Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  When his grandmother learned of what he had done in the forest she took him to a dark and frightening place, a place where other children like himself lived.

  Moon looked out the window for many years. The moon came to him every night, telling him of its travels. Moon learned of Paris and Munich and Upsala. He learned of the Deluge and the Street of Tombs.

  When his grandmother took ill, they let him come home. He returned to a quiet and empty place. A place of ghosts.

  His grandmother is gone now. Soon the king will tear everything down.

  Moon makes his seed in the soft blue light of the moon. He thinks about his nightingale. She sits in the boathouse, waiting, her voice stilled for the moment. He mixes his seed with a single drop of blood. He arranges his brushes.

  Later he will dress in his finery, cut a length of rope, and make his way to the boathouse.

  He will show the nightingale his world.

  31

  Byrne sat in his car on Eleventh Street, near Walnut. He’d had every intention of making it an early night, but his car had brought him here.

  He was restless, and he knew why.

  All he could think about was Walt Brigham. He thought about Brigham’s face as he talked about the Annemarie DiCillo case. There had been real passion there.

  Pine needles. Smoke.

  Byrne got out of his car. He was going to head into Moriarty’s for a quick one. Halfway to the door he decided against it. He walked back to his car in a sort of fugue state. He had always been a man of instant decision, of lightning reaction, but now he seemed to be walking in circles. Maybe the murder of Walt Brigham had gotten to him more than he realized.

  As he opened the car he heard someone approaching. He turned around. It was Matthew Clarke. Clarke looked agitated, red-eyed, on edge. Byrne watched the man’s hands.

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Clarke?”

  Clarke shrugged his shoulders. “This is a free country. I can go where I want.”

  “Yes, you can,” Byrne said. “However, I’d prefer it if those places were not around me.”

  Clarke reached slowly into his pocket, pulled out a camera phone. He turned the screen toward Byrne. “I can even go to the twelve hundred block of Spruce Street if I feel like it.”

  At first Byrne thought he had heard wrong. Then he looked closely at the picture on the cell phone’s small screen. His heart sank. The photograph was of his wife’s house. The house where his daughter slept.

  Byrne slapped the phone from Clarke’s hand, grabbed the man by his lapels, slammed him into the bricks of the wall behind him. “Listen to me,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  Clarke just stared, his lips trembling. He had planned for this moment, but now that it had arrived he was completely unprepared for the immediacy, the violence of it.

  “I’m going to say this once,” Byrne said. “If you ever go near that house again I will hunt you down and I will put a fucking bullet in your head. Do you understand?”

  “I guess you don’t—”

  “Don’t talk. Listen. If you have a problem with me, it is with me, not with my family. You do not fuck with my family. You want to settle this now? Tonight? We settle it.”

  Byrne let go of the man’s coat. He backed up. He tried to control himself. That would be all he needed: a citizen complaint against him.

  The truth was Matthew Clarke was not a criminal. Not yet. For the moment Clarke was just an ordinary man riding a terrible, soul-shredding wave of grief. He was lashing out at Byrne, at the system, at the injustice of it all. As misplaced as it was, Byrne understood.

  “Walk away,” Byrne said. “Now.”

  Clarke straightened his clothes, made an attempt to restore his dignity. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “Walk away, Mr. Clarke. Get help.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to own up to what you’ve done,” Clarke said.

  “What I’ve done?” Byrne took a deep breath, tried to calm down. “You don’t know anything about me. When you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, and been the places I’ve been, we’ll talk.”

  Clarke glared at him. He wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Look, I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Clarke. I truly am. But there isn’t—”

  “You didn’t know her.”

  “Yes I did.”

  Clarke looked stunned. “What are you talking about?”

  “You think I didn’t know who she was? You think I don’t see it every day of my life? The man who walks into the bank during a robbery? The elderly woman walking home from church? The kid on a North Philly playground? The girl whose only crime was being Catholic? You think I don’t understand innocence?”

  Clarke continued to stare at Byrne, speechless.

  “It makes me sick,” Byrne said. “But there’s nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it. Innocent people get hurt. You have my condolences, but as callous as it may sound, that’s all I’m going to give you. That’s all I can give you.”

  Instead of accepting this and leaving, it appeared that Matthew Clarke wanted to take matters to the next level. Byrne resigned himself to the inevitable.

  “You took a swing at me in that diner,” Byrne said. “A sucker punch. You missed. You want a free shot now? Take it. Last chance.”

  “You have a gun,” Clarke said. “I’m not a stupid man.”

  Byrne reached into his holster, took out his weapon, tossed it into his car. His badge and ID followed. “Unarmed,” he said. “I’m a civilian now.”

  Matthew Clarke looked at the ground for a moment. In Byrne’s mind it could still go either way. Then Clarke reared back and hit Byrne in the face as hard as he could. Byrne staggered, saw stars for a moment. He tasted blood in his mouth, warm and metallic. Clarke was five inches shorter and at least fifty pounds lighter. Byrne did not raise his hands in defense or anger.

  “That’s it?” Byrne asked. He spit. “Twenty years of marriage and that’s the best you can do?” Byrne was baiting Clarke, insulting him. He couldn’t seem to stop himself. Maybe he didn’t want to. “Hit me.”

  This time it was a glancing blow off Byrne’s forehead. Knuckle on bone. It stung.

  “Again.”

  Clarke ran at him again, this time catching Byrne on the right temple. He came back around with a hook to Byrne’s chest. And then another. Clarke nearly came off the ground with the effort.

  Byrne reeled back a foot or so, held his ground. “I don’t think your heart is in this, Matt. I really don’t.”

  Clarke screamed with rage—a crazed, animal sound. He swung his fist again, catching Byrne on the left side of his jaw. But it was clear that his passion, and strength, were waning. He swung again, this time a glancing blow that continued past Byrne’s face and into the wall. Clarke screamed in pain.

  Byrne spit blood, waited. Clarke slumped against the wall, spent for the moment, physically and emotionally, his knuckles bleeding. The two men looked at each other. They both knew this battle was winding down, the way men have known for centuries that a fight was over. For the moment.

  “Done?” Byrne asked.

  “Fuck … you.”

  Byrne wiped the blood from his face. “You’re never going to have this opportunity again, Mr. Clarke. If this happens again, if you ever approach me again in anger, I will fight back. And as hard as it may be for you to understand, I’m as mad about your wife’s death as you are. You don’t want me to fight back.”

  Clarke began to cry.

  “Look, believe this, or don’t believe it,” Byrne said. He knew he was reaching. He had been here before, but for some reason it had never been this hard. “I’m sorry about what happened. You’ll never know how sorry. Anton Krotz was a fucking animal, and now he’s dead. If there was something I could do, I would do it.”

  Clarke glared at him, his anger subsiding, his breathing returning to normal, his rage falling back into the domini
on of grief and pain. He wiped the tears from his face. “Oh, there is, Detective,” he said. “There is.”

  They stared at each other, five feet between them, worlds apart. Byrne could tell the man was not going to say anything else. Not this night.

  Clarke picked up his cell phone, backed his way to his car, slipped inside, and sped off, fishtailing for a moment on the ice.

  Byrne glanced down. There were long streaks of blood on his white dress shirt. It wasn’t the first time. It was the first time in a long time, though. He rubbed his jaw. He had been punched in the face enough in his life, starting with Sal Pecchio when he was about eight years old. That time it had been over a water ice.

  If there was something I could do, I would do it.

  Byrne wondered what he’d meant by that.

  There is.

  Byrne wondered what Clarke had meant.

  He got on his cell. His first call was to his ex-wife, Donna, under the pretense of saying “Merry Christmas.” Everything was fine there. Clarke had not paid a visit. Byrne’s next call reached out to a sergeant in the district where Donna and Colleen lived. He gave a description of Clarke and the car’s plates. They would dispatch a sector car. Byrne knew he could have a warrant issued, have Clarke picked up, could probably have a charge of assault and battery stick. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Byrne opened the car door, retrieved his weapon and ID, headed for the pub. As he stepped into the welcoming warmth of the familiar bar, he had a feeling that the next time he confronted Matthew Clarke it was going to turn bad.

  Very bad.

  32

  From her new world of total darkness, layers of sound and touch peeled away slowly—the echo of moving water, the feel of cold wood against her skin—but it was the sense of smell that beckoned first.

  For Tara Lynn Greene, it had always been about smell. The scent of sweet basil, the redolence of diesel fumes, the aroma of a baking fruit pie in her grandmother’s kitchen. All these things held the power to transport her to another place and time in her life. Coppertone was the shore.

  This scent was familiar too. Decaying meat. Rotting wood.

  Where was she?

  Tara knew they had traveled, but she had no idea how far. Or how long it had been. She had dozed off, been rattled awake a few times. She felt wet and cold. She could hear wind whispering through stone. She was indoors, but that was about all she knew.

  As her thoughts became clearer, her terror grew. The flat tire. The man with the flowers. The searing pain at the back of her neck.

  Suddenly a light came on overhead. The low-watt bulb glowed through a layer of grime. She could now see that she was in a small room. To the right, a wrought-iron daybed. A dresser. A chair. All vintage, all very tidy, the room almost monastic in its precise order. Ahead was a passageway of some sort, an arched stone duct leading into blackness. Her eye was drawn back to the bed. There was something white on it. A dress? No. It looked like a winter coat.

  It was her coat.

  Tara looked down. She was now wearing a long dress. And she was in a boat, a small red boat in a canal that ran through this peculiar room. The boat was brightly colored with glossy enamel paint. Around her waist was a nylon seat belt, holding her snugly into a worn vinyl seat. Her hands were tied to the belt.

  She felt something sour rise in her throat. She had read a newspaper story about the woman found murdered in Manayunk. The woman dressed in an old costume. She knew what this was all about. The knowledge squeezed the air from her lungs.

  Sounds: metal on metal. Then a new sound. It sounded like … a bird? Yes, a bird was singing. The bird’s song was beautiful, rich and melodic. Tara had never heard anything like it. Within moments she heard footsteps. Someone approached from behind, but Tara dared not try to turn around.

  After a long silence, he spoke.

  “Sing for me,” he said.

  Had she heard correctly? “I’m … I’m sorry?”

  “Sing, nightingale.”

  Tara’s throat was parched nearly shut. She tried to swallow. The only chance of getting out of this was with her wits. “What do you want me to sing?” she managed.

  “A song about the moon.”

  The moon the moon the moon the moon. What does he mean? What is he talking about? “I don’t think I know any songs about the moon,” she said.

  “Sure you do. Everybody knows a song about the moon. ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘Paper Moon,’ ‘How High the Moon,’ ‘Blue Moon,’ ‘Moon River.’ I especially like ‘Moon River.’ Do you know it?”

  Tara knew that song. Everyone knew that song, right? But right then it would not come to her. “Yes,” she said, buying time. “I know it.”

  He stepped in front of her.

  Oh my God, she thought. She averted her eyes.

  “Sing, nightingale,” he said.

  This time it was a command. She sang “Moon River.” The lyrics came to her, if not the precise melody. Her theatrical training took over. She knew if she stopped, or even hesitated, something terrible would happen.

  He sang with her as he untied the boat, walked to the rear, and gave it a shove. He turned off the light.

  Tara moved through the darkness now. The small boat tapped and clacked against the sides of the narrow channel. She strained to see, but still her world was almost pitch-black. From time to time she noticed a glistening of icy moisture on shiny rock walls. The walls were closer now. The boat rocked. It was so cold.

  She could no longer hear him, but Tara continued to sing, her voice rebounding off the walls and low ceiling. It sounded thin and shaky, but she couldn’t stop.

  Light ahead—consommé-thin daylight sneaking through cracks in what looked to be old wooden doors.

  The boat hit the doors and they sprang open. She was outdoors. It looked to be just after dawn. A soft snow was falling. Above her, dead tree branches blackly fingered a mother-of-pearl sky. She tried to raise her arms, but could not.

  The boat drifted into a clearing. Tara was floating down one of a series of narrow canals that snaked through the trees. The water was cluttered with leaves, branches, debris. On either side of the canals were tall, rotting structures, their supporting spines like diseased ribs in a decaying chest. One appeared to be a skewed and ramshackle gingerbread house. Another display looked like a castle. Yet another resembled a giant seashell.

  The boat banged around a bend in the river and the view of the trees was now blocked out by a large display, perhaps twenty feet tall, fifteen feet wide. Tara tried to focus on what it might be. It looked like a child’s storybook, open to the center, with a long-faded, paint-flaked red ribbon down the right side. Next to it sat a large rock, like something you might see in a breakwall. Something sat on top of the rock.

  The wind kicked up at that moment, rocking the boat, stinging Tara’s face, making her eyes water. The bitterly cold gust brought with it a fetid, animal smell that turned her stomach. A few moments later, when the motion settled and her vision cleared, Tara found herself directly in front of the huge storybook. She read a few words at the upper left.

  Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower …

  Tara looked beyond the book. Her tormentor stood at the end of the canal, near a small building that looked like an old schoolhouse. He held a length of rope in his hands. He was waiting for her.

  Her song became a scream.

  33

  By 6 AM, Byrne had all but given up on sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness, the nightmares creeping, the faces accusing.

  Kristina Jakos. Walt Brigham. Laura Clarke.

  At seven thirty the phone rang. Somehow he had drifted off. The sound jolted him upright. Not another body, he thought. Please. Not another body.

  He answered. “Byrne.”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  Victoria’s voice brought a burst of sunshine to his heart. “No,” he said. It was marginally true. He had been on the rock-fac
e of sleep.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  “Merry Christmas, Tori. How’s your mom?”

  Her slight hesitation told him a lot. Marta Lindstrom was only sixty-six, but she suffered from early-stage dementia.

  “Good days and bad days,” Victoria said. A long pause. Byrne read it. “I think I have to move back home,” she added.

  There it was. While both had wanted to deny it, they knew it was coming. Victoria had already taken an extended leave from her job at the Passage House, a runaway shelter on Lombard Street.

  “Hey. Meadville isn’t all that far away,” she said. “It’s kind of nice here. Kind of quaint. You could look at it is a vacation. We could do a B and B.”

  “I’ve never actually been in a bed and breakfast,” Byrne said.

  “We probably wouldn’t get to the breakfast part. We could have an illicit assignation.”

  Victoria could turn her mood on a dime. It was one of the many things Byrne loved about her. No matter how down she was, she could make him feel better.

  Byrne glanced around his apartment. Although they had never officially moved in together—neither was ready for that step, each for their own reasons—in the time Byrne had been seeing Victoria she had transformed his apartment from the prototype bachelor pizza box into something resembling a home. He hadn’t been ready for lace curtains, but she had talked him into honeycomb window blinds, their pastel gold color amplifying the morning sunlight.

  There was an area rug on the floor, end tables where they were supposed to be: at the end of the couch. Victoria had even managed to sneak in two houseplants that, miraculously, had not only survived, but grown.

  Meadville, Byrne thought. Meadville was only 285 miles from Philadelphia.

  It seemed like the other side of the world.