As Night Falls (29 page)

T
im stopped at home for a quick bite to eat between shifts, taking a few minutes to catch his wife up on what was happening. The visit he'd paid to the empty house on Long Hill Road. A K9 unit summoned from downstate. Items retrieved from the prison cells and given to the dogs to scent. Finally Tim mentioned the woman who had been admitted to the hospital having lost nearly a pint of blood, a likely victim of the escaped cons, although she'd been in no condition to give a report. Tim had left Mandy back at the barracks to identify the woman's missing vehicle, and phone in a description.

The staties were the ones setting up roadblocks and directing the search in a radius around the bridge, but since the escape had taken place within town limits, Tim felt a lingering responsibility. He'd stationed two of his men at the search area, and they'd already radioed to say that their presence didn't seem exactly welcome.

Tim drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter. If the cons were in the car belonging to the injured woman, then they were hundreds of miles away by now. He accepted the sandwich his wife had wrapped up in foil. She handed him a to-go cup filled with black coffee, holding a plate of cookies beside it.

Tim took one. “Are these really chocolate chip?” he asked. “Or did you slip zucchini mash into them?”

Liz shook her head, biting back a smile that hit him right in the chest. She was smiling more often now. For a while, he thought he'd never see her smile again.

Tim wished that he could stay. Let their gazes take hold, move them in the direction of the stairs. They would go up, and the kids would be fast asleep, digesting all those extra servings of veggies. While he and Liz would stay awake for hours. Tim had never been so short on sleep in his life as he was in the year since he had gotten married. They were making up for lost time.

“Tim?” Liz interrupted his thoughts. “Are you going to check that house on Long Hill again now, or later?”

Tim took a deep drink from the scalding cup of coffee.

Liz's fingers began stroking his skin, doing a quiet dance over and between his own fingers, and across his palm. She had magic hands.

“Because we both know you're going back,” Liz went on. “The only question is whether it will be before or after you check in with the state police, who don't know this town anywhere near as well as you do.”

Tim stayed there a moment, caught in her grasp. Then he loosened her hold on his hand.

“Before,” he said.

Liz topped off Tim's coffee with some fresh from the pot.

“Coincidences,” he added, shrugging into his coat. “Escaped con, sister's got an empty house. And do you know what's bugging me most of all? The couple I visited.” He consulted the pad in his breast pocket. “Hark and Anita Nelson. Why did neither of them ask why I wanted to know about their neighbors? It was like they'd been expecting me.”

The skin between Liz's brows, with its lingering touch of summer sun, puckered in a frown. “Mountain people living way out there,” she said. “They're not the kind to ask.”

Tim leaned to rub away the frown with one hand while he reached for his belt with the other. “You're right,” he said. “Most hunches are just air and worry.”

Liz hesitated. “We both know some hunches are worth following.”

Tim rapped the counter with his fist, a brief gesture of goodbye, and Liz went to open the door. In the aftermath of the storm, the night had grown startlingly clear, the air like black glass, and the sky shot through with stars. Tim pointed the keyless remote and the headlights flashed on the patrol car.

F
or twenty-four long years, Barbara had enacted the same routine every Wednesday, week in, week out, until the time mounded up like a pile of ash. Hundreds and hundreds of lost gray days, blown away into the wind as if they were nothing.

Without her son, life didn't mean living, it just meant existence.

Barbara paused by the mirror on the living room wall before she left, checking that the silver strands in her hair weren't too frazzled, and that twin streaks of pink colored her lips. She didn't know if it mattered to Nicholas, but it did to her. She wanted to present a semblance of the mother she had been to him, and would've continued to be had she only been allowed. As she peered into the glass, she wondered how long it had been since she'd last given herself a good once-over. Not last Wednesday surely, nor the one before that, or any of the others in recent memory. When was it that she had gone so completely gray?

Barbara went outside into the low light of morning, and climbed into the truck. It had been Gordon's before he'd died. Barbara hadn't changed vehicles, or done a thing to the house except clean it—and that sparingly—since Nicholas had gone away.

The route she drove took her along bare, desolate roads, stretches that led out to the flat midsection of the state if you followed them long enough. Soon this entire landscape would be obliterated by snow.

The prison wasn't far out of Wedeskyull, but it was distant enough. They didn't build prisons right in the middle of town; instead they sat them in wild places Barbara never would've ventured if she'd had a choice in the matter. She had seen a mountain lion on one of these roads once. It had run out in front of her truck in a desperate race after some type of prey, its plate-sized paws scrabbling to turn itself around just before Barbara would have hit it. She'd pulled over to the side of the road, placing a hand on her heaving heart, and looked up at the steep slope the cat had climbed. They'd stared at each other for a while, the cat from its perch on the hilltop, Barbara in the cab of the truck. The cat's eyes held the same look of pure, deadened frustration that Barbara knew must fill her own every day.

In the beginning, when she'd been making this drive, she'd petitioned the state for Nicholas to be allowed to leave, go on special outings, even if they only took place on Wednesdays. Once that request was refused, Barbara asked for extra visiting hours. But that too was turned down. Barbara supposed she shouldn't have been surprised. Nicholas' lawyer had utterly botched the case, and the judge clearly had a vendetta against them. His words still carried a tinny echo and the drop of his gavel rang out, haunting Barbara's sleepless nights.

Her testimony had been the last for the defense. She hadn't listened much to the prosecution's case, and she barely noticed when the jury was sent away to make their decision.

They had come back in under an hour.

“In light of the mother's testimony, this can't be considered a capital or first degree murder case,” the judge reminded everyone, once the verdict was handed down.

Barbara had been sitting on a hard ridge of pew, feeling every pore and divot in the wood. Upon hearing the judge's words, she let her bottom shift just a little. Never mind that head-up-their-ass jury. The judge at least knew how to listen. Now she and Nicholas would be going home, and this nightmare would be over. Perhaps they would leave Cold Kettle. Their house contained so many memories, images of the dreadful accident in which Nicholas had struck his father instead of the meat Gordon must've been preparing to butcher. Barbara had found a hind quarter processed by Thiele. Had it already been lugged to the kitchen, or had Barbara opened the deep freeze, hefted the package in her arms, then dropped it on the counter with an exhalation of sheer exertion? She couldn't remember, and thus hadn't lied under oath. All she could clearly recall was unwrapping the deer meat from its slick plastic casing and leaving it to sit in a cranberry stain much like the one on the floor.

But the judge had gone on then. “However, given the portrait of the defendant's escalating instances of violence, which we heard about from several young female witnesses, his own lack of emotion or remorse, and especially due to the horrific nature of the crime of patricide, I am going to apply the maximum sentence this seat allows me.”

The ridge of pew spiked Barbara and she let out a small shriek.

“Order,” the judge commanded.

The bailiff took a warning step forward. Barbara had come nose to nose with this bailiff many a time during the last several weeks.

“I sentence the defendant to forty years in prison,” the judge said, and Barbara's shriek rose to a high, circling scream, like a whirlpool; she was going to get sucked in. Her shouts echoed off the courtroom's tall windows and climbed all the way to the concave sweep of tiles that made up the ceiling above.

She was carried out of the courtroom, still clawing behind her for Nicholas.

In a narrow stretch of hallway, gray-walled and linoleum-floored, Barbara handed over her purse and keys, and endured the indecency of being patted down.

“Satisfied?” she asked the female guard. “I doubt my own mama knew me better.”

Barbara had been thinking a lot about her mother lately. How differently might her life have gone if her mother had been different as well? It was a thought Barbara usually clamped down on, squeezing the life out of before it could squeeze out hers.

The guard ignored her question, waving her through with a frown.

“Have you come to your senses yet?” Barbara snapped back over her shoulder. “Realized that my son deserves some respect around here?”

She was surprised when the guard responded. Usually they didn't. Barbara squinted into the woman's unlovely face. She didn't recognize this one.

“Your boy's finally making some headway, lady,” the guard said. “Why don't you shut your trap before you mess things up for him all over again?”

Another guard stepped out of a small, glass-enclosed room and took hold of the first's arm. “Sorry, ma'am,” the second guard said. “She hasn't been here that long. She doesn't know she's not supposed to talk to you.”

“I may be new,” the first guard muttered, “but I know when someone's blowing smoke up her boy's ass instead of just letting him grow the hell up.”

The buzzer on the door blared, stunning as an alarm, and Barbara was moved along.

She took a seat, straightening the hem of her skirt, and aiming a bright smile at Nicholas. It wouldn't do to let him see her upset. Only Barbara's stranglehold on optimism, the belief that everything would get straightened out and proper justice handed down soon, had allowed Nicholas to survive in prison.

“How are you, Nicky?” she asked. She almost always used the nickname now. It was a small morsel of comfort she could give her son within these walls.

It was so difficult to get used to seeing him like this. The transformation had taken place over the course of many years, but that hadn't made it any easier to witness. First, Nicholas' head was shorn of those beautiful, lush curls, turned into a toothbrush bristle of spikes. Then her slight, fragile boy had started to put on bulk and muscle. Last came all the dreadful inking Barbara still couldn't stand to look at, even though he'd told her that one of the dark, twining strands hidden beneath his shirt read
Mama
.

Nicholas sat in the seat across from her, assuming a position of ease. “I'm good.”

Barbara wasn't sure she had heard correctly. But her son was grinning, an expression she hadn't seen on his face in years. Decades.

“Well, that's—” She broke off, had to start again. “That's wonderful. I'm so glad to hear it.” She paused, then dropped her voice. “Did you learn something? About your case from that new lawyer I found?”

Nicholas looked annoyed. “No, I didn't. You want to know what I learned?”

Barbara gazed at him. “Of course,” she said after a minute. “Of course I do.”

Nicholas leaned forward, speaking low. “I learned how to play the game, Mama.”

The guard standing in the corner of the room let out a cough and fingered his belt.

“Sorry, Officer.” Nicholas sat back, and the guard resumed his stance.

Barbara looked down at her lap. This visit wasn't going as the hundreds of others had, but she couldn't say exactly what was different, or whether it was a bad thing or not.

Nicholas spoke again. “Why didn't you ever teach me how to play the game?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Barbara replied.

Nicholas shifted in the chair so abruptly that it rocked. “No. I guess you don't.”

“Nicky,” Barbara pleaded. “I only tried to do what was best for you. You know that, don't you? I gave you support and praise and recognition. All the things the young moms today say are so important. I wanted you to be happy. That's all.”

“You didn't give me the most important thing of all,” Nicholas said.

“I'm sorry,” Barbara said automatically. Always before, whenever Nicholas blamed her for something, she had tried to take responsibility. Swiftly, so he couldn't be angry at her. But for some reason, it felt harder today to tuck his complaint away beneath a blanket of apology. “What was that? The most important thing?”

Nicholas stared unblinkingly at her across the table. When he spoke, it was quietly, almost under his breath. “Cassie's still with her sportsman husband, right? In that big place you told me about, up on the mountain?”

That busybody Glenda Williams had made it her business to deliver updates on Cassandra. She'd even seen fit to place a slice of newspaper in Barbara's mailbox once with a photograph of a gigantic house perched high on a hill, and an article about it to boot.

Barbara gave Nicholas a nod as if the conversation were simply continuing, making some sort of sense, instead of flinging her around like a child on a carnival ride.

And then she thought she understood. “I know how unfair that is, Nicky. You're the one who deserves that house. And so much more. It all got taken from you.”

Nicholas seemed to consider this, staring at her levelly so that for the first time since she'd been making these visits, Barbara became aware of exactly where she was, in a sealed container, locked away with a legion of men who had done terrible, violent things.

“Maybe it wasn't what I didn't get,” her son said, scrubbing the short brush on his head.

There was some gray in there, Barbara realized with a sharp intake of breath.

“Maybe it was what I got,” he said.

“You got everything!” Barbara exclaimed, a note of outraged pique in her voice that she couldn't remember ever applying to her son. “Everything I had to give!”

After a long time, Nicholas broke their stare. “I love you, Mama.”

“Oh, Nicky.” Relief coursed through her, and she began to cry. In all the years she had loved and devoted herself to her son, she didn't know if she'd ever heard him say those words before. “I love you, too—”

“I thought you should know that,” he said.

“Five minutes,” the guard intoned from his point of remove.

“Nicky?” Barbara said. “Is anything the matter? You're not—you're not sick, are you?”

“No, Mama. I told you, I'm doing real well in here.”

“Oh,” Barbara said. “Well, that's…good.”

Nicholas offered an odd, sad smile. “Is it? You're happy about that?”

“Of course I am,” she said, giving the words thrust.

“Good,” Nicholas said, still with that peculiar note in his voice. “Because I wouldn't want you to be disappointed in me.”

“Nicky! I could never be disappointed in you.”

It had occurred to her, during the dark days and years that had accumulated without Gordon, or Cassandra, and especially without her beloved boy: what if she had pulled back just a little, changed course the slightest bit? She might have; in the chill, dull light of retrospect, possible places stood out. But parenting Nicholas had been such a slalom ride for her. From the moment her sweet, beautiful son tumbled into her life, Barbara had been overcome. Nicholas pulled her along like a river, and Barbara had been helpless ever to stop.

“No,” Nicholas said. “You couldn't, could you?”

He was agreeing that she'd succeeded in her mission of motherhood. The one thing Barbara had most hoped to provide her son with was overarching love and approval.

So why did Nicholas' response sound so much like damnation?