Lost

by Devon, Gary;

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  Praise for the Writing of Gary Devon

  Lost

  Edgar Award Finalist

  “Lost is the kind of novel that will play havoc with readers who enjoy a long night’s sleep. In fact, once you start this book, forget about sleeping, eating or whatever until you’re done. [Gary Devon] comes through with a book that deserves serious consideration as a minor American classic.” —Philadelphia Daily News

  “One of the most original riveting pieces of storytelling in years.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “I’ve heard books described as gripping, and I might even have used the term myself. I don’t think I really knew that it meant though, until I picked up Lost…. The writing is remarkable, dark, and exquisite. Lost is a real find.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “Gripping … Mr. Devon has written a novel of appealing originality.” —The New York Times

  Bad Desire

  “Devon follows his praised first novel, Lost, with an account of forbidden love and serial murder that thrills from intriguing start to chilling finish.” —Publishers Weekly

  “From the masterly depiction of his ice-eyed killer to his chilling Hitchcockian ending, Gary Devon blows away every other psychological suspense writer around. Bad Desire is a stunner. Buy it. Or beg, borrow, steal it. But read it.” —Martha Grimes, New York Times–bestselling author

  “Bad Desire is a very good read. A fine psychological thriller.” —Mary Higgins Clark, New York Times–bestselling author

  “Gripping and suspenseful.” —Ira Levin, New York Times–bestselling author

  Lost

  Gary Devon

  This book is dedicated to my family:

  to Mom and Dad and my three sisters,

  but especially to the memory of

  my brother Rudy, 1945–1953.

  I want to express my gratitude to

  Dr. Virginia Lowell Grabill,

  without whose early encouragement and assistance

  this work might never have been done.

  And to my wife, Deborah,

  who saw it through.

  Because there is wrath, beware

  lest he take thee away with his stroke:

  then a great ransom cannot deliver thee.

  Desire not the night, when people are?

  cut off in their place.

  —Job 36:18, 20.

  PART ONE

  1

  The bullet entered his head slightly above and behind his left ear, and the air pocketed with the report. The shot jarred him off balance and his tense face hurtled sideways, blurred like a swiftly unwinding bobbin of thread. His name was Sherman Abbott; he was twelve years old.

  Thrown out loose by the recoil, his upturned hand wavered daintily in the evening air, his fingers bent back twitching under the weight of the dangling revolver. Suddenly he slumped as if to curtsy, then bolted erect. He staggered forward a step or two, weaving from side to side; the revolver jiggled from the end of his thumb, and he fell headlong in the high grass.

  His sister Mamie, who was almost seven and the youngest of the Abbott children, watched him go down. She was standing less than ten feet from him when it happened, close enough for the resounding shock of the noise to hurt her ears. Clutching the tin pail with the nine berries in it, which she had picked and counted, she hurried to reach him. Small for her age, she squatted beside him, peering at him. “Sherman,” she said, leaning down through her spread knees. But if he saw her or heard her or knew who she was, he didn’t let on.

  He burrowed among the yellow stalks of grass, lurching and rocking up and down, as if he were trying to lift himself and crawl. Spasms flew through his body like tiny flickering fish. Then he stopped moving. Slowly his head settled on the crook of his unbuttoned shirt sleeve. The hurt side of his face was bone white and it was blood-pocked and embedded with grit, like a knee scraped on gravel. His still eyes were half shut and very blue. In the thin bristle of his new haircut, in the cheesy-white skin above his ear, the ruptured carbuncle of the wound was crusted with black dust. A rising puddle of bright blood filled his ear and broke down across his cheek.

  Again Mamie spoke to him, a nudging worry in her voice. “Sherman,” she said, “you better get up.” But she didn’t comprehend the terror of what he’d done or the gravity of the pain it would cause—she couldn’t believe it was real until she touched him.

  Irresistibly, even as the dread knotted tight inside her, she lowered her fingertips to the side of his face. Ever so lightly and gently. And the skin there was cool-hot and clammy like a fever. “Sherman,” she whispered, “what’d you do?” She was about to pull away when something happened: she lost her footing or her hand shook of itself, and her fingers smeared across the sticky blood drying on his cheek. At first she couldn’t breathe; when at last she caught her breath, a shriek rode out of her body so high-pitched it snapped in and out of frequency. It was like a corrugated sound she couldn’t stop. She jerked back, kicked back, flinging out her hand. She came to her feet and turned, and turned, stumbling in an aimless zigzag, her cry continuing as shrill and piercing as a chalk squeak.

  She ambled in loops, unable to get her bearings. Again and again, she found herself coming upon him. She wanted to pick him up, impossible as it was. She kept thinking, I should pick him up and take him home. But she knew she couldn’t lift him—he was nearly twice her size. Each time she saw her blood-dirtied fingers, she screamed. With the air almost gone from her lungs, she finally gasped, “Sherman … Sherman … Oh, Sherman,” so frightened she couldn’t call for help. She kept her bloodied fingers extended before her. She didn’t know what to do—she couldn’t dirty her dress, put blood on it. Suddenly she dropped to her knees, wiping her hands viciously on the grass, pulling out clumps of grass and scrubbing it across the palm of the bloody hand. Again, inadvertently, she touched him, his arm this time.

  She sat back on her haunches. Breathing hard and moaning, she wiped her face on her hunched-up shoulders. She couldn’t bear to look at him, but she did look and the blood was trickling out now in a pink foam—from his nose and mouth. Quickly she squeezed her eyes shut; she put her hands on top of her head, one on top of the other, and just sat there, still and numb. “Oh, Sherman,” she babbled in her desperation, “I wish you wouldn’t do things like this to me.” After she said it, she thought it sounded like something her mother might say. She sat there beside him on her haunches, unable to help him, afraid to touch him. And she covered her eyes with her hands but she couldn’t stop the tears running through them. At last, shivering uncontrollably, she pushed to her feet and whirled away, running for home.

  Some of the men in the neighborhood brought Sherman home that night and put him on the wicker lounger in the living room—the lounger their wives had pulled in from the porch and hastily prepared with starched white linen.

  Mamie sat halfway up the stairs, clutching the varnished spindles, peering down on the commotion. Above her, on the dark landing of the stairs, Toddy Abbott, who’d just turned eight, stood motionless in his pajamas as if by being quiet he could hide. He’d stayed in bed that afternoon and evening with a croupy summer cold. They listened as their mother frantically tried to decide what to do, changed her mind and changed it again, but none of the neighbors questioned her judgment. Finally, sobbing as she spoke, she blurted out what she wanted most. “If he has to die,” she said, “it should be here at home. Don’t you think so?” The longer she talked, the more she pleaded. “I want it to be here—in his home—among his own things when it happens. Not in some cold hospital room. I want him to be home, at least. Don’t you think that’s right?”<
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  Outside, police cars pulled up, one, then two of them, their red lights beating irregularly against the front windows. Car doors slammed and voices shouted outside beyond the doorway, but it was the doctor, followed by a nurse dressed in white, who wove through the tangle of neighbors in the foyer. Without a word, they went directly into the bright living room, where the doctor paused and drew the tall sliding doors shut behind him. Almost immediately from that closed-in place, Mamie heard her mother’s heartbreaking wail—a sound as thin and relentless as wind on wire. The cry tore through Mamie like a dagger; startled, she clung to the spindles, unable to stop her tears.

  Her mother’s voice rose and fell like a loud heartbeat: “Don’t … hurt him … please … don’t hurt him … any more.” Just when Mamie thought she couldn’t bear it any longer, the sliding doors rumbled apart. Escorted on either side by neighbor women, her mother wandered out, coming down the shaft of light and into the foyer where the dim wall lights lit the stairs. She hugged a small oblong box to her breast. Her face was white as plaster.

  The doors slid shut. The hot August night dragged on.

  By the time their father arrived in his work clothes, the police cars were gone. He had been running; sweat soaked his shirt. He stumbled through the crowd, saw their mother, and turned toward her, unsteady on his feet. And their expressions were so tender and full of longing they were painful to watch. Their mother’s fingers picked at the oblong box, and she kept saying, “Oh, Ray, I’m so sorry,” over and over again. They stood less than two feet apart, unable somehow to touch each other, their eyes full of tears. She said to him, “All my life I’ve been afraid of something like this.”

  When he could speak, their father said, “Where is he?” his voice raspy and tired. One of the women nodded toward the double doors; she said, “The doctor’s in with him now.” He glanced at the sharp light outlining the doors, stepped back, and turned. Their mother said, “Don’t, Ray. Let them do what they can,” but he paid her no heed. Moving out of her reach, he went to the closed-up room, grasping the handles to draw the doors open, but suddenly he slumped there. Another man from deep in the house—the dining room or the kitchen—called to him, “Ray, is that you?” and hastened to meet him and lead him away. Their mother, comforted by strange hands, let herself be drawn down on the edge of the foyer settee.

  As Toddy came down the stairs to sit by Mamie, the nurse slipped from the bright living room. Dodging questions, she hurried outside. Mamie could feel the heat radiating from Toddy’s body; when he bumped against her, she cringed from him. Clasping his arms around his shins, he said, “Can I stay down here with you?” He was trembling all over like a rabbit.

  She couldn’t begin to tell him how awful she felt; her skin seemed to draw tighter and tighter, and the ache of dread and regret sank deeper within her. Without looking around, she said, “Toddy, he was dead, I think. He’s really dead. I saw him. I reached down …” She began to sob.

  As her voice shriveled, he let out a shuddering sigh. “He can’t die, Mamie. He just can’t, y’know. He can’t die and you can’t die and I can’t die, because we’re all brand-new people. Him and us.”

  The weird logic of what he was saying escaped her.

  The crowd withdrew and dispersed. A few of them ventured forward to mutter their awkward goodbyes. With his shadowy friend in tow, their father had circled the house and was now on the porch with the last of the departing neighbors, smoking a cigarette. The nurse walked by him when she returned, carrying some metal apparatus and a large canvas bag. The two remaining neighbor women speculated that it was an oxygen tent.

  Still perched on the settee, their mother tapped her foot. Then, she stood and paced and sat down again, muttering something to one or the other of the ladies. Suddenly she seemed to realize that she was still holding the oblong box. She lowered it before her and opened the lid with her thumb. It was Sherman’s schoolbox, tattered and crudely marked.

  “We had such a hard time with him in school,” she said quietly, as if only to pass the time. “I worked with him till I was blue in the face, but nothing helped. He started a year late, you know, because of the stupid birthday law and it just got continually worse. He failed the fifth grade. Always so haphazard and happy-go-lucky. Just couldn’t’ve cared less.” She went on talking calmly about his ups and downs for quite a while. “Then he got in that trouble and it shook him—really upset him—and he seemed to snap out of it. This summer we sent him to remedial class, and for the first time he really started to try. And now this … this!” Struggling for breath, she cried again, more easily than before, but when she tried to cover her face, the schoolbox spilled, the gnawed pencils with the erasers bitten off scattering on the floor. The ladies closed around her.

  In that way, with unpredictable outbursts and moments of ordinary conversation, they waited. Eventually, Toddy said, “I’m afraid to watch. It makes me too nervous. I’m goin’ back upstairs.” And a few moments later, without saying anything more, he was gone from Mamie, who still clung to the railing. It was well after midnight before the doors rumbled apart and the doctor stepped out in the harsh span of light, mopping his face with a handkerchief. Then, with his arms spread, he caught the handles and pulled the doors shut, allowing just a fleeting glimpse of the wicker lounger, the makeshift apparatus beside it, and the shrouded shape under the gauzy tent. He scanned the foyer as he turned.

  Their mother came to her feet, dazedly. Her thin face lolled like a mask on a scarecrow. “Where’s Ray?” she said.

  “He went with them to look for the gun,” the nearest woman told her.

  “Tonight?” she said, visibly trembling. “In the dark?” She tried to smooth her hair as she gravitated toward the doctor, hardly able to keep her balance.

  Mamie stood when her mother turned, then rushed down the stairs as her mother went forward. But the two neighbor ladies were ahead of her, taking up their positions behind her mother, so that Mamie had to squeeze past their hips, clasping her mother’s thigh through her skirt, to hear what the doctor was saying.

  He was speaking low. He said the bleeding had stopped and that Sherman was in a coma. So softly she could hardly be heard, her mother said, “Then maybe we should move him to a hospital, after all.” The doctor studied what she had said at length, his dire thoughts apparent in his long hesitation. Presently he said, “No, I don’t think so. At least not right now. His condition is very … extremely delicate just now, very critical. It’s too dangerous. The risk … If he hemorrhages again, Mrs. Abbott, death would be instantaneous.” He was an elderly gentleman with baggy eyes and he had a small trimmed mustache that looked painted on.

  The woman nearest Mamie stooped down and drew her aside. “Mamie, you should go to bed,” she said. “It’s way past your bedtime. We’ll take care of your mama. Really, it’s okay now. Go on and go to sleep.” But Mamie shrugged away from her and went around to her mother’s other side.

  “… centrifugal force,” the doctor was saying as he massaged the base of his skull behind his right ear. “It’s lodged roughly here,” he said, holding his fingers stiff to that place. “It’s possible the bullet was deflected somehow and moved inside his head for several seconds like—like—”

  “Like a bee, in a bonnet,” her mother said distractedly.

  “Yes, I suppose,” he said, and nodded. “Something on that order. But try to remember, Mrs. Abbott, even if he should live through this—even if he does, the extent of the damage won’t be known for a very long time. He could be an invalid … or seriously impaired.” He cleared his throat. “Even with the most sophisticated equipment, we couldn’t know this soon.”

  “But he will live, then—won’t he?” her mother asked. She leaned toward him, anxious for his confirmation.

  The doctor’s face did not change. For a moment, he stared at her intently. His eyes drifted aside, then refocused on her. He opened his mouth but said nothing.

  She began to fold where she stood, and t
he women swept toward her. She staggered, caught herself, motioning them off. “Then I have to see him. Please, I have to go in to him.”

  Attentive, but without any further talk, the doctor accompanied her to the doors and slid them apart for her to enter. Too late, Mamie ran around the four legs blocking her path, but from inside the room her mother called out, “No, Mamie, not now. Not this time. Maybe tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow, maybe,” and she instructed the women to put the children to bed. She was nearly transparent with light.

  Mamie heard her father cross the hall; under the rug the floorboards snapped. He went to Toddy first. Drifting in and out of sleep, she heard the gruff rumble of his voice. A drawer squealed open, then shut.

  Through the open window came the distant funnel-like shouts of children playing in the yards below. Despite the residue of her distress and the mood of strife that had descended on the house the night before, the cheerful noises beckoned her like slow, enticing music. Her eyelids wobbled; she dozed. Immediately it seemed, although it could have been longer, an angry uproar erupted in the gray distance—the neighbor’s dog lashed out, growling and barking. Mamie thought, Those boys’re tormenting him again. In her imagination, she could see them sneaking along the right-of-way behind their house to throw rocks into the dog pen. All hackles and teeth, the dog would lunge at them, his snapping chain flipping him crosswise in the air. He was a crazy-mean dog with scary eyes, and the bet was to see if they could goad him into breaking his chain. Once in a while he did break it, his teeth slashing at the fence wire.

  “Oh, Chinaman,” she muttered. Mamie wanted to get up, poke her head out the window, and yell at them to stop it. She reached for the bedpost to pull herself up, but in the air her fingers bumped across a scratchy face. Her entire body flinched. She lurched crablike on the bed to escape it. The room was too full of sunshine to see clearly. With her pulse pounding, she rubbed her eyes and squinted. “Oh, Daddy,” she gasped. “You scared the daylights out of me.” He was seated on the small chair by her bed.