When he came back for the body, he found his mother standing in the kitchen. She had come back from her Paris trip early. She didn’t say why, didn’t ask why his clothes were so dirty or why he was sweating. She made him take her luggage and shopping bags up to her bedroom and then spent the rest of the day sleeping.
Later that night, he dumped Alicia’s body in the grave. Boyle stood over her body, gripped with a peculiar sadness. He shouldn’t have killed her. He should have strangled her until she passed out. That way, when she woke up, he could do it all over again, as many times as he wanted.
Boyle heard a branch snap behind him. He turned around and saw his mother, her face clear in the moonlight. She didn’t look angry, or sad, or disappointed. She looked blank.
‘Hurry up and bury it,’ was all she said.
She didn’t talk to him during the long walk back to the house. He spent the time wondering what would happen. Two years ago, when she caught him strangling a cat, she sent him to his room. She waited until he fell asleep and then came in and hit him with the buckle end of a belt. He had the scars to prove it.
His mother locked the front door. ‘Did you keep her in the house?’
He nodded.
‘Show me.’
He did. Alicia’s rosary beads were on the floor. They must have fallen from his pocket.
‘Pick it up,’ his mother said.
He did. By the time he stood, his mother had locked the door to the wine cellar.
During his two-week confinement, he used the same slop bucket Alicia had used for her bathroom needs. He slept on the cold concrete floor. His mother didn’t visit him. She didn’t bring him food.
Trapped alone in the cool dark that never went away, Boyle never cried or called out for his mother. He used the time constructively, thinking about what he would do next.
He had some wonderful ideas for his mother.
One day he woke to voices. There was a vent in the adjoining room and he could hear his mother talking to someone upstairs – the police. His mother had called the police. Panic gripped up and then floated away when he heard his grandmother’s voice.
‘You can’t leave him down there forever,’ Ophelia Boyle was saying.
‘Fine,’ his mother said. ‘You can take Daniel home with you. I’ve been thinking he should be spending time with his father, anyway. Should I bring Daniel by the club or the office?’
Boyle had been told his father had died in a car accident before he was born.
This isn’t the first time Daniel’s done something like this,’ his mother said. ‘I told you about the animals who disappeared around here last summer – and let’s not forget the time Marsha Erickson caught him peeking inside her daughter’s window in the middle of the night.’
Boyle thought about his cousin, Richard Fowler. Richard was Marsha’s friend. He had been inside her house several times, had stolen her money and lacy underwear – Richard was the one who had put the sleeping pills in Marsha’s beer. When she passed out, Richard called Boyle and said to come over. The two of them spent a wonderful night playing with Marsha inside her bedroom. Her parents were away for the weekend.
After that weekend, Boyle would often wake up in the middle of the night, remembering what he had done to Marsha. Several times he would venture outside and stand by her bedroom window to watch her sleep, imagining all the new and wonderful things he could do to her – only this time she would be conscious. It was more fulfilling when they fought back. He thought about the prostitute Richard had choked to death in the backseat of his car. She didn’t pray to God or beg for her life; she fought back with everything she had and might have hurt Richard severely if Boyle hadn’t come back with the rock.
His grandmother’s voice snapped Boyle out of his daydream: ‘Daniel is your problem, Cassandra. You’re going to have to figure out –’
‘I want him gone.’
‘You had your opportunity,’ his grandmother said. ‘I told you about the doctor in Switzerland who would have gotten rid of the bastard with a simple operation, but you absolutely refused because you wanted to blackmail –’
‘What I wanted, Mother, was for you to protect me. Daddy climbed into my bed, he put his hands between my –’
‘You’ve punished me