYE IS the hardest part.

  One day after Marny, Esther, and William came down off that mountain, the bodies of George Condon and Pete Morsey were found buried in the pebbled beach behind Mr. Condon’s shoreline home.

  Petey’s funeral was held a week later, Mr. Condon’s a day after that. Marny attended both.

  He hadn’t realized the scope and breadth of Mr. Condon’s influence on the people of Down East Maine. Hundreds came to pay their respects to the man some knew as Condy, some as George, some as Mr. Condon. They testified for hours of his dry humor and quick smile, of his toughness as a Maine native, of his kindness and generosity, and of his capable attention to the inner workings of any vehicle on wheels.

  When it was Marny’s turn, he stood before the crowd, tears in his eyes, and cleared his throat. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about Mr. Condon, sweet things and, I have no doubt, true things. Things I’m just now learning about him. He was more of a man than I ever imagined. And to me he was just that, more than a mere man—he was a father. I never had a father, not a real one at least, and Mr. Condon unknowingly filled those shoes. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss getting whipped at checkers by him. I’ll miss drinking coffee with him every morning at the shop. I’ll miss the tunes he used to hum while working on some engine or transmission. And I’ll miss the way he used to say my name, Mahny. I still hear his voice in my head. He gave his life to save ours. What greater love is there than that?”

  A month after the incident on the mountain behind the house on Cranberry Road, Marny, Esther, and William walked along the shoreline of Booker Island. William held a handful of shells he’d collected; Marny and Esther held hands. Water lapped at the pebbled beach and gulls circled overhead, always on the lookout for their next meal.

  They walked mostly in silence, Marny thinking about the night they had spent there. It seemed like years had passed since he went through every match in that matchbook and William started the fire with nothing but faith. Years of memories an
d nightmares and unanswered questions. And for Marny, years of making up time and drawing closer to God. He was amazed at how much one could learn from an eleven-year-old boy wonder and his overly protective sister.

  Eventually they came to the fire pit they’d sat around that night. The charred stones were still there in a neat circle, out of reach of the relentlessly surging and receding waters of the Penobscot Bay.

  At the fire ring Marny stopped and faced Esther. He took both her hands in his. “My mother once told me that behind every rain cloud is the sun, just waiting to shine its light and dry the earth’s tears. God knows I’ve been running from a rain cloud my whole life, trying to find the sun and never succeeding.”

  Esther’s eyes never looked bluer, like they’d been chipped from the clearest sapphires. She smiled at him and squeezed his hands.

  Marny turned his face toward the sky and took in the warmth of the sun, then looked at Esther again. “You’re my sunshine, Esther. You’re the one God sent to dry my tears and light my world.”

  Esther’s smile grew wider. “Marny Toogood, that has to be one of the sappiest and sweetest things I’ve ever heard.”

  “Good. Sappy is just what I was going for. Never mind the sweet part.”

  She stood on the tips of her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “I love sappy. Now why did you bring us here?”

  “To say thank you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” He glanced at William and winked. “To thank both of you for believing in me and seeing me as a hero even though I still don’t feel like one and think you’re terribly wrong.”

  Esther and William both laughed.

  “Thank you for teaching me the power of a little faith and how to truly trust.” He gazed into Esther’s eyes and blinked back the tears forming in his own. “And thank you for teaching me how to love, to really love. You remind me a lot of my mother in that way.”

  “Well,” Esther said. “I’m glad you don’t remind me of Gary. Or Harold.”

  “Or Karl Gunnison.”

  “Definitely not Karl Gunnison.”

  Marny paused and swallowed past the lump in his throat. Above them, gulls circled, riding wind currents and drawing wide, smooth arcs in the cerulean sky. “Esther, I have to ask you something.”

  “The answer is yes.”

  “Okay. Will you swim the English Channel with me?”

  “Seriously, yes.”

  “I’m not a very good swimmer.”

  “Bummer. I’m not either. Maybe we could just take a boat.”

  “That’s a sweet idea, but it’s not really what I was going to ask.”

  She cocked her head to the side and smiled. “So get to it.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I said yes.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him firmly. For Marny, those rain clouds had finally moved on, and the sun shone so brightly.

  William tapped Marny on the arm. “So you’re going to marry my sister, Marnin?”

  “I sure am, little buddy. What do you think of that?”

  William shifted his eyes to the gulls above, watched them thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Good. Will I live with you?”

  Marny ruffled his hair. “You bet. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  William watched the birds again, that familiar disinterested look on his face. “I hope it’s okay, Marnin, but I don’t want you to teach me how to drive.”

  Coming in October 2012 from Mike Dellosso—

  A Thousand Sleepless Nights

  Dear Reader,

  Cancer has a way of pushing you to reevaluate life. In 2008 I was diagnosed with colon cancer and took a break from writing while I endured chemotherapy. But it gave me plenty of time to think. And things started to come into focus.

  You see, there’s a side of me my readers rarely see. I’m a homebody. I’m sentimental to a fault. I’m a sucker for a good love story. And so, coming off my battle with cancer, I decided to focus on the characters in my stories: their relationships, their fears, their worries, and their struggles with faith. The result was Darlington Woods, Darkness Follows, and now Frantic.

  My next book, A Thousand Sleepless Nights, will open a new chapter in my writing, a change of genres that will have me exploring matters of the heart, love, relationships, and life as it’s really lived.

  A Thousand Sleepless Nights deals with issues that are very close to my heart: family and cancer. Set in the beautiful horse country of northern Virginia, it is about a family torn apart by neglect and hurt and brought together again by a most unlikely force. If you or anyone you know has ever been touched by cancer, I know you’ll enjoy this book. It is the kind of story you’ll want to share with friends and family.

  Thank you for taking this journey with me.

  Mike Dellosso

  Chapter One

  NENA’S BLEEDING STARTED three weeks ago.

  Now, sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, awaiting the verdict of his wife’s recent colonoscopy, Jim Hutchins’s stomach writhed and twisted like a rag in the hands of an accomplished dishwasher. Nena’s father had died of … he couldn’t even bring himself to think that cursed word. But there was a chance her tumor wasn’t malignant, wasn’t there? There was always a chance. It could be nothing more than just a clump of harmless cells. Something that could be easily removed and she would be spared the ongoing tests, the prodding, the radiation, chemo … the suffering.

  He reached over and took Nena’s hand in his, squeezed it gently. It felt no different than the first time he held it nearly forty years ago. She looked his way but did not smile. He could see the fear in her eyes, the uncertainty, so unlike her. She’d always been strong, defiant, full of fire and life. That’s what first drew him to her. But now she looked small, scared, childlike even.

  “It’s going to be okay, babe,” he said, even though he knew his words meant nothing, carried no weight at all.

  “Don’t say that,”

  she said. “You don’t know that.” She was right, of course. He didn’t know it. This was one problem sheer will power couldn’t fix, one problem hard work and late nights couldn’t resolve. No matter how hard he fought for her this time, he was powerless. And that alone was enough to drive him mad.

  Jim looked around the waiting room. There were only a handful of other people there, mostly older folk, reading magazines, talking quietly. None of them were even remotely aware of the storm raging inside him. How odd, he thought, that in a room of people they were each totally oblivious to the plights of one another. A wall separated them, cubicles around each individual, not allowing even the emotion within to show on their faces, in their eyes. Yes, he could see the strain on Nena’s face, but could they? Probably not, partly because they didn’t care enough to look.

  The walls of the waiting room were decorated with framed paintings of horses. Some galloping in open fields, some grazing. There was one of a mare and her foal standing in a valley of lush grass by a pool of still water. The glasslike water reflected the rolling hilltops of the range beyond it. It was a peaceful picture, and for a moment Jim wished he was back on the ranch, in the saddle, the feel of polished leather beneath him, exploring the far corners of the open land. Anywhere but here in this blasted office.

  The door beside the receptionist’s desk opened, and a young nurse stepped out. “Nena?”

  Jim squeezed Nena’s hand again, and they both stood.

  “Good morning,” the nurse said. She stepped aside, allowed them to enter, and let the door close behind her. “Follow me. We’ll go right to Dr. Van Zante’s office. He’s waiting for you.”

  They wound through a maze of hallways lined with exam rooms and more horse prints. This was Virginia’s horse country, after all, and horses were the only thing most of the people around here knew. Finally they came to a door with a plaque that read Richard Van Zante, MD.

  The nurse knocked and opened the door. “The Hutch
inses, Doctor.”

  “Yes, let them in, Becky. Thank you.”

  She stepped aside as Jim and Nena entered the room. A wide mahogany desk sat in the center of the office, and behind it Dr. Van Zante stood. He was an older man, had to be nearing seventy, with a lean build, narrow shoulders, and long face. His eyes were brilliant azure, magnified by thick glasses. He smiled and put out his hand to shake Nena’s. “Good morning, folks.” He gave Jim a firm shake too then motioned to two leather-upholstered chairs across the desk from him. “Please, won’t you have a seat?”

  Two of the walls in the office were lined with mahogany shelves stuffed with well-worn books and journals; the other two held more paintings of horses and one photograph of a man riding a muscular bay quarter horse.

  “That’s Buck.” Dr. Van Zante admired the photo before sitting.

  “He’s beautiful,” Jim said. “How long have you had him?”

  “Six years.” The doctor rested his hands on his desk and laced his long fingers. “But we’re not here to talk horses. Let’s get right to it, shall we?”

  He shifted in his chair, rubbed his hands together, an odd show of uneasiness for someone so poised. He’d probably delivered this same news to hundreds, if not thousands, of patients throughout his career. And in an odd way, his apparent discomfort was, in fact, comforting. It showed the doctor cared, that Nena wasn’t just another patient, a number on some chart; she was a person with real feelings and a family and a ranch that needed her.

  Dr. Van Zante massaged his chin and studied a piece of paper he held in his hand. “I have the results of the biopsy here.” He then met Nena’s eyes and said, “I’m going to cut to the chase here, Nena. It’s positive. I’m sorry.” He pushed a color photo across the desk. It was of the inside of her colon, taken during the colonoscopy. There was a growth there, a terrible-looking thing, knotty and wartlike, a monster. The doctor hesitated … then said, “You have colon cancer.”