Stutter Creek (3 page)

Kurt was infuriated, but he allowed her to come back to him on the condition she would give the kid up anyway, just as soon as it was born. Sherry had been a very good prostitute. Between the two of them, they’d been able to live just the way he’d always envisioned. Sleep all day, party all night. That’s all he wanted. No way he was going to support the both of them plus a kid.

So Sherry had agreed. But once the baby was born Sherry changed. Not only did she stop partying with him, she stopped whoring for him. She became useless.

Danny was almost a year old when Sherry went missing.

By the time Children’s Protective Services got involved, even Kurt had forgotten where he’d buried her body.

Someone had alerted CPS that Danny’s mother hadn’t been seen in a while, and they had paid him a visit, with police in tow, before he could get rid of his lab.

The caseworker had sat across from him in prison and read the report to him. They had discovered Danny in his crib, naked and caked with feces. The back of his head was flat from lying on his back constantly. They said it would take months to heal the bedsores on his malnourished little body.

After hearing the caseworker’s report, Carol Jones, the prosecutor, had made it clear that she was making it her mission to get Kurt as much prison time as possible. It was because of her that he’d finally been forced into sobriety for the first time since he was twelve years old.

He didn’t like that. Not one little bit. The world was one ugly damn place without the haze of drugs. That’s why she had to pay. Kurt had lain on his cot night after night writhing in cold, clear-eyed agony. He’d been stoned all his life for a reason. He didn’t like the world when he was sober. Stoned, he could tolerate it, barely.

But she would pay. He would see to that. Carol Jones may have gotten him locked away, but he’d had five years to develop his plan of revenge. She’d made it her mission to get him as much prison time as possible, so Kurt had made it his mission to kill one girl for every year he’d spent behind bars. And he intended to make certain she knew they were all dead because of her. Carol Jones hadn’t seen the last of Kurt Graham, not by a long shot.

Chapter Four

Purse gripped tightly in her lap, Beth sat in the folding chair with her ankles crossed and her eyes downcast. She still couldn’t believe she was actually attending a grief session. Cindy had offered to come with her, but in the end, Beth thought she would do better with people who
didn’t
know she was once the epitome of calm, centered, self-control.

After introducing herself to the group and listening to all of their introductions in return, she said, “All I want to know is whether anyone else has experienced . . . nightmares.”

She glanced around the circle of chairs to gauge their reactions, but most of the faces were blank. Some of them looked away or studied their laps or their shoes. So Beth continued, “I expected depression and sadness, maybe even guilt. But these dreams—”

They all began to talk at once. It was as if a dam had suddenly opened. Dalton, the grief counselor, could barely contain the outburst. Apparently, everyone had something to tell.

The lady in the red velour jogging suit said, “When my son died of a drug overdose, I had such vivid nightmares of him wandering lost through the house that I would sometimes awaken to find myself in another room, trying to catch him before he left again . . . it got so bad that my husband started sleeping on the sofa so I wouldn’t try to go outside.” Obviously holding back tears, she added, “I never walked in my sleep before. Not even as a child.”

Beth wanted to ask her how long it went on, but someone else was speaking.

It was the man in the Harley-Davidson tee shirt: “My Sue was killed by a drunk driver. She was a teetotaler, a Christian woman. We prayed together on our knees beside the bed every night before we went to sleep. Every night!” His voice broke as he held out his arms for Beth to see. “I had one tattoo while she was alive,” he said. “From my stint in the Navy.” Now, both his arms were covered from his wrist to the edge of his short-sleeved tee. “All these tats are memorials to her.” He pointed to one that appeared to be some sort of demon. “That thing was in my dreams a lot. I think it wanted me to find that drunk and kill him.” His bloodshot eyes were weary, watery. “He only got probation.”

He pointed to his other arm. A heavenly angel with blue eyes adorned his forearm. “This is my Sue. She’s still with me, too. In my dreams.” He looked away, an expression of shame crossing his face. “She wouldn’t want me to kill anyone.” Then he glanced hard at Dalton as if to say, I know we’ve resolved this already, but she asked.

Beth wanted to wrap her arms around him, around them both. But another man was speaking, a young man by the name of Jared. “My daughter, Taylor,” he whispered. “Leukemia. She was five. I’ll never let her go, dreams or no dreams. My wife left me. She couldn’t take the screaming. My screaming. The cancer threatens my little girl every night in my dreams. I can’t save her. I’ll never be able to save her.” He dissolved into his chair in tears and Beth
did
go to him, she couldn’t help it.

She knelt and placed her arms around him. He was like one of her students in need of comfort. Beth didn’t know the group protocol, but she knew the emotion. He held on to her and cried. Someone slipped a chair underneath her as she crouched beside him, and then she knew it was okay. She knew she would be okay, too.

If this poor man can keep on fighting, then so can I, she told herself. It isn’t like I lost a child. At least mine happened in the correct order: parents are supposed to die before children. Millions of people experience it everyday.

Finally, that one simple fact gave her a tremendous measure of comfort
.
Just knowing she wasn’t alone.

She called Cindy on the way home. “You were right. I’m not going crazy. It turns out that everything I’m experiencing is perfectly normal. In fact, Dalton said he’d be more surprised if I
wasn’t
having bad dreams. You know, seeing as how the two most important men in my life deserted me, so to speak. And then Abby—I keep dreaming about my little blond girl disappearing—well, she basically has, hasn’t she?”

“Yes,” Cindy agreed. “Italy is a long distance from here. I’m just glad you’re feeling better. Are you sure you’re ready to be totally alone, though?”

Beth assured her she was. Then she went straight home and loaded up the car.

She locked up the house and was almost overwhelmed with a tremendous feeling of melancholy. There was no one to know if she returned or not. The click of the deadbolt on the front door was very loud in the tiled entry. She gave herself a little shake to dislodge the blues, and then she turned off the kitchen radio, straightened her spine, marched out to the garage and slung her purse into the passenger seat of the ’69 Camaro. It had been her graduation gift from her father so many years earlier—a classic, even then—and they had spent many happy hours together as he taught her to care for it and keep it running. He always joked that she was the son he’d never had.

After a stop at the grocery store, she was finally on the road.

Streaking through the night like a flash of blue lightning on wheels, she glanced at the speedometer. Eighty. Slowly, she eased her foot off the Camaro’s accelerator. Her dad always said she had lead in her heel and ball bearings in her butt. The memory made her smile, but it also made her recall how many times the two of them had made this trip together.

She wiped away a sneaky tear sliding down her cheek, but it was too late. Once the tears got started, more followed. And more. And still more, until she was blubbering and leaking like a forgotten faucet.

Everywhere she went, everything she did, triggered memories of her father, or her husband, or her daughter. She felt abandoned, a
middle-aged orphan. The thought did not comfort her.

It occurred to Beth that the best part of her life might now be over. Both of her parents were gone, her only child was living in another country, and her spouse of a quarter century had simply tossed her out with the trash. She tried to combat it, but suddenly she was completely overcome. She felt old, alone, and useless.

The blubbering turned to sobbing, which turned to shaking, and then the shaking became so bad that her foot jerked on and off the accelerator. She tried to keep it steady, but trying only made it worse. She was on the verge of hysteria.

The on and off motion of her foot made the little car buck like a mechanical bull in need of a tune up. Anyone seeing the car juddering down the highway would swear the driver was three-sheets-to-the-wind. Or having some sort of medical emergency.

Beth began to wonder if she
was
having some sort of breakdown. Maybe the grief group had been a bad idea. All those emotions . . .

The shoulder of the highway wouldn’t stay put. Every few seconds, she would veer onto the shoulder and then back onto the highway. Her tires would kick up loose gravel and she would yank the steering wheel back toward the road. When she couldn’t seem to control it, Beth began to worry that she would overreact and wrench the wheel so sharply that it would cause her to roll.

That’s what finally helped her get her emotions in check. She took a deep breath. Her foot stopped spasming on the accelerator, her sobs tapered off to hiccups, and the hiccups replaced the shakes, at least for the most part.

Frightened at the ferocity of her mini-breakdown, Beth reached for the bottle of water she’d bought at the grocery just before leaving town. Her throat was parched from all the sobbing, but the bottle had fallen to the floor during her wild, bucking ride.

She checked her rearview mirror and prepared to stop and look for the bottle. Applying the brakes and downshifting carefully, Beth glanced in the rearview one more time. These gravelly shoulders could be dangerous. But she really needed a drink of water. Hopefully, she’d gotten the hysteria out of her system. She felt guilty for falling apart. She also felt guilty for thinking it was easier to lose a parent than a child or a spouse like some of the others in the grief group. Then she felt guilty for even presuming to know how horrible it must be to lose a child or a spouse. In short, she just felt damn guilty.

Dalton had said what she was feeling was natural, called it “survivor’s guilt.” She’d heard of that, but it had always been in relation to things like war or plane crashes. Beth hoped the counselor knew what he was talking about, because he had said it would get better. He said not to lose hope, because,
eventually
, it would get better.

At last, she was completely stopped. The sound of her tires crunching on gravel was very loud in the still night.

She pulled out the little knob to engage the Camaro’s emergency flashers just as her fingers found the smooth curve of the plastic water bottle under the seat. She opened the screw top and took a long fluid gulp. Then she rolled the still-cool bottle across her burning cheeks. Crying always made her face flame and her nose stuff up. She felt calmer but still miserable. Rather than being a comfort, it was as if she’d just realized that she had stopped in the middle of nowhere, alone.

It’s like a badly written soap opera, she thought. No one should have to go through this alone.
Should have had more children, then maybe one of them would still be nearby.
But of course, she didn’t fault her daughter for returning to her own life after the funeral. In fact, she had encouraged it. Beth couldn’t stand to see the hurt in her grown-up little girl’s eyes each time her father was mentioned. Seeing him at the funeral had brought it all to the surface again. Out of necessity, and perhaps a healthy dose of self-preservation, the hurt she herself felt had been put on hold.

Maybe that’s what is coming out now—the pain of seeing Sam again
. Just seeing him sitting there in the pew on the other side of Abby, knowing that his young lover was waiting for him at home, had caused a marrow-deep ache that came from the knowledge that this, burying a parent, was what the vows they had taken had been all about. But that didn’t matter to Sam.
She
no longer mattered to Sam.

Closing her eyes, Beth leaned back in her car seat and took several deep breaths to make sure the panic had truly subsided. The outside air was much cooler than it had been when she’d left West Texas at lunchtime. Back home, on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert, it had been seventy-one degrees, even in January.

But now she was nearing the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. There was a threadbare cover of snow on the shoulder of the highway, much deeper in the roadside ditches. The thin coverlet became a fluffy comforter across the darkening fields, quilting the foliage beneath the snow into patchwork shapes of light and dark. The air was moist, but no moisture was currently falling. Night was falling. She had forgotten how quickly darkness took hold in the mountains.

As the moon rose, the snow began to shine. It was beautiful, shimmering faintly, softly reflecting both the scant moonlight and the Camaro’s headlights. It made the entire countryside glimmer like a mirror wrapped in white silk.

Beth screwed the lid back onto the water bottle and rolled it gratefully across her burning cheeks and forehead one last time before placing it back into the drink holder. Then she opened her eyes and looked directly into the looming face of a small boy in an old-fashioned cap.

She screamed.

He was standing near the front of the Camaro like a little ghost, staring dully into her eyes from beneath the brim of his slouchy, too large hat.

Her hands flew up to her face. She wanted her right hand to engage the gearshift, but she couldn’t quite make it do that. Both hands were frozen over her eyes. They would not obey her.

The boy tapped the passenger’s side window. Beth looked; she had no choice. His face was almost touching the glass.

She might’ve screamed again, but there was no air. Her breath was stuck somewhere in the back of her throat. She stared into his eyes.