A large section of the garage floor in front of me was made up of haphazardly arranged house bricks, and it took me a second to recognize what I must be looking at. An old mechanic’s pit, where someone could lie down underneath a car to work on it. It had been filled in with bricks to approximate a flat surface.
Tentatively, I lifted up the one the butterfly had been on. It came out of the floor covered in dust and old webbing, the butterfly clinging obstinately to one side.
In the hole the brick had left, I could see the top of what appeared to be another cardboard box below.
The garage door banged again behind me.
Jesus.
This time I stood up and walked back out onto the driveway to check. There was nobody in sight, but in the last few minutes the sun had disappeared behind a cloud and the world felt darker and colder. The breeze had picked up. Looking down, I saw that I was still holding the brick, and that my hand was trembling slightly.
Back in the garage, I put the brick to one side, and then began to remove more from the pit, gradually revealing the box hidden underneath. It was the same size as the others, but had been sealed across the top with parcel tape. I took out my keys and selected the one with the sharpest tip, my heart humming.
Is this what you were looking for, Norman?
I drew the point across the center of the tape, then dug my fingers in to pull the seams apart. They came away at each end with a crackling sound. Then I peered inside.
Immediately I sat back on my heels, either unable or unwilling to comprehend what I had seen. My thoughts went back to what Jake had said last night after he’d been talking to himself in the living room. I want to scare you. That was when I’d assumed the imaginary little girl had come back into our lives.
A car door slammed. I glanced behind me and saw that a vehicle was parked at the end of my driveway, and that a man and a woman were walking toward me.
It wasn’t her, my son had told me.
It was the boy in the floor.
“Mr. Kennedy?” the woman called.
Instead of answering her, I turned my attention back to the box in front of me.
To the bones inside.
To the small skull that was staring up at me.
And to the beautifully colored butterfly that had landed and rested there, its wings moving gently, like the heartbeat of a sleeping child.
Twenty-eight
Back in the day, Pete had encountered Norman Collins on several occasions, but he had never had cause to visit the man’s home. He knew of it, though: it had once belonged to Collins’s parents, and Collins had never moved out. Following his father’s death, he had lived there alone with his mother for a number of years, and then continued to do so after she died.
There was nothing untoward about that, of course, but the idea still made Pete feel a little queasy. Children were supposed to grow up, move out, and fashion their own lives; to do otherwise suggested some kind of unhealthy dependency or deficiency. Perhaps it was simply because Pete had met Collins. He remembered him as soft and doughy, and always sweating, as though there were something rotten inside him that was constantly seeping out. He was the kind of man who it was easy to imagine might have kept his mother’s bedroom carefully preserved over the years, or taken to sleeping in her bed.
And yet, as much as he’d raised Pete’s hackles, Norman Collins had not been Frank Carter’s accomplice.
There was some consolation to be had there. Whatever Collins’s involvement right now, Pete hadn’t missed him at the time. While the man had never officially been a suspect, he had been very much suspected. His alibis had checked out, though. If someone really had been helping Carter, it was physically impossible for it to have been Norman Collins.
So what had he been doing at the prison?
Maybe nothing. And yet Carter had to have received communication from the outside world somehow, and as Pete parked outside Collins’s house, he felt a small thrill inside him. Better not to hope too much, of course. But he still had the sense that they were on the right track here, even if it wasn’t clear right now where it was