Family Murders: A Thriller (8 page)

"I noticed you and the dog like to come out this way for a jog," he said. "I thought it might be the perfect place for us to get together for some alone time."

Angela absorbed the crush of the emptiness around her, perceiving just how far the two of them were from anyone else. She didn't say anything.

"So, you're finally starting to put things together," Eric said.

"I know who you are. I know
what
you are."

"What am I?"

"You're a monster. Some people would say you're sick, but I have a daughter. I don't have the luxury of trying to understand you."

"That's backwards. You've got it all twisted up in your head. I'm not the dragon in this story, Angela—I'm the dragon-slayer."

"I can see why you would tell yourself that."

"I'm the one who should have recognized what needed to be done and done it," he said. "I should have done the right thing. And even though you don't deserve it, that's what I'm going to do now."

"It must make you feel better to talk like this, to rewrite everything with you as the victim, so you don't have to think about what happened to that little girl."

Eric started shaking his head. "No. You of all people don't get to talk about her."

"So you don't have to think about what you did to that little girl. To you own sister. What would Gabby—"

"
DON'T YOU DARE SAY HER NAME!
" It was like flipping a switch. From a default setting of cool detachment, his face morphed into a gargoyle of hatred and rage.

Angela felt herself take a step back from the sudden, near-tangible heat coming off of him. At the same time, Rocky started taking a step forward. For a second Angela thought about just letting him go, letting it happen, but instead she reached down and grabbed his collar. She could feel him surge against her, and then he was barking and snapping. She had never seen him like this before. Rocky was a member of the family, with a seemingly human personality, but that personality had dissolved. He was all animal.

"Control your dog, Angela," Eric said.

Angela said nothing because she was putting all her energy into an act of will, forcing herself not to open her hand.

"You know, I'm glad we have this chance to talk. Just you and me. You've been reading up on me. Did you get a copy of the trial transcript too?"

"Yes," she said.

"Did you read it?"

"Yes."

"So then I don't have to tell you—you already know." The edges of Eric's eyes turned downward; a perfect mimicry of sadness. "You're not the first person to treat me like a monster. Hell, you're far from the first person to say it to my face. The funny thing is, I've never harmed another person in my whole life."

"I read your bullshit story."

"That's what it was to you? Bullshit?"

"You raped your sister and got away with it. Yes, it's bullshit." Angela half-turned, disgusted with the idea of being so close to the hands that—

"Look at me.
Look at me!
" Her eyes met his, and for second they just both just stared. "I. Never. Touched. Her. Do you understand?" The earlier sadness returned, but this time is was mixed with his current fire. The combination distorted his features. He seemed angry and broken in a way that would be impossible to fake. Angela began to consider that he believed what he was saying and wasn't sure if that made things better or worse. A calculating sociopath was one thing, was what she had prepared herself for. An unhinged nutcase was something else entirely.

Eric perked up, smiled at her. "So now you're thinking I'm crazy."

"Either you must have done it in cold blood and planned to get away with it, or you did by accident and got lucky. And you know what? I don't care which. I really don't."

"That's good. That's progress. If you can make the leap from evil to diseased, maybe you can take a few more leaps for me."

"The police know about you. They have the locket. They found out what it is."

Eric threw back his head and laughed. "Good! I only got a glimpse of it before your loyal friend here chased me into the woods. I had a feeling that's what it was, but I didn't get a good look."

"You didn't get a good look before you buried it?"

"I've got news for you, Angela—a locket isn't all the police are going to find."

"Yeah, they're going to find you," she said.

"Yes. Yes, they are. But not quite yet. This is the first we've had any time together, so let me tell you a little story."

"I've heard enough."

"Indulge me."

"Why should I?"

"Should I threaten you? Because I'll hurt you if you don't and blah blah blah. You could have run away the moment you saw me. Instead you're standing here. I don't need to make any threats. This moment, this is the whole reason you're still here. You want to hear what I have to say."

Angela said nothing. And inside, deep inside, she admitted that she did. So she held tight to Rocky's collar, ready to let go if the moment called for it, and started to listen.

10

What do you think I did after the trial ended? I tried to live, of course. Tried to re-enter my life at all the points I thought mattered, tried to forget, as though six months had just been snipped out and lost forever. I put that time into a box in my head and marked it Do Not Open. For a long time, I didn't.

My mistake was also forgetting about everyone else. I assumed they would want to forget as much as I did, that they would assist in an act of collective memory erasure by never, ever mentioning what had happened. At the time it seemed obvious. I mean, who would want to think about that if they didn't have to?

Naive, I know. Tried to get my job back, no dice. I played the pity card on that one and almost got punched in the face. To be fair, though, no one did mention what had happened. At the grocery store, on the street, it was all the same. Silence and stares. I was right about one thing—no one would mention it. But they didn't have to. I carried the whole thing around with me, throwing it on people like a bucket of cold water every time I turned a corner. I couldn't forget because they couldn't forget, and they couldn't forget because of me. It was a vicious circle.

I figure I still could have made it work. I'd lived in that town my whole life, and I don't know if even all that would have been enough for me to get the message. The message was: move on. I get it in retrospect, and I don't blame them. The truth is, they
did
want to forget. Just like me, they wanted it gone from their heads. Of course, I was the reason they couldn't make it happen, the town's dirty laundry that just wouldn't get clean. Who knows how long I would have taken it, how long I would have lived like a ghost. Probably my whole life—that wasn't the the problem.

The house. The house was a problem. The second I stepped inside I could feel the slime dripping down off the walls, coming down from her room and straight through the ceiling. I spent whole days scrubbing the place at the beginning. Then I just scrubbed it once a day, then once a week. Then I gave up.

It wouldn't wash—more dirty laundry. I started sleeping in the yard, camped out in a tent next to the house, but I had to move to the barn because of the nightmares. They'd stop for a while every time I moved farther away, but as soon as I got comfortable with some new distance they'd start up again. It took a few moves for me to put that together.

When I did, I left. I'm sure people around here were plenty happy; all I cared about was putting as much distance between me and that house as possible. But there's a limit, you know. You can only go so far before you start coming back, so I had to give that up too. I still dream of the house often, but that's OK. With nightmares, I've found, the best thing to do is relax and let them happen, that way they come on slow, like good mushrooms instead of a coke-blast up the brain stem. It's like my life, you know? I live in a nightmare, every day, but you can get used to that. As long you don't fight it.

I had to give in to something else, too.

When you spend your nights dreaming of something, you spend your days thinking about it too. Given the lack of a conviction, my sister's case was still open, but I was pretty sure fuck-all was being done about it. The police knew who had done it: me. But a stupid jury had let him off, so why waste resources chasing someone who they can't touch?

If they wouldn't fix it, someone had to. I decided it would have to be me because no one else cared. So I started to read as much as I could: psychology, criminology, all of it, anything I could lay my hands on. I started investigating my own sister's murder.

But I never thought of it like that. It wasn't an investigation—it was a manhunt. I started looking for
him
.

***

"He doesn't exist! Don't you get that? Even if you don't get it, I do."

Angela's voice pierced the brief pause in Eric's story. She hadn't intended to say anything at all, but the words had escaped her. It was all so…unbelievable. Rocky leaned forward, baring his teeth, chomping at the bit. Her knuckles on the hand wrapped around his collar were white.

"Oh, he exists. He is very, very real. I only said that I'm not a monster—I didn't say monsters don't exist," he said. "They do."

"I know they do."

"Really, Angela? You may think you know. You may think you understand. But you don't. You of all people, I can say with certainty, do not understand."

"Me of all people?" She was confused.

"You of all people. You, with a six year-old daughter. She's the same age as Gab— as my sister was." He looked down at his boots. "People say the world is a dangerous place, but mostly it's just filled with dangerous people. People like him."

"The man who tried to take your sister? The man with the pink sunglasses?"

"Yes."

"The ones you're wearing right now?"

"I know what it must look like to you."

Angela said nothing.

"You know, when all this started I thought you must be in on it," Eric said. "I thought no one could be stupid enough, blind enough, to be so close and yet not see."

"See what?" she asked, but he just kept talking.

"And so the sunglasses were supposed to be a message. I didn't know if they would mean anything to you, but I figured you would would pass on the message."

"What message? To who?"

"You really don't know, do you?" Eric threw back his head and laughed. His laugh was hard and deep, and somehow desperate.

"This is funny to you?" Angela asked.

"No. It's sad. It's so fucking sad, either you have to laugh or you have to cry."

"So cry."

"I haven't cried since my sister died. But I've been laughing a lot. Watching your family, hell, it's been the best time of my life in a decade."

"Why? Why us?"

"Well, not the whole family. Just one very special person."

Angela felt a cold tongue lick up her spine. Rocky must have felt it too—he lowered his center of mass and started growling again.

"If you ever look at my daughter again, I'll—I'll kill you."

Eric shook his head. "What are you doing out here? The way you kept coming when you saw me…I thought you had at least some of this figured out. You're way off. Aren't you listening? I didn't hurt anyone. I don't want anything to do with your daughter."

"Right, sure, the invisible man did it, the man no one has ever seen."

"He did do it. But he's not invisible. I found him." His eyes were glowing now, and turned upward. He looked triumphant, but also blissful, like a burden had been removed.

"After all these years," he said, "it was so easy. A simple coincidence. I don't believe in God, but sometimes little things like that make you wonder, you know?"

Rocky leaned forward.

"After all these years, I was reading the paper, an article off the wire. I think they picked it up as a human interest piece. An editor would probably call that a slow news day. For me, it was the biggest news day in a decade."

"A human interest piece?"

"About rose gardens."

"Rose gardens?"

Eric actually rubbed his hands together, jittery with an uncontainable kind of glee.

"Rose gardens, Angela. One in particular. I can pull that picture up in my head any time, it's burned in there: that face, smiling and standing next to a bunch of prickly fucking bushes. Who cares? But they printed thousands of copies, and I saw one. I recognized him right away. I can't forget that face. I see it every night when I go to sleep."

He seemed genuinely crazy now, pacing and rubbing his hands.

"And the caption! It was all so easy—revenge as color-by-number. The world doesn't work like that, Angela, it must have been the hand of something bigger than you or me. Print a picture of a murderer, then put his name right underneath it."

Rocky was getting upset, pulling at his collar, swinging left and right like a pendulum as Eric moved back and forth.

"And do you know what the caption said?" he asked.

"No."

"Guess."

"No."

"Don't worry, I know it by heart. It said:
Local gardener Ted Gray shows off his prize winning roses.
"

Angela just looked at him.

"Do you get it now? Do you understand? Your husband is a rapist and a murderer. He's a hunter, and his prey is little girls. How can you let your daughter live in the same house as him?"

Angela took a deep breath, hoping there was a way to talk him down off the mental ledge he'd worked himself onto.

"Listen, I get it. This…this thing happened, and now you're looking for someone to blame. I don't know why you picked my family, whether it's because of my daughter or something else, but you have to stop. Do you hear me? You have to stop, because we didn't do anything to you. My husband didn't do anything to you."

She summoned the courage and took a step closer to him.

"Come with me. We can go somewhere and get you some help."

"Where does he go on all those trips?" Eric asked.

"Those are for work."

"Then why can't you contact him?"

Angela wasn't sure how he knew about that. She had to stop herself from asking, prevent herself from playing into whatever fantasy he had constructed.