The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  Madison looked around and tried to orient herself, to remember the structure of the clinic’s gardens as she had seen it from Dr. Peterson’s office, and she took off at a dead run.

  She had no idea where Conway’s men were or where anybody else was, but she had a rough idea of where she might find Vincent. The fire was still blazing on the first floor of the east wing as she turned around the side of the building and her hearing caught up with her.

  The light from the fire played among the shadows of the firs as the cool scent of the damp earth mixed with the smoke. At first the glow showed her the way as the path meandered away from the open and farther from the brick structure. After a few seconds Madison reached into her pocket and twisted the cap of her flashlight; it wasn’t ideal, but she had to see where she was going. She kept the pool of light right in front of her feet; her steps were overly loud and clear to her restored hearing.

  She heard him before she saw him: a low keening and shuffling only yards away from her. The beam of the light found Vincent Foley crouching in the dirt and digging with his bare hands by the bush of Dicentra formosa. The hole was already a couple of feet wide and a foot deep. For a moment Madison couldn’t speak. Vincent’s high-pitched wail rose through the air and fluttered with each breath he took.

  Madison came back to herself. “Vincent,” she whispered.

  He looked up, and she wasn’t sure whether he really saw her or anything else around them: his face was smudged with dirt, and his wide blue eyes shone with purpose. He went back to raking his fingers through the ground.

  “Vincent,” Madison repeated.

  His hands never stopped, and the soft whimpering resumed like a chant.

  Madison turned toward the building: orange light flickered through the shadows, dimmer now than it had been before. The firefighters were winning their battle. Occasionally a vehicle, invisible through the undergrowth, would roar past on the nearby driveway.

  She had to make a decision about what to do with Vincent Foley now that she’d found him, and she had to do it quickly.

  “It’s not safe here,” she said.

  Vincent looked up, and for the first time his gaze flitted around her, found Madison, and focused on her.

  “No, it isn’t,” he replied. “It isn’t.”

  “Who are you afraid of?”

  “The man.”

  “Which man?”

  “The man.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The very act of digging seemed to ease his anxiety, as if the compulsion was relieved by the action; however, it only lasted for a moment, and though he kept checking, it wouldn’t keep the darkness around them at bay for long.

  “What are you doing, Vincent?” Madison asked him.

  She examined the circling shadows. Was it safer to keep Vincent there when as many as four men were searching for him? Should she bundle him into her car and just drive him to the precinct?

  “What are you doing?” she whispered again, trying to keep the conversation going and aware of every noise around them.

  “Over and over,” Vincent replied in a similar whisper, his reedy voice barely carrying the words.

  “What’s over and over?”

  “Ronald said, ‘Hit.’”

  “He did?”

  The weak pool of light from Madison’s flashlight danced on the bottom of the fresh pit.

  “What else did Ronald say?”

  Ronald lay inside a morgue’s drawer and wouldn’t say anything to anyone anymore, and Madison felt like a thief prying nuggets of gold from this man who couldn’t begin to grasp that the only person who had cared for him in this world had been murdered trying to protect him.

  “What else did he say?” she repeated.

  “The trail is the wall,” Vincent said, digging and patting the sides of the hole.

  What?

  “The trail? What trail, Vincent?”

  He stopped and raised his muddy right hand into the beam of light. The index finger traced a line in the air between them.

  “The trail,” he said.

  And Madison saw his bare cell and the intricate lines that traversed every inch of wall that he could reach.

  “The drawings on your walls? Is it the trail?”

  She didn’t quite understand what it meant or even if it meant anything at all. “What trail? Where does it go?”

  Vincent dug and patted, dug and patted, with a pattern of repeating gestures. He spoke without looking up. “It’s not safe. Over and over.”

  The icy coldness from the damp earth reached into Madison’s bones. She shifted on the ground but stayed close to the slight man.

  Had Ronald told him to hit David Quinn over and over? Was that how the boy had died?

  The snap of a dry branch rang out only yards away. Madison fumbled with the flashlight, turned it off, and they were instantly wrapped in darkness. Even the glimmers from the blaze had all but gone.

  She stretched out her hand and touched Vincent’s shoulder. There he was. He stiffened but did not shrink from her touch. She sidled up close to him and whispered: “It’s not safe, Vincent, like Ronald said. It’s not safe right now. Don’t make a sound. I will protect you.”

  They were ridiculous, inadequate words and fell like stones from her lips.

  Madison crouched next to Vincent: her left arm went around his bony shoulders, her right in front of her holding her piece. The muzzle tracked the muffled sounds approaching them. Someone walked lightly between the trees; someone placed his feet carefully and avoided making too much noise.

  Madison thought of the dead eyes in the little window and how the man hadn’t blinked when she had pointed her gun at him.

  Vincent was a taut ball of wire tucked in by her side, vibrating with fear. The beams of two flashlights blinked through the bushes and then appeared as they crossed and parted on the uneven ground, suspended in the gloom.

  Two men. Not cops. Not calling out to Vincent or to anyone else. Not here to serve and protect.

  If it came to it that she could aim at one of the lights, but chances were their other hands were holding pieces, and her muzzle flash would tell them where they were.

  The men approached slowly and steadily, a gap of eight feet now between them. Their slender light beams crawled over the ground and the roots of the evergreens; sometimes they made a quick pass at waist height.

  They made hardly any noise at all, as if they had been absorbed by the chilly air that stank of smoke and the trailing fingers of the flashlights were all that was left of them.

  Vincent whimpered. It was a tiny bubble of sound that resonated like a gunshot in Madison’s ear.

  The beams stopped where they were, about six feet away from Madison, and she took aim at the closest. She had hoped that the gap between them and the men would be enough for her to keep herself and Vincent Foley safe, but her chances were getting slimmer by the second. If they were discovered, all she had going for her was precision and speed. Shoot at the light. If they see you, shoot first one, then the other. Those two seconds are all you can count on.

  And even then the men would probably get a few shots off themselves.

  A burst of sounds and lights from the edge of the lawn startled Madison. People calling out, hollering, and coming closer: staffers, cops, all looking for the missing patient. Had they found the dead nurse yet?

  The two men had also heard them and stepped closer, closing the gap and walking faster, bearing straight down on Madison and Vincent. Stealth was not necessary anymore now that the noise from the search party covered their footsteps.

  Madison grabbed Vincent and inched backward, putting her body between the men and him, keeping low, careless of the rustle of clothes and Vincent’s yelps.

  A car drove past, the engine picking up speed as the siren came on. Madison continued backward: they were sandwiched between the men hunting Vincent and the wall that surrounded the property, and in a few yards she would
find their backs against the iron railings; the search party was pushing the men right onto them.

  A car pulled up and stopped in the driveway, engine still ticking—she could glimpse the headlights through the bushes. Suddenly the flashlights moved sideways and away from them, and after a beat two car doors opened and closed. The car—Madison had not seen what it was—sped away.

  Madison let go of Vincent, who crumpled on the ground behind her, and she quickly searched her pockets for her cell phone. The small square screen lit up her face and told her exactly what time it was. Traffic cameras; there are traffic cameras all over the darn road.

  Vincent was slumped against the railings, his hands opening and closing around fistfuls of earth. Madison sat down next to him.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “They’ve gone—the bad men have gone. We’re safe now.”

  Vincent shook his head as if she’d missed the whole point. “It’s not personal; it’s business,” he said.

  Uniformed officers of the SPD made a cautious sweep of the grounds and found no trace of the intruders. The body of Thomas Reed was carried out on a stretcher before Health and Safety could snap into action and declare the building a no-go area until it had been checked for structural failings due to the blaze.

  Madison gave her statement to an officer of the North Precinct, who took her piece—standard operating procedure when a weapon is discharged—and watched Vincent Foley as Dr. Peterson checked him over and gave him a mild sedative.

  Most of the patients had been temporarily dispersed among a number of institutions, and no one knew when and if they would be allowed back inside the place they had called home. Dr. Peterson looked drained and pretty close to collapse himself; the rest of his staff wandered from patient to patient, trying to make themselves useful and not think about Thomas Reed.

  As Madison had imagined, Vincent had been evacuated with everybody else and then had slipped away in the confusion. Reed had gone back—into a burning building—to look for him.

  “You’d said they’d come,” Lieutenant Fynn said. He was unshaven and wore no tie.

  “Not like this,” Madison said. “I never thought . . .” She gestured at the blackened, ruined east wing.

  “Was it Conway?”

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. I saw his eyes, and I’m not going to forget them in a hurry. But any lawyer five minutes out of law school would be able to get a jury to doubt: it was dark, there was a reinforced glass window in between us, and it lasted only seconds.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Still . . .”

  “Where are they taking Vincent?” she asked him.

  “Peterson’s deputy is going to chaperone him, and two uniforms will stick to them like glue. They’re still looking for a secure, appropriate environment. We can’t exactly drop him into a B-and-B.”

  Madison nodded.

  “Are you all right? Do you need to get checked over?”

  Madison looked at herself: her clothes were muddy, and her hands had a few nicks and scratches from the run down the fire escape but nothing that needed a bandage.

  “No, I’m fine, sir. I need a cup of coffee, a shower, and my piece back as soon as humanly possible, but aside from that I’m okay.”

  “Did Foley say anything useful?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I need to write it down and think about it. It’s difficult to sieve what’s relevant from the rest. One thing I know is that Ronald Gray gave him some instructions, and Vincent retained some of that.”

  Among the police officers and the firefighters Madison spotted Detective Kelly. He gave her one long, somber look from a distance, as if at some point, somehow, he knew this mess would turn out to be her fault.

  “It’s almost dawn,” Fynn said. “And you look like death warmed over. Go home, grab some sleep, and get to the precinct when you don’t need to spell-check your name.”

  Madison waited until she saw Vincent Foley climb into a Fire Medic One truck, together with the doctor and two police officers.

  “How many people know where they’re taking him?” she asked Fynn.

  “Not as many as those who knew he was here. Go home, Madison.”

  Chapter 40

  August 28, 1985. Ronald Gray put one foot in front of the other and tried to hold on to the very small pool of calm and common sense he still possessed. The air was heavy, thick with humidity and the scent of earth and undergrowth that the sun never reached. They had been walking for a while with their shirts stuck to their backs and a growing sense of panic crawling in their guts.

  They walked on because there was no alternative but to follow Timothy Gilman: he had brought them there, and he would have to lead them out of the nightmare.

  It had been ridiculously easy to grab the kids—they were like puppies. And yet even then, even in that moment that should have been an easy day out for men used to that line of work, there had been a dark focus in Gilman’s eyes that—if Ronald was going to be honest—had scared him a little.

  He had watched Gilman closely as they had swooped on the boys, afterward in the van and in the clearing, as he went from one boy to the other, delivering his own brand of threat and evil. And all the time Ronald was sure—even as Gilman was taunting and yelling at the little one—that the man had kept an eye on the blond, curly-haired kid; and when the awful thing happened, and the kid choked and stopped breathing, Gilman watched it happen without blinking. Almost, Ronald thought, almost as if that was exactly what he had wanted to happen.

  It made no sense. Still, there they were: four men walking in a line in the deep green of the Hoh River forest. Gilman was first, then Warren Lee—the grinning idiot whose jokes had died on his lips an hour ago, then Ronald, and, last, Vincent—bewildered and mute with fear. And Vincent carried the dead boy in his arms. Warren had refused to do, it but Gilman had turned to Foley and said, “Do it,” and Vincent had picked up the child from the mossy ground, because Vincent always did what he was told.

  Gilman knew where to bury the body; all they had to do was to get there, dig a hole in the ground, and then they’d go home.

  Ronald’s middle ached as if his insides had been filled with acid. The shovels. All of them except for Vincent were carrying a shovel. Ronald walked and stared at the soil—all those rotting leaves and dead roots—because he didn’t dare lift his eyes as his brain tried to grasp the reality of the situation. Gilman had put three shovels in the van. He had packed shovels in a stolen van with a stolen plate to go snatch three boys for a simple intimidation job.

  In that instant he knew Gilman’s look; he recognized it for what it was: a killer setting the trap, making sure his intended victim fell into the pit he’d dug.

  Ronald felt the old, familiar fear coming back like a ghost as the sun set above them and the woods turned dark. It was the fear of being pushed, shunted, and shoved by someone harder, colder, and stronger into doing something he didn’t want to do—slap someone or be slapped, cut someone or be cut.

  The sounds behind him, a sudden gasp followed by Vincent’s yelp, froze them all, and, as they turned and saw the boy’s eyes wide open and the kid breathing—breathing, for Chrissake—on the damp dirt, all Ronald could think of was, No, please God, no.

  Years later, for as many years as were given to Ronald on this Earth, he wondered how different things would have been if he had said something or done something in that moment when Timothy Gilman, with neither doubt nor hesitation, stepped forward and thrust his shovel into Vincent’s hands.

  “Kill him,” he said.

  Later, their clothes caked in sweat, grime, and blood as they traveled in silence back toward Seattle, Gilman pulled the van off Highway 101 outside Port Angeles onto a dirt track.

  “We’re switching cars,” he said.

  They staggered out of the van; Gilman emptied a gas can inside it, making sure all the rags, ropes, and shovels were doused, and lit a match. The van went up like kindling. They were already driving away in a maroon
station wagon when the van’s gas tank exploded.

  Ronald wasn’t sure how they’d made it home. He had helped Vincent undress and had put him under the shower.

  “Wash it all out, Vin. There’s a good boy.”

  His hands shaking, he had peeled off his own clothes and crammed everything into the washing machine, hoping it would take care of the worst stains. Tomorrow he’d put the whole load in a garbage bag and drop it in a Dumpster downtown—one of those in the alleys behind the busiest restaurants.

  Vincent had spent the journey back with his head leaning against the car window, staring at the pitch-black darkness and the blurry lights. He had not said a word for hours.

  Once they were both clean, Ronald dug out a tub of strawberry ice cream from the back of the freezer, and they sat down at the square kitchen table under the strip of fluorescent lighting.

  “Here.” He scooped out the ice cream into a bowl and passed it to Vincent. The younger man’s eyes could not rest on anything; his gaze flitted about the room, and his hands trembled in his lap. Under his nails a line of grime and dirt from digging the grave had managed to escape the washcloth.

  “Here,” Ronald repeated, his voice gentler than he’d thought possible.

  Vincent looked at the bowl as if he had never seen anything like it before. After a minute, he picked it up and ate the ice cream.

  The round clock on the wall said it was 1:00 a.m. The boys were still in the forest, Ronald thought. The plan had been that Gilman would make an anonymous call after the message about payment for protection had been delivered, and the kids would be found before nightfall. Three kids. No harm done. Except that had never really been the plan, had it?

  Ronald waited until Vincent went to bed; he waited until he could hear his slow, regular breathing. And then he laid it on the table—the thing he had saved from the van as it caught fire.

  “Hold it, Tim. I’ve left my jacket in there.”

  “Make it quick.”

  He had noticed Gilman stuff the piece of paper under the rags and had left his jacket in the back on purpose. He now placed the scrap of paper on the cracked Formica table. He had known what it would be, and it didn’t surprise him: a photograph of the fair, curly-haired boy circled in pencil.