by Gregg Olsen
Olivia seemed to understand.
He was hopeful that even if he was soulless and without any hope of redemption, he would never pass on the evil that had cursed his own life.
Evil, he knew, was both born and learned.
Chapter Forty-five
The last time that Michael Barton had been to Disneyland was memorable for all of the wrong reasons. It was the place his mom handed his sister and him off to a stranger in front of the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House. It was the last time he’d ever see her, and with her vanishing, the last glimpse of his own childhood.
Before it was stolen by those who did not love him or his sister.
Michael thought of a million reasons why he didn’t want to go there, suggesting that Knott’s Berry Farm was a superior attraction for young families.
“Knott’s is more fun,” he said, urging Olivia to reconsider her push for the Magic Kingdom. “I also feel like one of their chicken dinners. You like those, too, Olivia. Remember?”
Olivia did, but she also wanted to see Disneyland with Carla and Danny.
“I know you have some hang-ups about Disney, but, Jesus, Michael, get over it. The kids want to see Mickey Mouse,” Olivia said. She held her breath, almost wishing that she could reel in her hurtful words. And yet part of her wanted to shake him from whatever it was that haunted him so that her own children could experience all the joys of childhood. All that he had missed.
“I know they do,” Michael said, slipping back to his own memories. He was older than Carla and Danny when he set foot there the terrible week before Christmas when Adriana threw him away. The park was done up in all sorts of Christmas finery. But to an abused boy from Portland, Oregon, the extra lights and plastic snowflakes were merely dollops of unneeded frosting on the most amazing cake in the world.
He fell deeper into the memory. First it was foggy, then clear.
His mom had been agitated the day before she announced they’d be going to Disneyland. No need to pack, she told him. They’d be there only a day or so and could buy new things if they needed them.
“I’ll get you a Mickey Mouse shirt and hat,” she said.
What she didn’t say was that they’d be driving, a grueling eighteen-hour drive from their small house in Portland. Mrs. Barton packed up Michael and Sarah early—before daylight. It was cold before the sun came up and Michael complained about it to his mother, but she ignored him. He tugged on Sarah’s blanket and swiped it from her somewhere in the mountains between Oregon and California. Later, he would feel bad about many things in his life, things that deserved major regret, but nothing compared with stealing the blanket.
Nothing seemed as rotten as taking that little piece of comfort from his baby sister.
Adriana Barton took the kids to the Denny’s across the street for breakfast because the park wasn’t yet open at that early an hour. Outside of ordering pancakes and bacon, she said nothing. Michael had seen his mom sad like that before. He knew that it had something to do with the fact that she and Sarah’s father weren’t getting along. Hadn’t gotten along for a long time.
“Mommy, don’t be sad,” he said. The words were practiced. He’d said them over and over whenever his mother cried.
“It’s OK, baby, you’re my big little man,” she said. “Always look out for your sister.” Her response was equally canned. No feeling. No warmth. Just a rote don’t worry.
But as much as she appeared to be an automaton as she slid deeper into the booth, blank-eyed, cold, Michael would later remember those simple words as the last words of substance that his mother would ever utter to him.
They parked the family’s dark blue Subaru in the Tigger parking lot. Michael could remember how cold he felt that day as they waited for the tram to take them to the gates, past the floral portrait of Mickey Mouse. He could feel the push and pull of the moment. His mom was sad, almost broken. His heart told him something was wrong with her, but all he really wanted to do was to get down to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
He gripped the hem of Adriana’s coat as she pushed Sarah in a stroller and they snaked through the long line, first under the bridge, then inside the funny smelling mix of children and chlorine that filled the entrance to the ride. And then down, down, down into the magical world of rubber pirates, barking dogs, and gold-painted treasure.
“Are you OK, ma’am?” a girl asked, snapping Michael’s mother out of a stupor as she sat in the boat at the ride’s conclusion.
“Fine,” she said.
As Michael Barton entered the archway that proclaimed Adventureland it was all coming back to him. He felt his heart work overtime, his breathing accelerated.
He gripped his own son’s hand and looked over at Olivia and the baby, pushed in a rented stroller. He wondered if it had been the same stroller that had once held his sister, so long ago.
Across from the kiosks that sold pineapple spears and coconut milk in coconut shells loomed the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House.
It looked more real—at least in its design—than he imagined, but more fake, at the same time. It also had a new name. It was now named Tarzan’s Tree House, for the animated movie. The Robinsons, it seemed had long since been evicted. Gone. Over.
He wished it had been the same for his memories. He thought they’d been vanquished. He remembered how he stood with his sister by that steel and concrete tree while his mother nervously tapped on the shoulder of a woman waiting for her brood to come down the bamboo staircase of the attraction.
“I have an important call,” she said. “Will you watch my children? Here.” She didn’t even wait a beat. There was no time for the woman to say yes or no. The crowd was thick, almost impenetrable. But Michael and Sarah’s mother found a little fissure among the throng and in a second, she was gone.
Gone forever.
Before he and Sarah ended up at the Anaheim police station, he remembered hearing someone talking in a low voice over by the pineapple kiosk.
“The woman’s been behaving strangely since she got here. She looked crazy, depressed.”
A young man in a safari costume joined a group of colorfully attired Disney workers huddled by the river ride.
“God, do we have to drag the damn lagoon? Can’t we just drain it? Why do the suicides always come here? Why can’t they jump off the log ride at Knott’s, or something?”
He didn’t know what “drag the lagoon” meant, but there wasn’t anyone to ask. His mom was gone.
How to do it? Why do it at all? The triggers that brought him to the place in which he’d find himself fantasizing about doing evil, doing harm, came at unexpected times. During mundane moments. Always uninvited. When working the ketchup dispenser cleanup detail at McDonald’s as a teenager, he found himself caught up in a memory of the first cat he’d ever killed. He hit the pump multiple times to empty it, in nearly a manic performance that brought glances from those closest to him in the fast food restaurant.
The red of the condiment was blood.
“Hey, easy on that, Mike,” a pimply-faced crew chief called from the other side of the counter while another worker, a girl, looked on with utter distain. “The dispenser is stainless steel, not titanium.”
“Oh, right,” he said. Inside his uniform, his heart was a drumroll. He hoped no one could see the excitement that he’d experienced looking at the ketchup. He was thinking of the blood, killing the Hansens’ cat.
He felt an erection grow and hurriedly excused himself. He flipped the RESTROOM BEING CLEANED sign into view and did what he needed to do to relieve the excitement.
The excitement that he hated more than anything. Why, he often wondered, had his brain hardwired unspeakable violence to an animal to his sexual organs?
It wasn’t all the time. After all, he did have the occasional girlfriend. He wasn’t a weirdo in bed. He didn’t strangle a girl as he made love to her. He wasn’t a killer.
And yet, the compulsion came to him. One time, when he was mowing lawns to mak
e some extra money for college expenses, he flashed on catching a particularly annoying dog. It obviously hated him, sneering and barking whenever he arrived at the house to cut the lawn and weed the garden. He thought of burying it in the center of the lawn, up to its furry little neck, and running over it with a weedwhacker. The idea shifted to something even bloodier. The riding mower. It would be decisive, sending a red, bloody spray from the point of impact over the patio, onto the lawn furniture, arcing on the glass doors to the living room. The thought excited him, as always, but he suppressed it. He wished it away. He even prayed it away.
Then dormant, he’d go.
But the cycle was relentless. For a time, he thought marriage or fatherhood could abate it completely. And it did. He never acted on the compulsion to harm another human being or an animal. That wasn’t to say the thoughts didn’t come to him.
He thought of killing the loan officer at the bank when he and Olivia were applying for the financing and things were looking a little dicey. Credit scores out of college were always in the five hundreds. They jumped through some extra hoops and prayed that late payments on a big screen TV were not as big a deal as the jerk had insisted. Killing him would be good. But, he reasoned, what guy didn’t fantasize about killing someone who stood in the way of his future happiness?
The loan came through, and the man’s life was spared.
Another time the neighbor’s dog barked until all hours. It was the kind of barking that came only when he was desperate for sleep. If he hadn’t been so mad, he’d have laughed at the irony that the dog that barked incessantly didn’t seem to keep his owners awake. He could have pumped a couple of slugs in the mongrel’s head and they’d probably not even stir. But he didn’t do that. He simply opened the gate on the chain-link kennel and the dog ran out, chasing whatever it was that he had to chase.
Problem solved, compulsion to kill and torture gone.
He’d done some reading about his own psychological makeup, but he never really saw himself in the label of antisocial personality disorder. He wasn’t so messed up that he was a narcissistic person. In fact, he was too good for that.
Michael Barton never wanted to eat anyone, so he wasn’t Jeffrey Dahmer. He didn’t capture and torture girls like Joel Rifkin. He didn’t stalk young women, à la Ted Bundy.
Yes, he wet the bed into his teenage years. Yes, he tortured a few animals, but they were only animals, and he knew it was wrong. Yes, there was a slight sexual charge that came with the rush of what he was doing, but he could function normally, too.
Michael had his problems. He knew every one of them and how they matched up to evil, but he wasn’t like any of those guys.
What he didn’t know was that he’d never been pushed. And that was about to change.
Chapter Forty-six
Before Olivia, every move Michael Barton made was meant to hurt someone. She changed all of that. She was forgiving and beautiful. And, most important of all, she soothed him. She might have thought that she understood him. But of course, she could not. He’d let her inside his messed-up world more than anyone he’d ever known. But he could never tell her specifically what he’d done when he was younger.
“My background’s not so good,” he had told her. “State institutions, a few run-ins with the cops. Let’s just leave it at that, OK?”
“But I want to know you, babe. Let me in.”
“You’re in. You’re in as far as I can allow you. Maybe later, maybe down the road, I can tell you more.”
His words were a lie. He knew that if she’d known all the things he’d done, she’d leave him, too.
She was his hope. She was his chance not to be a monster anymore.
How could he tell her that when he was serving food in the cafeteria at the Ogilvy Home, he spat on the food, poured salt in the milk, and emptied Visine into the counselors’ iced tea because it made them sick and that made him feel good. When the boys found a cache of balloons that had been brought into the institution for a water balloon fight, he filled them with urine. He also filled the balloons with water and froze them so that when he hurled them, the strike would almost break a bone.
Only then did he feel a kind of joy. Holding those frozen balloons—red, yellow, blue—and throwing them at the kids he hated most. The weaker ones. He broke one fat boy’s nose with a well-aimed shot, and though he felt a flutter of satisfaction, he also felt a bit of remorse. He wished he’d broken something more vital. Like the fat boy’s neck.
There was always cover there for that kind of an act. No boy, no matter how tough he thought he was, would ever tell on Michael Barton for what he did to them. When he offered up a new kid to service one of the security guards, he didn’t choose the weakest. He chose a kid from a well-off family in Los Angeles.
“You’ll suck his dick and you’ll shut up about it,” he said.
“I will not,” said the L.A. kid, a redhead with freckles and blue eyes that were unable to hide the fear that swelled through his bloodstream.
“You will. Or I’ll cut off your head.” Michael stepped closer to the boy as they stood in the hallway outside the institution’s library. The librarian smiled uneasily through the glass and Michael just smiled a phony smile. A practiced one. He put his arm around the boy and leaned forward. “I’ve done it before.” His voice was a whisper, cold and flat. “And I really want to do it again. Welcome to Ogilvy.”
The security guard thanked him the next day. And gave him a five-dollar bill.
Michael could care less about the money. He was glad there was someone else to take his spot on his knees in front of a man with a lowered zipper.
Nothing, he knew, would ever get back the years he’d lost in the system. Nothing could erase what his mother had done to him. He was just a little speck of human life, floating around a world in which there seemed to be no place to land. There was nothing to love. And without love, there could be no other emotion but hate.
Michael knew that there were things about him that were so dark, so out of the boundaries of acceptable behavior, that what he’d done was deviant. Aberrant. He looked for understanding in the stacks of the Madison library. The psychology books talked about how sociopaths had no ability to empathize with others. How they had no connection to another human being. Isolation from emotion was a term one of the books used. Sociopaths were like pod people who just existed in a world designed for their own empty pleasure. One writer said they could only mimic the feelings of others, unsure how to act or react. They were completely detached.
But that wasn’t him. He knew that he did have an attachment. His sister Sarah was out there. He loved her. He wanted her to be free, to be happy. Sometimes he wept for her, thinking that his loss was so great. And at the same time he hoped that she felt at least a little like he did.
He wrote several letters that he never sent because he didn’t know where she was.
Dear Sarah,
I think it’s your birthday this week. I’m not sure of the exact day? Maybe the fifth? I wish I knew. I wish I’d paid more attention to things like that. I’m imagining you in a pretty white house with one of those big chocolate cakes with curls of chocolate stuck to the sides. I’d bet you’d like pink candles, too. I remember how much you liked pink, when you were a baby.
He stopped and thought how silly that note sounded. Sarah wore pink when she was a baby because their mother bought her pink clothes and blankets. She might have loved lavender or yellow. He crumpled the paper into a tight ball.
He missed her. One day, he told himself, they’d be together again.
While Danny and Carla played amid the array of toys scattered like a cyclone had hit the basement, Olivia continued to rack her brain about their missing cat, Simon. Simon had been a housecat who never ventured outside because he hated the feeling of morning dew on his paws.
“He ran out when I opened the door,” Michael had said. “I think the coyote got him.”
Olivia asked the neighbors about the coyote t
hat her husband had insisted had been the likely culprit.
“Good news on that one,” said Angela Martinez, the retired schoolteacher next door, when Olivia ran into her one afternoon shopping at Vons. “Animal control trapped the miserable animal three weeks ago. Your cat surely wasn’t a coyote snack.”
The information surprised her. “My husband said he saw the coyote last week.”
Mrs. Martinez dropped a couple packages of white and pink Hostess Snowballs into her shopping cart. “Grandkids are coming Friday. Lucky me,” she said, with a kind of tone to indicate she was annoyed with the prospect of a visit by her daughter’s band of grade-school hellions. “Anyway, I’m sure of it. Talked to the officer myself. Coyote problem solved. Now if I could just find a way to make it through the weekend.”
Olivia smiled. “Call me if you need reinforcements.”
As she pushed her cart toward the checkout aisle, Michael’s words echoed in her thoughts.
“I saw the coyote by the garbage can. I never should have let Simon out.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Cherrystone
Camille Hazelton seldom stopped by the sheriff’s office. She left that, rightly so, to her assistants who wanted to burn off carbs or see how the order tent pole of law and order lived. But today, she’d called ahead and Emily was waiting for her in her office. Camille snapped the door shut. The warmth on her face was absent. She was granite.
“Em, this isn’t a social call.”
“I figured.”
“We’ve got a problem with Tricia Wilson.”
“Is she all right?”
“Far from it. One of our DAs noticed a couple of inconsistencies in her depos and did a little more digging. Sent the kid down to Portland. Good thing I did.”
Emily could feel the blood drain from her face. “I’m not going to like this one bit, am I?”
Camille shook her head. “About as much as a kick to the stomach. That’s how I felt.”