by Steven James
And with that, a weight lifted from my shoulders.
So that was what this was all about. Work had gotten to her. The long hours of residency and the stress of putting in twenty-four-hour shifts, hundred-hour weeks, that’s what’d brought all this up.
“But it will get easier, Taci. You know it will. When your residency is over.”
“Pat, that’s the thing. I don’t want it to get easier. I want it to stay the way it is. With the adrenaline and the hours, the stress, and the trauma of life and death right there in front of me every day. The rush. Living on that sharp edge. That’s what I realized when the doctor said that. I’m not made for having kids and going to soccer games and chaperoning field trips. I don’t want the weekends off to go antique shopping. I don’t want to come home to a safe little life every day after work.”
I stared at her. “And you think that’s how it would be with me? A quiet, safe little suburban life? Are you kidding me?”
“I’m saying I don’t have what it would take to make our relationship work. It wouldn’t be right to treat you that way.” She paused as if to gain the courage to go on. “You’d always be in second place. There. I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry. It took me a long time to figure this out, I know it did. Too long. I’m really sorry. I am.”
I could feel the moment splintering apart like a piece of china that’d just been tipped off a table and shattered on the floor.
“I can’t change who I am,” she said, “and I don’t want to-and I couldn’t live like that, with the knowledge that I was holding you back from being loved like you deserve.”
“I’m a big boy, Taci. I can-”
“Don’t say you can handle it. Love isn’t supposed to be something that needs to be handled; it’s supposed to be the thing that helps you handle everything else.”
I had the sense that I was falling, that I’d just stepped off an escarpment and was now plummeting through a thin stretch of air toward the bottom of a cliff.
“I love you.” It was all I could think to say, words that I knew, even as I said them, weren’t going to change anything.
“Yes,” she said simply.
The whole conversation seemed surreal. Two people who love each other, two single, available adults who respect each other, who’re committed to each other and care deeply about each other and have been together for this long being torn apart by nothing more than uncertainties, priorities that might change over time.
At that moment I realized it: hope has the potential to dissolve right before your eyes. You can be looking at it, something golden and precious, like the way I felt when she was joking around with me when she first walked in here, and then suddenly it’s folding back into the air, leaving a dark trail behind-the dissipating smoke of the very things you used to gain strength from.
“Taci, listen, things have been crazy for us both lately. I understand that. But there’s no reason to-”
She clutched her purse in front of her now as if she was using it as an emotional shield. “I can’t.” And before I could stop her, before I could come up with anything to say that might salvage things, she rose. “I’m sorry. I just care about you too much to…to…Second place isn’t right. Not for you, Pat, not for anyone who’s in love.”
I stood up as well, tried to think of a way to talk her out of this, but no words came to me.
She made her way toward the door and slipped outside.
My feet seemed like they’d been rooted there forever. Go! If you just let her walk away, you’ll always regret it!
I hurried outside and made it to her car just as she was climbing in.
“Taci, please. Let’s talk about-”
“No, Pat. It’ll only end up hurting worse. Please.” These were the words she said as she closed the door. Then she pulled onto the road and drove down the street.
Those were the final words she said.
Of course every relationship suffers fractures. I get that. Of course they do, but people work through them, especially when they’re in love.
How is this happening? This cannot be happening!
But it was happening.
It had happened.
She turned the corner.
And then the woman I loved, Taci Vardis, disappeared out of sight.
51
As I returned to my car and drove to HQ, the questions hit me hard: How could she just let things end like that? Just abandon everything that’d been, the us we’d become, and say it was over? How can someone that important to your life, that central to all of your dreams and plans, so suddenly and unexpectedly walk away?
It happens every day, Pat. People break up. They divorce. Just like that. It’s over. All the time.
I thought it might’ve actually been easier if she were leaving me for someone else, but then it hit me that, ironically, she was leaving me so that I could find someone else.
And she was doing it because she loved me.
A tumble of clouds hung in the sky, lavender gray and still marred with the remnants of night. I left them, and the day they were ushering in, behind and rolled into the dark mouth of the police headquarters’ underground parking garage.
Ten minutes later, at my desk, I was trying to focus on the case, but it didn’t feel like I’d ever be able to concentrate on anything again, only that I would feel numb and distracted and full of unanswered questions from now on.
Ralph’s low voice rumbled through the room. “Just think…” I looked up. He was walking my way, holding up a manila folder. “As computers take over, there’s gonna come a day when these things disappear. Completely obsolete. Can’t wait for that.”
To me it seemed like the more we used computers, the more things we printed out. Manila folders weren’t disappearing at all from the department; they were multiplying like rabbits.
“Yes,” I acknowledged distractedly.
He joined me at my desk. “So, how did it go last night?”
“How did what go?”
“Dinner. On your anniversary.”
“Actually, it turned out to be breakfast.”
A sly grin. “You dog, you.”
“No, no. Not like that. I mean…”
“Did you guys check out any…action movies?” He gave me a wink.
Oh man.
How to do this.
I debated about whether or not to tell him what’d just happened at Anthony’s. In the end, perhaps naively, I decided it probably couldn’t hurt anything. “This morning, just now at breakfast, Taci broke up with me.”
“What? The day after your anniversary?”
“She wanted to tell me last night.”
“Oh man, that’s cold.” It looked like he was about to say more, maybe express in his own distinctively colorful way what he thought of a woman who would do that, but he held back-likely because he wasn’t sure if I was bitter, or if maybe I hoped there was some way we could get back together again.
“Apparently,” I said, “it was a choice between me and her career.”
We were both quiet, then he rested a giant paw on my shoulder. “If there’s anything, seriously, anything I can do. Anything you need, let me know. I’ve been there. If you can’t go to your friends when you need ’em, what good are they anyway?”
I barely knew this man and he already considered himself my friend, one close enough to help me when I was really hurting. And in that moment, I realized the feeling was mutual.
“I’ll let you know, Ralph. Thanks.”
He removed his hand. “Maybe we grab a beer tonight, you know? After work? Get your mind off things?”
“Yeah. We’ll see.”
Then he smacked me on the arm in what I took to be a friendly gesture, but one that just might leave a bruise. “Hang in there, bro.”
“Thanks.” I held back from rubbing my arm. “I will.”
He stepped away and I tried to dial in to the case again, but thoughts of Taci just wouldn’t leave m
e alone. I shut my eyes and concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, promised myself I wasn’t going to cry. That I wouldn’t let it hurt that bad.
And in the end I succeeded.
I took the pain and shock and dismay and buried them as deeply as I could, telling myself that if I stuffed them down far enough, they wouldn’t be able to bother me anymore.
I didn’t want the tape on my hands all day and the bleeding had stopped, so I peeled it off. Tossed it in the trash. Then I went back to work, reviewing what we knew about yesterday’s homicide and the attack on Adele Westin, a woman who was engaged to a man who was willing to do the unthinkable to save her from a madman.
But I hadn’t succeeded in burying my feelings. Not really. When you stuff your pain like that, it can never be called a success.
52
Watching the news last night had been informative to Joshua.
He’d learned more about Hendrich’s murder. The Channel 11 News team was reporting that he’d been, “brutally attacked in a neighborhood known for its aggressive gangs and uncontrolled street violence.”
By the end of the night, the anchorwoman was stating that unnamed sources in the police department were confirming “that law enforcement personnel are looking closely at outsiders who frequent that neighborhood” and “that if you have any information regarding the crimes, you should call the police.”
They gave a hotline number.
As Joshua had thought, Hendrich had been off duty yesterday and no one was sure why he’d been in the train yard in the first place.
The coverage was extensive enough for Joshua to realize that it was all possibly a coincidence after all.
But then how did he get in after you locked the gate? You really think he crawled in under the fence? Or was he in there already?
Yes, there were still questions. A lot of questions. But Joshua had enough information right now to move forward with his plans, right after a visit to the bookshelf to remind himself why he did what he did.
Yesterday he’d thought about the cache he’d found stashed under the basement steps at Timothy Griffin’s house in Fort Atkinson.
Now, he went to look at the cache of his own.
Over the years he’d kept a memento from each victim, all the way back to that first time in the barn when his father gave him one of Kenneth’s teeth.
Coincidently, his collection was in the basement, just like Griffin’s was, but Joshua’s wasn’t in a fake cabinet under the steps, but rather in a small enclosed space behind a bookcase that he’d built when he first moved into the house, before he and Sylvia got married.
Nomads in the Sahara value their freedom and their ability to pitch their tents wherever they please so much that they call houses “graves of the living.”
In the United States we call a nice big home the Great American Dream.
A grave or a dream. Depending on your perspective.
Two truths piercing each other: freedom and security. And you end up with the great irony of American life-living in the grave you have always dreamt of owning.
He slid the bookcase aside and looked at the crate that bristled with bones. He didn’t know how many there were, the statistics of it all were, perhaps surprisingly, one of the things he hadn’t kept track of. It was as if a part of his mind needed to shut that out in order for him to live as normal a life as he could.
But even though he couldn’t remember the name of each victim, just seeing the bones brought the flood of images and memories back again, merging across each other, faces pulled from time in an order that didn’t make sense but that played out in his mind as real, just the same.
They were mostly images of things that’d happened beneath the barn, in that secret place his father took him to. Images of the victims, and the most striking memories of all-of the last day Joshua ever went down there.
He reached into the box and picked up the tractor keys.
Curled his hand around them.
And remembered.
It all.
The day he’d left, the day he’d locked that trapdoor shut, leaving those two people behind him-one, a corpse; the other, soon to become one.
You saw what your father was doing, Joshua. You had to do something. You were finally old enough to take action. Fourteen years old. You had to do it. You know you did.
Yes-running up the steps that day, out of the secret place, into the barn.
You were scared. You had to stop him.
Yes-hearing his father pound up the stairs after him, knowing he was going to make him do things that he didn’t want to do, that he would always hate himself for doing.
Yes-closing the trapdoor and locking it quickly, then standing beside it for a long time, listening to his father bang on it from the bottom and yell. Yell so many things. Bargaining. Threatening. Cursing. And then screaming.
And then the banging started all over again.
His father had handed him the knife before he ran up the stairs, so he knew his father wouldn’t be able to use it to chip away at the thick wood of the trapdoor to escape.
But still, to make sure there was no way for him to get out, Joshua had positioned a long piece of sheet metal over the opening and then drove the tractor over the two ends, positioning the tires, just so, to hold the metal firmly in place. No one else knew about the place beneath the barn. No one else came to their ranch. No one would be moving that tractor.
Now he uncurled his fingers and looked at the keys.
He’d gone out there every day for three weeks, spent long hours sitting in the barn on the seat of the tractor listening to the muted sounds coming from beneath him. The screaming, the pounding. Eventually the crying. His father had a lot of meat down there and it took him a while to die. But eventually, with time, the sounds stopped.
Joshua went out there for another week after that, listening to the enduring stretches of silence, then he left the house for good and never went back.
You were brave to stop him. You were right to leave.
But another voice inside his head convicted him of his sins and would not stop recounting them, naming them, would not let him rest, never rest, for sealing his father in that earthen tomb with the man he’d just killed.
Thinking of what it would have been like for his father down there made Joshua remember an article he’d read so many times.
He replaced the keys in the crate, closed up the bookcase, and then removed from the shelf his well-worn copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s cult classic first published in 1973.
The entire book was a collection of reproduced newspaper clippings from the 1890s and obscure, somewhat troubling turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs.
Nearly all of the articles were reports of pestilence, suicide, murder, arson, and announcements of people being declared insane and committed to a nearby asylum. It seemed there’d been an inexplicable outbreak of madness in that area of the state around the turn of the century.
No one knew why, but it was well documented.
Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
The 1890s.
The photographs showed life in Wisconsin at the time. Some photos were the typical tired-looking nineteenth-century women in somber dresses, scowling ministers, and stern, thickly mustached men in work clothes. But most of the photos skewed toward the bizarre-a woman with a malicious grin holding two snakes with a third draped around her neck, lithographs of dwarfs and deer heads and a one-legged man, and young children who’d died and were lying in small tragic caskets laid out in a neat row on the wooden floor of a funeral home.
The book had no page numbers, but Joshua had dog-eared the page that contained a copy of the newspaper article from the Badger State Banner on April 14, 1898:
A horrifying discovery was made at the Rosedale Cemetery in Pardeeville. The grave of Mrs. Sarah Smith was unearthed for the purpose of removing the remains and, on opening the coffin, it was discovered that she had been buried while in a trance.
>
The body was partly turned over and the right hand was drawn up to the face. The fingers indicated that they had been bitten by the woman on finding herself buried alive.
The fingers had been bitten-not the fingernails.
That was the line Joshua had always found the most intriguing.
How much of her fingers did Sarah Smith chew off after she woke up in that coffin?
How much meat did she swallow?
You are a lost and evil man, Joshua. A man beyond redemption!
Beyond atonement!
You did that to your own father!
That thought jarred him back to the present. He closed the book. Put it back on the shelf.
And went to pray.
Perhaps he would find a way not to go scout out the bank today. Perhaps he would find a way not to go rent the moving truck he would need when he took the children tomorrow. Perhaps he would find a way to stop all this before it went too far.
It’s already gone too far, Joshua. There’s no turning back. You’re going to finish this. It’s who you’ve become.
Yes. He had to pray first, see if he could find the strength to change.
Then he had to go to work.
In the normal world, where no one knew what he really was.
53
Indiana.
Why had he skipped over Indiana?
If Dr. Werjonic’s theories were right, it would most likely be because the killer lacked familiarity with the area.
But when I reviewed the tip list and suspect list as I’d decided to do while I was at the climbing gym, I found that in most cases there simply wasn’t enough information about the people’s backgrounds to make any real headway in that direction.
Slightly frustrated, I reviewed the other case files that the task force members had left on my desk. Based on Ellen’s interviews with Vincent, it was looking more and more like he couldn’t possibly be complicit in his wife’s abduction. Additionally, only the guys at work knew he would be staying late.