Cast Of Shadows

by Kevin Guilfoile

  “Then I’m going, too,” she said.

  Joan and Davis watched from the open swinging doors of the gym foyer with the bored stepfathers and the chain smokers. Few people recognized him, and strangers who did could no longer make a connection between him and the long-forgotten nastiness with Martha Finn and her son. “We’re just here to congratulate Ned and Ella’s boy,” Davis said to the one couple – former patients – who asked. He was glad they didn’t ask who Ned and Ella were.

  The students, in blue robes and mortarboards, sat alphabetically in long rows of folding chairs. Their parents pressed against one another in the bleachers like tennis balls in vacuum canisters. Championship sports banners from years past stood rigid above their heads, only occasionally turning a corner like a dolphin’s flipper to let past a breath from an exhaling air vent. Clothes dampened by the rain outside stayed damp. Coughs and sneezes echoed skyward. Between the south exit and the auxiliary gym – the wrestling room, as it was called – lines formed outside bathrooms while savvier parents ducked into the locker rooms.

  “Today is a very special day for all of us,” Mary Seebohm began unpromisingly. “It marks the end of our high school careers. For some, it marks the end of our academic careers. For many, it marks the end of our athletic careers. For each one of us, it also marks the beginning of our freedom.

  “For eighteen years, give or take, we have been human beings without choices. Sure, we made little decisions – what color to paint our room, what instrument to pursue in band, whether to try out for cheerleader or pom-pom squad, quiz bowl or debate, whether to run for student council, or to take metal shop instead of wood shop. But when it came to the most important aspects of our lives, we had no choices. Today that changes.

  “Seated in this footba – I mean basketball gym are one thousand one hundred and twelve individual destinies. Each of us has the potential to make a difference. To be heard. To help our fellow man, or to hurt him. To achieve great things, or to vanish into obscurity. To be graceful, courageous, uninhibited, powerful, merciful, caring, cruel, callous, artistic, creative, productive, promiscuous” – cheers – “mischievous, inspiring, beneficent, intimidating, loving, cautious, fearful, dominant, truthful, fair, generous, law-abiding, kind. We will never have more choices, and thus more freedom, than we do right now. Every day between now and the day we die is a day with fewer choices than the one before it. And so I implore you, my fellow graduates of Northwood East, my friends, my classmates: choose wisely.”

  Mary continued. Davis checked his watch. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. His clothes stuck to him in uncomfortable places. The man just behind him and to his right exhaled through his nose in quick whistles. Davis took a step forward. The line to the men’s bathroom had grown by a dozen in just the last few minutes as parents heard nothing from Mary that sounded like a summation. Davis thought about a visit to the urinal himself. He even thought about taking Joan’s hand and suggesting they leave. She didn’t want to be here, anyway.

  Martha Finn appeared in the foyer through a parting curtain of bodies, her eyes at maximum aperture, her skin tight and angry over her skinny jaw. She looked old, and Davis wondered how many years it had been since he’d last seen her. Not that many. She should see a doctor. Even her intense rage couldn’t account for the unhealthy pallor on her face.

  “Dr. Moore,” she whispered tersely. Her eyes directed him to the glass-and-metal doors leading outside. He nodded and followed her, putting a hand on Joan’s arm, telling her to stay put. He’d be back. It will be all right.

  Outside, under a narrow asphalt roof over the entrance, rain pelting the concrete just a few yards away, Martha hugged her own arms and said, “I know you’ve been seeing my son.” She was trembling as if a combustion engine inside her were both powering her speech and keeping her anger in check.

  “He came to see me,” Davis admitted. “After you told him he was a clone. We’ve done nothing but talk.”

  “Since you’ve been meeting him, he’s changed. Did you know he’s been doing drugs?”

  Davis started. “Drugs? That’s crazy,” he said. “There’s no way.”

  Unconvinced, Martha said, “Have you been giving him drugs?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Have you tried to make him stop?”

  “Mrs. Finn, I assure you, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Justin isn’t doing drugs.” As he said it, however, he wondered. She seemed so certain. Had she caught him? As close as he felt to Justin, how well did he actually know him? How much time had they really spent together? Would I know if Justin were on drugs? He answered himself. Yes. Yes, I would.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m so scared. Scared of him. Scared of what he might do. To himself. To me. To somebody else.” She looked Davis in the eyes. “And there’s nothing I can do or say. How can he be so sure of himself when I’m so insecure?”

  Davis said he was sorry. It was wrong to have met with Justin behind her back. He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t try to explain why he and Justin had been meeting. Why they had been sneaking around. To his surprise, she accepted that small concession with a nod and then opened the door and disappeared into the foyer, making her way back to the gym.

  “That was weird,” Joan said when he returned. “What did she want?”

  “An apology,” Davis said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. Davis dipped his head in a way that resembled a nod.

  They stepped out to an open area of the foyer to put on their jackets. A girl, perhaps five years old, in a pink dress, with sun-blond hair, approached them from the direction of the gym. “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “That boy asked me to give this to you.” She handed Davis a program from the commencement.

  “What boy?” Joan asked. The girl shrugged.

  Davis opened the folded booklet. Scribbled in black pen: 415 Saint Paul Rd. 11:00. Tonight.

  – 91 -

  “Thanks for coming,” Justin said. “This might be the closest we get to a celebration.” He threw his arms in the air. “Congratulations! We got the bastard.”

  The spring surf licked the beach on the other side of the dunes. Across a hundred yards on either side of them, couples made out on blankets thrown over the wet sand at irregular intervals. Muffled shouting over a muffled stereo marked the epicenter of the graduation party at 415 Saint Paul Road, just steps from the water. It was unclear to Davis if it was being supervised by freethinking adults or if there were still parents so apathetic and stupid they would leave town the weekend of their kid’s graduation and expect him not to turn their home into a three-million-dollar frat house.

  Davis said, “Should I be celebrating, Justin? Tell me.”

  “Of course you should. Coyne’s been arrested and, according to the papers, already convicted. Quote: The trial, it seems, is almost a formality. ”

  “What happened to your theory?”

  “What do you mean?” Justin smiled in the manner of a comedian waiting for his audience to get his last joke.

  “You said that when Coyne kills in Shadow World, he doesn’t feel the urge to kill as the Wicker Man. Didn’t Coyne just murder someone in the game a few weeks ago? The night he attacked Sally?”

  “It’s an inexact science.” Justin smirked.

  “It’s bullshit,” Davis said. “Your whole Wicker Man/Shadow World theory is bullshit.” He turned and pressed his shoe into the damp spring sand. His footprint made a detailed impression, outlining every tread and recess in his sole.

  “I know what you did,” Davis said, and as he said it he knew the accusation could not be undone. That it would change things between them. The significance was not in the truth of the statement, and Davis would admit he had no evidence to support it. Indeed, before the idea occurred to him he never would have thought Justin capable of such a thing. Sure, he had read Justin’s psych reports, and once worried over missing dogs in
the Finns’ neighborhood, and he and Joan had held endless discussions about what Justin might one day become (in her office and, more recently, across the low valley where their pillows met). Even so, they had never considered it anything but a remote possibility. Davis had never entertained the notion, not for a moment, that their darkest fears had become real.

  But now he knew it to be true. The moment Martha Finn told Davis she suspected Justin was taking drugs, he began to accept it. Mothers know things about their sons. Justin wasn’t taking drugs, but there was something else profoundly wrong with him.

  From the day Justin knocked on his door, he and the boy had been connected by a priori truths, not facts in evidence. It was true that Sam Coyne had killed Davis’s daughter. It also must be true that Coyne had killed others, in numbers impossible to figure. For the past year he and Justin had kept these awful truths between them, and their inability to share them with the world had felt like a penance to Davis. For being a selfish person. A bad husband and a mediocre father. Unmasking AK’s killer had once been something like his religion, but he became resigned to life as a monk, with silence in service of the truth being its own reward. The final secret he shared with Anna Kat would be the face and the name of her killer.

  He hadn’t counted on Justin, however. The evangelist, determined to bring the word to the people at any cost.

  “I was going to tell you,” Justin said.

  “Bullshit,” Davis said again.

  “Seriously. I considered that you might be happier if I didn’t. But I was going to tell you. Because we’re not done.”

  “No, no, Justin,” Davis said. “We’re done. The only question is, how are we going to make things right?”

  Justin laughed and shook his head. “You don’t think things are right? The man who killed your daughter is going to prison, probably for the rest of his life. Not for Anna Kat’s murder but-”

  “Not even for a murder he committed.”

  Justin climbed halfway up the dune and looked toward the lake, which he could make out in the darkness only by the tiny white foam of the soft breaks. “You know how we talked once that it might be possible for one self to exist simultaneously in two bodies? I felt him. When I was killing that girl, I felt Coyne. I understood him. I knew why he had to do it. Why the Wicker Man comes out. I understood what it means to have an urge beyond your control. To be a puppet in the hands of compulsion. I felt bad for her. I did. But once I started – I mean, there was this rush. Stopping it would have been like – like stopping an orgasm.”

  Davis felt sick. He crouched in some tall grass.

  “I’m sorry,” Justin said. “I know that’s hard for you to hear in those terms. But don’t you want to know everything? I don’t know why Coyne picked Anna Kat, but once he did, she had to die. It was inevitable, like an accident. Like a bolt of lightning. There was nothing either of them could have done to stop it. I thought you’d find that comforting.”

  Davis couldn’t even conceive of the concept. “We have to – we have to go to the police.”

  Justin slid back down the dune. “Now? What will that do? Set Coyne free? Put him back on the street? Put you in prison, probably for the rest of your life? Where’s the justice in that? For you? For AK? For your wife? For the parents of the dozens of people Sam Coyne has killed and will kill in the future if we set him free? Because I’m telling you. I felt it. He won’t stop.”

  “Where’s the justice for Deirdre Thorson? What about her? What about her parents?”

  Justin sniffed. “That’s why I said we aren’t done.” He had a glaze on his eyes, like Vaseline. “Dr. Moore, the reason I know Sam Coyne won’t stop killing is because now that I’ve killed, neither will I.” Justin picked up a handful of packed sand and crumbled through his fingers as he explained. And when he was done, Davis knew it would happen just as the boy said.

  Justin at Seventeen

  – 92 -

  Writing is the pursuit of truth, Barwick supposed, but the whole truth was outside her purview. Big Rob had preached that, and it applied to journalism as well as investigation. Both disciplines were about identifying facts that will lead to understanding, and withholding facts that will lead to confusion. She remembered a conversation she once had with a war correspondent just returned from front lines two continents away. “I could have filed a story every day about the good things that were happening there,” he said. “About the schools that were opening and the hospitals being rebuilt and the valleys being repopulated. About women in Parliament and the growing economy and the long-term hope of a new nation. I could have filed a story every day that would have painted a real rosy picture, and it all would have been one hundred percent true. But to my eyes, things weren’t going well, so I served the truth by focusing on the car bombings and the assassinations and the political corruption and the religious feuds. That was the real story, and it was my obligation to tell it even at the expense of lesser truths. Hell, in fifteen column inches you couldn’t tell the whole truth about a lost kitten.”

  Over afternoon sandwiches and white wine, on a broad mahogany deck alongside the Ohio River, Sally answered questions from a mousy young reporter from the Cincinnati Inquirer. Sally’s just-published book, In the Sights of the Wicker Man: The Unmasking of America’s Most Feared Serial Killer, sat on the table between their dishes.

  “Why do you think he did it?” asked the reporter, whose name was Alice. “Why do you think Sam Coyne killed?”

  “I don’t know,” Barwick said. “Compulsion, I guess. But he was rational, too. He took the time both to pose the bodies and to cover up his crimes, and when he came after me it was only because I threatened to expose him. He didn’t become a killer because he was desperate. He became desperate because he had so much to lose by getting caught.”

  “That’s one of the most compelling things about your book,” Alice said. “Coyne led so many different lives – respectable lawyer, loyal son, sex addict – and those were just the ones he lived publicly… ”

  “Right.”

  “…and then he was a sexual predator, a murderer, and most of these lives he replicated one way or another inside Shadow World.”

  Sally said, “That was the fascinating thing for me in writing this story. As a Shadow World True-to-Lifer, I was very aware of the ways in which we all lead multiple lives. I think for Sam Coyne this became a pathology.”

  Alice smiled. “And what are your other lives like?”

  “Well, in at least one of them, I have a boyfriend,” joked Sally, thinking of both dreamy Eric Lundquist and precocious Shadow Justin. “No, seriously, one goal of a True-to-Lifer is to have no secrets. Or no secrets from yourself, anyway.”

  Eyebrow raised, Alice said, “So on this book tour, will you be revealing the identity of the Conductor? Maybe here in this interview?” She chuckled hopefully.

  “The Conductor” was Sally’s name in the book for her mysterious police informant, called that because of his insistence on meeting her aboard a tourist trolley that circulated through downtown.

  “No, no,” Sally said, reaching for her wine. “I promised I’d never do that.”

  Barwick suspected there were many cops who knew the Conductor was a fiction. They would never say so, however, as they would also have to admit that Sam Coyne had never been one of their suspects. It was better for Ambrose and the superintendent and the mayor to say nothing and have the public assume they had been hot on Coyne’s trail when the story broke. If Barwick didn’t want to reveal her nonexistent source, that was just fine with City Hall.

  Nowhere in the book was the name Justin Finn.

  Before Justin had moved out west to spend time with his father, he and Sally met in Shadow World one last time to make certain they could keep each other’s secrets.

  “You’re going to be okay, living with this? The way it played out?” Shadow Justin asked. They were sitting on a short wall along North Avenue Beach, watching fit and young avatars play volleyball.

/>   Sally said, “Sometimes you need to perpetuate a lie to preserve the truth, like burning trees to save the forest, or hunting deer to save the herd. Sam Coyne killed Dierdre Thorson. He is the Wicker Man. That’s not a lie. If people knew about you, it would muddy the waters, make the truth of that statement unclear. Coyne’s lawyers would say that if two people have the Wicker Man’s DNA, that casts doubt on their client’s guilt.” She watched real-looking waves break around a handful of swimming avatars. “But you and I know only one of those two people is a killer.”

  Shadow Justin nodded.

  They stood up to leave but lingered on the sand for a moment. Sally pulled him to her, the face of Justin’s avatar so close it filled her screen. They kissed clumsily – she doubted he had ever kissed a Shadow World girl – and they walked away, Justin to the north, to the suburbs, and Sally back into the city.

  The Cincinnati sun ducked from behind a white cloud and quickly warmed Sally’s dark cheeks. The after-work crowd was arriving, and as the volume of background noise increased, drinks and appetizers appeared by the trayful from behind the bar.

  Alice said, “Forgive this question, I’m not a gamer. What is Shadow Sally Barwick doing just this moment? Is she sitting here with some version of me? In some version of this restaurant?”

  “She really is in Shadow Cincinnati,” Sally said. “She’s also promoting a book about Sam Coyne: The Shadow Chicago Thrill Killer. ”

  Shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare, Barwick was momentarily envious of her on-screen alter ego, who had undoubtedly written a book with fewer fictions than Sally was capable of writing in real life.

  – 93 -

  Decades of irregular stains had turned the thin gold carpet six different shades of pistachio. The place smelled something horrible, too. Given the nature of what must have taken place between mostly illicit lovers in this room (and other rooms like it at the Lawrence amp; Lake Shore Mayflower Motel), Davis would have been surprised to hear the windows had ever been cracked open or the thick gold curtains ever drawn. Who knows why Justin chose this neighborhood? It was one of hundreds in the city where they could walk anonymously in the street, and one of dozens where the neighbors wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or a ruckus if they noticed a teenaged boy and a middle-aged man entering the same motel room an hour apart.