Waking Lazarus

by T. L. Hines

  Grant pulled into the parking lot, and a few minutes later they stood inside the building.

  At the desk they took a left turn and walked down a hallway lined with offices. Except, Jude found out, one of the doors on that hallway wasn’t an office at all. It was something he recognized from cop shows he’d watched as a kid: the interrogation room. Grant escorted him into the room, then retreated.

  The room put no effort into breaking from the mold of your standard interrogation chamber. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were stark and plain. A heavy metal table loomed in the middle of the room with chairs on both sides.

  Jude sat down and tried to clear his head. He took a few deep breaths, willed his heart to stop sledgehammering the cavity of his chest, and did his best to appear calm and relaxed. Looking nervous in here would do him no good; he knew full well someone, maybe even a few someones, would be staring at him from behind that large mirrored wall in front of him right now.

  Jude thought he’d been handling it all pretty well, keeping up that veneer of serenity, until Chief Odum opened the door of the room and walked in.

  Instantly Jude felt his internal circuit breaker trip. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. The chief was supposed to stay on the other side of the mirror while one of his officers questioned him. Jude’s gaze fell to the table as Chief Odum sat down across from him, and he could not bear to look up.

  Jude continued looking at the smooth surface of the table, but in his peripheral vision he could see Odum smiling. Probably noting Jude’s all-too-obvious reactions and feeling as if he had a nice fish on the line.

  ‘‘Mr. Gress,’’ Odum said, ‘‘thanks for coming down. We have a few things we were hoping you could clear up for us.’’

  Standard boiler plate cop talk. Nothing too dangerous. ‘‘Okay,’’ Jude answered.

  ‘‘All right, then. You have any idea what this is about?’’ Odum asked.

  Jude shrugged. Of course he had an idea what this was all about, a very good idea. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Least of all to Odum.

  Odum held up a photo of Tiffany, the girl who had been locked in Sohler’s home. ‘‘Have you seen her before?’’

  ‘‘Yes. Tiffany.’’ Jude decided he would only talk in short sentences, give only the information asked. That was the way it was done. Of course he had already offered more information than was asked by giving Odum the girl’s name, but he was new at this thing. Gotta expect a few stumbles just out of the gate.

  ‘‘And this boy?’’ Odum held a photo of the boy in the cage.

  ‘‘Yes.’’ This time he didn’t offer a name, partly because he didn’t know the boy’s name.

  ‘‘How about this man?’’ A photo of Ken Sohler.

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘Of course you know this man,’’ Odum said. ‘‘We all met just a few days ago at that vehicular accident, didn’t we? You were there.’’ Odum waved Sohler’s photo. ‘‘He was there.’’ He paused. ‘‘I was there.’’

  Odum paused. Jude decided he wouldn’t speak; Odum hadn’t asked him a direct question. After a few moments Odum smiled again and lined up the photos of Sohler and the two kids. ‘‘We’ve got three pictures here, Mr. Gress. But we don’t have the whole picture, if you can see what I mean.’’

  Jude shrugged.

  Odum continued. ‘‘The whole picture includes you, now, doesn’t it? You showed up at that accident with Sohler last week. Then last night, you were at Sohler’s house.’’

  It was a statement, not a question. Okay, maybe if he talked a bit about last night, that would give Odum the information he needed to follow a new trail—a trail that led away from his own background. He closed his eyes for a moment. Time to step off the cliff. ‘‘What do you want to know?’’

  Odum smiled again. ‘‘Oh, how you know them, for starters. What you were doing in Sohler’s house.’’

  ‘‘How’d you know I was there?’’ Jude asked, although he had a pretty good idea.

  ‘‘Let’s call it a professional secret.’’

  Jude sighed. He was pretty sure he knew, anyway. ‘‘The boy, I’d never seen before I got into the house. And the man—Ken Sohler— well, I had a bad feeling about him when I first saw him.’’

  ‘‘A bad feeling?’’

  Jude nodded. He knew he was starting weak, very weak. But lead- ing with ‘‘I had some psychic visions’’ didn’t seem like the best opening line.

  ‘‘When you first saw him, you say,’’ Odum said. ‘‘That was at the accident?’’

  ‘‘Well, no. I mean yes. The first time I saw him was at the accident. But then I saw him last night at the Red Lodge Cafe. That’s when I got the bad feeling.’’

  Odum offered the knowing nod of a man who’s had a few meals at the Red Lodge Cafe. ‘‘So what happened?’’

  ‘‘I saw him, and I just felt like something was wrong. Really wrong. So I . . . kind of followed him to his home.’’

  ‘‘And?’’

  ‘‘Well, you probably know. I needed to get him out of the house, so I called and said I was . . . you.’’ He expected Odum to be quite mad about this, but he wasn’t. Or, more likely, he’d already boiled about it and had now cooled down.

  ‘‘So you got Sohler out of the house. Then what?’’

  ‘‘Well, I went into the house—’’

  ‘‘He left the door unlocked?’’

  ‘‘No, the door was locked. I, uh, busted out a window in the door.’’ Surely Odum already knew that. He just wanted to make Jude uncomfortable. ‘‘Anyway, once I got inside, I heard a thumping noise. Like metal, you know? And I discovered the boy—I still don’t know his name.’’

  ‘‘Joey.’’

  ‘‘Joey. I found Joey locked in a cage just behind the basement door.’’ Jude felt tears starting to form in his eyes, but he forced them to open wider, dry a bit. He wasn’t about to cry in front of Chief Odum. That would be a bad move, akin to flopping on his back and showing a weak underbelly.

  ‘‘The basement? Did you go into the basement?’’

  Jude was a bit surprised by the question. ‘‘No. Why? Was there something important in the basement?’’ A thought crossed his mind—a particularly nasty thought he wished had never come. ‘‘Were there . . . other kids?’’

  Odum leaned back in his chair, ignoring Jude’s question. ‘‘So tell me about the girl,’’ he said.

  ‘‘After I got the boy, um, Joey, out of the cage, we found her in the bedroom. She was chained to the bedpost, so I kind of knocked the bedpost loose. Then we slipped out of the back window when Sohler was chasing us with an ax. I . . . well, I hit him with the bedpost.’’ Again, he was pretty sure Odum knew this already.

  Odum stared into Jude’s eyes. ‘‘Mr. Gress, that sounds like a pretty good story. But why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me everything that happened.’’

  Jude winced. ‘‘I don’t know—.’’

  ‘‘See, that’s just it,’’ Odum interrupted. ‘‘There’s so much of this big picture I still don’t know. Like your real name.’’

  Uh-oh. This was headed into dangerous territory. Jude swallowed, and he knew Odum wouldn’t speak again until he gave an answer. He backpedaled, mostly so he could avoid answering the question about his identity. ‘‘If you talk to the kids, Tiffany and Joey, they can tell you they haven’t seen me before. They can tell you—’’

  ‘‘Oh, they’ve told me everything I need, Mr. Gress,’’ he said, leaning on the name. He sat a few moments, saying nothing, then: ‘‘Would you be willing to submit to a polygraph test?’’

  Jude blinked, stared down at the table. He wouldn’t have a prayer of passing a lie detector test, even telling the truth; he was a jumble of paranoid tendencies and nervous tics.

  Jude’s mouth was dry, and he wasn’t sure what to say, so he muttered a quiet ‘‘Maybe I’d better call an attorney.’’

  ‘‘Maybe you should. If you’d like to do that, I’ll be mor
e than happy to provide your lodging for the evening right here. Your attorney can come talk to you in the morning, and I’ll let you out in twenty-four hours. We can play the game that way.’’ Odum licked his lips. ‘‘Or, we can just make a gentleman’s agreement right now that you’ll be down here bright and early tomorrow, and I’ll let you go home and snuggle into your own bed for the evening. Your choice, of course.’’

  Jude noticed he’d been unconsciously itching at the inside of his forearm; he stopped, glancing at the red mark he’d left. Odum had pried open his mind already, figured out there was no way he’d choose a jail cell over the safety of his home. At home he could lock out them, keep the bad out. Maybe Odum was even one of them, and if he stayed here, he’d be locked in with . . .

  Jude shook his head. This was no time to let his paranoia rise to the surface and take over. But he was trapped. Odum knew it. He knew it.

  ‘‘I’ll . . . I’ll be here tomorrow morning.’’

  ‘‘Good, good. Officer Grant will escort you back, keep an eye on your home for the night—’’ Odum flashed another grin—‘‘for your safety, of course, Mr. Gress.’’

  29

  CONNECTING

  Jude closed the door behind him, went through the familiar locking ritual. A cold skewer of steel rode inside his intestines, and his head felt sweaty, itchy. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

  He walked into the kitchen, opened his refrigerator, and looked for something to drink. Orange juice. He shook it and drank it as he stood in the kitchen. The juice helped, calming his roiling stomach. He sat in the single chair at the kitchen table, running the recent events through his mind.

  He hadn’t counted on anything like this being part of the deal. Talk to a few people, tell them to straighten out their lives. Sure, fine. Rescue kids in danger, also fine. But now it seemed the carefully constructed cocoon he’d built for himself was going to be burned away, charring him in the process. He didn’t want to help others if it meant exposing himself in the process.

  If he took that lie detector test in the morning, Chief Odum would be well on his way to figuring out that Ron Gress wasn’t really Ron Gress. He’d already said as much. And it wouldn’t take a whole lot of digging for Chief Odum to find out who he really was.

  He closed his eyes, sighed, forced thoughts of being discovered out of his mind.

  The worst part was, this was a giant leap backward just after he’d taken a few small steps forward. He’d been paranoid for a long, long time, and in these last few days he’d felt himself coming out of that cloud cover. He didn’t hear footsteps walking down the street behind him. He didn’t feel eyes watching him while he worked. Last night he hadn’t even armed his alarm system. That was all good, and in his mind he knew it had something to do with . . . well, Nathan. And his father in some odd way. And yes, Rachel. For the first time in a long time, he was thinking about other people, and their happiness. And that was part of what had let him go along with this ‘‘looking for signs’’ stuff from Kristina. There was something nice about rising above the self-centeredness.

  He took another drink of the orange juice. But here was the other question: had he been getting better, or were all these events of the last few days mere delusions themselves? He tried to be soberly analytical, examining the evidence. Paranoia, repressed memories, blackouts. Rachel had suggested epileptic seizures, a real possibility. Mix it all together, and he wasn’t exactly a poster child for mental fitness. Wouldn’t delusions fit that pattern? Couldn’t his mind have imagined all of it?

  He shook his head, another unconscious effort to clear it. No matter. He would just ignore it. This incident, he decided, would bring the Kristina experiments to a dead end. He didn’t fit her superhero image, and she’d just have to die without doing her own good deed.

  The whole vision thing, the signs . . . those had to be delusional. (No, they’re not. Coincidence can’t explain it all.)

  He slammed down his fist. Yes, it was delusional. He would allow no other explanation. This was all his mind playing tricks on him, pulling the taste of copper from his past and putting it in his mouth at moments of high stress. Yes, and the visions were part of Rachel’s epileptic seizure scenario. After all, they were filled with odd colors and sequences, and he really had no way of knowing the visions were correct. (Yes you do. Ginny, the waitress—) He cut off the thought, gulped down the rest of the orange juice. Case closed.

  He was about to be discovered, which would destroy all he’d been building. Along with any sliver of normalcy he might share with Nathan. (And Rachel? Maybe.)

  He needed to clear his mind, reset his thoughts. And he immediately thought of one way to do it.

  When Rachel opened the door and saw Ron standing there, she felt the familiar knot clench in her chest instantly. He was all right. Almost without thinking, she pulled him in and hugged him, then caught herself as she felt his body stiffen in the embrace. She let go, turned, and walked across the room. ‘‘Where have you been?’’ she asked. She felt as if she needed to do something with her arms, so she crossed them. ‘‘I . . . tried to call you this morning, and I’ve been worried. I got a strange call last night, and—’’ She stopped, unsure what to say next, because her mind was unsure what to think.

  He stared for a moment, then slowly blinked. ‘‘I, uh . . . know. I got your message. I wanted to call you back, I meant to, but I was just at—’’ He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, opened them again. ‘‘I’m sorry, I’ve been through a lot the last few days, and I’m just fried. Could we maybe talk about it all tomorrow?’’

  She nodded. Now, more than ever, she was conflicted. On the one hand, he was still the pathetic puppy; he was a sick man, possibly, who needed her help and prayer. She should show him kindness and understanding. She knew this. On the other hand, the nickname she and Nicole had given him—Boo Radley—fit more than ever. She’d discovered buried secrets in this man’s past, and she’d done the right thing (she was sure it was the right thing, because she’d prayed about it and felt at peace) by calling the police and telling them what she’d found. The man standing in front of her probably wasn’t Ron Gress. So who was he? And who had called her home looking for him?

  He stared at the floor. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he said, ‘‘to be so pathetic. Just have a lot going on.’’

  Yes, you certainly do, she thought to herself. A lot you probably don’t want other people to know about. Then she remembered their last conversation. ‘‘Saw your dad?’’ she asked.

  Ron, or whatever his real name was, gave a weak smile. ‘‘Yeah, I saw my dad. For starters. We need to talk about some things. Soon. But tonight, can we just . . .’’ He trailed off, seeming like he was searching for a particular word. ‘‘Can we just be with Nathan?’’ he finished.

  He wanted to talk, which was good. She could talk, maybe let him get a little bit off his chest, perhaps that ‘‘I ran away from a mental health facility years ago’’ confession. That she could handle.

  Having this man, this Boo Radley, in the same room as Nathan, however—how could she dance around that? ‘‘Um . . . you know, why don’t we talk now?’’ she said, going over to the couch and sitting down.

  And then Nathan came bounding into the living room. ‘‘DADDY!’’ he squealed at a level somewhere above a hundred decibels, and sprinted across the room to vault into Ron’s arms. Ron, she noticed, actually opened his arms, actually welcomed the hug from his son.

  ‘‘I’m making a robot with Magnetix,’’ Nathan said to Ron. ‘‘Wanna see?’’ He started pulling Ron down the hallway toward his bedroom.

  Her radar was maxing out now. ‘‘Nathan,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s almost your bedtime, and Ron’s—’’ But they were already down the hall, Nathan chattering about his creation.

  She followed, she had to follow. She couldn’t just leave her son alone with this man. What would happen if he went into another seizure or something? She walked into Nathan’s room. ‘‘Here,’’
she said, ‘‘let’s get your pajamas on.’’ She went to Nathan’s dresser, fumbled through the doors before finding some Ultra Man pajamas, then went back and grabbed Nathan’s hand. ‘‘Come on. We’ll, uh . . . change in the bathroom.’’

  ‘‘Mom! I can change here. It’s just Daddy!’’

  She bit her lip. ‘‘I know, dear, but it’s not—’’

  ‘‘Your mom’s right,’’ Ron interrupted. ‘‘It would be more polite to change in the bathroom.’’ Ron looked at her, and in his look she didn’t see the sad emptiness she’d seen before. She saw something warmer. More human.

  ‘‘Okay,’’ she half whispered, still looking at Ron. ‘‘Let’s go.’’ She pulled away her gaze and took Nathan into the bathroom to change, barely registering her son’s chatter.

  ‘‘You okay, Mommy?’’ Nathan said as he popped his head through the neck opening of his pajama top.

  She mussed his hair. ‘‘Never better,’’ she lied.

  ‘‘Can Daddy tuck me in?’’

  She felt panic in her veins. She’d guessed this question would come. It was only natural. She closed her eyes, said another quick prayer, opened them again. ‘‘Yes,’’ she said, surprising herself as she said it. Okay, she could do this. Let Ron tuck him in, and just keep an eye on things. That would be fine, wouldn’t it? She bit her lip again.

  Nathan rushed back into his room. She followed him and stood awkwardly in the doorway for a few moments. ‘‘I’ll, uh . . . just be out here,’’ she said numbly. Ron looked back at her, that warm, human glow still in his eyes. A look that made her uncomfortable because it was so trusting.

  ‘‘We’ll be okay,’’ he said, and hugged Nathan.

  She backed out of the door, closing it most of the way behind her, then peeked through the crack. She was only willing to let faith go so far where her son was concerned.