And then the hospital. A stream of doctors and nurses and detectives came to see her. They’d visited her with questions, and she answered them carefully. The painkillers the doctors prescribed her made her feel fuzzy, but she told her story. About the cellar, the phones, and leaving the message, and about getting free and the struggle and running away. She said that she ran and hid in a cabin in the woods that she knew from the hikes she liked to take from time to time and waited, and that when he found her, she killed him. She told them all of it.
Almost.
She didn’t talk about the ruined girl in the cellar. In the yard. Among the trees. Who often stood in the corner of her hospital room.
Everyone believed her, though the detectives always seemed on the edge of wanting more. As if some missing detail of her story was a gap that needed to be filled. But the detectives who came to visit her were kind. Detectives Lirvin and Freschi. They treated her with respect, and when they found the letter from her mother and the locket in Malcolm Roarke’s apartment, they brought them back to her. One of them—the woman, Stacey now—said the DA wanted it, but she’d told him the perp was dead; the Commonwealth could live with pictures of the necklace. Nelle thanked the woman through her tears and took the gift. Holding the necklace, she realized she and her mother had something new in common now. Since her stepdad had died, they were both widows.
Widow. She was too young to be one. Of course, no one was too young to lose. She was living proof. Her and the woman in the car trunk. Stacey told her that woman’s name was Siobhan McKinley. She’d been a friend of Samantha’s. From the news, Nelle learned that Mack killed Donna DaSilva, a courthouse employee, and her daughter, Joanne, too. He’d killed his ex in-laws, and the cops said that if Nelle hadn’t killed him, he would’ve kept going: they’d found a cache of weapons and explosives at the Darnielles’ house. He’d been staging from there. Her heart sank. First, she felt grateful Juanita and Colin hadn’t been home, then she wondered what would’ve happened if she’d been able to break that patio glass door and get inside. Would she have gotten her hands on one of those guns and been able to confront him? Would she have been able to reach Evan sooner and save him if she had?
She doubted it.
By the time she was released from the hospital, she’d expected the Range Rover to have been towed away and for a fresh set of detectives to come knocking, or worse. But it was still right where she’d parked it, untouched. She drove it back to her house, loaded the men’s bodies inside, and brought them to work, where she burned them in the middle of the night. All of her problems, gone with the breeze at the top of a chimney. She’d taken their “cremains,” ashes and unburnt bone fragments, and scattered them in the brush behind the house. One good rain, and the Russians were the same earth as everything else back there. Their car she left in long term parking at the airport, and took the Logan Express shuttle bus back to Ripton, and a cab home from there.
She watched the news. Roarke showed up often. He was a big deal. They talked about his start as a high school athlete, destined for college ball until he was sidelined by injury. His interests, his passion for building, and the failed home remodeling business were fodder for the think pieces analyzing the mind of a gunman. So we can know the signs better and try to prevent the next mass killer from emerging, optimists agreed. Nelle was a realist. She knew what those endless prosopographical pieces were really for.
Roarke’s ex-wife gave interviews and wept for her parents and her friend and all the horrors her former husband had wrought. Nelle declined to be interviewed, but they seemed more than happy to talk to Samantha. After all, she’d lost so much more than anyone else. And she had no reservations about being the public face of the tragedy. The other woman who’d escaped Malcolm Roarke’s rampage. The national media ran with the story. Experts came crawling out of obscurity to analyze why he’d done what he had, trying to understand him and his motivations. Some sympathized, talking about how unfairly men are treated in the family court system and how abandonment of affection is a terrible form of abuse that can turn good men bad. They called him by his nickname, Mack, and implied Samantha’s culpability in driving him to violence. Whatever the perspective, his name seemed to be spoken ten times for every single utterance of Donna DaSilva; her daughter, Joanne; Siobhan McKinley; or the Zamyatins. The newscasters mused that the list of his victims would’ve been longer, but Samantha’s boyfriend had stolen her away to Vermont to propose over the holiday. The news called him the fiancé. They tried to spin the end of the story as the triumph of beginnings over endings. Love over hate. Showed the two of them sitting with a little red dog on their front porch like a happy family. But Nelle knew Samantha’s engagement would always be the anniversary of “the Ripton Rampage.” It was no way to start a life together. Nelle wished her well, but she suspected their future would be full of angry ghosts.
Eventually, the coverage died down as a different national news story took center stage, and people’s attentions shifted back to Washington and Pyongyang and Hollywood and wherever the next body count was waiting to be tallied.
Tony touched her shoulder and brought Nelle out of her trance. “Do you want to go wait with your friends?” he asked. Nelle shook her head and said, “I’ll be out in the garden. I think I need a few minutes by myself.” Tony was right. She didn’t want to do any of the rest of what it would take to finish. It wasn’t anything she ever wanted to do again. She was done with the dead, and had told Tony she quit. He took the news like he took everything else, in stride and with grace. She didn’t know what she’d do without him or this job. It wasn’t the money—she had more of that than she could spend. It was the stability. The job, his support, were something fixed to hold on to. She figured she was going to find out, though. She left him to finish the job of reducing the love of her life to ashes.
The garden outside was shady and cool. A breeze swept through, raising gooseflesh on her arms. She ignored the chill and fingered her great-gran’s necklace. The pictures inside replaced with her and Evan. She felt overcome with rage and despair, and slumped on the bench and thought that there was nothing left for her. Her friends told her anytime she needed to talk, they were there for her. But she didn’t reach out. She didn’t tell them that for days after, she went back to where she’d left Roarke’s body, regretting telling the police where it was. She went back to that cabin and imagined him lying there in the ivy behind it, purpling, with bugs beginning to lay eggs in his corpse, and she fell down and cried and screamed and thought that she should have buried him somewhere in the forest where he’d never be found because eventually the police would release his body to next of kin, and he didn’t deserve anyone to mourn him. That was too good for him. If there was a single person in the world who would mourn Malcolm Roarke, even accidentally, or show sympathy or care at his disposal, she wanted to stand in the way of it. He didn’t get to have a ritual. He didn’t deserve to be lowered into the ground while his mother wept or a sibling said a prayer. “Closure” be damned. He deserved what he got when Nelle ruined him. And what she wanted to give him was an anonymous cremation in the middle of the night without a word of grief or regret, just like the other two. And after she burned him, she wanted to scatter him in a dumpster behind a strip mall somewhere to spend eternity with the rest of the world’s trash. Because that was exactly what he was.
She didn’t say any of that to her friends, because those were her private thoughts and her lasting regrets. The passing days only served to give her a chance to reflect on the choices she’d made in her desperation, and regret and self-doubt swelled.
Fresh tears stung her eyes, and she sat and cried heavy, sobbing gasps of despair. When she found herself too exhausted to cry anymore, she wiped her eyes and sat up. She heard the door behind her open and footsteps crunch across the gravel path. Her spine stiffened. Tony stood over her shoulder but didn’t try to touch her this time. He said, “Can I get you anything?”
“No. I’m okay,” s
he lied. She stood and said, “I think . . . I should go home.” It wasn’t home anymore. Yet having fought for it, she wasn’t ready to let go. Not yet. It was all she had left of her husband.
He looked scared. Not of her. For her. “There’s no rush, Nelle. If you need something, I can get it for you. Don’t punish yourself.”
She laughed and thought, You can’t tell me what to do. Instead, she said, “Thank you, Tony. Maybe you’re right. I’m going to go. Can you let my friends know I’ll get in touch with them later?” Knowing she probably wouldn’t. She walked out of the garden to the parking lot and drove in silence to her house in Ripton.
The police tape that had denied her entry for days was gone. She let herself inside and stood in the front room for a long moment, listening, hoping deep down she’d hear the familiar sounds of her husband in the kitchen, knives and pans and glasses clanking as he got a start on dinner. She hoped to hear from behind the wall, “Bar’s open!” But there was nothing. No smells of sautéing mushrooms or chorizo, no clank of the wineglass he sipped from while chopping peppers. And worst of all, no music.
She shut the door behind her. The alarm system chirped, and she felt a swell of panic rise in her. An unborn scream, pregnant in her throat. She swallowed it and locked the door. Nelle hung her car keys on the hook beside it and wandered through the kitchen into the living room.
Her phone pinged, and she saw a new text from her mother.
Are you okay?
Need me to come over?
She knew she should reply, but didn’t know what to say. She wrote back,
No. It’s ok. I need some time alone.
I’ll come by tomorrow after I check on Inês.
I love you.
I love you.
She silenced her phone and dropped it on the sofa. She knelt down in front of the shelves Evan had filled first before they’d unpacked anything else. She pulled out his favorite record and fit it over the spindle. She lowered the needle and listened to the warm, serene guitar strum a soft bossa nova rhythm. He’d said it reminded him of his parents when he was young, watching his father Joãozinho play the guitar while his mother danced in their living room.
Every time she thought she had no more crying left in her, fresh tears filled her eyes.
She set the album jacket on the floor and curled up next to it, closing her eyes and listening. She lay there in a lonely house much too big for a single person and whispered to herself, “No darkness. Only light.”
Acknowledgments
To start, I owe considerable gratitude to my agent, Howard Morhaim. He read this manuscript many more times in its nascency than anyone should reasonably be expected to, and his insights into the story were essential to it being what it is. In that same vein, my editor, Jaime Levine, is the other of my collaborators who believed in this story and its characters and helped me find exactly the right way to tell the tale. She got exactly what I wanted to do and was instrumental in bringing out the best of this book. Thank you, Jaime!
Thank you, Frank Raymond Michaels, for answering my questions about computer tech and security. Despite his efforts to educate me, any mistakes or inaccuracies herein are mine alone. Thanks to my friend Lyndsey Emery for the insight into the experience and practice of medical pathologists. Talking to you was one of my favorite (and weirdest) moments of research into this book, for sure! Also, thank you to Alison Courchesne for directing me toward the episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast describing the idea of “pulling the goalie” when I told her I was writing a home invasion thriller (Season 3, Episode 7, “12 Rules for Life,” for anyone who’s interested). Now I can finally watch the movie!
Also, a very special thank you to Katya Heldwein for helping me construct and transliterate Russian phrases she is much too polite to ever say aloud. That was such an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.
I am fortunate to have a large community of literary friends, colleagues, and influences who stand at the ready to give me love, inspiration, and support. Among them are Paul Tremblay, Christopher Golden, James A. Moore, Brian Keene, Errick Nunnally, Christopher Irvin, K. L. Pereira, Josh Malerman, Thomas Sniegoski, Hillary Monahan, Dana Cameron, John McIlveen, Tony Tremblay, Izzy Lee, Joe Lansdale, Jennifer McMahon, and Andrew Vachss. Thank you all for your friendship and guidance.
My son is the constant star in my sky. Thank you, L., for always having a hug ready and offering to play Halo with me. You’re the best kid what ever was in the whole history of kids! No, you cannot have the last slice of cold pizza; it’s mine.
Finally, as always, I owe the most gratitude to my wife, Heather, for her unwavering affection, especially while I wrote a book set in a simulacrum of our house, endangering characters reflective of ourselves. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but put me in some pretty bleak places coming out of my office daily after work. Your patience and love are the sun and the moon to me. You’re my rescuer and best friend. Always.
* * *
I miss you, Dallas.
Sleep well. You earned your rest.
About the Author
© Heather MacLeod
Bracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award–nominated author of the novels Mountain Home, Come to Dust, and Stranded and two collections of short fiction, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods and White Knight and Other Pawns. He has worked as a trial attorney, a philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives in New England with his wife and son.
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