The Turning Season (30 page)

The three of us sit around the kitchen table, put Celeste's cell phone on speaker, and call Aurelia. For a wonder, she's actually in her office and not, at the moment, consulting with a client, so we quickly recount our adventure at the police station. She agrees with our assessment that we had no choice but to explain to Sheriff Wilkerson that the Foucaults attacked Celeste. And she very much likes the idea of using Alonzo to deliver the necessary serum to Ryan.

“But I told Celeste. I can't write the scrip,” I say.

“I can take care of that part,” Aurelia answers. “I know someone who will do me a favor.”

“Prescribing unnecessary drugs?” Bonnie demands. “That seems morally questionable.”

“I'll make the case that they're necessary but, for various reasons, unobtainable through the ordinary channels,” Aurelia replies. “Which has the advantage of being the truth. Don't worry.”

Bonnie sighs and looks weary. When, a few minutes later, we cut the connection, she continues to sit and just stare at the phone.

Celeste watches her a moment and then says, “You hate this.”

Bonnie looks up, some of the usual fire in her eyes. “I would think we
all
hate this.”

“You think Ryan did this terrible thing and he deserves to be punished for it,” Celeste challenges her.

“And you don't?”

Celeste flings her hands in the air. “I think he did a terrible thing for reasons I understand. He did a terrible thing, but he's still
Ryan
. And he's still my friend and I want to help him if I can. I do
not
want him to go to prison. I'd lie for him. I'd set him free if I could. I'd help him leave the state, or leave the country. If you hate me for that, I'm sorry. But I'd do the same thing for you if you murdered somebody.”

I expect Bonnie to retort
I would never murder anybody!
But her fierce eyes grow fiercer and she stares Celeste down. “I believe that, in certain circumstances, any of us can be moved to violence,” she says in a steely voice. “If someone threatened Alonzo's life, for instance, and I had the means at hand, I would kill that person if it was necessary to save my boy. But deliberately seeking a man out to take his life because you believe he does not deserve to live—that's something I can't countenance. Something I can't forgive.”

“Don't you think—” Celeste begins, but Bonnie overrides her.

“If Ryan can decide Bobby Foucault deserves to die, why couldn't Bobby's brother decide you should die? If vengeance is always an acceptable motive for murder,
all
of us will be gunned down at some point. And if we give the individual the power to make those life-and-death decisions—if the single, armed vigilante can take it upon himself to rid the town of monsters—how can we make sure the individual correctly identifies the monsters? Some people would call
you
a monster. So does that give them a right to shoot you on sight?”

Celeste's face is stormy. “No—I don't believe in vigilante justice. I don't think we should all be armed and shooting at people because we don't like them. But this is
Ryan
. And so it's different. I can't explain.”

“Situational ethics,” I say in a muffled voice.

They both look at me. “Well, don't you agree with me?” Celeste demands.

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm so shocked I have no idea what to think. And I don't expect to figure it out anytime soon.”

Bonnie gives a heavy sigh and appears to deflate a little. “In the meantime, there are mouths to feed and people to care for and ordinary days to get through,” she says. “Maybe we can solve this problem tomorrow. It will certainly be waiting for us then.”

I
t's a relief to get out of the house when Joe arrives a little after three, Jinx and Jezebel peering out happily from the backseat of the extended cab. There's a little coolness between Bonnie and Celeste after the argument about Ryan, and I can tell Celeste is thinking it's time for her to return to her own apartment or at least find another place to recuperate. I wonder if I should bring her back to my property for a few days. Surely between the two of us—and Helena and her girls—and Daniel, if he's around—we could fend off the remaining psychotic Foucault brother.

I mention this idea to Joe once we're out of the main traffic of Quinville, not quite to highway W.

“Sure, if you want,” he says. “But I'd like to stay, too, if I can.” He glances over at me, and his smile is warm. “It would be nice to find out what it's like to wake up next to you and not go rushing off to some disaster.”

“Things
have
been pretty exciting with my friends lately,” I agree. I keep my voice light to camouflage the sudden wild excitement of my heart.

“Of course, you're practically running a bed-and-breakfast these days. Not like we'd have much privacy.”

“The doors lock. We'd have privacy.”

“Then let's do it.”

We travel a couple miles without exchanging any more words. Joe is a relaxed driver, his right hand loose on the wheel, his left elbow resting against the door frame. I lean back in my seat and try to convince myself the silence is companionable. But despite his casual pose, I think I feel tension emanating from him, or maybe it's disapproval.

Or maybe I'm the one feeling tense.

“You haven't said what you think about this whole Ryan situation,” I say finally. My voice sounds overloud and almost accusatory. I feel like I have blundered into this conversation, but I don't know how else to begin it.

He gives me a brief glance before returning his attention to the road. “I think it sucks.”

“Bonnie thinks we're wrong to even try to help him,” I say, my words still bald and bumbling. “She thinks there shouldn't even be any thought of mercy for a murderer.”

He nods. “Lot of people feel that way.”

“But how do
you
feel?” I persist. “Will you be mad at me if I do something to help Ryan?”

He gives me another quick glance, switches hands on the wheel, and reaches over to squeeze my fingers, which are knotted together in my lap.

“I think whenever we see someone we love do something terrible, we're faced with an impossible dilemma,” he says quietly. “You can't stop loving people on the spur of the moment. And if you understand why they've done terrible things, it's even harder to turn against them. So it's your job, in a sense, as Ryan's friend, to still believe in him.”

There's obviously a
but
coming, and I wait for it in silence while he collects his thoughts.

“But just because a mother loves her son who's gone out and shot ten people, it doesn't mean that boy shouldn't go to prison,” Joe continues. “It's her job to love him. It's society's job to punish him. I understand that you want to help Ryan, and I'm okay with that. But I think he belongs in jail.”

I turn a little in the seat to get a better look at his face. I'm still holding on to his hand with both of mine. “But he's a shape-shifter. He can't
be
in jail.”

“Why not?”

“Because—because—what happens when he changes shapes? The world goes crazy! The sheriff calls in the FBI, and Ryan gets sent to some secret laboratory in Washington, and suddenly there are doctors and government agents and I-don't-know-who-all swarming all over Quinville, looking for other shape-shifters. We live in
terror
of being discovered, don't you understand that? Discovered and—and—” Bonnie's word comes back to me. “Viewed as monsters. Hunted down and killed, or locked up and experimented on.”

“Pretty scary. I absolutely agree,” he says. “But just because they find Ryan doesn't mean they'll find you.”

“I can't control my shifting! I don't even know when it'll happen! When those FBI agents start snooping around Ryan's life, don't you think they'll start investigating me? And I'll be in the middle of an interrogation and the change will come over me and—oh, you have no idea. This is what my nightmares are made of.”

He squeezes my fingers again then releases me and puts both hands on the wheel. “Maybe it would go a different way,” he suggests. “Maybe the government would protect you. The doctors and scientists would ask permission to study you. They'd see you as—magical. Creatures with phenomenal possibilities. The military would want to hire you to deploy in delicate operations. You could all come out of the shadows and live in the light. Maybe
that's
what would happen instead.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but I think it's more likely that some deranged survivalist would creep out one night and put a bullet in my head because he thinks I'm an abomination.”

“Well, that's about the worst thing in the world that could happen,” he says in a soft voice. “Makes my heart almost stop to think about it.”

“And that's why Ryan can't be in jail,” I finish up.

He nods but doesn't answer. He's turning from 159 onto W, and there's a fresh pothole right at the intersection, which requires a little negotiating. I look out the window and realize with a shock that autumn is almost over. There are a few defiant elms and maples still madly clinging to their scraps of color, but most of the trees have been stripped bare. They stand like grim gray ghosts beneath the unforgiving sky, the wraiths of summer haunting the gloomy season.

Winter soon enough. Winter too soon. But then, I always think it's too soon for winter.

When Joe speaks, it's in that faraway voice people use when they're concentrating on a memory, trying to bring it more clearly into focus. “I never gave it much thought before, but if you were trying to commit the perfect murder, a shape-shifter would be the one to do it,” he says. “There was one time—back when I was on the force—we never could figure out how this crime was committed. How the killer got away. But if the guy had been a shape-shifter—”

I bring my attention away from the trees, back to Joe. “What happened?”

“Couple different people called us one night from the same neighborhood. They'd heard shouting and crashing noises from this one house, like there was a fight going on. Well, my partner and I were only one street away—we got there in, like, two minutes. Kind of a shabby house in a shabby part of town. Bunch of people standing in the yards nearby when we pulled up, pointing at the house in question. We were just going to ask the name of the homeowners when we heard shots fired inside.

“My partner called for backup and I ran up to the house, shouting, ‘Police!' No one came out, no one answered. We waited until a couple other units arrived, then we all went in at the same time, front and back, guns drawn. I was with the group going in through the front, and the minute we opened the door, a couple of animals came streaking out—a cat and a dog, I think, though they went by so fast I really couldn't tell you. Figured they were spooked by the gunshots and wanted out bad.

“We didn't find anything in the house till we got to a back bedroom that had been turned into an office. And there was the body, pooling with blood. So freshly dead you could almost think you could bring him back to life. Gun was on the floor right next to him, but it was clear he hadn't killed himself, 'cause he was shot in the back.”

Joe's quiet a moment before he resumes his story. “We looked through every inch of that house, from the basement to the attic, and we never found the shooter. He was gone, but we couldn't figure out how he could have gotten out without being seen. The back door was chained shut—we had to break it open to get in. All of the windows were locked from the inside. The only way out would have been through the front door—where I was standing from the moment the shots were fired. The shooter was
not
in that house, but there was no way he could have gotten past us.” He glances at me. “Unless he was a shape-shifter.”

I nod. “The cat. Or the dog. He shoots the victim, he changes shape, he runs out the door when you open it. Why would you think to stop him?”

Joe nods. “The perfect crime.”

“Did you ever figure out who he was? The shooter, I mean? If he left the gun behind—”

“We lifted his prints, but they weren't a match for any we had in the system. And they've never turned up again.”

“So you never found out who killed that poor man.”

Joe makes a sound something like a snort. “Well, if ever anyone deserved killing, it was him. We found the most god-awful setup in his basement. Horrifying. Some blankets and some water bowls and a terrible smell of piss and shit and rotted food. There was a chain wrapped around one of the weight-bearing poles in the middle of the basement, with a collar on the end of it. On the floor there were a couple of belts, and a whip—like the kind of whip you'd see in an
Indiana Jones
movie. There were matches and cigarettes and something that, I swear to God, looked like a cattle brand.

“You know, your first thought is, ‘What's all
this
shit for? Is he keeping
animals
down here?' And then you start looking at the size of that collar, and you realize that the food on the floor is in McDonald's wrappers, and you see a pair of blue jeans that are way too small for the body upstairs, and you think, ‘Was he keeping a
person
down here?' And pretty soon the forensics guys are there and they start taking evidence and looking at samples, and they say, Yeah. Yeah, there was a person down here. And you start talking to neighbors and they say, Yeah, used to be a kid who lived here, but they haven't seen him around for a while—a boy, maybe ten or twelve years old. Gosh, it's been a couple of years since they've laid eyes on him.”

By this time, we've traveled all the way down W to the edge of my property. Joe makes a smooth turn onto the gravel, cuts the motor, and twists in his seat to give me a serious look. “And you think—you think—it can't be possible, but this
motherfucker
was keeping his son chained in the basement for
years
. And somehow that kid got free and he killed the son of a bitch and he got out of the house before anybody saw him, and you're glad. You hope he never gets caught. You only wish you could have gotten there sooner, so you could have shot the prick yourself.”

I am staring up at Joe with so much horror on my face that he instantly dissolves into remorse. “Christ, I shouldn't have told you that story. It's a shocker, I know. Worst thing I ever saw when I was on the force—and I saw a lot of bad things.”

I shake my head, but I can't answer. I can't speak. I almost can't breathe.

I suppose there could be two stories so awful, so similar, but I don't think so. I think that was Alonzo's house. I think that was Alonzo's father.

I think it was Ryan who shot him.

He's not just a murderer. He's a serial killer.

*   *   *

I
tell Joe it might take me a couple of hours to mix up the drugs for Ryan, and he agrees to confer with Helena and the girls to see what needs to be done around the house. I head back to my lab, Scottie at my heels, and when I shut the door behind us, I throw the inset lock.

Then I stand in the middle of the room and stare sightlessly at the silver-toned refrigerator that holds my samples and experiments.

Ryan killed Alonzo's father. After somehow learning of Alonzo's existence, he gained admittance to the house, freed the boy and shot the father, probably right in front of Alonzo. That certainly explains why Alonzo has always been so wary of Ryan. Sure, Ryan rescued him, but he hadn't presented himself as any less brutal than his dad.

Maybe murder had not originally been on the agenda. Maybe Ryan had just planned to rescue Alonzo, hoping the two of them would simply vanish into the night, but the dad had come home unexpectedly. There had been an argument, Ryan had snatched up the man's gun—

That doesn't make sense, though. If they'd found Alonzo's dad in the basement, or the hallway, maybe you could make the case that he had arrived inopportunely and Ryan had been forced to kill him just so they could get away. But they found the body in a back room, which argues that Ryan went looking for him. And if I ask Joe, I'm betting I'll learn that the victim didn't own the gun used in the shooting.

I'm betting that Ryan came to the house armed and intending to kill Alonzo's father. Because he thought the man deserved to die.

For the crime of abusing a shape-shifter.

For which he also believed Bobby Foucault deserved to die.

I have no way of knowing if Ryan has encountered other humans that he also brought to justice for similar crimes. But it seems very, very possible to me.