by Ed Markham
The fury and indignation she felt on his behalf made David momentarily forget the investigation and his suspension. Lauren’s loyalty to him was plain, and he realized he would do anything to repay that loyalty. The realization frightened him.
“I don’t care if it wasn’t his call,” she said. “I’m going to tell Carl exactly what I think about this.” Her tone had mellowed a bit, but she was still visibly worked up. “I want him to know where I stand.”
She looked at David and then at Martin before letting out a groan of disgust and walking quickly out of the room.
When she’d gone, father and son stood silently for a few seconds before Martin uncrossed his arms and clapped his hands together. “All right, this is what we’re going to do,” he said, beginning to pace.
David had expected this—had been trying to prepare himself for it. He shook his head and said, “No,” hoping his father would, for once, recognize when to stand down.
But Martin continued as though he hadn’t heard him. “I could tell by the look on Tim Thompson’s face that he didn’t back your suspension, and obviously Carl didn’t either—”
“Don’t start,” David said. He could feel anger welling up now—the day’s events rekindling the emotions he’d felt toward his father during his mother’s final weeks.
Martin went on, “With those two backing us, I can put in a call to—”
“Shut up, Pop.”
“—Mike Baddens, who I know well and is the director’s personal—”
“MARTIN,” David said, his voice sudden and sharp like a thick branch snapping in two. He made a cutting motion with his hand. “STOP.”
Martin looked at his son with a mixture of surprise and confusion. “What? You think I’m going to take this lying down?”
“You can’t fix this,” David said. He could feel the heat behind his eyes as he stared at his father. “You think you can fix anything, but you only make it worse.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Martin said. “I try to fix things? I’ll make it worse?”
“You can’t fix this, just like you couldn’t fix the way she died.”
“Watch what you say now,” Martin said, raising a hand and pointing a finger at his son. His expression darkened.
David went on, his whole body tense in preparation for a collision. “Shouting at doctors and hauling her from one specialist to the next like you could take her cancer away by strong-arming everyone who gave you an answer you didn’t like.”
“I did the best I could.”
“You did it your way, and you made it harder for her.” He knew it was all going to come out now. Everything he’d been holding inside since his mother’s death. There was no reason to hold it back any longer.
“Stop talking,” Martin said, taking a step toward his son. “I know you’re upset about your mother and this bullshit suspension. But stop talking.”
“You do things your way and everybody else has to fall in line. But your way didn’t help mom, did it? She still died, and you made sure she died pumped full of drugs in a strange hospital instead of at home with the people she loved.”
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH,” Martin shouted, lunging forward. He latched his hands onto David’s collar and tried to jerk him. But David had his hands on his father’s shirt now and he was too strong to be pushed around.
“You think it’s easy to watch your wife die?” Martin said, his face red and angry and close to his son’s. “After forty-five years, you think that was easy for me to take?”
“I don’t care what was easy or hard for you,” David said. “I cared about mom—about how she felt. But you only thought about yourself, you coward. You weren’t even man enough to look her in the eyes at the end.”
Martin’s face twisted with rage and he bared his teeth. David was ready for anything. But what came next wasn’t what he’d expected.
His father groaned loudly and shoved him away.
Martin let out a long, anguished breath and ran both his hands over his forehead and back through his silver hair. “You’re right,” he said. He took a few more deep breaths, his chest rising and falling, and there was no anger in his face. It had been replaced with remorse. “You’re right, David. I was a coward.” His hands opened and closed at his sides, and his eyes were red with sorrow. “I’ve had to look at dead people my whole life,” he said. “In my neighborhood growing up, in Vietnam, and all through my time at the FBI. Hundreds of people with the life sucked out of them in every way you could think of. And I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Angela like that—her eyes empty, her face slack. I couldn’t fucking stand it.”
He sat down on the window ledge and leaned forward, rubbing his hands along the tops of his legs and shaking his head from side to side. “I knew she was ready, David. And I knew I was making it harder on her. But I couldn’t sit back and watch it happen. I just couldn’t do that—not with your mother. And then when I knew it was going to happen anyway, I couldn’t bear to watch her go through it. I did my best, but when I looked at her I couldn’t hide the way I felt. She could see it in my face, and I knew that made it worse for her.”
David was quiet now. He felt the anger draining out of him.
“She was your mother, David. But she was my girl.” Martin paused, still rubbing the tops of his legs. “I’ve never told you this, but through all the years of working these types of cases—of being away from you and your mother—the way I kept myself going was to think about these awful things happening to you or her. To my family. And that was all the motivation I needed.” He shook his head. “There are so many sick people in this world, and how they choose the people they kill makes no goddamn sense. None. One of them could have picked you or your mother, and thinking about that kept me going—drove me to do whatever the hell I could to take those people out of the picture.” He slapped his hands on top of his legs. “Out of the fucking picture.”
He turned away from his son to look out of the window, his expression solemn and his shoulders stooped.
David had never seen his father look so defeated, and seeing Martin like this removed what was left of his anger. In its place, he felt only a deep weariness at the way the world ripped away the people he loved and knocked him against the ones he had left.
There was so little a person could really control, he thought. But the less control you had, the harder you tried to hold on.
The two men, father and son, cast their eyes about the room in search of answers, but found none. For a long time, neither spoke.
Chapter 46
EDITH VEREEN WOKE to the sound of salt water crashing against course sand. She’d fallen asleep in a canvas beach chair, an umbrella shading her delicate skin from the late summer rays. But as she slept, the world had continued to turn, and so the sun had begun to peer at her from beneath the umbrella’s petals.
Though the heat on Edith’s bare legs woke her almost immediately, she still worried about her skin. She had never been able to tolerate sunlight—a cruel lesson she’d learned many times as a young girl. Her daddy would warn her, but Edith wouldn’t listen. The call of a summer afternoon outdoors was too much for her to resist, and she would run outside to play along the edges of the rye fields near her family’s farm. Her daddy would eventually send out her older brothers to fetch her back. And when they brought her home he would be so angry with her.
He would not yell; Edith’s daddy never yelled. But to a young girl, his quiet rage was much more frightening.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Edie?” he’d ask softly, shaking his head.
He’d make her take off her dress and her underthings, exposing the paper-white skin of her pre-pubescent chest and stomach and thighs. And as she stood naked, he would have one of her brothers fetch his hickory switch. Then he would swat her over and over until her skin turned red.
He would say to her, “You want to know what it feels like to have the sun burn your hide? Here you go.”
Edith’s
daddy allowed her brothers to stay in the room during these punishments. Their sniggering heads bobbed together over his round shoulders, turning him into a three-headed beast. Three pairs of hungry eyes staring down at her.
She would cry softly, trying her best to suppress the shrieks or loud sobs that she’d learned would enrage her daddy further.
“I know this hurts you,” he would say, his cheeks flushed and sweaty from the exertion. “But you have to learn, girl. You have to mind me and your brothers because we know what’s best for you.”
As she grew older, Edith became adept at disguising her pain. She learned to step out of herself—to float outside of her tall, ungainly body when her daddy and brothers did things to her she knew were wrong. Later, when she’d left home for college, she had let some of the men there try those same things. She’d hated it all the same. But she’d tolerated it silently, slipping deep within herself.
Edith had been the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. She’d buried herself in her schoolwork during her teenage years, grateful for any distraction from life. Her favorite subjects were literature and history, both of which allowed her to lose herself in different worlds—either those of the past or of the imagination. She’d received a partial scholarship to the nearby university, and her father, who had remarried, had let her go.
After two years, Edith had narrowed the focus of her studies; her own personal history was painful, but her country’s history—the stories of so many men and women overcoming such adversity—had captivated her. And it was because of her interest in history that she’d met Levi, her partner.
Now Edith tilted the beach umbrella forward and pulled her legs under herself, away from the sun. She sat looking out at the water for a long time.
When an evening breeze started to roll toward her off the water, she walked back up to the house. The smell inside was redolent of sand and ocean, and she thought of her partner.
The one other time she’d been to this house, the two of them had taken a long walk together on the beach. It had been evening, when the sun could no longer bite her tender skin. Earlier in the day they had made love in the large bedroom overlooking the water. Unlike the few men Edith had been with in college, Levi knew exactly how to please her; somehow he understood that the more she protested, the more she was enjoying herself. Afterward he cried softly and she held him, understanding why he needed to cry and why it was right. Afterward, the people they passed on their beach walk had stared at the bruises on her face and neck. But Edith had only smiled at them.
It made her sad to look around the house now and know she would never be there with him again. But that was the price to be paid, she told herself. What they were doing together was more important—more necessary.
Levi had explained it all to her here at the beach house—had made her understand his anger and feel his passion. “People only care about themselves,” he’d said to her. “When you think about all we were given—the freedom and responsibility that was entrusted to us and that we’ve abandoned . . .” His eyes had filled with tears of anger and disgust. “Most people are so weak, Edith. So weak and so blind. We need to help them see.”
He’d kissed her, and had caressed her cheek. “The things you’ve told me about—the impulses you have that you call evil . . . I think they’re just part of someone’s plan for us. Someone made us the way we are, and that someone wanted us to find each other. I’m certain of that. We were brought together for a reason, Edith. God makes vipers too.”
As she’d stared into his handsome face and felt his love for her, Edith had known everything he was telling her was true. It hadn’t taken long for her to adopt his passion for their cause. It felt good to her. It felt right. And now, after all she’d accomplished in the previous week, she couldn’t doubt that a higher power was helping her along.
She walked out onto the house’s deck and watched the sun dip below the horizon. When darkness had settled on the beach, she found the small bottle in the bathroom cabinet where he’d told her it would be. She also found the letter. She brought both down to the deck and sat reading in the gloaming.
It had been an exhilarating week for her, but also a difficult one. There had been times when she’d felt unable to go on. Not while she completed the acts—never then. But afterward, during those in-between times on the road or in her hotel rooms when she had struggled to recall the weakness in her victims’ faces, and when she felt most alone.
But now, after reading Levi’s words, she felt her strength renewed.
She removed her clothes. Carrying the small bottle and a towel, she walked out naked toward the evening-calm water and stopped when she felt it splash onto her feet. She looked out at the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Then she peered up and down the beach, searching for any signs of movement.
When she was sure there was no one to see her, Edith knelt down and nosed her head under the water. The carrot-red tendrils of her hair spread like eels in the shallow waves. She lifted her head and opened the bottle she’d found in the medicine cabinet. She kneaded the viscous liquid into her sopping hair. After she’d emptied the bottle, she stepped back onto the beach and sat down on her towel. The night air was cold, and she felt goose bumps ripple over her skin as a breeze lifted and fell. But she did not cover herself. After a while she went back to the water’s edge and rinsed her hair, which was now an inky black.
After depositing the empty bottle of hair dye and her towel in the SUV, she dressed and returned to the house. She turned out all the lights and lay down on the couch near the front deck where she could re-read Levi’s letter in the moonlight. She knew she’d have to destroy it, as he’d instructed her. But she wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
The first part of her task was finished. In two days it would begin again.
Part II
Thursday, September 14
Chapter 1
TARYN WITHERSPOON FELT crusty mounds of soil scrape against her back and the undersides of her bare legs. Far above her, the night sky was littered with stars. A shard of moon leered at her.
She couldn’t turn her head to look, but occasionally she caught glimpses of the woman’s head and shoulders, which were draped by a veil of black hair.
Taryn’s could feel the rope around her wrists—the rope the woman was using to drag her out into the field. She tried to scream, but she could manage only low gasps, as though her throat were stuffed with cotton balls. Loose chunks of earth slipped into the collar of her nightgown and shuffled down her back until they’d settled at the curve of her behind. Interspersed with thoughts of near-hysterical terror, Taryn wondered if she would ever be able to get the nightgown clean again.
The woman stopped every few seconds, and Taryn could hear her inhaling deeply, catching her breath. Then they’d start again.
They reached a place Taryn knew had to be near the fence line that separated the two northern fields, and she heard a familiar sound. She listened, and heard it again. It was the sound of a horse, exhaling and shaking its mane.
It’s one of mine, she thought. And soon her eyes confirmed what her ears suspected; at the far edge of her vision she saw two of her horses, Seminole and Charger, standing impossibly tall against the clear night sky. She could see thick lengths of rope tied around the horses’ necks and the tops of their forelegs, and, from the sound of it, another of her horses was nearby.
Then, for the first time, the woman came fully into Taryn’s view. She loomed over her, black hair falling on either side of her narrow face. Taryn felt certain she was looking into the eyes of a witch.
Edith stared back at the girl. Near the end it’s always the same, she thought. She’d seen this look in each of her victim’s eyes—this alone-ness that came into their faces—and it both disgusted and enraged her because she knew it so well. It was weakness and fear and, more than anything else, recognition that no one was going to comfort or protect you. No one was going to save you. You were alone.
>
For Edith, looking into Taryn Witherspoon’s frightened face was like looking into a mirror and seeing the thing you hated most in yourself—and having the chance to destroy it.
Taryn could see the fury in the woman’s eyes, and she felt it coming; whatever it was this witch planned to do to her, it would happen soon. She labored desperately to cry out.
The woman disappeared from her view, and Taryn could feel her tying rope around her ankles. She managed another moan, but then something wet and acrid splashed across her lips. She felt more of the liquid on her face and neck, and the sensation spread down across her chest and stomach to her thighs. She could smell what it was, and she nearly choked on her fear, her breasts rising and falling as she began to hyperventilate.
Then she saw the black-haired woman loom over her. She looked up into large, angry eyes. And, for a brief moment, she thought she saw the woman’s features soften. But then the softness was gone. The woman spoke to her in low, angry tones.
Edith stepped back after a time and lit a match. She stared at it for a moment and then pitched it onto the girl’s gasoline-soaked body.
As the flames exploded to life, Edith watched the four horses push off on their haunches and spring into the night, trailing sections of the fire behind them.
Friday, September 15
Chapter 2
DAVID STEPPED OUT of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and wiped the condensation from the bathroom mirror. Too-little sleep had darkened the soft places below each of his eyes, and his cheeks were covered with stubble.
He took his time shaving, and then walked to his bedroom and dressed, eschewing his usual work attire for dark jeans, heavy brown boots, and a navy button-down shirt. As he pulled on his clothes, he kept an eye on his bedroom television. Cable news pundits were discussing the latest murders.