“I thought . . . I thought all that blood was from you.”
“Sweet. No. I just used it to write you a message before I left to fetch Warner off the beach. You know, on the bathroom door. Funny, huh? Did you laugh?”
“Who are you? You’re not part of the Thompsons’ game, are you?”
“No. Nor Warner’s, either. David had anger-management issues even by the standards I’m used to. His diminishing level of control had caused concern among acquaintances of his. They do not like any kind of attention being paid to their members. I was put in place here three weeks ago to keep an eye on him, and then—bang—the whole thing just darn explodes. Messy. Time to tidy up and put away.”
“Are you . . . Is this the group that Barclay told me about? The Straw Men, whatever?”
Any trace of levity left the woman’s face very suddenly. “Barclay said what?”
“Who are these people?”
“Nobody. They don’t exist. Just an urban myth. A cracker sheriff getting things all mixed up, bragging on stuff he doesn’t understand.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like. But sometimes in life we pass by the side of things, Mr. Moore, like standing in the shadow of monsters in the night. Better to leave them be. Keep on going, don’t look back. Lest you be turned to stone. Or dead meat.”
“What—now you’re going to kill me, too?”
“Well, actually, there’s the question.” She dangled her gun from one finger. “My original plan was that you’re found here, a suicide surrounded by evidence, appalled by the magnitude of the things you’ve done. Barclay will be dropping the gun by later, the one you ‘bought’ and ‘used’ back at your house. With everything that’s been going on today down at the Circle, it will be a couple days before you’re found—by which time Warner will have expired as a result of unnatural causes.”
“But why?”
“The trail has to end here.”
“I’m supposed to have done all this? Killed Karren, and Emily, and Hallam? Left Warner to die?”
“It does sound odd,” she said. “But the acts of the deranged often do, at first, until we accept, yes, that’s what they did. And it won’t seem too out of line, in light of your recent Facebook activity.”
“What? I haven’t been on there for days.”
“Right—you’ve been too busy. But, yeah, turns out you’ve been posting a load of subtle crazy shit up there in the last forty-eight hours. How Ms. White was making moves against you behind your back. How your secret friend Mr. Warner had started to give you ideas about how to teach chicks like that a lesson. And how finally you realized you don’t need him anymore, and you can take vengeance on your tight-skirt-wearing colleague by yourself. Kind of dumb of you to have posted up those photographs of Karren this afternoon, but the flamboyantly deranged aren’t always very smart.”
“No one is going to believe I did all this.”
“Actually, they will. People will believe anything that’s lurid enough—we’re all still looking for that sense of wonder. Plus, it sounds like you played the wacko very well in the hospital on the way. That’ll help.”
“Is Nick . . . Which bit of this is he a part of?”
“Nick? I have no idea.”
“You know. You must know.”
“I really don’t. This is intriguing.”
“He . . . he was the guy who was trying to have an affair with my wife. Who was there when she drank the bottle of wine intended for the Thompsons.”
“I got nothing. That must just have been real life, I’m afraid. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
“But . . . who are you? Where do you come from?”
“Out there. In the world.”
“And you’re just going to do this to me, and go?”
“It’s the way it is. I’m sorry. You’re not actually a dumb guy, not totally anyway—you just got modified. I don’t even mean by the old folks here—I mean by life. Everybody does. You start with an open road, but then the walls start to close in—day by day, year by year. There’s no market for who you thought you were, so you become someone else. You get trammeled. You get crucified by the quotidian and you get smaller and smaller every minute until you die. Resisting that? It’s tough. Staying true to who you are is the only real superpower. I have it. You don’t.”
“But—”
“No, my friend, we’re done talking. Are you going to leave the building, or what? I would if I were you, because what I’m offering isn’t in anybody’s game plan but mine. It’s a cheat code, if you like. A secret side door. Who knows what you’ll find on the other side?”
“You’re going to . . . let me go?”
“It’s why the balcony doors are open, dumb-ass.”
I looked across at the doors, but couldn’t work out what she was getting at.
“Could be that you manage to get past me,” she said patiently. “That you flip over the side before I can get a clean shot, and run off into the night.”
“But . . . why would you do that?”
“Why does anyone do anything?” She smiled, wide and innocent, looking for a moment exactly like the girl who’d served me mascarpone frozen yogurt on a hot afternoon not long ago. “To see what happens next. My job was to tidy up the Warner situation and provide whatever collateral muddying seemed necessary or advisable. But as regards you personally . . . I have no instructions. I’m thinking it could be fun to watch. No one’s going to believe a single word you say. About anything. And if they should ever start to . . . well, then I guess I’ll just have to come and find you, right? So what’s it gonna be? Do I shoot you now or later? It’s your game. You choose.”
I walked out onto the balcony. I climbed onto the railing, all the while expecting to feel an impact, and then to die. I dropped down onto the grass, landing heavily, falling on my side. I got up.
Cass was on the balcony, looking down at me.
“I’ll count to a hundred, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Run and hide.”
The car was still there. I opened the driver’s-side door. Steph looked up at me, eyes wide.
“Is Karren okay?”
“She’s fine.”
My wife hauled herself across into the passenger seat. I got in and started the engine with hands that were not shaking and I drove away.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
I drove for a long time without stopping, and as I took us up the coast and then north across the panhandle, I also talked. I tried to explain everything that had happened to me in the last days, to recount it, at least, but I kept getting tangled, caught up in trying to work out who had been running things at each point, and why. I couldn’t think straight. I had not eaten for a long time. I was exhausted. I had seen people killed and I had seen what happened to them after that, without at any point understanding why. At first Steph asked questions, though not many, and in a voice that sounded increasingly tired. After a while she stopped asking and so I just kept talking, trying to put it all together and glad she was giving me the opportunity, glad that she was sitting next to me and letting me run. Sometimes that’s what you need in your loved ones. Someone who just lets you run on, who provides a safe track for your thoughts and hopes to revolve around. It was a long time—in fact, only when I stopped for gas in South Carolina in the dead of night—before I realized that she’d fallen asleep.
When I’d gassed up I got back in the car, put a blanket over her, and went back to driving and talking to myself. I drove straight through the night, up into the woods of Kentucky, wondering how long it was since we’d done something like this. Simply been in movement together, without an agenda, without a five-year plan. A world without walls. Eventually the sky started to soften and the forest on either side of the road turned from being an undifferentiated mass of black into individual trees. I tried to make something metaphoric of this, but I was so tired I was incapable of joined-up thought. I’d stopped talking by that point, had become content to keep driving
with Steph sleeping in the seat beside me.
No matter how much I talked through the last five days, the final analysis remained the same. Everything we’d had was gone. There would be people who’d try to blame a lot of things on me, at least one cop who’d be ready to help, and as much evidence as they could need. It was all gone, then—everything, except for the two of us. After a decade of accruing baggage, of earning and seeking and building our lives layer by layer until we were held apart by our accretions of shell, it was back to just the two of us, naked in the world—and the weird thing was that it felt good. It felt like what I’d always wanted, back when I had an idea of who I really was and who I wanted to be. You put one foot after another, one word after another, and it makes sense at the time—until one day you look up and find you’re lost in a future you don’t understand, someplace you never wanted to go and do not recognize. That’s what had happened to us: had happened, most of all, to me. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror and find a stranger looking back, and you brush your teeth and smile, and when you leave the room there’s no reflection left in the mirror because you have climbed inside the fake.
What do you do if you realize this has happened? Go back to the beginning and start again? It isn’t possible. Time flows but one way and all rivers make for the sea, and so we keep trudging on, writing our story-lives sentence by sentence, hoping that sooner or later we’ll be able to steer them back onto a track that we recognize. It never happens. We just die, and in death it becomes contextualized. Everything makes sense at the instant we close the book on ourselves.
That’s what happened, for better or worse.
I’m done now.
Good-bye.
In the end, a little after six in the morning, I got too hungry and tired to continue driving. I took it as a sign when, five minutes later, I glimpsed in the distance the blessed great yellow M of a fast-food outlet Stephanie and I had been going to for all of our lives together. So much of a sign, in fact, that it was only when I parked in the lot outside that I realized my face was wet. I sat looking up at the golden arches as if they were the gateway to the promised land.
“Hey,” I said gently. “Look what we found.”
Steph was lying with her head propped against the window, wrapped up in the blanket I’d put around her. Her face was pale. She looked peaceful. It still took me a long time to realize that, at some point in the last few hours, Stephanie had died.
She is buried in the woods near where I live. Her mother passed away a few years back, her father never reappeared. I’m the only person left to care. The world notices your passing, then turns back to the remaining group of revelers at the bar and orders another round.
I keep on the move. I have a cabin, but I spend long periods away from it. I walk, for days at a time, in broad circles along unpredictable routes. I stay a while near some hill town thirty miles away, then walk in the opposite direction to somewhere else. I spread the custom of my presence. I always come back, however. I’m not going to leave her alone for long.
I’ve grown a beard, and my hair is ragged. My nose got broken in a fight outside a bar, so I don’t look quite the same as I did. It will do for now.
I used Internet cafés and libraries to track unfolding events down in Florida. It made the national media for a while, but it’s instructive how short the news cycle is. There’s always something else, another ring in the circus to stop us from looking too closely at any particular show. A war here, a celebrity death there, a recession, a crisis, something shiny going past. So much so that it might even make you suspicious.
Marie Thompson survived her wounds. The deaths of her husband and Hazel Wilkins were accurately ascribed to the actions of John Hunter, disgruntled former local resident and convicted killer. Tony was much mourned, celebrated far and wide as one of the last big characters of the Florida boom years. Hazel didn’t get the same coverage, on account of being just some old woman.
The deaths of Deputy Rob Hallam, Karren White, David Warner, and Emily Griffiths remain unsolved. As the bodies of all but Warner were found in the house of a couple who’d vanished, the media spent a day enthusiastically vacillating between claiming that Mr. and Mrs. William Moore were further victims, or else the murderers, egged on by circumstantial evidence relating to the purchase of a handgun used as a murder weapon. Once the stuff on my Facebook page became public, however, Steph rapidly joined the list of (assumed) victims, and I was shoved right into center stage—with David Warner emerging as a kind of shadowy accomplice/mentor figure who’d outlived his usefulness and met a grisly end in the apartment of one of my other victims, with whom I’d become obsessed.
The media were far too excited to look hard for inconsistencies in all this, being more interested in me being the first nutcase to unravel semipublicly via a social networking site. That was how Warner and I met, apparently, and then started to feed into each other’s obsessions, creating a spiral of virtual insanity that eventually spilled out into the real world. Searching questions were asked about the online community’s responsibility to keep an eye on its members, and hand-wringing editorials written about the need for the interactions of distant others to be monitored. It was a big deal. I had my own logo on the news.
Then it all faded away, and now the only ones who still care are a few conspiracy Web sites. According to these, I am either dead, or still alive, a stooge framed to divert attention from foreign policy shortfalls and/or rising CO2 levels, a ranking member of a hidden elite, an actual psychopath but with supernatural superpowers, or I never actually existed in the first place. I prefer the last theory. To me, it has the ring of truth.
The cases remain open, as does speculation regarding the purpose of the structures discovered underneath David Warner’s house. A small and powerless local pressure group, formed from relatives of missing women in the area, has called to have the building demolished so that its foundations can be examined. So far they have been totally unsuccessful. As the house has now been purchased by a holding company belonging to an unknown man based on the West Coast, it seems likely it will remain that way.
David Grant sold Shore Realty and left the state. The Breakers is still open for business. Marie Thompson lives by herself in that big apartment overlooking the ocean. Adrift in the present, queen of a diminished domain. Friendless, I hope.
Certainly alone.
A month after it had started to go quiet, I saw an article in the Longboat Gazette, and another lodged in the online version of the Sarasota Times. Local lawman Sheriff Frank Barclay had been found dead in his house, victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A collection of child pornography was discovered on a hard drive in the basement. I doubt it was his. I doubt also that his final moments were quite as they were portrayed, or how he would have wished. I think he shouldn’t have said as much to me as he did. I believe my telling Cassandra what he’d said was what got him where he was going.
I can live with that.
To the outside world, the two stories are unrelated, Barclay’s death merely one of those nasty things that nasty men deserve. We’re all pebbles on a beach. One lying here, one over there, another handful down by the tide line. They’re all brought there by the same ocean, though, quietly moving us to and fro when everyone’s asleep. Whichever way you’re looking, there’s a lot more going on behind your back than there is in front, where you can see. Count on that.
Only one other loose end remains, courtesy of a girl playing her own version of the game. That loose end is lying low. For now.
I have not been in contact with my mother. At first I kept away because I didn’t want to put her in the position of knowing anything that might lead the police—or anyone else—to me. But the more time I spent alone, the more questions I started to ask. How well did I know her, in fact? There was no question she’d been there all the time I’d been a child. But it could be that while I was down in Florida she’d become different, that she could have been approached. It could eve
n be that it had always been that way. Did I even have proof that I was actually her son? People tell you things, but that doesn’t mean they’re true. From there, further questions. Did my father really die of a heart attack? He’d always been very fit and healthy before. Did there come a time when, for some reason or other, it became better that he was no longer around?
Silly ideas. Probably. But are we ever more than details around underlying determinants over which we never have anything more than illusory control? The couple who go to church like clockwork but put on masks to record homemade S and M videos for sale on the Internet; the man whose alcoholic (and unfaithful and violent) wife presents so functionally to the rest of the world that he feels he’s living in a dream; the mother whose angelic-looking child runs her ragged every morning to the point where she sits in the car for ten minutes—after she’s finally uploaded her daughter to school, chatting with the other moms, who all seem to have everything so together—and sobs her heart out, fingernails cutting crescents into her palms.
We’re all of us living Stepford lives, pretending in ways we don’t even realize, having faked it for so long that we don’t remember we’re doing it, or why. But sometimes the edifice collapses, and we want nothing more than to burn down the entire world, just for some peace from the lies.
I have scoured the Internet for mention of the Straw Men. I don’t even know whether there’s anything there to be found. It could be that was just part of Cass’s game, a red herring, an injection of apparent meaning into a meaningless narrative. The only thing I found was a paperback thriller. I read it. It was about a shadowed conspiracy of well-connected murderers, people killing others because that’s what they do, and because they believe it’s our natural way of life. It was a decent read, but it was fiction. Part of the game, too, perhaps, something planted to muddy the waters, to reassure us that these things only happen in stories and could not possibly exist in real life.
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