Safer (31 page)

When they’re finished, the carolers smile and pass their wishes to me as they file one by one out of the room. They’re all wearing their scarves and hats and mittens, as though moving about a neighborhood, stopping on wintry doorsteps. One guy has sweat running down his face.

I wait for the last of them to clear the doorway, then step inside. The room is dark except for the flickering light of the muted television mounted on the wall. It’s quiet except for the occasional beep from a machine beside the bed. The distant sound of the carolers starts up again in another room.

The old man in the bed looks like a pile of bones wrapped in tissue paper. His eyes are open, but he doesn’t appear to be looking at anything. His mouth is slack.

Van Stockman’s father has taken a hard ride downhill since I last saw him. Two weeks ago, the man was sitting up in his easy chair, growling at strangers. Eight years ago, he was still on the police force. He can’t be more than seventy years old.

Is it cancer? Cancer and five other terminal diseases? What ever is killing him, it’s killing him.

“Captain Stockman?”

In the dimness, I can see him blink. After a moment, his head sags toward the sound of my voice.

I walk over to the bed. One of his hands clutches the railing. The other rests on his bloated stomach. Laced in his wasted fingers is a crucifix on a rosary. He looks up at me with dull, sunken eyes.

I nod. “Merry Christmas, sir.”

He says something, but his voice is little more than a rasp. When I lean forward, he lifts his hand from the railing, gestures limply toward the roll- around table beside the bed. There’s a drink bottle half filled with water, the words
Clark Falls Mercy General
stamped on the side. I put down my coat, pick up the bottle, and hold the straw against the old man’s lips.

He sips. Some of the water slips from the corner of his mouth, following a crease in his neck all the way down to the pillow. I put the bottle back on the table.

Clair Mallory’s father clears his throat. “You’re the reporter.”

“That’s right.” He knows me on sight after all. He just doesn’t know who I am. “I’m the reporter.”

He coughs. It sounds like a shovel blade scraping wet earth. His eyes move to the ceiling. Clods of mud shift in his chest as he breathes. “Hell you want?”

From my coat pocket, I take out the small digital voice recorder I bought at the drugstore on my way here. Ironically, it’s exactly the kind of tool a legitimate reporter might use. Brandon Mallory’s grandfather watches me. His eyes move to the small red light that blinks on when I press the record button.

“I’m here to ask you about a man named James Webster,” I tell him. “He used to live across the street from your daughter.”

Stockman looks at me.

“James Webster’s wife reported him missing eight years ago. You signed off on the paperwork. Do you remember?”

His eyes seem to focus for a moment, then drift back to the ceiling.

“James Webster, sir. Thirty-four Sycamore Court. Right across from Clair and Roger. And Brandon.”

I hear beads click faintly. The old man’s rosary hand moves and falls still.

Surely what I’m thinking can’t be possible, and yet, in this moment, I know that my darkest speculation is true. It’s almost as if the old man has been waiting for me. For this.

“You remember,” I say. “Don’t you?”

Stockman exhales. His breath hitches and clogs on the way out. On impulse, I reach out and take his other hand. I stand by his bed, looking down at him, already half shrouded in hospital sheets.

His skin is cool. His knuckles feel like marbles under silk. Somewhere, in the physical connection between us, I can feel what this dying man needs. If the world were right, I’d be the priest from his church. Or even the hospital chaplain.

But it’s only me.

“Tell me what happened to James Webster.”

Stockman looks at the recorder. For a moment, he seems transfixed by its patient red light.

Beads click.

The crucifix moves: three weak taps, the cross barely lifting, dragging the soft fabric of the gown along with it.

“We put him in the woods,” he says.

They say an old dog can sense when the end is near.

Maybe Gaylon Stockman has been clinging to the instincts that compelled him, as a young man, to swear himself into service of the common good. Maybe he realizes that he’s tethered to a stake and looking his wolf in the jaws.

I tell myself that I’ve done him a favor. I’ve given him permission to cut himself free before the wolf tears into his belly.

The truth is, I’ve only tricked a frightened man into telling me a secret. His wolf is hungry.

The victorious warrior wins first.

“I made them wait,” he tells me.

For two years, they knew what James Webster had done. Every volunteer from the search party had been interviewed as part of the original investigation, and Webster had been cleared along with everyone else. But then, at some point during that first terrible summer—after Brandon had been found and Clair Mallory had taken her own life—the neighborhood raccoons had gotten into the Webster family’s garbage.

“God forgive what I did to that man,” Stockman says, and at first I assume he’s talking about James Webster. Then I realize he’s talking about Roger. “But I made him wait.”

The old man looks toward the opposite corner of the room while he’s talking, as if watching an old dusty slide show over there. He can’t speak more than a few words without running out of breath, and he clicks the morphine button like a ticket counter. At some point the pain steals his clarity; he begins to mix up his facts. He loses his place, repeats himself. Sometimes his oldest daughter is alive. Sometimes she’s gone.

Brandon is always gone. Always twelve.

And it’s always raccoons that get into the garbage.

That was how Roger found a school paper with Brandon’s name on it. Sometimes it’s a shoe, or a pair of underwear. Stockman tells this part of the story a handful of times, and each time, the damning evidence changes. But it’s always the raccoons who find it.

For two years, they’d known. For two years, Roger had lived across our circle from the man he believed had murdered his son. Two years watching. Two years waiting.

“Rodge, he kept tabs on that son of a bitch.” Stockman finds the strength to nod. “You can believe that. God knows he had to do something.”

I hear Myrna Webster’s voice:
He wanted me to be sure nothing had happened to the son of a bitch.

“Couple years in the clear, the son of a bitch starts driving across town, middle of the day. Watching schoolyards. You see?”

What I see, when I close my eyes, are Pete and Melody Seward, walking up a slope, their faces like masks.

By the time he’s finished talking, I would swear that the old man’s face has changed.
We put him in the woods.
It’s almost as if a mask has fallen away. Beneath, he looks almost at peace. His strength is spent, and he looks grateful to rest.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself when I hear the door to the room close behind me.

I turn expecting a nurse and see my own folly.

Van Stockman must be off duty. He’s wearing jeans and a flannel coat. He turns from the door, one hand still on the lever, eyes black beneath his brow.

The man beside him wears a suit and an overcoat. His tie is loose, collar unbuttoned. I can see the dull gleam of a gold badge on his belt. I don’t need to see his face to know that I’m not the victorious warrior.

“Good news,” Detective Harmon tells me. “We found the guy who broke into your house.”

BEFORE CUFFING MY HANDS together in front of me, Harmon looks at Van Stockman.

Van Stockman is busy watching his dying father. After a minute, he looks at the floor. Shakes his head.

Harmon puts a hand on his neck. “Okay.”

I feel like I’m floating. I wouldn’t know my feet were touching the floor if I didn’t look down. While I’m looking down, Detective Harmon snaps the cuffs on my wrists and squeezes until they bite.

“Am I under arrest?” My voice sounds distant and muffled in my ears, as if I’m underwater.

“Something like that.” He grips the chain connecting the handcuffs together and applies subtle pressure. The pain brings me straight back to Earth, almost all the way to my knees.

Harmon leads me a few steps and stops at the door. He pockets my voice recorder, turns to Van Stockman, and says, “Take your time.”

Van Stockman hasn’t stopped staring at me. He looks like he wants to do things. Things that will make Timothy Brand look like he tripped on a flower and fell into a pile of pillows.

“Van.”

Stockman finally breaks the glare.

Harmon nods at him.

With that, Van Stockman takes a long breath and lets it out slowly. He turns and approaches the bed.

“Pop,” I hear him say, taking the old man’s hand.

I hear a buzz, like an insect trapped in cotton. Harmon holds my tether in one hand and digs in his coat pocket with the other. He flips open his phone, holds it to his ear. He listens a moment, then quietly says, “Okay.”

I’m seeing the situation now. Numb is gone. Anger is back. When Detective Harmon closes his phone, I say, “I don’t think you’re supposed to use those up here.”

He smiles. It’s not so different from the smile I remember seeing in my living room five months ago, when he was helping us. He leans close and speaks softly in my ear. “More good news. Your wife is home.”

The burn in my gut goes immediately cold. An instant chill works its way through me from the inside out.

Over by the bed, Van Stockman leans over the railing and kisses the old man’s head. The old man pats his arm.

The son straightens. I see his knuckles go to his eyes. Van Stockman hangs his head and stands there a minute. Then he reaches out, steps back, and pulls the privacy curtain around the bed, between him and his father. His eyes are wet and red when he returns.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Harmon tells me, going through my pockets while he talks. He takes my cell phone, my car keys, my wallet. “You’ll walk out of here with your eyes
down and your mouth shut. Your compliance will be full. You’ll do that, and Sara will wake up tomorrow. Do we agree that’s what’s going to happen?”

I must be nodding my head, because Detective Harmon looks satisfied. He hands me over to Stockman. “You know what to do.”

Silence.

“Van?”

Stockman lifts his chin.

“Call Roger. Tell him you’re on the way.”

The two men look at each other one last time. I consider the fact that Harmon didn’t say anything about
me
waking up tomorrow.

Then Van Stockman takes me by the elbow and opens the door. Detective Harmon stays behind in the room.

The carolers are long gone from the floor. It’s just us and the nurses, all watching and whispering as I’m led past their various stations. On our way to the elevator, we meet Nurse Harriet walking quickly in the other direction, on her way somewhere. She scowls at me as she passes, shaking a finger.
I’m not as dumb as you think I am, Mr. Family Friend.

In a basement level of the hospital parking garage, where I see no security cameras, Van Stockman pulls me around a fat concrete support column. He pushes me against the passenger door of his Dodge Ram, holding me there with one elbow while he digs his truck keys out of his pants pocket.

I take a breath. “Listen.”

“Fuck you just say?”

“Please don’t hurt Sara—”

I see his head flash toward me. It feels like a cinder block landing in my face. Explosion. Pain. Darkness.

I wake up cold.

I can feel that my eyes are open, but I’m still in the dark. An enormous jolt tosses me, rattling my teeth. When the back of
my head hits the ground beneath me, I bite my tongue hard enough to squirt blood. At first I think somebody’s hitting me in the face again.

Then I sense that I’m in motion. I roll onto my side and feel some kind of corrugated metal beneath me. There’s a droning sound all around, so loud that it almost seems quiet.

I lie back and work out that I’m in the bed of Van Stockman’s pickup, locked under the lid. My hands are still bound. The center of my face feels pulpy and crusted, and I can’t breathe through my nose. My coat and gloves are back at the hospital; I wonder if Detective Harmon thought to grab them from the bed rail after he finished smothering Gaylon Stockman, or dosing him with morphine, or however you go about putting an old dog down without raising suspicions.

The truck slows down and pulls to a stop. In a moment, the drone disappears. The lingering wake of silence seems louder than the drone.

Behind my head, a door opens, then slams. The truck bed rocks gently.

I hear footsteps scuffling on pavement, rounding the tailgate. A faint jingle of keys, the snick of a lock somewhere down by my feet. The sound of the lid latch releasing is an amplified thud in the space around me.

The lid begins to open, then closes abruptly. I hear the sound of another car passing. Where are we? If I can hear other cars, and we’ve never left pavement, surely we can’t be especially isolated. For a moment, I feel what I know is an unreasonable glimmer of hope: maybe I’ve been pardoned. We’re on a highway somewhere, way out in the country, where I’ll be released into the wild.

The lid opens on a black December sky. It’s snowing.

“Get out.”

I struggle to one elbow, then to my knees. Looking over the side of the pickup bed, I recognize my surroundings immediately.

I’ve made it almost all the way home.

•    •    •

Van Stockman unlocks my left hand and snaps the empty cuff onto his own wrist. He drags a duffel bag out of the bed of the pickup and slings it over his shoulder. Something metal clanks heavily inside the bag.

Stockman locks the bed cover and sets the alarm on the truck. He looks both ways, up and down Sycamore Drive. Then, without a word, he heads across the open ground toward the refuge, pulling me along behind.

I look at the sky. White flakes fall out of the endless dark. While I’m busy looking up, I manage to trip over my own feet; Van Stockman doesn’t slow down, and for a moment I wonder if he’s going to pull my shoulder out of joint. I decide to keep my eyes in front of me from now on.