by Tony Healey
“Why did he hate ’em, Mama?”
“They ain’t to be trusted. Gettin’ ideas above their station, like they real folk. Cussing and drinking and havin’ they kids,” she says, rolling her words around in her mouth before spitting them out like poison.
Lester cocks his head to one side. He is just a boy. “What’f the KKK, Mama?”
She leans forward. “Don’t matter what it is. You just remember they niggers ain’t the same as us, you hear? They need teachin’ the right ways, the boundaries of what they can and can’t do. Your daddy had the right idea, Lester. He treat ’em like you would a dog. What do you do if a dog gets out of line?”
Lester fumbles for the answer.
“You give it a good kickin’ that’s what!” his mother shouts impatiently. “You could learn a lot from the way your daddy was, God rest his soul.”
Lester blushes. “Ruby’f my friend, Mama.”
She stops what she’s doing and slaps him in the mouth. Lester cries out, holding a hand to his lips. “Mama!?”
Her snarling face is in his, spit flying from between her broken teeth. “Don’t ever think of one of them as a friend again! You hear me boy? We is better than them. Why, your daddy would be rollin’ in his grave to hear you blaspheme in such a way. Now, get outta my sight!”
Ida can feel the hurt, the shame, the confusion. And now she sees Lester walking home from school and Ruby catching up.
“Hey, Lester, wait for me.”
He turns toward her, finger in her face. “I can’t walk home with you no more. My mama fayf,” he spits. The f of every s is heavy and thick.
Ruby backs off. “Lester . . .”
He rushes on ahead of her, waving one arm in frustration. “I can’t hear you!”
Ida wants to take the young girl in her arms and hold her tight, but she can’t. She’s left to watch her sobbing in the street, the boy she considered a friend storming off, turning against her for no reason other than the pigment of her skin.
It doesn’t end there. Lester watches her come and go. He thinks of her. Despite what his mother has to say to him, he follows her home sometimes, keeping his distance so that she won’t see.
His mother gives him a chest of his father’s old belongings. A worn pair of boots, some army paraphernalia, a knife. He roots through it all. Books, papers, medals, his old leather belt, the same belt Mama would use to “teach that boy some sense,” as she liked to say. Lester reads what he can in the Hope’s Peak library about the KKK, looking at the pictures mostly—when he tries to read the words, they just swim in front of his eyes like black minnows in a stream of white water. At home one night, he takes his pillowcase and cuts two eyeholes. He puts it on his head, but it just flops around. Lester takes his father’s old belt and ties it around his neck. Looking in the mirror, he feels a sense of power. That night, when he masturbates, it is better than ever. And all he can think of is Ruby Lane at school. Her tight curly hair and dark-brown skin.
Years pass. Eventually, he gets a job at the dry cleaner’s in town and finds her working there, too. They do not speak, but she glances up at him from time to time. One day, he says hello and she says hello back.
“Forry for how I waf back then,” Lester offers one afternoon on their break, both of them drinking a cold Coke out back. “I waf confufed.”
Ruby smiles weakly. “Okay, Lester.”
He asks her to meet him up at Wisher’s Pond for a picnic. Ruby says she will, if she can get a sitter for her kid. She lets him down twice before finally seeing it through. Lester finds her waiting for him under the shade of an old tree, standing in the tall grass.
She doesn’t appreciate the mask. She doesn’t get it. He feels powerful.
As he forces her down, as he hits her, as he consummates their years of friendship, as he wraps his strong hands around her throat, he can feel the power of what he is and what he is doing.
Ida doesn’t have any choice but to watch. It is the dream. It is what she has revisited when she closes her eyes, for so, so long. She watches as Lester strangles her mother, then crowns her head with the twisted supplejack vine.
Lester takes a job with an auto repair shop. His mother is at first confined to a wheelchair, then slowly starts to lose her mind. Mack, a man at work he’s gotten to know, suggests putting her in a home.
That’s what Lester does. He goes to Mack’s for dinner and meets his wife, Ceeli. Years later, he has left the repair shop, but he stays in contact with Mack, on and off.
Most of the time, it is Ceeli who calls him when something needs fixing. And when his mother dies, it is Ceeli who gives him comfort. She tells him he can come visit her, have a coffee and a chat, tries to help him through his grief. Lester asks Mack if that will be alright, and Mack doesn’t object. A few days after his mother’s funeral service, Lester arrives at Ceeli’s door.
That’s when it starts. Lester tells her how much he misses his mother. Ceeli confides in him that Mack works long hours, sometimes works away, and she gets awful lonely in the house by herself.
Doesn’t Mack understand a woman’s got needs?
For a time, his mama’s voice goes away. But weeks later, he hears her whispering in the dark corners of the house. When he closes his eyes, she is in his head, looking at him, bugs crawling from her rotten eyeballs, out between her jagged teeth.
The dark creeps in at the edges. Ida feels squeezed on all sides, but she knows she must see it through. Lester is falling from the light, from the glow of life. It is above him, as the sun is when you’re underwater, sinking toward the abyss.
Before his mama goes to the home, a man comes to the house, dressed in a light-gray suit, with polished brown leather shoes, a pristine white shirt, and a dark-blue tie. He is overweight, has chestnut hair struck through with silver at the sides. He smells like a salesman: cologne, perspiration, and cigar smoke.
He asks if he can come in to speak with him. Lester steps to one side to let him in and the man introduces himself as Hal Crenna. “Maybe you haven’t heard of me, but I’ve known about you for a while. I’m your half brother. We share the same daddy.”
Lester shakes his head, stepping back from the man, but it’s undeniable. The physical resemblance between the two of them is uncanny. “My daddy’f dead . . .”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Mama ain’t never told me about no half brother,” Lester mumbles, trying to wrap his head around it. “Like I faid, Daddy been in the ground yearf now.”
The man smiles. It makes him look like the devil incarnate. “Weren’t your daddy, fella.”
“What d’you mean?” Lester asks. He holds the door open for his visitor. “I think you better leave, mifter.”
“Don’t be so hasty.” The man produces a photograph. “Here. Have it.”
Lester’s mama appears at the top of the stairs. “Who’s that?”
“Vifitor, Mama,” Lester calls up. “Fayf he’f my half brother.”
His mama’s face twists into a furious knot of intense hatred, and she hangs over the banister, pointing one bony claw at their caller. “Don’t listen to him, baby!”
“I’ll not impose any longer,” Hal Crenna says. He heads through the door, then turns back at the threshold. “I’m telling the truth when I say we got the same daddy, Lester. And he’s watching over you. We all are. Making sure you don’t go getting yourself in trouble so deep you can’t pull yourself back out.”
Lester knows what he’s getting at. The girls. He makes their crown and, after, he gives it to them.
“Lester, get rid of that motherfucker!”
Lester fills the doorway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You better go.”
Hal Crenna nods his head in parting. “As you like. But you just watch yourself, Lester. Everyone’s got needs, and Lord knows I ain’t got nothing against culling a few niggers . . . but watch yourself.”
Lester watches him go and wonders if there’s any truth to what he
’s saying. But like most things, the incident is forgotten about soon enough.
Killing once in a blue moon satisfied his urges. But it was never enough. Before long, he was hungry again, yet his mother held him at bay. Her needs, the burden of caring for her in the beginning, was enough to keep him occupied, though he still thought of the girls.
Then, she was admitted to the nursing home and gradually deteriorated. Still, she kept him busy, insisting he visit every day. This left him no time for his girls.
When his mother finally passed, Lester sought solace in the arms of Ceeli, who was eager to give it to him—when Mack was out of town.
The hunger ate away at him. And when he killed, he tasted the lust in his mouth, and he killed again. It was easier. When his mother died, he realized he could finally do as he wanted. He could become the man he’d always wanted to be—the mask had always hidden his true self. He knew that soon he wouldn’t need it.
The darkness grows, yawning wide to swallow him whole. Ida lets go, watches him fall, screaming, consumed by the black until there is nothing of him left but the echo of his voice.
A tether snaps, a filament to which Ida was connected with the monster. She is pulled back out of the darkness as surely as he falls toward it.
To the dark ether. Silent and cold. Endless.
Now his scream has faded and there is no sound, nothing but the light growing around her as she surfaces.
Ida remembers telling Harper that death was warm sunlight from that other place . . . brighter and brighter until there’s nothing else.
But, as she wakes on the floor of the house, Harper asking if she is alright, the smell of gunpowder, death, and sweat filling her nose, the sound of approaching sirens in her ears, the sound of her heart . . . she knows she was wrong. The warm light that pulled her back from oblivion was not death.
It was life.
EPILOGUE
Captain Morelli surveys the scene, John Dudley at his side, coordinating the officers who have arrived to prevent anyone going anywhere near vital evidence.
Morelli looks at where Stu lies in a puddle of his own blood, and he cannot help but feel his heart sink. “Shit.”
“He was a good man, sir,” Dudley offers.
Morelli glares at him. “I don’t think you’ve got a right to pass comment, son, after what you pulled.”
Dudley looks at his shoes. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Look at me.”
Dudley does as he’s told.
“I hear Durham has a spot open. I think you’re gonna take it. It’d be best all round, don’t you think?”
“I—”
Morelli points at Stu. A crime-scene photographer is snapping away, trying to catch the detective from all angles. “That is the price you pay for causing what you did. Be thankful that’s all that’s happening to you.”
The color drains from Dudley’s face and he walks outside. Morelli treads carefully around the blood and mess on the floor and hunkers down next to Stu.
“I’m sorry, Detective,” he mumbles.
“Harper!” a familiar voice says. She feels someone take her hand, looks down, and sees Albie at the side of the gurney. “Thank God you’re okay.”
“Thanks, Albie.”
“I’m so sorry about Stu,” he says. His eyes are rimmed with red, glassy with tears. “I can’t believe it.”
The paramedics wheel Harper’s gurney into the back of the ambulance, jostling her slightly in the process.
“Talk soon,” Harper calls to him.
Albie blows her a kiss. Ida elects to travel with her, sitting next to the gurney. The paramedics shut the doors, and the ambulance heads for the hospital, siren wailing.
“You okay, sugar?”
Harper looks at her. “I guess. I can’t stop thinking of Stu, though.”
“I know,” Ida says, taking her hand and squeezing it. “But it’ll all make sense tomorrow. And it’ll get easier. That hurt you’re feelin’ right now? You’ll get used to it. I did.”
“Thank you. Through this whole thing, you’ve been great.”
Ida smiles. There are tears in her eyes. “Don’t mention it. Had to be done.”
“Hey,” Harper says in a hushed voice. “What did you see? When you made the connection with him.”
Ida considers telling her, but rethinks it. “Let me tell you in a couple of days, when you’re on the mend . . .”
“No, really. I need to know, Ida. What did you see at the end? When he was dying?”
Ida’s gaze burns into her as she speaks. “The darkness smothered him like a blanket. I guess he was only darkness all along anyway. That’s what he became in the end.”
“You saw it?”
Ida nods slowly. “Saw him sink into the black, saw it take him and make him disappear. For people like that, I like to think death is a dark corridor . . . and there ain’t no light at the end of it for ’em. Only silence.”
The breath seems to catch in Harper’s throat and she starts to sob. “And Stu?”
“No, no, no!” Ida smiles, patting her hand. “Trust me, sugar, that boy is surrounded by sunlight. He did good. And maybe I shouldn’t tell you this . . .”
Harper frowns. “Tell me what?”
Ida lets go of her hand and reaches over, resting her open palm where Harper’s stomach is. “Tell you about the part of him that grows inside you.”
Realization dawns on Harper’s face.
Ida nods. “You know what I mean.”
Harper shakes her head. “I don’t believe it . . .”
“Well,” Ida says, sitting back and folding her arms. “You better start.”
Harper doesn’t say anything for a long time. The ambulance bounces on the rough backstreets of Hope’s Peak. After the silence has stretched out, and what Ida has told her has sunk in, Harper speaks up. “What will you do now?”
Ida smiles. Her eyes shine. “Sugar, I’m gonna do what I should’ve done a long time ago. Start living.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance and support with this book:
Bernard Schaffer, who graciously tore the whole book apart—and helped me put it back together again; David K. Hulegaard and Sandie Slavin, who read the earliest draft and gave their honest feedback; my “Constant Reader” and all-round Irish badass, Barbara Spencer; Meg Gardiner, who gave sound advice when it was needed; my agent, Sharon Pelletier at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, who took me on as her client and worked tirelessly in getting me a two-book deal; Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, my editor at Thomas & Mercer, who fell in love with the book and wanted to publish it; and last (but not least) a big thank-you to my wife—without your support I wouldn’t have the time, or space, to do what I do. You’re my rock.
But of course, the biggest thanks goes to you, dear reader. Having you read these pages means more than you could ever know.
—TH
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Healey is the bestselling author of the Far From Home series. He has written alongside such award-winning authors as Alan Dean Foster and Harlan Ellison.
Tony is currently working on book two of his Harper & Lane series, of which Hope’s Peak is the first installment. He lives with his wife and four daughters in Sussex, England.