Authors: Eric Rickstad
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T
EST TRIED TO
run on the sidewalks, but it was not possible. If Jon Merryfield was truly going to see his Gregory and Scott, Test could run to their home in five minutes if she pushed it. But if she called ahead now and told them she was Merryfield's assistant and he was running late, their reaction would tell her if Jon was expected by them or not.
She dialed 411 as she hurried. The number was unlisted.
Beneath the snow, the wet sidewalks were frozen and footing was hazardous. She slipped on the icy sidewalks, her heart heaving.
She was two blocks down from the house, across the street from the Village Fare, when she heard a man speaking loudly.
Jon Merryfield.
He stood just outside the light that lit up the area by the Dumpster, speaking into a cell phone.
He strapped a headlamp on his head, then took something from his jacket pocket. Test could not see what it was. Except that it briefly shone black and metallic before he slipped it back into his pocket.
Test ran across the street, slipping and falling as a truck trundled toward her, its headlights blinding her. She scrambled out of the way and got a purchase again as she rose to her feet and ran as swiftly as she could to the back of the Village Fare.
Jon was nowhere to be seen. All that remained were his footprints in the snow. They led straight into the dark woods; woods that were not navigable without the aid of a light.
Quick research had revealed that the thumbtack Test had found in the Merryfields' yard, and the one stuck to the tree behind the restaurant, were used to mark trails in the woods so hunters could find their way to and from their deer stands in the dark. There were bound to be other tacks in the woods. Jon's headlamp would reflect them, so he could find his way easily in the dark.
Without a light, Test would never catch him in. She tried her iPhone light, but it wasn't bright enough. She needed to run all the way back around the woods to the schoolyard, take the long way.
She took off running.
Â
J
ON
WORKED HIS
way in the woods. The going was arduous. It would have been quicker to have gone straight from his house to the destination. But the sender did not want that; and neither did Jon. He could not risk being seen.
The headlamp illuminated the woods a few feet ahead, reflected back to him in tiny fragments by the reflective markers in the trees.
He headed toward a marker, then repeated the search until the next marker glimmered.
He pushed along, branches slapping his face. He shoved his hands into his pockets to try to keep them warm, but the cold steel against his flesh in one pocket only made him colder. Still, he wrapped his hand around it. Its heft was reassuring.
He made his way down a gully and up the opposite bank. It took longer this time than it had the first time. The first time when his heart had raced with such panic for the small window of time he had to do what needed to be done before he would be missed by Bethany in the restaurant.
His heart raced now, but he felt a calm finality spreading through him with each step. It would be over soon. This would cover the ugly truth for good. It had to. He did not care about Jessica. He could not. All he could do was protect and save himself now. Everything was clear.
He saw lights up ahead, sifting through the trees.
He finally came out behind the school, near the back of the parking lot, where this had all begun so many years ago.
The lot was empty. Snow swirled in the pale lamplights.
Then he saw it, off in the shadows. A figure. Him.
Jon turned off his headlamp and walked toward the figure, his legs feeling as if he'd walked a thousand miles. Leaden and sore, yet somehow detached.
His hand wrapped tighter around the cold steel in his coat pocket.
He came to stand a few feet away from the figure, who had now materialized into Randy Clark.
J
ON CLUT
CHED THE
cold steel in his jacket pocket.
“Randall,” he said.
Randy Clark said nothing. He stared at Jon, and even in the poor light Jon could see the watery weakness in the man's eyes. The boy's eyes. The victim's eyes.
“Randall, it's over. Here. Now. This stops. Your threats stop. I haveâ”
“You're ready then? To tell the police what you did?”
Jon shook his head. No. Randall looked over toward the parking lot, where so many years earlier, when he was eight, a GMC pickup had been parked. It was a night like this: snowy and cold. Christmas vacation week. The lot empty except for that truck. Jon had been heading home through the same woods he'd just come through, after having left the Town Arcade, where the Village Fare now stood. The woods had not really been woods then. The trees had been small and scrubby, and because kids walked and biked everywhere, there'd been a clear path. Jon had taken the path that evening, and as he'd passed by the truck he'd looked inside.
Jon shivered.
“That's your choice,” Randall said.
“They'll never believe it. I'm a prominent man. And you. You're what? Jobless? Homeless?”
Jon recalled the time he'd seen Randall at the White Spot. Jon had truly not recognized him. The last time Jon had seen him before that, Randall had been eight years old. At the White Spot he'd been in his twenties. But Randall had recognized Jon. He remembered the word Randall had whispered in his ear to make Jon suddenly understand who this stranger was.
“You should have helped me,” Randall said. He thumped a tight fist against his thigh. His hands were bare. He wore jeans and sneakers and a torn dark denim jacket. “You could have helped me. It was fate I ran into you at that diner in Virginia. A thousand miles from home, ten years later. That was fate. And you spat in its face. You could haveâ”
“I couldn't.” Jon felt the cold steel in his pocket. “And you? You didn't need me. You could have helped yourself, like I did. You could have taken control over your own life. Claimed your life back. Survived. It's the only way. Forget. Separate. Survive. Instead, you played victim.”
Randall snarled, spitting his words: “What the fuck do you know? You fuckingâ” His voice was rising as he pounded a fist against the side of his head.
“No one will believe you,” Jon said. “Even with the photo. It's not proof.”
He started to ease his hand out of his coat pocket.
Randall licked his cracked lips.
“I'll make this go away,” Jon said and started to yank his hand out of his pocket and bring out the only thing that could stop all this.
But Randall, weak as he looked, was fast, and he was on Jon before Jon could finish his move.
Â
T
EST CHAR
GED TOWARD
the two figures grappling in the snowy lot, drew her weapon and shouted: “Stop!”
The smaller of the two men was on top of Merryfield, slapping at him and screaming, crying. “You did this! You did this! You killed her! You killed
me
!”
Test grabbed the man by his hair and hauled him off of Jon. She trained her gun at him.
The man stared up at the muzzle of the gun.
“Do it,” he moaned. “Do it. Please. Please. Just end it.” He broke down, curling in a ball on his side and sobbing wretchedly.
Jon was getting up, trying to hide something in his jacket pocket. Test brought her weapon around on him. “Drop it,” she said.
Jon dropped it.
A black rectangular metallic box.
She kept the gun on Jon as she cuffed the man crying on the ground.
“Hold still,” she said to Jon and went to the box. She opened it, unsure what to think. Unsure what was going on here, but knowing it was much more than she'd ever imagined.
Â
I
T HA
D BEEN
dark by the time Victor strode out of Jon Merryfield's office. He'd stopped by the Canaan Police station to speak with the woman cop, but she had not been in. He'd called and left a message with the state police for Detective North to call him as soon as he could.
Since then, he'd walked about town, too nerved up to go home, trying to get his thoughts straight, and going over his notes to tell the police all of it at one time, collected and calculated. They would press him, and he had to have the story perfect. The memories clear.
Now, as he walked around town, he kept thinking,
It's going to be all right. My boy is going to be all right.
He would reveal all, even if it meant losing Fran and Brad; he'd do it in order to save his son.
He'd confess and when they heard the motive, they'd have someone to investigate, to give reasonable doubt regarding Brad.
The girl had been killed in
Jon's house
after all.
They'd see. They had to.
Victor shivered. The temperature had crashed and the night air felt cold enough to crack glass. The town lay barren.
The frozen sidewalk made the footing treacherous. Victor's feet went out from under him and he fell, cracking an elbow hard on the concrete.
He sat, cradling his elbow. Bewildered.
The ice melted beneath him and the concrete's cold seeped through his jeans. As he reached out for a nearby bench to get support, he heard a scream.
It came violently.
Followed by shouting.
The baying of the wounded.
Victor cocked his head like a dog sensing the distant danger of the enraged master he'd run away from but who now was gaining ground and would find and beat him. But the shouting was not that of a master yelling at his hound. It was that of two men, railing.
And more than that too.
More than heated words, more than anger and threats.
It was wrath. Lunatic. Animal. Incandescent. And it was pain. Feral and unchained.
And it was something else, too, that Victor could taste but could not yet name.
The two voices ruptured the night air with their fury, entangled. They melded into one voice that rose up as if from the earth itself, as if the two voices were two souls trying to rend themselves loose of their purgatory, and only the one whose screams rose above the other could free itself of the hatred that bound it.
The cries were full of blood, and cut into Victor as cleanly as a scalpel between his ribs. He had lived with such shouting as a boy. How his father had howled.
Vic scrambled to his feet.
The screams came louder, no longer that of souls or animals, but humans and their ancient violence.
Victor ran.
He ran as if his father were after him. He ran on the ice with an athleticism that surprised and elated him, as though a last reserve of his youth had been stored up to be tapped now, for this purpose, to reach the voices and stop whatever awfulness was about to unfold.
Fear crowded him with each stride. A pressure so enormous it seemed he might explode into vapor. Still, he ran toward the voices.
He came around the corner and saw it.
Saw them.
Across the street.
On the ground, on the village green. In front of the Civil War cannon. A small crowd circled them, watching. Victor bolted across the street and pushed through the crowd.
Two men struggled on the ground. A knot of limbs as they beat each other.
Jed King and Gregory Sergeant.
The icy ground had gone soft beneath them, turned muddy as a pig sty. The men's fists pounded each other's flesh. A hard fist smashed an eye socket. Split it. Another fist burst open a mouth. Blood misted. Teeth broke and bit. A hand grabbed hair to lift a head and rock it against the ground with the dull thud. Feet kicked groins, stomped on hands. Clothes ripped. Fingers gouged and tore. Blood flowed. It flowed as the voices howled.
Victor could not tell one man from the other. There seemed no separation. It was as though the two men were a conjoined creature of mythology, tired and sick and enraged from having to share the same heart, yet separate minds, and each would rather tear the other apart and die than continue as one.
Or perhaps, it was just the opposite.
Perhaps they were two humans tired of resisting the urge to join, to Âcouple, and what appeared as violence was only a sort of ugly, primal lovemaking.
As if in agreement, one of the creatures shouted, “Fuck!”
Then, “You're killing me!”
No one in the crowd blinked. Larry Branch stood smoking a cigarette as if watching friends bowl at Riverside Ten Pins. Another man stood with his arms folded, shaking his head as if disapproving of boys throwing snowballs at a car. Each face watched with the same look. Not afraid. Not repulsed. Not moved. Resigned. As if what was happening was beyond their control, the arrival of a storm they all knew was coming, and now there was nothing to do but look out the window from the safety of their homes and weather it.
King grabbed Sergeant by the hair and pounded Sergeant's skull against the cannon. Blood sprayed. “Fuck you!” King shouted.
“Stop!” Victor roared.
King cracked Gregory's head against the cannon again.
“Stop!” Victor pleaded. “In the name of God!”
King pinned Gregory beneath him and grabbed a rock. His wet hair like a tangle of seaweed, his eyes lunatic. He raised the rock high above his head. Gregory lay motionless.
“You queer fuck!” King roared.
“Stop!” Victor rushed King, lowering his shoulder as he squared himself, as if to put a hit on a wide receiver, to jar that ball loose, one last time.
He struck King with the whole of his upper body.
King tottered backward.
But he held fast the rock.
As he teetered, he swung the rock.
Hard.
Lightning flashed in Victor's mind. He suddenly felt very warm. Hot.
He heard a far-Âoff sound. The thunder that followed the lightning? It must have been. You could not have one without the other.
If you did, the world no longer made sense.
He heard a thud. Saw the darkness. Collapsing on him with the mighty weight of an ocean wave.
A voice said: “You've killed him.”
Victor did not know to whom or about what the voice spoke, but it made sense.
You've killed him.