by Gary Sapp
night a few weeks ago there is meeting of these monsters at long last—a clash of titans. Someone finally found him after all of this time. Someone finally caught him in the act of a mercy killing. And then it was on. The creature known as Pennywise’s reign of terror against the poor and the disfranchised came to an abrupt end in a glorious battle that the few who witnessed it will never forget. Or so I’ve been told. You happen to know anything about this, Chris?”
“Maybe,”
“I’m in love with you, Christopher Prince.”
Chris spun back around with a suddenness that startled her.
“And I love you, Roxanne.” He helped her to her feet and into his arms for a long passionate kiss. She fought back against the alcohol smell and let her affection for this man guides her. “I believe that I fell in love with you when I first saw you after so many years, that night in the park right after I escaped the siege at the Fox Theatre.” He said and leaned in to kiss her once again.
Afterwards he walked her over to where the largest of his portraits sat with a sheet wrapped over the top of it.
“I needed you to be here before I allowed anyone else to see it.”
The drawing is of her.
Roxanne stared at the mirrored image of herself, biting back tears of gratitude the entire time. And speaking of time—
“I need you to come with me. We still have time to make it.”
“We have time to make what, Roxanne,” He smiled at her but was confused at the same time. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Do you trust me, Chris?”
“Do I trust you?”
“Yes, do you trust me?”
“Of course I do, Roxanne.”
“Then I need you to make the necessary arrangements with your people.” She kissed him one cheek and then the other. “I need a couple of hours with you alone without Peacekeeper interference. You’ve saved me Chris and now I want to return the favor.”
One hour later the two of them walked through the main gate that led them into Turner Field, home of the hometown Atlanta Braves, the local professional baseball team. Roxanne watched his level of anxiety rise as they drove ever closer to the stadium. She could smell the hotdogs grilling and the peanuts roasting. She could hear the buzz of an early morning season crowd even on a cold night as this one was.
“Look, Roxanne, I understand what you’re trying to do here and I appreciate it,” Chris was struggling to steady his voice. “But I don’t think that I can do this. I don’t want to do this.”
“While I was gone, Chris, I had to go face to face with some difficult memories of things that I could and could not control during different periods of my life. This is how we survive. I understand how you felt that night when you learned the truth about what your father had done to you. I know that coming back here—that coming back here across the street from where it all started brings it all back to you. You don’t want this, Chris. You need this. I’m no doctor like your friend, Angel, but I know your pain. I won’t let you go, Chris. I won’t let go.”
“My father sacrificed me to better his cause, Roxanne.” Chris said after a long time. “No matter what the greater good might have been, how could a man who loved his son do something so hideous? How am I supposed to get over such a thing?”
“You don’t,” Roxanne answered him. “You never do, not really. You do go on. You rely on the people and the resources that you have in your defense. You trust the ones that you have by your side. You believe in the one’s that love you. You believe in the one that loves you.”
“I will,” Chris fought back tears. “I can try.”
“But you will have to do something even more difficult than that, Chris. You will ultimately have to do something that you don’t want to do.”
“I already know what you are going to say.”
“Well then you should know that I mean it,” She said. “I’m changing Chris. The one thing that remains in me from the old Roxanne that you knew is my desire to fight you on your vices. I’ll help you every step of the way. I love you, Chris, but either the drinking goes or I do.”
Chris nodded his answer and let his head collapse on Roxanne’s shoulder where she held him there with all of her might.
By the bottom of the ninth the Braves found themselves down by a three runs. They had the bases loaded with two outs and a full count on their cleanup hitter who had failed to produce in his first three at bats.
In the moments after he delivered a grand slam homerun to win the game for the home team Chris Prince and Roxanne Sanchez engaged in a long, glorious kiss.
Afterwards, she looked into the eyes of the only man that she had ever loved. She thought that the Braves weren’t the only ones in this town who could stage a rally—who could come back from the dead.
She saw her dark eyes in the reflection as well.
How could either one of us continue to love a monster, she wondered as they filed out of the ballpark with tens of thousands of other patrons into the darkness of the Atlanta night.
Angel
“My dear, you look as if you could use a drink?”
Dr. Angel Hicks Dupree cocked a brow and smiled sadly. Am I that obvious? Am I that pitiful looking? “I’d might, Mrs. Healy, but I’ll take a glass of water with a side of lemon instead if you would please.”
Lisa Healy, Hugh Keaton’s mother, hurried off to retrieve her drink from the bar. Agent Blue’s report said that this woman had worked at the Mississippi River Park here in Memphis, Tennessee for a couple days a week to supplement her social security for nearly three years now. She had put in enough time do that she could ask her boss to give her a full hour’s break to speak with an FBI consultant who’d flown over from Atlanta to speak with her.
This establishment planted here on the banks of the Mississippi was filled with noisy regulars and tourist this evening enjoying unseasonably warm day for this point of the spring. Still, it was still enough of a chill for Angel to button the top button of her jacket. The bartender was stirring up miracles, the chef sweetened the air with the smell of beef and pork and fish and the waitresses were marching to beat of their own drum. Angel smoothed out her skirt and crossed one booted leg over the other.
She damn sure could have used that drink—especially after what she’d experienced at the airport flying in. She’d run into a blonde bombshell, a biker at that. He told her that he owned a pawn shop just across the river from Memphis in Arkansas but had been flying back from business in LA. He was short on brains, but long on hair and his ass fit snuggly in his tight jeans the way she liked it. He was definitely her type. Somehow, Angel had politely declined his invitation for a drink or two…but had accepted his address and phone number anyway—
“Young lady, do you hear me?”
“Sorry,” Angel bounced herself back into the present. “I’m a little distracted. Thank you for agreeing to see me, especially on short notice.”
Lisa Healy waved Angel off with one wrinkled hand off as she made herself as comfortable as one could consider the lack of cushion in these chairs.
“Forgive me, young lady, but sometimes I forget things. I must ask you again, Agent Hicks Dupree, what agency do you work with?”
“I’m a doctor actually,” Angel took her first sip of her drink. Gin would have worked so much better—especially against this backdrop. “I’m a Clinical Psychologist by trade. The short story is that for a brief time I was a member…of an organization that treated your son on more than occasion.” She stopped long enough to allow the older woman to absorb what she said and to allow a cool breeze to comb her hair. “I was with Hugh when he died near Stone Mountain last year.”
Lisa Healy sat back in her chair and looked down the river. Angel switched her leg position and let the information she’d fed the old woman breathe. Agent Tabitha Blue had provided Angel with all of this Intel and location of Hugh’s mother in return for the danger that she and her husband Seth had faced down in order to catch Joseph Champion
back in the fall. Angel knew that she probably had one hour to make this work. She wouldn’t blow it by talking too much, especially here at the onset.
“Oh my,” Lisa Healy finally said. “Oh, yes, I guess I understand. What can I help you with?”
And in speaking of talking too much, “If you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs. Healy, you don’t act like you are overly surprised to see someone like me come all of this way to see you here in Memphis.” Lisa Healy didn’t answer her right away. Angel reached over the half table and locked her fingers into the older woman’s wrinkled ones. “You’ve had other visitors haven’t you?”
Lisa found interest in a casino boat chugging its way up the Mississippi with the evening crowd aboard more than happy to gamble today’s earnings away. When Hugh Keaton’s mother finally looked back at Angel she looked as if she’d aged 20 more years.
“My Hugh was a troubled boy who had grown into a troubled man.” She swallowed, audible, even over the chattering of the dinner crowd. “And to answer your question, Doctor, yes, I’ve had visitors from you people more than once or twice asking about him. When those poor children started going missing in Atlanta, I always envisioned that someone would go digging into my boy’s past.”
“May I ask who came to see you, Mrs. Healy?”
The older woman folded her arms against her tiny frame, but not against the cooling Memphis day. She is an old woman. Maybe her memory isn’t what—
“Are you asking me if a member or members of Pandora came to see me? Why don’t you ask me how many times they came to disrupt what little life I’ve made for myself here?” She smiled as she nodded but there was nothing but sadness scribbled on her wrinkled face otherwise. “Yet, when Serena Tennyson came here about this time a year ago I could only wish that disruption was all that Pandora had brought to my life.”
“Serena,” Angel struggled to keep her voice down. “She was here in Memphis?”
“Yes,”
Angel squeezed both of the other woman’s hands with her own. Lisa Healy looked as if she needed Angel’s strength to get through this.
And Angel felt as if she needed Lisa’s strength as well.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Angel cocked a brow. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“It wasn’t as serious as you think, dear, at least not at first. We did a lot of girl talk like you and I are right now.” Lisa’s eyes got glassy. Angel felt a nerve twitching in her shoulder. “You would be surprised at what total strangers have in common sometimes.”
“I’m sure but I have the feeling that this casual conversation ended with her threating you somehow.” Angel put what she said in statement form.
The old woman nodded her head once and a single tear ran down her cheek.
“One of Serena’s people handed her a knapsack. She pulled my brother’s severed head out of it for starters.” Lisa’s smile was back and the lack of warmth was ever present as well. “She put it right on the dining room table next to my uneaten peas and potatoes that I had cooked earlier in the day. The two of us sat at the table with my brother’s severed head and conversed for a while longer; mostly we talked about Hugh’s childhood.”
“What happened then?”
“Serena pushed her chair over to where I was seated, pulled out a very large handgun and planted it on my forehead.” Lisa’s new tears had joined the single one in a race down her slight wrinkled cheeks. One of the nearby patrons noticed. Angel jumped out of her seat and hoped that Lisa Healy would follow her lead. Two minutes later they were standing in a semi secluded area of the boardwalk although they were both freezing their ass off as the sun began setting in the west. The old woman, to her credit, had gained a small measure of her control back. “When I finished telling her all that I had to say about our past she told me that I deserved to die for what I had allowed to happen to Hugh. She told me that no woman would have disgraced motherhood like I had.”
Lisa told Angel the same story that Serena Tennyson had taken to her fiery grave with her. And then she folded her arms over her breast both in exasperation…and curiosity to why Oracle had allowed the old woman to live.
“Why didn’t you report this—“
“Report this to whom, young lady?”
“Listen, Mrs. Healy, I know that you were afraid,” Angel heard herself say. And she stayed silent a second while she exercised the use of a different tactic. “You survived, Mrs. Healy. You are a survivor. You must have said or done something or the other that she allowed you to get up from that table alive. Serena Tennyson is dead, Mrs. Healy. She’s no threat to hurt you any longer. Yet, I’ m damned curious to what you said to her that she allowed you to live on?”
Lisa shrugged her bony shoulders.
“She just let me live is all, Doctor. I really wish that I could give you something more professionally more interesting than that. I wish that I could explain it better than that.”
Angel kicked at a rock that was littering on the boardwalk and folded her arms again.
“Forgive me, Mrs. Healy,” Angel found the composure that she’d momentarily lost. “But it almost sound disappointed that she didn’t do you any harm?”
The old woman turned away to watch yet another casino boat cruising down the Mississippi nearly out of their site.
“Angel said, “Mrs. Healy—“
“Let me tell you something, Missy,” Lisa frowned and her voice sounded as if the words were being mouthed by another woman. “When you’ve stunk it up like I’ve stunk it up over the years, when you’ve done so much wrong, when you’ve made mistake after mistake as I have—you expect judgement to cometh…even before His judgement comes.”
“But she let you go, Mrs. Healy.”
Lisa only nodded at that.
“Serena was in total control. I wouldn’t have had time to scream. She was younger than me, of course. She was fit and strong and even if I had escaped her she still had a couple of her other operatives waiting in my living room.” Lisa Healy told her. “At the precise moment in time, I was living the last minutes of my life the way that I guess inmates on death row whose stay of execution was over.”
Angel found herself turning away this time.
“Why didn’t she finish this…?” Angel mumbled louder than she had intended.
“I haven’t gone one day, not one single precious day since that evening without asking the same question that you are now, Doctor.” Angel heard the old woman speak behind her. “Every day I see my brother’s head sitting on that table. And by everything I’ve read in the papers, everything I’ve seen in the news in the year since, tells me that Serena wasn’t known for being merciful to her victims.”
Angel shrugged at that and turned to face the old woman again.
“Perhaps Serena felt that you seeing firsthand the gruesome murder of your brother were enough punishment for you both.”
“Maybe she did,” Lisa’s silent frown afterwards spoke volumes to Angel that the doctor could have phrased that last statement better. “But sometimes I think that she allowed me to live long enough to see my boy dying the way she figured he would might be a far sterner punishment.” She bit into a clenched fist. “And now my precious boy is gone. I saw it on national TV when it happened. I saw you there as well.”
“I’m sorry,”
Lisa patted Angel’s hand…and then held it tight in her own. If there had been tension between the two of them over the past few minutes it had passed with the last gust of cool wind.
“It’s alright, Doctor. My faith tells me that I’ve already been forgiven for my mistakes.” She glanced at her tiny watch.
Can I ever be forgiven for what I’ve done? Will God forgive me? What about Seth? What about Christopher?
“I know that you have to get back to work soon.” After a moment of silence Angel said: “I’m sorry to disturb your life once again, Mrs. Healy. I shouldn’t have come here to Memphis at all.”
“But you did come, dear. We all learn to live wi
th our decisions, Doctor. Whether I am forgiven or not I’ll spend however days I have left coping with the decisions I’ve made. My precious boy is dead. Look at me though, I’m clean and sober for one of the few times in my life. I’m doing…okay financially. I’m just an old working girl. I’m trying to have some of the things that I couldn’t provide us when Hugh was a small boy.”
“I tried to save him,” Angel found herself suddenly saying. “I tried to reach out to him…all of him. I tried to get inside of him. I want you to believe that about your son.”
“I do believe you, Doctor,” Lisa Healy pulled Angel in for a fierce a hug as an old, scrawny woman could provide. “In the end—at the end the four of us failed him equally. You, I and Serena all failed Hugh at crucial points of his life, Doctor but she failed him in the end. ”
Angel pulled herself away from the older woman’s embrace with considerable effort. What she saw next in Lisa Healy’s brown eyes was something she would not soon forget. It looked as if someone had placed a dark mask over the other woman’s face. It was if a dark cumulous cloud was blanketing an otherwise docile woman that stood here on this boardwalk only a minute ago.
“What do you mean by that,” Angel worded her question more carefully this time. “Who is this fourth person that you are referring to?”
“Serena left my kitchen that night promising to watch over my Hugh for as long as she could. She said that she would be his guardian unlike one that he’d ever had before. She promised to keep him from harm. But then she can’t keep her promises if your friends in the FBI killed her too.”
Angel kept her tone and her answer neutral.
“She died a few hours after your son did.”
Lisa Healy shook her head back and forth until Angel was sure the woman’s brains were rattling inside.
“Don’t be silly, Doctor,” Lisa smiled but the darkness cast over her had remained. “Serena Tennyson is very much alive and she’s with her now.”
And as shocking as Lisa’s proclamation was it would be her final words that both shocked Angel into disbelief—and answered the question to why Serena Tennyson had allowed Hugh Keaton’s mother to live that night nearly a year earlier.
Two very long hours later Dr. Angel Hicks Dupree found herself lying nude in Brad’s—the Blonde from the airport—bed sipping on her sixth or seventh shot of gin. In fact, after she drained the last glass she sat the glass on the nearby nightstand and angled for the bottle from which the shots had come.
She saw Brad watching her out of the corner of his blue eyes.
The sun had set. If she hurried she would still have time to make her flight back to Atlanta for the connector flight home to Macon and her devoted husband Seth. She would still have time to save the last of her dignity. It is still time to stop this before it starts. Sure, they’d played around a little and drank a lot. They’d touched a few body parts that belonged to the other,