“So he did,” I say, watching her. “But it didn’t change what happened, if that’s what you’re wondering. It didn’t undo the damage or erase the memories.”
“You didn’t feel better.”
“No,” I admit. “I didn’t.”
She seems disappointed, slouches a little. I want to ask her: What happened to you? Tell me. What is hurting you? What are you trying to understand? But I don’t. And she tells me she’ll be in touch. There’s no warning, or indication that she suspects me in any way. But there’s something just off in our interaction, a strange new vibration. What did I say? What did she intuit from our conversation? What will be her next line of inquiry?
When I close the door, Tess sits on the hearth.
She’s a girl in pigtails again, with those ridiculous glasses and a mouth full of metal.
“You should have told her that you felt worse afterward,” says Tess. “You should have told her—that’s when you knew.”
“Knew what?”
She looks up and she’s as I last saw her. I turn away, heart thumping.
“That he was never going to feel better.”
EIGHTEEN
The Kreskey house. It was still there. In Rain’s mind, it had been torn down. Or maybe it had burned, set on fire by vandals. What other fate could a place like that meet? No one would ever live there, surely. She expected an empty lot, or a burned-out shell. But from the road, she could just catch sight of it. It sat empty and sagging, the peaks of its roof jutting above the tree line. It was still there, intact.
Rain sat in her car at the edge of the drive, wondering if she’d completely lost her mind. Coming here. Bringing the baby. She could envision the ashen look of worry and disapproval on her husband’s face, pretty much the look he’d given her last night when she told him that she couldn’t explain herself to him. He’d gone to bed angry, left this morning without saying goodbye. He didn’t even know that she’d taken Lily to Markham’s house, that she was about to enter into negotiations to go back to work. She was a bad person, a horrible wife. She might be a shitty mother, too. But she was a good journalist. That much, she knew.
Rain cast a look at her sleeping baby, then took the digital recorder from her bag, hit Record and pulled up the drive. She was fine with the ambient noise of tires on the road, her own breath. There was a certain aesthetic to it; the realism of it appealed. If she was going to do this, she was going to get in deep, warts and all.
“While I sat in the hollow of the old tree, bleeding, in shock, barely aware of myself, Eugene Kreskey brought my friends, then twelve-year-old Tess Barker and Hank Reams, back to the house he’d inherited from his parents,” she said.
“It’s still here, sitting on an isolated property in this rural New York town. Within its walls, I’d learn at his trial, the young Eugene Kreskey suffered. As a child in this place, he was starved, beaten, locked in the basement for weeks at a time. There are no records that he was ever sent to school.”
She brought the car to a stop, regarded the abandoned, dilapidated house.
“Kreskey was twelve when a carbon monoxide leak killed his parents,” Rain said.
“A hiker, on the trails behind this house, heard the sound of his screams and called the police. The year was 1990.
“Locked in the basement, he’d been spared the fate of his parents. He was in the house with his dead parents for a week, before the hiker’s discovery. It was suspected but not proved that he was responsible for the accident—the furnace in the basement was cracked, might have been faulty.”
She paused here, thinking, wondering what it was like to be Eugene Kreskey. A child, a victim of unspeakable abuse at the hands of his deranged parents. He was a baby once, just like Lily. She tried to imagine him, locked in a basement, starving, alone in the dark, his parents dead upstairs. She couldn’t get her head around it.
“At the time of his first hospitalization, Tess, Hank and I were not quite toddlers,” she went on. “We each lived within five miles of this house. Kreskey was made a ward of the state, treated, and housed for the next ten years. He was released, deemed fit to hold a simple job and live alone, a year before the