Authors: Eric Rickstad
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T
EST AND
C
LAUDE
lay in bed, each eating from their own pint of ice cream: vanilla for Test, Chubby Hubby for Claude.
Test sighed.
“You need to let things go,” Claude said.
“I just wonder,” Test said.
“Don't.” Claude dug his spoon into his ice cream, pried loose a chunk of chocolate. It popped out onto the bedspread. He plucked it up and slipped it in his mouth. Licked his fingers.
“No wonder our kids have such refined manners,” Test said and slipped a spoon of vanilla ice cream into her mouth. She sighed again. “It's just . . .”
“Just what?” Claude said. He offered her a bite of his ice cream. She refused it.
“Brad. He never once broke. Never once has he admitted guilt. It's not normal for a kid his age not to break. He's not some hardened criminal. Usually the guilt of something like that destroys a person and forces them to confess. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence.”
Claude scooped out a piece of chocolate and tipped the spoon to her lips.
She waved him off. “And Brad's mother, she seemed so certain he didn't do it.”
“That kid threw his life away,” Claude said. “That's his fault. ÂPeople throw their lives away every day. No one can stop them. He got what he deserved. We all do. Plus, she's his mother. She has to believe in him, even when no one else does, against all evidence. The mind can convince itself of anything.”
“But the heart,” Test said. “A mother knows her child's heart. Doesn't she? Don't I know my children's hearts.”
“Maybe. All the things I kept from my parents. My mother would roll over in her grave.” Claude wedged a scoop of ice cream free. Offered it to her. “Almost gone.”
She waved him off. He ate it, slipped the spoon around the edge of the bottom of the pint, getting every last bit of ice cream.
“Last bite,” he said.
“You eat it.”
“It's yours. Open wide.”
Test surrendered. She licked the ice cream off the spoon, smiling. “Mmmm. That is good.”
“Told you,” Claude said. He pulled her close so she rested her head on his shoulder. He rested his hand on her belly. “I'm sorry nothing's taken,” he said.
She nodded, though her mind was still on the verdict.
“Would you like to try?” Claude said, his voice tender.
“No,” Test said, “I just want to lie here with you.”
From her bedroom down the hall, Elizabeth cried out in her sleep. “Mama. Mama!”
Then she quieted.
In the new silence, Test felt the tears come; tears that had nothing to do with the ugliness and meanness in the world, and everything to do with the kindness and hope she had the good fortune to have in her life.
Â
F
ORGET.
Separate.
Survive.
He lay awake. The room dark. His breath thin.
His fingers clenched tight, as though holding the handle of a hammer.
He'd lain in bed for hours. Days. Months. Tormented.
The night ate at you. Its darkness brought ill thoughts that rattled in your head like old chains so you could not hear the clear thoughts of daylight when you felt almost rational, almost sane. Almost normal.
In the daylight he tried to busy himself, and thoughts of the girl slid far into the back of his mind as unnoticeably as pocket change slipping between the cushions of a couch.
Forget.
Separate.
Survive.
But at night.
Thinking. Thinking thinking thinking. Imprisoned by thoughts.
It had started with the first time he'd seen the boy's arrogant mug splashed across the front regional sports page. Week after week. After week. He'd seen it. The smiling golden boy with the perfect life. Not a care in the world. Even without his name splashed all over, there was no doubt whose son he was. Quotes from his smug father polluted the articles with boasts and “thank the Lords” for their good blessings. It was unbearable. Something had to be done. The father needed to pay, endure his own living hell.
So he'd come across the river, to get close to the father, who tricked the world so he could live a sick, blessed life, prideful, gloating about his son, to anyone who would listen.
He'd gotten close to the father as his plan began to take root in his mind.
He began to follow the son, who was the way to destroy the father.
That's when he'd seen the two of them together.
The son and the girl. A girl clearly too young for the son.
Another victim of this sick family.
The glorious articles about the boy that never made mention of statutory rape.
He followed the son and the girl. Studied them. Learned their private routine, their secret places and times to meet. Inside and out.
He watched as the boy made out with her in the woods behind the school. Fucked her.
Not a care in the world.
He'd thought of killing the son, taking him form Victor.
But no. At the library, where he'd tracked the girl on many evenings, he'd studied the size and shape of her head from a few computers over; put to memory where her blood pulsed at the temple; at the very front edge where her hair went downy.
He'd studied how beef cattle were slaughtered by the single blow of skilled slaughterer's sledge. Clean kills were not about force. They were about placement.
Thwack.
The sweet spot. The cattle may kick and drool when they went down.
But they did not get back up.
He'd practiced the blow on pumpkins he'd picked because they were the size of her head, stuck them on a stick about her height of five feet. With a magic marker he'd drawn a circle the size of her temple. He'd kept the hammer at his side, as if a gunslinger. Then yanked it up, snapped it back and cracked it down. Hard. In the temple.
Thwack.
With practice, the marks on the pumpkins caved as the hammer drove into the pulp. He'd not wanted to hit her twice. He'd known he did not have it in him. He'd not wanted her to suffer. He was not cruel. He had not wanted to cause her pain. He'd wanted it over as quickly as possible. In an instant. Humane. Merciful. He had not wanted to scare her. Or to torture her. He had not wanted her to
know
.
But she had known.
The flashlight had blinded her. But she'd moved just enough to see the hammer. See his face. She'd looked into his eyes. She'd known. For an instant he'd almost not done it. Then. Quick. Clean. A trapper finishing off the trapped.
Thwack.
If there had been any other way.
But there hadn't been.
She'd been the only way.
A sacrifice.
So he'd told himself then.
So he told himself now.
Except now it was not so easy to think of her as that: a sacrifice.
Not at night.
She'd been a girl. An innocent. Used, by him. For his own means. Not any different from the way the father had used him. That is what stung most.
In that instant of striking her, he'd felt an unexpected, retching pull from deep inside him. He had thought his soul had been torn from him long ago in a truck parked behind the school; but as the hammer met her skull and she'd stood for an instant looking at him in disbelief, trying to speak but only garble and blood spewing from her mouth, he'd felt as though a grappling hook had been affixed behind his heart, and an invisible rope that led from it, through the center of him, had been given a savage yank and the hook had ripped through him, ripped him open, splayed apart his ribs and pulled everything out of him. Everything.
He'd felt as though God himself had been ripped out of him. And he knew in that instant that he'd had his soul all along. That it had not been taken from him by the father. It may have been buried beneath his pain and isolation, but it had been there if he'd been willing to excavate. And he'd known, as she'd crumpled to the floor, that a soul could never be stolen by acts committed against you, but only lost in acts you committed against others. All along he'd thought vengeance would free him. Would bring him the happiness he had never known.
Instead, vengeance had enslaved him. It could never bring peace or freedom. Only ruin.
Forgiveness of a wrong exacted against you was the only act that brought freedom from those who'd harmed you.
He lay in bed now, feeling as though he were buried deep in the ground, so much weight on his body, his flesh encased in darkness. She'd seen him. And he'd thought he could bear it, and believed he could have if the father were alive to suffer the indignity and humiliation of his star son imprisoned for murder. But the father was dead. He'd been spared. It had been a sacrifice made in vain.
Forget.
Separate.
Survive.
He needed to split himself from his pain.
Forget.
Separate.
Survive.
He was safe from ever being caught. After speaking to the policewoman, an agreement had been struck with the father's other victim: For one man to forget who he might have seen leaving the creamery that night, in exchange for another man never mentioning what had happened to either of them as boys. A willingness between two men to accept a sacrifice now that the other man knew, after they'd fought in the school lot that night, that he'd killed the girl.
The father's bragging had revealed his son was home alone with his beloved playbook, he'd acted spontaneously, knowing the babysitter was alone too, feeling as if the window of time he was given was a gift granted by God.
Forget.
Separate.
Survive.
But he could not forget. Could not separate. He was no longer strong enough. Had never been strong enough.
“Help me,” he murmured in the darkness, not knowing to whom he spoke, only knowing that it was not to God.
God was beyond his reach.
“Help me.”
He opened his eyes to the dark room.
There was no one there.
He was alone.
As he'd been since that night in the truck.
He thought of the father, who'd died a hero, escaping the torment meant for him.
What kind of God spared such a man?
He could bear the pain he'd made for himself no longer.
He picked up the phone and dialed.
A woman answered. She sounded as if she'd been crying.
“Hello?” she said.
“Detective Test. This is Randall Clark. Do you have a moment?”
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While I am sure to forget someone and be rightfully taken to task for it, I will try this time to thank all who've encouraged and supported my writing. My lovely wife Meridith, of course. My daughter Samantha, especially for her smiles and hugs. My mother. My sisters: Beth, Judy, and Susan. Jake Tobi. Bryanna Allen-ÂRickstad. Gary Martineau. Dave Stanilonis. Libby and Herb Levinson. Ben Wilson. Todd and Diane Levinson. Bill and Mary Wilson. Dan Myers, Dan Orseck, Tom Isham, Roger and Susan Bora, Mark Saunders, Lailee Mendelson, Alan DeNiro. Rob O'Donovan. Jeff Racine. Mike and Janice Quartararo. Stephen and Carol Phillips. Eric Weissleder. Chris Champine. Dave and Heidi Bouchard. Jamie Granger. Jim Lepage. Phil Monahan. David Huddle and Tony Magistrale. Jamie and Stephen Foreman. Paul Doiron. Steve Ulfelder. Roger Smith. Hank Phillippi Ryan. Jake Hinkson. Drew Yanno. Tyler McMahon. Howard Mosher. Rona and Bob Long. And, of course, Philip Spitzer and Margaux Weisman.
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If you loved
LIE IN WAIT
read Eric Rickstad's
New York Times
bestseller
another thriller set in Canaan, VT.
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O
CTOBER 3
1, 1985
U
NDER THE DIM
porch light, the child's gruesome mask looked real, as if molten rubber had been poured over the poor thing's skull and melted the flesh, the features hideous and deformed.
The woman caught her breath and shrank back, the bowl of candy nearly slipping from her hand.
What kind of mother lets a young child wear such a grotesquerie,
the woman wondered.
And where are the child's parents?
Sometimes, parents who drove their kids to these better neighborhoods waited in their cars as they sipped beer from cans and prodded kids too young for Halloween to
Go on up and get your goodies. Grab Mommy a big handful.
But the woman didn't see any adults or vehicles at the shadowy curb.
She stooped to better see the child's mask.
“And what are we supposed to be?” she said.
“Dead.”
The child's voice was reedy and phlegmy, genderless.
The woman searched the child's mask, unable to tell where the mask ended and the child's face began. There seemed to be no gaps around the unblinking eyes; the irises, as black as the pupils, wet and animal, swam in the oddly large eye whites.
“You're very scary,” the woman said.
“You're scary,” the child said in its strangled voice.
“Me?” the woman said.
The child nodded. “You're a monster.”
“I am, am I?”
“Mmm. Hmmm.”
The woman started to laugh, but the laugh died in the back of her throat, gagged on a sharp bone of sudden, inexplicable dread. She looked over the child's shoulder, toward the street, which was quiet and still and dark.
Where were all the children from earlier, so ecstatic with greed
?
“There's no such thing as monsters,” the woman said.
“Mmm. Hmm.”
“Who says?”
“My mom.”
“Oh? And who's your mom?”
“You.”
“I see. And who told you I was your mom?”
“My mom.”
A greasy sickness bubbled in her stomach. The dread. Irrational. But mounting. Her blood electric. She reached back to grip the doorknob as blood thrummed at her temples.
A child shrieked. The woman flinched and looked up as a pair of kids in black capes floated along the sidewalk and melted back into the darkness.
Wait! Come back!
the woman wanted to scream.
She looked down at the child again. It held something in its hand now: something gleaming. A knife. The blade long and slender. Wicked.
The woman held out the bowl of candy.
“Take all you want,” she croaked, “and go.”
The child's black eyes stared.
The woman's eyes caught the silver glint of the knife blade as the child jabbed it at her belly.
“Jesus!” she cried. “You little shiâ” But she could not finish. Pain cleaved her open, turned her inside out. Her hand slipped from the doorknob, and the candy bowl clattered to the porch.
Oh God.
She clutched her bellyâÂtoo terrified to lookâÂfeeling a warm stickiness seep between her fingers.
The child drove the knife blade clean through her hand, and the woman howled with pain. The child plunged the knife again, just above the waistband of the woman's jeans and yanked upward.
Oh God.
She was being . . .
. . . unzipped.
She staggered backward, crumpling in the foyer.
The child stepped into the house and shut the door with a soft
click.
Its face hovered above the woman's. The woman reached up, clutched the mask's rubbery skin. Pulled. The mask would not come off. She dug her fingers in. Clawed. The mask stretched. The knife sliced. She tore at the mask, gasping. The child had been right.
Monsters did exist.