Sometimes when we think we don’t deserve what we have, we subconsciously set fire to our lives. I think that’s what I did with your mother. Her father’s true confessions yesterday—was it just yesterday? I was so broken inside from abuse, I don’t think I knew how to handle your mother’s brand of love—giving, unconditional, nourishing. I’m sure I didn’t deserve her.
Maybe he’d hoped she would argue the point. But, meanly, she didn’t. Lilian, her mother, was good, through and through—a loving spirit, a sensitive soul, a beautiful writer—and he was not good enough. He didn’t deserve her. The way she didn’t deserve Greg.
Beware of self-destructive impulses, Laraine. They are shadows in the psyche. We often aren’t even aware of them until they’ve burned our lives to the ground.
In her history with Hank—both sides of him—he’d done all the chasing, all the watching. He’d come after her in the woods that day, risked his life and sacrificed his sanity to save her. He’d stayed close to her, even when she’d made it clear she didn’t want him. But tonight, it was her turn to chase. She wasn’t even sure why.
She gave Hank a bit of a head start, then she followed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
But no. I’m paranoid. Or at least when I come to an abrupt stop and pull over, the car behind me keeps going fast. The night is velvety, and I’m a bit off my game. I have to admit that my conversation with Tess (or myself, depending on what I think she is) has me a bit rattled. So, I don’t get the plate, or the make and model of the vehicle. But it’s not Agent Brower’s black sedan. So that’s good, at least. Our conversations have been increasingly tense.
She came by the office when I was out with Angel. “I just have a few more questions,” she scribbled on a note that she left with my assistant. Her handwriting is tight and precise.
A message on my voice mail: I just have a few more questions, Dr. Reams. Something in her voice has shifted a little, less deferential, more hard edges.
I asked my assistant to make an appointment with her for tomorrow.
She asked about dates, Brenda told me after they’d talked.
What dates? As if I have to ask.
September 7. She asked if you’d been in Boston or the surrounding area on June 5 of last year? I told her I’d have to check your calendar.
I’ll take care of it.
Dr. Reams, is everything all right?
Of course. Not to worry, Brenda. I’ll turn over my calendar to her tomorrow when I see her. Tell her that.
Just one more night, just one more wrong to right, if I can. And then, and maybe, maybe I will call Beth. Maybe I will try to take back the time I’ve lost.
It’s not too late to have a life. Is it?
And what about me?
He rattles around in his cage, pacing, wanting things that—to be honest—I don’t want to give as much anymore.
What about you? You integrate.
Good luck with that.
This is what it’s come to, Rain. My only friends are a ghost and the other side of my own fucked-up psyche. Sad, right? More than sad. Unsettling. Kreskey did kill me that afternoon, all the best of me.
I pull the car deeper off the road tonight. There’s a path by the shoulder right on the edge of the Walters property. I check my pack, shoulder it and head into the night, air sparkling with cold.
I think they’ve abandoned this property. The house is dark again, the yard and shrubbery overgrown. There’s never a car in the drive.
I’ve been inside; it’s nicer than I expected, with tattered antiques, an orderly kitchen. The rooms upstairs are simple and clean, with quilted bedspreads, old pictures along the hallway wall.
I’ve seen the room Angel says she stayed in—the oak tree right outside, branches that scraped the window at night. It doesn’t look like the kind of place where awful things have happened. Tom and Wendy Walters, slim, innocuous in the smattering of photos on display, are unremarkable if a bit rumpled and dull about the eyes. They don’t look like the kind of people who torture children.
But if I’ve learned one thing in my work and life, it’s that bad things happen everywhere, and almost no one ever looks like the demon inside. Markham was movie-star handsome. The Boston Boogeyman looked like Mister Rogers, kind and graying about the temples, soft-spoken.