Endings

by Linda L. Richards

Back in my rented car, I text the number.

  It is done.

  There is no reply, but this time I didn’t expect one.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THERE ARE MORE assignments after that. Slowly at first, then at a more consistent trickle. I figure it probably stems from their growing confidence in me as much as anything. And business, for them, is probably good. Apparently, there are a lot of people that need killing. Every day.

  Of course, I do not do it every day. Not even close. But the work is lucrative, and I don’t have to do a lot of it. My natural camouflage—an average woman of early middle years, neither beautiful nor ugly—stands me in good stead and I get a lot of jobs.

  Life has a pattern. There is a trip, culminating in a job, followed by a period of quiet—spiritually and actually—when I use the money gained to try and rebuild something that looks like a life. It ends up being both easier and more difficult than I’d thought it would be.

  A life.

  What is that made of? A family. Mine is gone. A job? Mine has no watercooler, no office parties. Friends? I cut all ties with them after the fire. Directly after, I couldn’t stand the pity I’d see in their faces. Later, I felt like an imposter when I’d see them. They would talk about things I found empty and inane. Or worse: meaningless. Not that my thoughts had so much meaning, but at least I did not pretend. I found I no longer had the capacity for it. Life. Death. Living. Dying. When your life is so basic, small talk doesn’t really have a place, that’s what I found.

  And now? Well, now they don’t even know where or who I am.

  In my half-hearted quest to build a new life, I buy a house. I pay cash. It is very different from the house I’d had when I was part of a family. No Pebble Tec pool. It is little more than a cottage, really, this new-to-me house. And it is far enough from the nearest small town to be quiet, while really not being very far out at all: less than twenty minutes in a car.

  The house has a living room, a kitchen with a little dining area in it, two bedrooms. I outfit one of the bedrooms as a guest-room, though I anticipate no guests. And there is a single bathroom. I can’t imagine I would ever require more than one. The house is modest and old-fashioned, but with a sort of lost middle American charm. From the first moment, I feel very comfortable there. I feel like I am coming home.

  It is private. A small acreage at the edge of a forest and no one around to see me come and go. I create a persona for myself, one with an indistinct name. Bland. Vanilla. I give the impression but do not actually say that I am a writer of some sort, likely of something uninteresting that nobody cares about anyway. Knitting in Hellenic times. Or the mating habits of baboons in captivity. Nothing anyone would ask about. Topics people would avoid asking about, for fear the answer would be lengthy. The profession goes along with the baggy housedresses I take to wearing out there alone and when I drive into town for supplies. The bulky sweaters. The outmoded glasses. The hair pulled back into a rough bun. I become an invisible resident in an already invisible demographic. I come and go, and nobody sees.

  Invisible or no, I still need to fill my time. The time between. I take a stab at gardening, spending hours in the pale spring sun enriching a small, overgrown rectangle that looks as though it might have been a kitchen garden in the long-ago. A thick bunch of rhubarb starts sprouting of its own accord as soon as the weather begins to warm up. The enthusiasm of that volunteer rhubarb inspires me. If something can appear as though by magic with no effort on my part, what can happen if I add some muscle and intent?

  And so, I set to work. But just as it looks like my new garden is about to flourish, I catch a job in the Far East that keeps me away for a number of weeks. By the time I get back, the poor baby plants I stuck in the ground before I left have withered and died. Even the rhubarb now looks as though it might pack it in. It ends gardening for me, and I don’t have the heart to try again. It seems cruel to plant something in order to watch it die. There’s been enough death in my life. There is enough death. I don’t want it at home. Not anymore.

  So gardening is out before it even really begins. I let the weeds reclaim the little bits of brown I’d unearthed and feel a dull satisfaction at the resilient green that results. I leave the rhubarb alone though. I’d never really acquired a taste for the stuff, and, in any case, it seems to manage better without me.

  The jobs start slowly, then come with increasing regularity. There is a pattern to this. A rhythm. The quiet weeks and sometimes months at home, passing time at my house and rambling in the forest and making occasional trips into the nearby small town for supplies. And then work, of course. An assignment generally involves a few days or a week of traveling, stalking followed by a hit, and then—sometimes by circuitous methods—home, where it all begins again.

  I devise systems to keep everything sorted. Everything tidy. I keep a packed suitcase and an empty gym bag in the trunk of the car that replaced the minivan. The suitcase holds the tools of my trade, including a darker twin of the Bersa I have with me always. I keep the second gun under a false bottom in my trunk, under and around the spare tire of the elderly tank-like Volvo I pick up and have customized several hundred miles from my little town. The car is invisible in my rural community. Like me. But solid enough to take whatever is coming. I hope that part is true for me, as well. I’m not always so sure.

  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about fingerprints or DNA, but I do take basic precautions. Since I’ve never been arrested, I know I won’t show up on any law enforcement lists, but I am aware that other databases exist in our society—such as murder databases. And so I keep nitrile gloves and disinfectant wipes in there, too. Just in case. I am careful.

  All of this becomes my life. It is neither stimulating nor satisfying or even stifling. I am living. I am alive. I don’t want for anything, except there is a sort of dull hunger in me that I seem never able to fill. And there are days I wake covered in sweat, and with my heart racing, like I’ve been chasing something; like something has been chasing me. Still, I know worse existences are possible. Worse outcomes. All things considered.

  I am in stasis, in a way, though I can’t imagine what I’m waiting for. Even though I have a home now, I am drifting, still. To be settled in my spirit, and to have a real life, that would not reflect the things I feel I deserve.

  So I drift for a while. Time passes. This becomes my now. And I don’t think about what my tomorrow will hold or even if it will develop at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE DAY THAT everything changes, the only thing I see coming at me is lamb stew. I’d seen a recipe in a food magazine and, suddenly, nothing will do but that I drive into town to the butcher’s for three pounds of lamb. I have the kind of life that allows self-indulgence of that nature. The drive, followed by the cooking, are the activities that will help pass this day.

  Three pounds of meat is an extraordinary amount, really, considering it’s only me eating and I never entertain. But it is what I want and, anyway, I have a freezer. If I end up eating defrosted lamb stew every few weeks for the next half year, that will work out fine, too.

  The ingredients called for tell me the stew will be beyond good. It will have figs and dried apricots. Pomegranate molasses, masses of garlic, a full pound of mushrooms. Other things, as well. I imagine it will be super delicious. A stew worthy of the drive necessary to gather the ingredients.

  Of all the things I do have in my new life, a television is not one of them. Not missing, but not wanted. For me, television had been a family activity in the life before. The three of us huddled around a pizza and watching some PG movie. Or my husband curled up with me on the couch, binge-watching some inane show, me folded into the protective curve of his shoulder, even when many of the other warmths we’d shared had passed away. There was this: physical connection in a puddle of evening calm, our shared life whispering all around us. Not stimulating, no. But comforting somehow. At least in memory. But that’s not how it is now.

  When I move in
to the house, I get a television right away just because one does. There is a wall in the living room that looks like the place where a television should be. But when I put it there, it leaves me feeling even more hollow and alone. The soulless voices in sitcoms and reality shows seemingly offering pale echoes of actual reality. The crime dramas all hollow and unreal. Family sagas are worse. They leave me weeping. And old movies bring back memories I have no place for. There is nothing I want to see. I keep trying, though. That’s what people do: they watch TV. And so, every so often, I turn it on again.

  And then it gets worse. I am watching the news; the coverage of the inexplicable killing of a prominent person I had seen die. Television brings me the keening widow. The grief-stricken children. Traces of a life I’d contributed to ending. I don’t want to see that.

  I can’t see that.

  As much as possible, I want—no, need—the people I hit to be nothing more than the scraps of information shared with me upon assignment. Then perhaps a few details I ferret out myself; just enough to get the job done. Anything additional makes those lives a little too real. Anything additional is surplus to requirement.

  So I shut it down, half carrying, half dragging the huge television out to the garage, then immediately forgetting about it. Without the hollow black square of a television gaping at me from the living room, even significant news events have trouble trickling down to me. Everyone has to be talking about it, or else I will never hear. Sometimes not even then. This does not concern me. In the state I am in, I no longer have room for details that don’t move my immediate concerns forward. The French president. The state of railroads in Italy. A heartbreaking car accident in Texas. None of this has meaning to me. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, no, that’s not it. It’s just that I don’t care. It doesn’t touch me. Nothing does.

  And then one day that changes.

  I go to the local butcher’s for my lamb. That stew. There is a television playing in the back of the shop. And I hear something drift over from the TV that I cannot, at first, believe. The clerk helping me sees me stop and listen, right between ordering my lamb and a bit of chicken I’d intended to pop in the freezer. She sees my widened eyes and makes a sympathetic sound.

  “I know,” she says. “Another one. Can you believe it? How long will this go on?”

  “Another? But how many have there been?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “I live under a rock. Never mind. How many?”

  “This makes sixteen! Imagine. And they’re sure it’s the same guy. The MO is distinctive, that’s what they said.”

  MO. Civilian talk learned from watching television. I know what it means though. Modus operandi. Method of operating. Whoever has done this heinous thing has done it frequently enough that his style can be determined by examination of what has occurred. A chilling thought.

  I reposition myself so I can see the television better, and the clerk and I both turn our heads to see the screen where distraught-looking parents are being interviewed by a woman whose pale-blond hair seems to perch on her head like a hat. The body of the missing child has not yet been found, but there is little hope she is alive—that’s what is under discussion. Everyone expects that she is dead. The child had been spotted getting into a van, driven by the man they knew had been taking these children. An item of clothing has been recovered. Things do not look good.

  “Sixteen,” I repeat. It’s an impossible number.

  “That they know of. They say there have been others they haven’t been able to connect to the same guy. Not for sure.”

  Murder database. The phrase comes back to me again. In this context, it has a whole new meaning.

  The camera is now showing a charming town. A bandstand. A high school football team. Oaks whose branches are heavy with Spanish moss sway over a golf course so green it makes you doubt the color balance of the set we are watching it on. Then a smash cut back to the grieving parents. The highlight of this hour. Something so raw in them. Animal grief. I recognize it. I feel it in my soul. They are my siblings. I am connected to them.

  The reporter sticks a microphone in the mother’s face.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to share with my audience, Mrs. Webster?”

  The eyes she turns on the camera are dead. Empty. She moves her mouth, but no sounds come out. It is like looking at the shell of a person. Like whoever usually lives inside has moved out. I recognize the expression, the emptiness. More than that, I hear the things she does not say, the tears she can’t yet cry.

  “My God,” I say out loud, her tears running down my cheek.

  “Yes,” the clerk agrees, her voice bringing me back. I am in a butcher shop. For a heartbeat, I’d forgotten. “Unthinkable.”

  “Yes. Beyond thought,” I say, as something hard locks inside me. It pushes the tears away. I complete my transaction, money and meat change hands, but my mind is elsewhere.

  I go home with the three pounds of lamb I’d come for. The pomegranate molasses. Kosher salt. Figs. After a while, I start making the stew I’d been so excited about. But even following the recipe, my motions are automatic. Chopping, searing, deglazing; I am on autopilot. My mind is elsewhere.

  I can’t get the images out of my head. The dead eyes of the parents. The bleating newscasters. The trail of children lost. There is no room in my head, my heart for all of this grief. Mountains of it. Rivers. Even with my kitchen alive with the scent of onions, garlic, and spice, that grief wells up and overflows. More than I’d thought could be left in the world. And all of it had happened fifteen times before. At least. In some ways, I feel it more than I’d felt my own loss, even if only because, at that time, I’d been too numb to feel.

  In desperation and like all the sheep around me, I pull out my laptop and look for the news. Finding it is maddeningly easy—the story is everywhere—though none of it is even really “new,” simply constant rehashing of stories already told. There is only the occasional addition of some morbid detail, sometimes told in the breathless tones of someone craving and fishing for enthusiastic response.

  Authorities know that the perpetrator—the monster—is a young man in San Pasado County in California. William Atwater, twenty-seven years old. The photos that are constantly being aired show pale blue eyes, a strong jaw and light hair that curls slightly. If he ever smiled, the total effect would be that of a surfer kid, though none of the photos show a smile.

  Various newscasters are reporting that confirming that it had been Atwater had been surprisingly simple. After killing several of his young victims, he had posted photos to his Facebook page. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Even so, several people had reported it instantly. And, the next time, several more. After a while, the officials had begun to believe and had looked into things. This alone, of course, had caused outrage. Had the authorities paid attention sooner, lives would have been saved, Atwater apprehended. And this is part of the reverberations that move through the news just as I tune in. Negligence of several sorts had been involved, various parties are saying. And the Facebook tie-in provides an Internet connection of the sort the media loves to crow about. Now it was an Internet killing, though from what I could see, that didn’t reflect the actual picture at all.

  But it is the local authorities who are being given the most grief. Those in charge had not paid attention and with that had not protected several young citizens who had come to horrid ends, that’s what is being said. No one wanted to think about it, but there it was. The system had somehow broken down. Children had gone missing and had probably died. Children continued to die because, by the time the police and the powers that be put everything together, Atwater had fled.

  I get up from my reading and watching. Move to the bathroom. Throw up tidily into the toilet. Wash my hands and then my face to redness with a rough washcloth. Go back to my computer. Continue reading. I don’t know how much of what I read is true, but the stories are decisive and they’re all over the map: Atwater’s b
iological parents, both dead, had been second cousins. Bodies of two of the children he had killed early on had been recovered. Twin girls, aged eight. They had been found holding hands. An early teacher of Atwater’s had come forward and said he had once found the murderer as a young man, in the schoolyard pulling the wings off flies. Any fact or almost-fact, it seems, is grist for the news mill: anything to keep the story alive. And with a story like this one? It doesn’t take much.

  By the time I’ve collected all of the available facts, it feels as though my heart is bleeding and there is nothing left inside me to throw up. And while I continue to learn everything I can, I weep. I weep as I haven’t since my own child died. I weep for all of those mothers and fathers: I understand what this means to them all too well. I know mine is not a rational response: all this weeping to honor the death of other people’s children. But still. I weep on.

  After a while, I feel a shift inside myself. I feel the grief hardening; morphing into something different. I stop crying and feel something growing. It’s an embryo at first. I lean into it. Embrace it. Feel it grow. I walk into a rage so pure and perfect, I have to sit back and taste it in my throat. This thing I feel is like love in its intensity. It fills my chest. Stops my breath. Fills me with need.

  I look again at photos of the face of the killer. The man-child who has stopped the breath of at least sixteen rural California kids. I look at him and mark his face. Photos taken at the time of high school are the most common. His face would be more lined now and slightly more worn.

  William Atwater. No violent history on record. Weedy. White. Maybe a little goofy looking, but nothing exceptional in his face. He looks neither super smart nor alarmingly dumb and, certainly, there is no hint in his face of the violence that will come. None I can see, at any rate, and I peer at the photos very closely. No hint of what, by the time these early photos were taken, may well already have begun, even if only in small ways.