Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  Walter’s words crashed against a brick wall, “Did you get that from a motivational poster? Was it the caption under a picture of a loving mother hugging her child? You are hopeless, Walter.”

  “So are you,” replied Walter.

  Utter silence.

  “What now? I am unarmed.”

  Walter held up the Ziploc bag. There was a small light-blue capsule in it. “I saved this for you.”

  “Is that my . . . Blue Stew?”

  “Yes, it is yours.” Walter took a step towards Timothy; Timothy flinched. “It should have only ever been yours, Timothy. You created your life’s purpose: a medicine to treat your own mental illness. But you were deluded and arrogant and you forced something that is yours onto those five men and those six boys, and that is sickening.”

  Walter saw Timothy’s eyes dart to his side, towards the door.

  That was when Walter acted as he had since decided he should’ve on that defining night, late last fall.

  He lunged towards Timothy. Timothy let out a screech and jumped for the door, but Walter was too fast. He barreled into Timothy with all his weight, and Timothy’s body went sprawling before him with startlingly little resistance. It felt as though he had just tackled a scarecrow.

  Walter easily overpowered Timothy’s bony, flailing limbs, straddled his chest, and put the Swiss Army knife up to his neck.

  “Now I’m giving you a choice,” Walter spoke fast. “Either I turn you in, and you suffer for the rest of your life in two kinds of prisons . . . or you take your own medicine and end this yourself, right now, the way it should’ve ended before any of . . . this.” With his free hand, Walter retrieved the nearby Ziploc bag that’d been dropped in the abbreviated scuffle.

  Timothy looked up at Walter, blinking frantically, panting. Walter felt as though he was staring down a scared, cornered rodent.

  “So,” Timothy swallowed, and his convulsing Adam’s Apple touched Walter’s blade, “this is how it ends for me?”

  “This is how it ends for you,” asserted Walter.

  Timothy closed his eyes and forced a slow, shuddering breath out of his lunges.

  “Okay,” a calm seemed to come over him.

  Without taking his eyes off of Timothy, Walter took the blade from his neck and opened and reached into the plastic bag.

  “I’ve seen the news.” Timothy’s voice was so soft that Walter didn’t realize he was speaking at first. “They’ve called me every kind of terrible name. If nothing else, I want you to know that nothing I’ve done has come from a place of hate. I am a man driven by compassion.”

  Walter, holding the knife in one hand and the blue capsule in the other, hesitated.

  “Okay. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right?”

  “Very cute. I’m beyond convincing you now, I accept that. Soon enough you will grasp the extent of my compassion.” Timothy’s face twitched. “I never would’ve wanted you or anyone you love to suffer the way I did when my wife died. But sometimes plans don’t work out the way you draw them up.”

  Walter jerked a shrug after a moment. It was so odd and uncomfortable to be conversing with Timothy at this point—straddling him while brandishing a weapon—that it was hard to ingest what was being said.

  “Who is Marshall McDowell?”

  “Who?” Walter blinked.

  “See? You were the one who brought him up, but you don’t know him. No one in the public does. You all know him as the media portrays him—as a poor innocent victim. Victim Number Two, that is.”

  Walter shifted on top of Timothy’s chest. He bobbed the blade he was clutching, intending to return it to the forefront of their attention, and he spoke with manufactured firmness, “What are you doing? You’re stalling. Take the pill.”

  “I’m a man whose life is about to end. Allow me my final words.”

  Walter exhaled. He was beginning to appear more agitated than the man on his back with the knife in his face. He failed to protest before Timothy resumed.

  “Marshall came looking for me recently. He wanted more Blue Stew. For just one small favor, I promised he would get some.” Timothy gave a significant look. “You look surprised.”

  “I . . . no . . .”

  “The human capacity for denial is massive. But an intelligent human who has been shown the truth cannot hide from the truth for long. Marshall, who you so amusingly flaunted as an example of my failure, is proof of this.”

  “Believe whatever you want.”

  “Soon enough, you will see.”

  Walter shook his head. “Are you done?”

  “Yes.”

  With that, Timothy threw opened his mouth, like a patient in a dental office.

  Walter, feeling like he’d somehow lost the upper hand even as he sat on Timothy, surveyed the man with mistrust. Tentatively, he placed the baby-blue capsule into Timothy’s open, inviting mouth.

  Timothy closed his eyes as he swallowed.

  “Thank you,” was the last thing Timothy said, and with such sincerity.

  Chapter 15 – Loose Ends

  The story, as Walter told the police and the media later that day, was that Timothy had meant for the encounter to end as a murder-suicide, but he had been able to overcome the effects of the Blue Stew after Timothy had already stabbed himself to death, suffering only the damage to his foot and minor frost-burn to one ear.

  When asked by a TV station if there was anything that had helped him power through the influence of the drug, Walter was ready.

  “Yes. I was thinking about my girlfriend, Maddie.”

  Walter smiled into the camera. It couldn’t hurt.

  • • •

  Walter was driving north up I-91 when his world began to tear apart at the seams.

  He had tried calling Maddie a half-dozen times since the police had discharged him, to no avail. She had been so upset with him, though; she had clear motive to ignore his calls, especially if news of what had happened hadn’t reached her yet. Still, with the long drive ahead of him, there wasn’t much else to do in the car but worry, so that’s what Walter did.

  His worries started out tamely enough. Maddie was a hardheaded person, as she admitted. How long, then, would it take her to forgive him for defying her and risking his life? Weeks? Months, maybe?

  However long, Walter knew he would wait.

  Unavoidably, though, Walter’s untethered mind conceived of more and more improbable scenarios of gloom and disaster involving Maddie. Of freak farming accidents: being trampled by cows, or getting twisted up in the mechanisms of one of their family’s hay bailers. Or, out of such an irrational sense of betrayal, having reconnecting with past boyfriends that Walter only knew of from passing reference.

  The swelling unease in his chest threatened to burst his ribcage apart, however, when he finally connected Maddie to Timothy’s final ramblings.

  How had he put it? “I never would’ve wanted you or anyone you love to suffer the way I did when my wife died.” The key words echoed through his head as pleasantly as a mace rattling inside his skull: “Anyone you love.” And before that he’d promised, “Soon enough you will grasp the extent of my compassion.”

  Did he know about Maddie? Is it possible he was implying that he’d meant to go after Maddie next, so she wouldn’t suffer after he died? Walter’s stomach rolled over. He couldn’t put something like that past Timothy. Especially now that he was sure that Timothy had come to see him, in some warped light, as a kindred spirit.

  But how would this unsettling interpretation work if Walter was supposed to grasp Timothy’s compassion “soon enough”? Timothy knew that his life would be over imminently—he hadn’t put up much of a fight against the outcome. That didn’t align, then, with the thought that the promise foreshadowed anything more than Timothy’s delusional belief that Walter would soon come around to his way of thinking. Maybe, Walter now thought with faint easing relief, he was just reading too much into the last ramblings of a certifiable lunatic?<
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  Another piece of Timothy’s diatribe leapt out at Walter then, a piece that, at the time, had seemed wholly disconnected from his compassion spiel: “Marshall came looking for me recently. He wanted more Blue Stew. For just one small favor, I promised he would get some.”

  For just one small favor.

  Walter cried out and stomped on the gas, and his yellow VW whined pitifully as it struggled to accelerate.

  The speedometer peaked at 83, and Walter thrashed at the dashboard.

  The pain the outburst brought to his fist was momentarily sobering. He was being crazy, right? He tried desperately to get a hold of himself. He’d spent the entirety of the drive thinking up increasingly implausible and tragic circumstances explaining why Maddie wasn’t answering her phone. This was just a natural product of that, and it didn’t actually make sense, did it? Timothy couldn’t possibly have enlisted Marshall McDowell to kill Maddie as his one favor, right?

  Walter only got so far as seeing—through what seemed like a narrow, out of focus telescope—that yes, so much of his speculation was highly far-fetched.

  But he couldn’t eliminate any of it as outright impossible.

  He held the accelerator firm against the floor and began jerking the steering wheel forward and back, willing his car to go faster. He was still two hours away.

  After a reflexive moment of panic, Timothy had seemed to become disconcertingly content with the whole situation, hadn’t he?

  Timothy had come to see a skewed reflection of himself in Walter. So, would the private knowledge that Walter was about to lose the woman he loved—just as he had—be a heartening thought in Timothy’s twisted mind?

  • • •

  A chill gust of springtime air slipped in through the cracked window, flipping over a few scraps of paper covered in hastily jotted notes.

  Braylen Taylor set down his phone and pen, then stood and stretched before ambling around the table and shutting the offending window. Deep in thought, he gazed through the glass.

  It was a beautiful early afternoon. The sun, obscured through the dense pine forest, was high in the sky, and the birds were cheerily vocalizing their gladness to be returning after what had been a quiet winter. The air outside, cool and fragrant and full of moisture from the evaporating snow, had been especially refreshing due to how Braylen’s small cabin tended to get stuffy near the end of the winter. But Braylen had work to do, and he couldn’t keep corralling his notes every time the wind decided to blow.

  He returned to his seat.

  It was times like these when Braylen would think seriously about the benefits of buying himself a computer. He had spent the past two days calling directories and taking down names and addresses and phone numbers, all while scribbling quotes while rewinding and watching VHS recordings of the local news. Braylen knew he probably could’ve accomplished most of this within an hour if he owned—and if he was proficient with—a computer.

  But this internal struggle with technology would wait for another day—or maybe another year.

  Braylen turned over the paper scraps that the wind had played with and spread them all before him. He now had all the information he had set out to collect. Before he meant to act, though, he wanted to go over everything one more time.

  When the news of the Boy Scout tragedy broke yesterday, Braylen dove into it like a man possessed. The Boy Scout camp where Timothy had unleashed his nightmare had been the very one Braylen had gone to as a boy, where so much of his life’s direction and philosophy had been established. The news, then, hit very close to home, and as a man of action, he was driven to action.

  Braylen knew he had a talent for finding people. Of course, tracking missing people is very different from tracking fugitives, but when you boil it down as Braylen had, you see that either case has to do with having an eye for clues and a mind for interpreting them with precision. In his head, that was close enough. So he absorbed himself in the endless news reports and picked Tom Corey’s brain over the phone, and—like a twig bent askew just so—Braylen identified his first hint of a trail.

  The trail was not marked by disturbed undergrowth in this case, but by a man. Marshall McDowell. Victim Number Two.

  With the news media desperate for relevant material to throw on the air, sound bites of Marshall’s televised interview were once again all over the airwaves. Yet as Braylen saw it, no one had listened to him then or now.

  Walter had heard the worst of it when he’d flipped off his TV that morning late last fall, but Braylen had watched the full interview, and he knew it had contained further veiled praise for Timothy’s Blue Stew. While everyone wrote Marshall’s uncomfortable comments off as just the sentiments of a man still coming to grips with reality, Braylen—even at the time—wondered if his words were indicative of deeper issues.

  Now that he was ingesting everything with a more active mind, another thought crossed him: Why would an apparent recluse subjugate himself to an interview so soon after learning the truth of what had happened? It struck Braylen as something of a cry for help . . . yet, from what Marshall had said, there was little reason to think that he was looking for help from psychiatric professionals. Could it have been—if just on a lower subconscious level—a plea for Timothy Glass’s attention?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, Braylen felt Marshall had made enough off-color comments to grab Timothy’s attention. Adding up what little he knew about both men—and filling in the blanks with a good deal of instinctual speculation—Braylen saw it as possible that one of Timothy or Marshall had made an effort to contact the other over the course of the winter.

  Yes, the evidence linking the two was faint and largely based on instincts, but most of the trails Braylen followed—with proven success—were faint and pieced together with big helpings of instincts. And if there was any chance Marshall knew where that child murdering psychopath was, no excuse in Braylen’s mind would allow him to remain complacent.

  Unfortunately, unlike tracking, following this type of trail isn’t as easy as keeping your eyes open while putting one foot in front of the other. Braylen knew he didn’t have any substantive evidence to bring to the police in order to enlist their help—not yet—but that wasn’t a huge hindrance. He often preferred working alone, because it allowed him to do things his own way.

  Throughout his adult life, Braylen had been applauded for his “boldness” and “fearlessness” many times by those who knew him well. With a sincere shrug, he would explain that he just hated wasting time.

  The plan of attack Braylen had come up with was this: find where Marshall lived, knock on his door, and claim that he too was working with Timothy Glass. The plan was characteristically bold and alarmingly direct, and Braylen felt sure that, within seconds of making this audacious introduction, he would be able to discern whether or not Marshall had been in contact with Timothy. Even if Marshall’s reaction was nothing but speechless awe, Braylen thought he stood a good chance of perceiving his answer.

  Having just gone over the lopsided portions of logic and instincts that had brought him to this point, Braylen now felt okay with what he had to do.

  He was not a machine, to be clear. Nerves were already doing very unpleasant things to the light breakfast in his stomach. But again, now that he was confident that his process of thought was sound enough, nothing would have him pass up the chance to follow a trail—however faint—that might lead to the capture of a child murdering lunatic.

  One last time, Braylen glanced over Marshall’s work schedule (given away without interest or hesitation by his employers) at a local supermarket. He worked nights in a shipping and receiving warehouse. Braylen would find Marshall at home most likely, possibly asleep. That suited him fine—if Marshall’s wits were dulled by fatigue, he would be even less able to deceive him with a false reaction.

  Braylen folded the scrap of paper with Marshall’s address into his pocket, stood up, and made for the door.

  It was a twenty minute drive. Braylen learned
something along the way: When it comes to doing something so thorny, twenty minutes is plenty of time for one’s initial resolution to lose momentum as it stumbles through the defense mechanism known as second-guessing.

  How would he play it if, in a best case scenario, Marshall bluntly acknowledged that, yes, he’d been working with Timothy, and invited him inside? Braylen doubted that, even if it were true, Marshall would be so forthcoming with an unknown, unannounced guest. But if he was—well, then he would have to improvise as Marshall’s demeanor dictated. Then maybe the next time Braylen came to visit, he’d be wearing a wire with an unmarked police surveillance truck parked outside.

  On the distant other hand, what if Marshall—genuinely aghast at Braylen’s implication—slammed the door into his nose and called the police? This seemed more realistic than the prior scenario, and while he’d certainly have some fast explaining to do when the cops turned up, he felt confident that, after putting in a call to Officer Tom Corey and rationalizing what he’d done and why he’d done it, his friend would be able to bail him out.

  Almost immediately it got to the point where so many variations of these scenarios were flinging through Braylen’s head that any extra preparedness he might’ve gained through the process was lost. His mind was getting tipsy and jumbled, and he was starting to feel nauseous.

  It came as a huge relief when he thought to turn the car’s radio on. The music, even at a moderate volume, gave him something to latch his overactive mind onto.

  As his thoughts untangled, Braylen was able to reestablish his mental grip on the core of the plan: make his outlandish introduction, and then refuse to blink as Marshall’s initial reaction gives him away. One way or another.

  Marshall McDowell lived in one of a series of four grey, squat two-story apartment buildings. A sign by the road advertised them all as “very affordable.”

  Braylen pulled his green Subaru to a stop in front of the first building. His palms were clammy and his insides were stirring.