by Chris Raven
“I came to tell you that the girl is already out of danger and has returned home. I thought you’d be happy to know.”
“That’s great news. I’m very glad.” I answer with a radiant smile.
“It’s not that good news.” Eloise stops me, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m so glad you managed to save that child, but, if our theory is correct, the man who tried to kill her has very little time to hunt down another child and drown it if he doesn’t want the spirit to take his kid. Either way, we’ll soon have a dead child in Swanton. Unless we prevent it.”
“Miss, I’m sorry to have to be rude in your own house, but what you’re saying is rubbish. All this has nothing to do with spirits or curses or nonsense of that kind. We’re trying to catch a flesh-and-blood being who has tried to assassinate a girl. I don’t need you to baffle my investigation even more with those ridiculous superstitions.”
“As long as you don’t realize that my ‘ridiculous superstitions’ are true, you won’t get anything from your research.”
“Yes, I’ll get a damn murderer behind bars and prevent that any child dies.”
“And in three years, ten or twenty, when there is a drought again, everything will happen again. You will no longer be working for the police, so it will not be your business, but you will still know that you had in your hand to stop this forever and that you did not.”
“Do you believe what you’re telling me? All your trinkets, the candles, and the mystical language are good to deceive the unwary and steal their money, but you cannot expect me to base an official investigation on your nonsense.”
Eloise throws a hateful look capable of stopping hearts, she snorts and leaves without saying another word, leaving us alone. I watch her leave while I think she’ll be in a bad mood all day and it’ll be my turn to bear it.
“You should listen to her.” I advise Dunning.
“You too? I took you for a coherent kid, but I see that you have been brainwashed.”
“If you had seen the things I have seen, you would be brainwashed too.”
“Let’s leave it. You’re not going to convince me.” Dunning shakes his head in denial as he throws an ironic smile at me. “I’ve come to talk to you about real facts, not to argue about old bat’s tales.”
“Have you found out anything? Do you have any leads?”
“Sadly, no. The girl is very small and was drugged most of the time. We’ve sent a sample of her blood to Montpelier to determine what she was drugged with. Maybe that will help with something.”
“But she had to see him at some point...”
“Yes, she told us that he was a very big man, but after talking for a while we realized that for her all men are big. She also told us that his head was black with a couple of holes for his eyes.”
“A Ski mask...”
“Exactly. We’re not going to get any clues out of that girl.” Dunning stays silent for a few seconds, staring at the tips of his shoes. When he raises his head, he looks at me pleadingly, hoping to contradict him. “You also think he’ll try again, don’t you?”
“Yes. The information we have found indicates that it will be three children and, for now, he has none. He will have to find a new victim as soon as possible to calm the spirit.” Before Dunning can speak, I make a gesture with my hand indicating that he should wait and listen to me. “Even if you do not believe in that spirit, the murders occur in series of three...”
“This may have nothing to do with the murders of previous years...”
“No, of course... Year of drought, same place to commit crimes, same type of victims... Fuck, you don’t have to be an expert on criminal behavior to see that they are related. Listen to me, don’t accept the supernatural explanation if you don’t want to, but don’t go blind. That man will attack again.”
Dunning snorts and begins to walk in circles through the hall, denying again and again with his head. I wait quietly, giving him time to reflect.
“Alright. I believe you.”
“About the ghost too?”
“No fucking way, kid... I still believe you are nuts, but I can’t ignore that you predicted there would be more murders and some of the things you say make sense. I’m going to ask for reinforcements from the neighboring cities and we will patrol the area. Not a frog is going to move on the shore of that lake without me knowing.”
“Will you inform me if you get anything?”
“Sure, don’t worry about it. You’ll be the first to know.”
Dunning says goodbye and opens the street door, spreading all the salt. I close the door and turn to the dresser to pick up the package and fix the protection before Eloise quarrels with me, but she’s back in the hall.
“Leave that. I’ll do it.”
“But if you just told me that I have to do it myself whenever I open the door.” I protest, unable to understand what I should do to keep her happy.
“It won’t do you any good to pour the salt, because you have to go out right now and you would spread it again. I’ll throw it out as soon as you get out.”
“As soon as I go where?”
“To Anne’s house. You have to go talk to her father.”
IV
Here I am, standing at Anne’s house’s garden, glancing at the door without daring to take the steps that separate me from it and knock. Just stepping on the driveway, memories have invaded me so strongly that I find myself paralyzed and on the verge of crying. All those summer evenings when I came to look for her... See her leaving the house, jumping the three steps of the porch, with her hair in the wind and that smile on her face... Those red sunsets, in which we both sat on the grass of her garden, talking about anything while we waited for her mother to call her for dinner... I almost hope that the door opens and she appears, but at the same time, the certainty that that will never happen again hurts like a red-hot dagger writhing my bowels. They snatched away all of that from us. It’s so unfair that I feel like I’m short of breath.
I could have spent an eternity standing in her garden, unable to move a muscle, but the door opens and a man of about fifty years appears. I find it hard to recognize Mr. Austen. He is much thinner and has lost hair, but besides, his skin looks gray, there is no trace of a smile on his face and his eyes are dull and sad. It’s a shadow of the man I met fifteen years ago.
“Do you need something, boy? Are you lost?”
“No, Mr. Austen. I came to talk to you.” I approach him and hold his hand. “I’m Eric Armstrong. I was a friend of your daughter. Do you remember me?”
He doesn’t move nor accept my hand. I stand there, with my hand extended, while he throws at me a look I don’t know whether to interpret as sad or angry. I’m afraid that he blames me for his daughter’s death. If it hadn’t been for our mischief with the car, she wouldn’t have been punished, she wouldn’t have come home alone, and the murderer wouldn’t have caught her. I know what he is thinking because I’ve been feeling guilty for those same reasons all my life. That’s why I’m not surprised when he crosses his arms in a defensive posture.
“Why are you here?”
“I have to talk to you about Anne.”Before he can say anything, I raise both hands, asking him to wait and listen to me. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about anything with me, which, in a way, you will blame me for the death of your daughter and that I must be the last person in the world you want to talk about her, but this is important.”
The silence seizes the garden again, while his eyes look through me. For a moment, I’m afraid he’ll go home, take his shotgun and throw me out of his yard, but, instead, he throws a long sigh, which sounds as if his soul was coming out of his mouth. His eyes don’t transmit fury. They shine a little by a few rebel tears that try to escape and that he catches, wiping them with the sleeve of his shirt. Without saying anything, he nods before turning to the house.
“Follow me. We’ll be better inside.”
I’m sitting at
Mr. Austen’s kitchen table. Even if the sun looks radiant, the kitchen is dark. It’s been so long since the windows are not cleaned, that the dirt filters the light like a thick curtain. There are plenty of unwashed dishes piled up in any way, invading all available surfaces. It smells like musty and expired food.
Mr. Austen opens the door to his fridge, he pulls two cans of beer and puts one in front of me. I’m not used to drinking alcohol without even having breakfast, but I appreciate it with a smile anyway. He sits in front of me, he opens his can and drinks such a long sip as to empty half. I get the impression that he has a lot of practice in drinking beer.
“Sorry for the mess. I live alone, and household chores have never been my thing.”
I’m considering where his wife would be. I don’t know if she’s dead or if she left, but I don’t dare to ask. Quite uncomfortable is already the situation to enter into intimate questions.
“Don’t worry, you would have to see my room.”
Despite the joke, he doesn’t smile or make any comments. He just looks at the beer can as he spins it in his hands. It seems that he is not going to do his share to make the conversation flow, so I decide to go to the point directly, despite how nervous and uncomfortable I find myself.
“Well... As I suppose you would remember, I was very much friends with your daughter.”
“Yes, of course, I remember. You can’t imagine how I felt when she came home saying she had a boyfriend. I confess I had the shotgun ready in case you did anything bad to my princess.”
They are already there again: the furtive tears peeping into his eyes. He wipes them again with his sleeve and drinks another sip to his beer.
“I loved her very much.” I confess. “I know we were only twelve years old and that we were a couple of brats with no idea how the world worked, but for us that was important. It’s been a long time and I haven’t been able to forget her.”
Now he can’t help it. A couple of tears fall in one go down his cheeks. I feel very guilty about doing this, for bringing out feelings that he’s been trying to drown in alcohol for years, but I still have to go on.
“I know that what I am going to tell you will seem crazy and that it is most likely that you end up kicking me out of your house, but I beg you to listen to the end. It’s important.” I wait until he nods. “Since Anne died, I’ve seen her several times. I know you’ll think I’m crazy. My parents thought about it, my doctors also... I even thought about it. Then she stopped showing up and I thought it was my imagination, caused by the trauma of her loss, but then I found this.”
I open my backpack and take out The Lake Crimes book. I put it on the table and I pass it on, so he can see it. He opens his eyes when he sees the author’s name on the cover, but he doesn’t say anything. He just finished his beer and got up for another. Then he sits down again, he drinks another long sip and opens the book to start taking a look.
“Where do you want to go with all this?” He asks at last.
“That book made me come back to Swanton to find out what had happened, to try to stop whoever did it. Since I arrived, Meg Freeman, Anne’s friend, has given me two messages from her.” I take out of my bag the two papers and I give them to him. “Meg says she writes them in a trance and she thinks that it’s Anne who is writing to me.”
“It resembles her handwriting.” His voice is cut in a sobbing, but the next second, his face is transformed. He gives a strong punch on the table, which makes the beer cans tremble, and looks at me with contempt. “What are you trying to do with all this? Drive me crazy? Get some money out of me?”
“No, Mr. Austen. Calm down, please.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you come here to remove the past and hurt me. Don’t you think you’ve caused us enough pain already? What are you looking for? That I forgive you for ruining my life?”
What I assumed. Anne’s father also thinks I was responsible for her death. I don’t care about his words and the hatred that distills through his eyes. There is nothing that he can tell me that I have not repeated more than a thousand times during these fifteen years.
“I don’t want you to forgive me. You can hate me forever if that helps you. All I want is for Anne to be at peace, for her spirit to rest.”My words seem to leave him unsettled because he stares at me with his mouth open. “I’ve been talking to Eloise Carter. You may have heard in the village that she knows about these issues. She told me that maybe Anne can’t talk to me because you forbade it to her before she died. Eloise believes that Anne died with the weight of knowing that you were still angry with her.”
“How am I going to be mad at her after what happened? How am I going to stay mad at my princess?”
Mr. Austen loses the little control he had left and collapses on the table with his head buried in his arms. His body was convulsed by the sobs. For a few seconds, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I can get up and try to comfort him or if he’ll take it as an insult and get even more angry. I remain silent, waiting for the sobs to slacken a little.
“I know you’ve forgiven her, but she doesn’t know. Could you tell her?”
“Tell her?” He raises his head and looks at me angrily again. “She’s dead. How am I supposed to tell her?”
“Just say it out loud. You don’t lose anything in doing it.”
He throws himself back in his chair, trying to control the breath still agitated by crying. He looks at me indecisive. I think he’s looking for any small hint that I’m pulling his leg to stamp my head against the kitchen tiles. I keep myself earnest and expectant, trying to convey him with the look that he can trust me. Finally, he nods and, raising his gaze towards the ceiling, as if Anne were floating there, he decided to talk to her:
“Anne, my child... You’re not punished anymore. I forgive you and I love you. And I miss you so much...”
The kitchen faucet suddenly opens, expelling water at full pressure. Mr. Austen rises jumps up from the chair and tries to close it, but moves away with a gesture of pain, shaking his hand.
“The faucet is burning. What the hell does this mean?”
I shake my head in denial, not knowing what to say. The faucet still throws burning water, increasing the temperature of the kitchen and steaming up the window panes. Then we see how little by little letters appear on of the crystal’s mist.
THANK YOU
Underneath those words, a little invisible finger draws a heart. And then everything ceases. The faucet stops throwing water and we notice a cool breeze, which smells like peach and jasmine. Despite all the years that have passed by, I recognize her cologne. I think her father also recognizes it because he raises his head sniffing the air with a dreamy smile on his face.
“Anne, is it you, my child?”
We don’t get an answer. Just another slight gust of that fragrant breeze touching our faces like a light kiss.
I don’t know how long we keep silent, facing each other, trying to assimilate what we just lived. Finally, I shake my head, as if trying to awaken from a dream and, without saying anything, I start to pick up the messages from Anne and the book.
My movements seem to wake up Mr. Austen, who gets up from the chair. He seems dizzy. He even has to lean on the table for a moment not to fall. Without a word, he accompanies me to the door of his house. I cross the garden to pick up my bike when I hear him call me.
“Eric, wait...” He approaches me as he searches in his pocket. I pray that he does not intend to give me money. “Is that the same bike you had when you were a kid?”
“Yes, my faithful bicycle.” I answer with a smile. “It has never failed me. I even came on it from Burlington.”
“Don’t you have a car?”
“Well, No... We have a family car, but my mother needs it to go to work.”
Mr. Austen finds what he was looking for in his pocket. It’s a keychain with a single key. He tells me with his head to follow him and he lifts the door of his garage. Inside there are two
cars: a Ford that looks pretty new and the 67 Chevrolet Impala with which Anne and I smashed Mrs. Jones’s mailbox. The dent we made next to the right front headlight is still visible.
“I haven’t driven it since Anne died. It brought me too many bad memories, but still, I was never able to let go of it... I think, unwittingly, I was saving it to close the circle.” He extends to me the key that is in his hand. “It’s for you.”
“I can’t accept your car. It’s a classic, it must cost a fortune.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s my way of showing that I forgive you, that the car doesn’t matter to me, that I would give a thousand cars for hugging her for a second...” The man snorts, trying to keep his tears at bay again. “What you’ve done for me and my Anne today is priceless. Accept the car in payment.”
I nod and extend my hand to accept the key. He gives it to me and then, with a sudden gesture, he draws my body towards him and gives me such a strong hug that it cuts my breath. When we separate, I see new tears that furrow his face, but somehow, I find him happier than when I arrived. He seems less gray, less sad, less a shadow than he was...
Quietly we dismantle the wheels of my bike and put it in the trunk. Fortunately, it fits perfectly. I dedicate a farewell smile to him and I get in the car. As soon as I turn on the switch, the engine greets me with a roar. I roll down the window to say goodbye to Mr. Austen. He leans and rests his hands on the door.
“Find him. Find the son of a bitch who killed my Anne and make him pay.”
“I will. I promise.”
He moves back and lets me go. This time I go past Mrs. Jones’s mailbox without complications. In the rearview mirror, I see how the figure of Anne’s father is becoming smaller and I swear again to myself that I will find out who did all this to us. For Anne, For Bobby, for Dave... Also, for Anne’s father, for Jim, for Jake, for my family... and for myself.
V
As I pull over in front of Eloise’s house, I notice something strange is going on. Dunning’s car is also parked here. They’re both standing on the porch and they’re not killing each other, so something serious must have happened. I get out of the car and run to the house.