Family Murders: A Thriller Page 6

  "I guess it only works if I know you're there," she said out loud. And she did feel better now. The light coming through the uncovered corner of the window was bright and clear and still. Pre-hurricane weather in her experience, but even so, it was a better looking day than she had seen in a long time.

  With a start, she realized it had only been three days since an almost carefree family dinner. She looked down at her husband. In some ways, she had missed him so much, needed him so much. But she had also surprised herself. She had figured out the danger to their child, figured out just how sick the man stalking their family was, and she had overcome her fear and survived. Julie was safe, the house was secure. It was only a stopgap until they could figure out what to do, but as stopgaps went she was proud of it.

  She was proud of herself, and surprised at how her thoughts of Ted had diminished over the past three days. Looking down at him, she thought she would feel relief. Instead she felt…comfortable. She was comfortable now with the idea of confronting Eric Fallows alone. She would do it head-on if she had to.

  Let Ted sleep. There was so much to tell him, and she doubted he would believe half of it. She also doubted her ability to unify the events of the past few days into a cohesive story, one that would make sense to him as it now made sense to her. She needed him to understand the important part: there is a monster out there, one with a penchant for young girls, and he is fixated on our daughter.

  Let him sleep, and she would spend some time thinking about how to explain it all, thinking about what to do. Stepping up had given her authority, but a sense of responsibility came along with it. Ted would be thunderstruck, paralyzed. She had to be ready with their next move.

  She decided to go for a hard run, across the rough terrain on the path behind her house. It was hilly, and the lull of the ups and downs, the mental energy of controlling her breathing, always freed up a part of her mind she couldn't otherwise access. Perversely, these past few days had made finding it easier. She needed that clarity now more than ever.

  Ted was here, Julie was safe, and the bright still air that came only before a storm beckoned to her. There would never be a better time.

  And for protection, well, nothing fazed her as long as she had Rocky.

  Downstairs in the kitchen she found a note:

  "Bet I'm asleep right now. Came home on the red eye hoping to beat the storm. It worked! See you soon. Love, Ted."

  Angela pulled open the sliding glass door, stepped out on the deck, whistled for Rocky, and carefully locked the door behind him. She bent over and tied the key into a shoe lace.

  "Come on, boy." She started walking. Warm-ups usually lasted five minutes, but today she felt loose and ready. Today she couldn't wait. Before she hit the edge of the yard, she was running.

  The trail started out flat. It was slick and colorful with the reds and oranges of damp and fallen leaves. After perhaps a quarter of a mile the hills started, small at first, bigger later. The entire area behind the house was owned by the city, but undeveloped. It extended for a few miles and then, at some invisible line, became state forest. The trees behind her house went on farther than she could ever hope to walk. She knew she should be scared to be out here, even with Rocky, but this was her territory. Besides, she had never met anyone who could keep up with her cross-country on terrain like this. Angela didn't know where it came from, but it had always been like that for her—when she wanted to, she could really fly.

  Right then she kept it slow and steady, searching for that hypnotic pace. Rocky lumbered along next to her, tongue out, occasionally shooting out left or right in an attempt to corral unseen animals. At the most distant part of her usual run, the trail came around a corner and made a straight, level two-hundred-yard run just below the lip of a plateau. The path had been artificially cut level into a grade that was too steep to walk on. The result was a vertical dirt and clay wall on one side of the trail and a steep drop off into some tree tops on the other.

  Coming around the corner, running along the straight-away with dry leaves curling up into the air in her wake, Angela felt better than she had in a long time. She laughed out loud. A few yards ahead of her, Rocky barked in return. Then the bark turned into that low rumble and Rocky came to sliding halt.

  Angela stopped and looked down at her dog. "What is it, boy?"

  She looked up at the trail again, ready to scan the area ahead, but any kind of search was a moot point.

  There he was, standing in the center of the path. She hadn't so much as heard the leaves rustle. Even at fifty yards, Eric was easy to pick out. He was wearing a dark leather jacket and a pair of bright pink sunglasses.

  It seemed impossible to just appear on this section of path, but Angela quickly figured he had come from above, sliding down the incline and then jumping down from the top of the vertical cut into the hill. She realized just as quickly that she couldn't escape the same way: it was effectively a wall over ten feet tall, one made of a compressed, crumbly kind of brown clay, the type that would give way at her first handhold.

  But he couldn't get back out that way either. A quick glance over the steep side reinforced her first impression. As far as drops went, it was probably not survivable. This section of the path was effectively a funnel, one way in and one way out. There was only one way to go—she had to turn around, head back, run away. Her body turned halfway, and then Angela made a decision. She had been on the run from this man after their very first meeting, and ever since.

  No more. Because there was one other direction she could go. Forward.

  "Come on, Rocky." She started walking. Rocky didn't really need any encouragement. She could feel the change in his demeanor, from playful to something like human fury. She hadn't known dogs could feel that way, had certainly never seen it in Rocky, but could feel it radiating off him. Could see it, too. He was usually so clumsy for a dog, like a perpetual teenager who doesn't know how long his limbs are. In an instant he had become lithe and loose and powerful. Each footfall seemed measured, streamlined. He was, she realized, stalking.

  "Good boy," she said.

  Rocky didn't look up. He kept his eyes down-range, and Angela realized she should do the same. One foot fell in front of another. She started to approach. Eric's entire body was so still, it was easy to believe he had never moved at all.

  That he had always been here.

  Behind the pink plastic, his face was unreadable. When Angela was twenty yards out, she started talking.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked, calmly as she could.

  He said nothing.

  "What are you doing here, Eric?"

  Using his name at least got a small movement. He smiled.

  "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."