Afterlife (2 page)

Fear came, as well.

Fear that leaked into madness, and he tried to cling to his memory, and tried to shout himself back to consciousness.

The killer kept the knife in his victim’s chest, and his eyes closed, experiencing everything with his victim, feeling the descent into death, trying to stay with his victim so that there was no fear of what was to come.

1

In the early afternoon, off the path along one of the trails of the Jenny Jump Mountain of northern New Jersey, deep in the woods bursting with new green growth beyond the slight hills above a placid brown lake, a woman and her young daughter hunted for fossils alongside a creek. The outcroppings of rock between patches of forest had fascinated the little girl as they’d wandered, and her mother pointed out what she’d remembered from her college years about the area. “Some of these rocks are 1.6 billion years old.”

“That’s old,” her daughter said, making her mother chuckle at how mature Livy could sound, even at six and a half.

“That’s why you can sometimes find fossils.”

“Like you used to with Gramma. When you were little.”

“Yep. Right along here.”

“I love days like this,” Livy said.

Julie chuckled. “Why’s that?”

Livy hesitated, then sighed a little. “Well, just you and me, Mommy. After school. And you don’t have to go to work today. And Matty doesn’t come home ’til later. I just…I just sorta like it.”

“Me, too, sweetie.”

The view beyond them, over the ridge, was of the Kittatinny Mountains, and Great Meadows. The sky was damp with the recently passed rain, and the fresh, pungent smell of the wild permeated the countryside.

They’d found a possum skull, two arrowheads, and what they thought might be a small cracked trilobite print on a rock fragment. “This was once part of a glacier,” she told her daughter. “That’s why we have all these lakes.”

“Like Ghost Lake. And Forest Lake. And…Lake Pesomething.”

“Lake Pequest.”

“Where’d it go?” her daughter asked.

“What?”

“Where’d the glacier go?”

“Well, the earth changes. The earth shifts, the earth warms, the glaciers melt, and then it recedes. Over millions of years a lot of stuff can happen.”

“That’s scary,” Livy said. “What if the ocean comes back?”

“Well, if it ever did, we’d have beachfront property. See this?” Julie Hutchinson held the bit of trilobite fossil up for her daughter’s inspection. “Once, these lived all over the place here. Swimming underwater.” Julie tried to remember if that was precisely correct—she had come up to these woods with her grandmother, who knew a lot more about the trilobites than she ever would. She and her grandmother had never gotten along all that well, except for their mutual love of nature and exploration.

Livy took the fossil into her cupped hands, and looked at it. Then, up to her mother. “Is it a dinosaur?”

Julie considered how she’d respond. She was screwed when it came to the precise classification of a trilobite. “Sort of.”

“Wow.”

After a minute of turning the fossil over in her hands, Livy passed it back to her mother, who dropped it into the small green knapsack they’d brought that had contained their bottles of water, and now also held the smooth pebbles, bits of shell, and arrowheads they’d collected during the late afternoon. Then Livy went back down to the creek, crouching to look around the rocks and fallen logs for more fossils.

Julie Hutchinson felt a gentle tingling in her hand, and for some reason, it made her think of Hut, the way he grabbed her hand sometimes.

The way he did when she thought he was in love with her. Back in the courtship days. Back before the storm clouds had come into their marriage.

An animal scent nearby—dead raccoon? Possum? She hoped it wasn’t too close. Immediately, she glanced over at her daughter, who was teetering back and forth on a log at the edge of the creek, her small feet curving around the wood as if trying to clutch it. Livy had an enthusiastic smile on her face, and she leaped from the log into the sandy edge of the creek, causing a splattering that nearly reached Julie.

“Liv,” she scolded. The hem of her daughter’s dress was already soaked. “Olivia Hutchinson, get out of the water.”

Her daughter looked down at the water around her ankles. “I’m only a little in it, Mommy. It’s freezing. I like it.”

Julie let this one go. She glanced across to the other bank. That warm odor of a rotting wild creature wasn’t unusual in the woodlands and the several creeks just beyond their town. Sometimes she saw deer pausing between thickets, and recently, she and Livy got to see a beaver swimming down toward its dam.

“We should get back to the car. We need to pick up Matty next,” Julie said.

Julie crouched down to pick up some small, nearly round pebbles her daughter had dropped. She glanced over at Livy, who stared across at the view beyond the ridge, to the slope that led down to the lake.

Her daughter’s face had a curious slant to it—Livy squinted, and her nose wrinkled slightly, her head gently turning a bit, not quite looking up at the trees, but nearly.

“Mommy?” Livy asked, detecting something was wrong. “Daddy says it’s all right.”

Julie pushed herself up from the muddy grass. “He always says that.”

“He said it just now.”

“On your brain radio,” Julie said, grinning. It was a joke between Livy and her father that they could communicate on something Hut had made up called a “brain radio.”

The wind came up again; it got a bit chilly; Julie was about to lift Livy up out from the muddy water, afraid she might get a bit of a cold from being out when the weather was about to make such a sharp change.

“Daddy’s in the city. He won’t be home ’til suppertime.”

“Silly you,” Livy said, teasing. “He’s here. He just said it.” She glanced around through the ferns and trees, as if her father were playing hide-and-go-seek with her. “Daddy?” She turned her head side to side, and then scrunched her eyebrows up, confused.

After Julie wiped her daughter’s soles off with her own shirttails, and slipped her small feet into what Livy called her “sockets,” the small white and pink socks, then into her shoes, they walked back down the path that led to where she’d parked the car at the shoulder of the road below. The wind picked up and died down frequently. Her daughter clutched her hand as if she were afraid of being blown off the path. They watched some Canadian geese that had gathered on a large patch of grass near a creek, and Livy told a joke that her father had told her, “Do you know how I know those are Canadian geese?”

“No.”

“They say ‘Quack, eh,’” Livy said, and giggled as if it were the funniest joke in the world.

“You need a new joke,” Julie said, smiling.

Then, the cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of her overstretched wool sweater.

“Is it your job?”

“Maybe,” Julie said, trying to ignore the slight downward turn to her daughter’s voice whenever Julie’s work at the hospital came up. In some respects, Livy seemed like an old soul, and could see right through her mother. “Liv, aren’t we having fun?”

“I guess. I just miss you when you’re gone.”

“But you see Daddy.”

Her daughter didn’t answer. The awful and stupid guilt that Julie had worked so hard to overcome— about going back to work in the hospital again after having stayed home with Livy for her first four years— warmed her face.

“But you want to work in a hospital, too, you told me,” Julie said. “When you grow up? And you like all the stories I get to tell you from the ER. Aw, honey, I get five days with you each week. Two days away isn’t so bad.”

“I know,” Livy said, sighing. “It’s okay Mommy. I know they need you.”

When Julie looked at the number on her cell phone, she saw that it was not the hospital at all.

2

Julie dropped Livy off with Laura Reynen, the young mother who ran daycare out of her house and babysat far too often for Livy. Laura was in her mid-twenties, with two young children, and had arranged her life such that she could stay at home and run the business from a small cottage-like house, complete with wisteria creeping up the trellis at the side of the house, and an enormous fenced-in backyard, full of swing-sets and sandboxes and a double slide. Laura could take one of the kids on a moment’s notice, and Livy adored being at her home with the great playground in the backyard. Laura was the mother that Julie knew she never would be—happy with the clutter, happy with kids all over the place, happy in a way that Julie barely understood, since Julie felt like a screw-up of a mom.

At the front door, Laura, with a baby in her arms, said, “So I can expect you back when?” She always had the aura of joy around her, as if young children were somehow meant to be attached to her arms and legs and running in and out the backdoor all the time.

“Two hours, tops,” Julie said. Then, looking down at Livy, “We’ll eat junk food tonight, okay?”

“Mommy, you look sad,” Livy said.

Julie leaned down, and gave her daughter the tightest hug she could, kissing her on the forehead. “You go play, all right?”

“Only if you promise to read to me tonight.”

“Promise,” Julie said. She hoped she wouldn’t have to break that promise.

3

The Rellingford Learning Academy was a small private school for children with certain behavioral issues. The Academy sat on three well-manicured acres at the end of a circle of buildings. Although there was a blacktop and a baseball diamond in the back, there was little else to suggest a school other than the name at the front driveway. The school had on-staff medical personnel as well as a psychologist and a psychiatrist on-call who also conducted therapy sessions among the student body of sixty-four students from grades 6 through 12. Although the school was expensive and at times administratively pig-headed, Julie had convinced Hut that it was the best place for Matt, despite the added expense, at a time when Matt had been getting increasingly violent and uncontrollable at the public school—and at home.

Julie tried to put that episode out of her mind: that moment when Matt had pulled a kitchen knife on his father. Matt’s face full of rage, his eyes wild as if he wasn’t even seeing who stood in front of him, spit flying from his lips as some of the worst language that Julie could imagine came out of that boy’s mouth.

It wasn’t Matt. It was something else. A mental disorder that hasn’t yet been diagnosed. When he’s older, they’ll find something. They’ll get the right meds to fix Matt’s problem. I know they will.

At the front desk, near the secretary’s office, Julie flipped through one of the magazines
(Psychology Today
, perhaps, but she wasn’t really noticing), and finally the headmaster came in.

She glanced up from the magazine. “He’s all right?”

“He’s resting. He’s fine now. I’d like you to speak with Dr. Maitland, first.”

“Maybe I should drive him over to Dr. Swanson.”

“We already put a call in. Our nurse, Miss Jackson, thinks that’s not necessary at this time. He’s fine, really.”

Julie refrained from commenting,
“Cut the condescending attitude. I’m a nurse, too. I’ll decide what’s fine for Matt.”

Instead, she said, “I’d like to see him now.”

4

The school psychologist was named Renny Maitland, and he looked like a ski bum to Julie, and far too young. He was on hand every day for the students. A psychiatrist was in once per week for special consultations, but Maitland handled the day-to-day issues.

“It’s not as big a concern as we’re making it,” Maitland said. “It’s just not the first time it’s happened, and we wanted you and Mr. Hutchinson to be aware of it. It may be the added pressure right now of the exams. We’ve been going through standardized tests these past few weeks. Nothing the students have to prepare for—but they’re timed, and there’s some pressure, so there’s some…well, some students act out a bit when doing them.”

“What exactly are we talking about here?” “He’s been carving things. Into his skin.”

“He got hold of a
knife
?”

Maitland shrugged. “Just a pen. A good old ballpoint pen.”

“He’s done this before?”

“Well, just with drawings. Sometimes on his hands. He seems to have an issue about his hands.”

“You need to call either me or my husband when Matt does this. We can’t be kept in the dark.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson, I did call your husband the last time it happened,” Maitland said.

She felt a brief flush of embarrassment in her face.

“He said he’d talk it over with Matt. When a child draws with a pen on his hands, we simply have him wash the ink off. It’s not abnormal for kids to draw on themselves. But today, well…He cut.”

“Is he all right?”

“I think so. This isn’t the first time a child has done this. It doesn’t always indicate anything more than a preoccupation on the child’s part. But, based on Matthew’s history…”

Julie nodded. “Of course. I can’t…I just can’t think of anything that might be bothering him. I thought with the camera, he was doing better.”

“Most definitely. That was a stroke of brilliance. He videotapes everything. He’s communicating much better because of it.”

Julie smiled, slightly, but still felt worried. “Where is he?”

5

It was a long walk from the front offices down to the nurse’s office. Julie glanced at the green walls as she went down the corridor: pictures that the kids had painted, essays pinned to bulletin boards. The smell of sawdust and paint—she glanced down a hallway as she passed by—two men working on ladders to paint the walls. She passed a girl of thirteen or so in the hall, and smiled at her. The girl stopped. Her arms crossed over her chest in anger, a pout on her lips. The girl watched her as she passed by.

She tapped at the open door of the nurse’s office. The room was white and large, with an empty cot pushed into a corner, the blinds drawn on the windows, and an examination table.

“Yes?” the nurse turned from an open folder on her desk, and smiled. “Mrs. Hutchinson?”