by Candice Fox
When you’ve been beat up a few times, as I have, you learn that the best way to manage the pain is to keep moving if you can, even if very slowly. The first time I’d been smacked around in prison—a misunderstanding over some newspapers in the rec room—I’d gone to the infirmary and curled up in the nice, soft bed and surrendered to the blessed desire to sleep. I’d been in general population until my segregation was approved. It was safer to sleep in the hospital there than it was in my cell; the beds were better, the place was cleaner, and there were more guards around. It was so quiet that I’d been able to delve briefly into a fantasy that I was free, outside, in a regular hospital. Big mistake. All my muscles seized up and all the fluids in my joints settled, and I woke up in more pain than when I’d arrived.
When I found Mr. Bingley, he wasn’t inside the airport at all, but sitting in a rental car in the hire lot. I spotted the white-blond hair, his head buried in his hands, defeated, just as I’d seen him in my kitchen. I stood nearby for a while waiting for him to lift his face, but he didn’t. I went to the passenger-side door and opened it, and when I got in he shuffled violently against the driver’s door, grabbing for the handle.
“Wait,” I said. I held my hands up, palms out. “Just wait.”
He froze, staring at me, wild-eyed. I pulled my door closed slowly, its weight agonizing for my bruised arm. We were sealed in silence, closeness. I fancied I could hear his heart beating, a smashing rhythm that reverberated through the car around us—but maybe it was my own. I carefully pulled the folded yellow envelope out of my back pocket and held it between us, a peace offering wavering over the handbrake.
“You forgot this,” I said.
“I don’t want anything from you.” His jaw was twitching, teeth clamped together. “I need you to get out of this car. Right now.”
“This is what my partner has been able to find out about—”
“Get out of my car!”
“—about the man who raped your fucking daughter!”
Our voices swelled against the roof of the car. Neither of us could look at the other. We sat staring ahead, panting, two passengers in a vehicle going nowhere.
“I did not rape your daughter,” I said after a time, chancing a glance in his direction. “I don’t expect you to believe that until you’ve looked at this.” I threw the envelope into his lap. “I hope you’ll look at it. But I don’t expect you to do that, either.”
He didn’t move.
“Why did you come here?” he asked eventually. “Why did you follow me?”
“Because I want him caught too. Can’t you understand that?” Suddenly I was on the edge of shouting again. Thumping my sore chest. “I. Didn’t. Do. This.”
He was stiff, the muscles of his neck pulled taut, eyes locked on the dashboard. His hands were in his lap, under the envelope, one raw, bloody knuckle visible. It was my turn to put my head in my hands.
“I don’t even know your name,” I said.
“How the hell do you not know my name?” His voice was a low, dangerous monotone. “How did you not recognize my face?”
“Because from the moment I was arrested I was in terror for my fucking life,” I said. “I lost my family. I lost my job. I lost my house. I was put in chains and thrown in prison with a bunch of psychopaths. My own colleagues interrogated me. My friends. The whole world was upside down. My brain didn’t have room for you. Or your wife. Or your daughter, for fuck’s sake.”
He shifted at the mention of the child. I took a breath and continued carefully.
“I saw Claire for a few seconds on the side of the highway that day, and I never saw her again. You understand? I had no idea who she was. I didn’t even remember seeing her, in the beginning. All this has been just a fucking idea to me. It never actually happened.”
I stared at the side of his head. I wasn’t sure he understood at all, or if he even should. Long minutes of silence passed.
“My name is Dale,” he said eventually. “Now get the fuck out of this car.”
I got out and shut the door, stood there wondering if there was anything else that I could or should say. But there wasn’t. I walked away and left him.
Dear Diary,
Is that how you start one of these things? Dear Diary? I’ve never had a therapy journal before, and to be honest I’m feeling a bit stupid about it. The whole “dear” thing makes it feel like I’m writing “to” someone, but Dr. Hart assures me that no one will ever read this. Not even him. The whole point is that I use it to be aware of my illness, bring my addiction out from under the shovelfuls of dirt I’ve been habitually heaping onto it for the past decade. Uncover it. Hold it in my hands, so that I can understand it somehow, maybe one day find the strength to put it aside. The whole problem is, I guess, that he thinks I’m uncovering and holding up and examining something relatively harmless here. I’m starting out my “therapy journey” with a lie. I’ve told him I think I am a sex addict, which he’s surprised by, me being twenty-five and all. He doesn’t see anything wrong with a guy my age thinking about sex all day long. He was confused by my deep shame, my terror at even coming to see him. But, in truth, Dr. Hart has no idea of the nature of the thing I’m really talking about. The thing that follows me, the friend I made when I was about fifteen, who I didn’t know would be right beside me for the rest of my life. I’m not sure he would treat me if he knew what I really was. There’s doubt in the psychological world that you can even treat people like me at all.
My first therapist wouldn’t even try.
I went to my mother once and asked her to take me to a psychologist. She was standing in the kitchen stirring a pot of stew, losing herself in the motion of it, her eyes downcast and cheeks rosy from the steam coiling all around her, pretty and slim in her nightie. I’d been floating around for a little while thinking I should ask the question. Loitering, trying to work up to it. I picked some bacon out of the rice in the pot next to the stew and Mum glanced at me, cheeky, told me there wouldn’t be any left if I kept going. It was hard to bring her down from the dreamy place she went to when she cooked, created things. She used to sculpt back then. I’d watch her for hours in silence, her slick fingers moving over the slimy gray clay.
In the end, I just filled my lungs with air, counted to three, and did it.
“I think I need to talk to someone,” I’d said. “A counselor.”
“Kev.” Her brow had dipped, eyes shooting to mine from the work before her. “What? What do you mean?”
Her face was a picture of confusion, flickering with panic, the sculptor who sees a wet vase leaning, sliding, who can’t understand why it won’t hold its body like the rest of the identical vases she’d spun, sitting straight on the kiln shelf like soldiers. She was the chef who smelled burning but couldn’t see it, the expectant mother who feels an odd twinge in her belly, the baby shifting suddenly as though stung. What’s wrong with my creation? Or, more accurately, what have I done wrong here? It hurt, to both tell her and not tell her, to make up some tale about being depressed and sit silently all the way to the cold, quiet psychologist’s office without any explanation for her about what she’d not given me, what she’d not said, which moment she hadn’t been “present” that had left me in this state—unable to share with her at all why this clay pot had cracked.
I’d sat in the shrink’s office gnawing my fingernails and examining the certificates on her walls while she stood out in the hall with Mum, reassuring her that prepubescent depression was normal and that she’d probably be able to find the cause of my distress within a couple of sessions. That it wasn’t likely I’d need to be medicated, but it was an option. There’d been some talk of statistics. Of limiting my TV time and increasing my vitamin intake, making sure I got to sleep at a reasonable hour. When the psychologist had come in and shut the door, I’d watched her carefully as she walked to the other side of the desk, smoothing down the sides of her neat black bob, as though she couldn’t possibly chat without knowing every hair was
in place.
“Kevin, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”
I’d told her exactly that. A bit. I’m looking back on myself now, on my teen introduction, and smiling. I’d told her about the books I was reading and the video games I was playing, and about my best friend Paul and our bikes. She’d asked me if I was being bullied. How my grades were going. If I was drinking. All the normal sources of a young person’s despair.
I’d been just about dripping with sweat by the time I got up the courage to tell her. She was leaving me long, gentle silences, trying to build me up to it, letting the ticking of the clock on her desk mark the seconds that I had left in the session to spill my guts. I licked my lips and looked at the floor, and when I spoke it was over the top of her as she was posing her next question to me.
“I think I’m a pedophile,” I said.
Her mouth was still formed in a small, tight O from saying “Do you…” the way she’d been saying “Do you…” since we started the session. Do you enjoy getting outside the house? Do you spend much time with friends? Do you ever get angry? But now there she was, stuck on the edge of that “Do you…” because I’d done all the things she’d asked me if I’d done, and now she realized it wasn’t about what I did at all. It was about what I was. She sat back in her seat and looked at me, and her mouth for a moment turned downward, making the muscles in her throat pull tight.
“What do you mean, Kevin?”
The words were tumbling out of me now. I was hardly drawing a breath between long, rambling, stammering sentences. I could feel the heat climbing up my chest, into my neck, a burning rash that lit the rims of my ears on fire. She listened, hands hanging by her sides, lips slightly parted. I was panting like I’d been running.
“What sort of pictures?” she asked. “How did you find them?”
I’d told her about the pictures. My very first foray into my addiction that was not entirely contained within my brain, actual images I’d been sent from someone in an AOL chat room. How I’d clicked from picture to picture, link to link, video to video down a dark staircase into the bowels of the internet, to places most people didn’t even know about. I told her what the pictures were of, described them all in details I knew perfectly from lying in the dark staring at them on my laptop screen beneath the blankets of my bed, terrified that someone might come in and see me with them if I wasn’t covered up. I told her how terrifying and exhilarating it had been to see the images of the things I had been thinking about on the screen, like I’d somehow opened a window into my own mind. The things I’d been imagining, that I’d been sure were impossibilities, depraved fantasies, had actually happened somewhere in the world and someone captured it and now I could see it whenever I wanted, as many times as I wanted. I was Dorothy opening the door on Munchkinland, everything suddenly in color. I told her about how great that made me feel.
And I told her about how awful that made me feel.
How sick and wrong and vile a thing I knew I must be to think about these things and feel relief that they weren’t just inside me.
“I don’t want to do those things,” I said. I was hugging myself now, trying to stop myself from shivering. “I … I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why this is happening. I’ve been wanting to ask someone like you what I should do, you know? I mean, should I be looking at these things? If I’m looking at these things being done to these kids, that kind of means I don’t have to do them myself, right? I mean it’s not like what those people did was okay. But … But it’s like, if they do it, then I don’t have to.”
I was rambling, pleading, and she could see that. But as I kept talking, her face was becoming redder and redder, and a thin sheen of sweat was starting to pop up at the edge of her hairline, on the short, fine hairs that receded to fluff on her brow. And then she did the last thing I thought she would do.
She got up and went out into the hall and brought my mother into the room.
And I sat there and listened as she told my mother everything that I’d just said.
I promised my mother as she sat in the car crying and thumping the steering wheel that I was going to stop looking at the pictures, stop thinking about little children, stop doing those things to myself in the dark and wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Because yes, there was something wrong with me. I knew that. I knew it was wrong. And I was finished with it. I’d got it out of my system, talking to the therapist. It didn’t matter that the therapist wouldn’t see me anymore, had said that she couldn’t treat me. I reassured my mother that there wasn’t a problem anymore.
Lies.
It has been ten years. My problem has never been worse.
I acted on my desire for the first time.
I got awkwardly out of my car at the crime scene, the faces of four or five uniformed officers turned toward me, and each was completely unreadable. The police in Crimson Lake had mixed feelings toward me. For all they knew I was guilty of attacking Claire Bingley, a dangerous pedophile running wild on their beat, an imminent threat to the children of their town. To them, I’d thumbed my nose at the justice system—every breath of free air I took was a personal insult. And then there was the fact that I worked with Amanda Pharrell, who’d been cheeky enough to get herself approved for a private detective’s license despite the killing in her late teens. She’d been a juvenile when she stabbed Lauren Freeman and, having served her time, she’d successfully convinced a panel of experts that she could and should be approved to investigate crimes on a private contractual basis. To the Crimson Lake cops, Amanda moving in on the law enforcement game in the very same town where she’d committed the murder of one of their high school golden girls was just rubbing salt into the wound. No one here was ever going to accept Amanda Pharrell, or me. We were utterly alone together.
Police and private investigators are always at odds anyway; people only hire us because they believe, however truthfully, that the cops aren’t doing their job. It also didn’t help that I actually used to be one of them. I had spent five years as a drug squad detective back in Sydney. Pictures of me in uniform had been circulated by the newspapers during my trial, smiling broadly when I graduated the academy, frowning sternly as I put a pimp into the back of a police car. I was a traitor to the force. The ultimate insult.
It should have been all-out war between the Crimson Lake cops and Amanda and me, but things were not that simple. On our first case together, Amanda and I had solved a murder. This put one of the Crimson Lake police department’s only unsolved homicides back in the black. The Crimson Lake cops hated us—but they also owed us.
They stood now beneath the sprawling branches of a two-hundred-year-old fig tree dripping with Spanish moss, immaculate uniforms, shining boots. The Barking Frog Inn had been almost completely consumed by the rainforest at the edge of the creek. A tangle of poisonous vines with furry sprouts crept up over its wood-paneled walls and across the corrugated iron roof, a blanket of green making it seem as though the bar had popped up from beneath the earth, a trapdoor spider’s lair exposed with glowing window eyes peering out. Some brave spirals of native wisteria had joined the fray along the porch rail, but its cheerful purple blooms were struggling under the grip of the weeds and were browning at their tips, thorns piercing new branches, dripping sap onto the boards.
The officers attending the scene had festooned blue and white police tape across the entryway to designate the inner cordon. There was an older, gray-haired man pacing the edge of the outer cordon, head down, watching his feet. As I crossed the dirt road and ducked under the tape of the outer cordon Amanda appeared from the side of the bar in denim shorts and a faded cotton singlet. Her only forensic efforts were a pair of cotton booties over her sneakers and a cap of the same material pulled down over her shaggy black and orange hair. She’d called me that morning and given me the address, waking me from a painful half slumber on the couch on the porch. She came to me and inspected the work she’d done on my slightly less puffy
and bruised cheek. In the dim light of the cloudy morning her scars were obvious, running down her arm and shoulder, along her lean legs, crossing hundreds and hundreds of individual tattoos, slicing through inked faces, cutting objects in half. A crocodile had tried to make her its evening meal once, and now her colorful body was cracked with these baby pink lines and cracks. She was fun to look at, Amanda.
“Did you catch up with the prize fighter?” she asked.
“I did.” I walked with her to where her yellow bike was leaning against another ancient tree. “I gave him the leads you gave me. He can do what he wants with them.”
“That was pretty ballsy.”
“Well, I’ve still got ’em. Might as well use ’em.”
“He didn’t try to thump you again?”
“I think he might have, if I’d pressed any harder,” I said. “What’s this all about?” I gestured to the officers under the tree, the shadows of more inside. I didn’t think there were this many cops this side of Sydney.
“Happened this morning, about three, they think, though we don’t have any ear or eye witnesses. Last text message from one of the victims was at two forty-seven a.m. telling Dad he was just about to head home.”
One of the victims. All Amanda had told me that morning was that people were dead inside a bar, not how many. I could have been about to walk in on a full-scale massacre or a lover’s spat gone wrong.
“Who’s hired us?” I asked. Amanda nodded over my shoulder at the stocky man with gray hair standing by the outer cordon, looking at the bar. As we walked toward him I recognized the stranglehold of grief on his otherwise powerful frame, the shoulders hanging and arms limp by his sides, all the effort he could muster going into keeping him upright. I knew the feeling, the incredible weight on the back of the head, as though the hurt has lodged there like a lead ball in the back of your skull. I put my hand out.
