by Blake Banner
He wouldn’t meet my eye. He stood suddenly, moved to the drinks tray behind his chair, and poured himself a drink. When he spoke, he addressed his words to the his glass. He said simply, “What you’re saying makes no sense. How could Arnold’s illness make me vulnerable?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that it does.” I smiled at Karen. “Tell me something, Karen. What happens to Arnold’s friends when the visit is over?”
Neither of them answered. Al remained staring down at his drink. Karen’s mouth became a thin, obstinate line and she turned her face away from me.
I gave a small laugh. “Let me guess. Let me see if I can guess. Do you send them back to their families? Well, you don’t want this kid going back. Because if she goes back, she has something on you, she can identify you, and if she or her parents should escape, she can put her finger on the owner of the mine, who not only uses child slaves, but takes those children home for his son to…” I paused and labored the word, “…play with.”
Al said, “That’s not what happens.”
I ignored him and went on. “And, however remote the possibility of escape, you are not a man who likes loose ends. That was one of the reasons you did not like Vasco. He was a man liable to leave loose ends lying around. So it is much easier, when the nice little girls finish their visit, to simply have them disappear. And you had a man in your household who was more than willing to do that job for you: Vasco. Only trouble was, once he’d done one job, he had you over a barrel.”
I was talking, working my mouth, but I knew there were more holes in my theory than in a self-medicating hypochondriac acupuncturist. That didn’t stop me. I kept going. “Or are you going to tell me that Vasco didn’t have a taste for killing young girls?”
The silence was a palpable thing. Finally, Al said, “He did, yes. He was sick in that way; in many ways.”
I felt a hot flush of anger and fought to control it. “Yeah, he was sick. You’re just pragmatic.”
“I do what I have to do to protect my family.”
I stood. “Well, call me sentimental, Al, but this kid goes home.”
Karen said, “That’s not possible.”
I snapped, “Why not?”
She stood and came toward me, reaching for me. “He needs to be with her. Then I’ll see to it. Then I’ll take care of it. I’ll see that she’s… that she…”
“Karen!” It was Al.
I turned to look at him.
His face was flushed with anger. “Be silent!”
She clamped her mouth shut.
He glared at me. “It is impossible. How would you get her there?”
“I’ll drive her.”
“You’ll never make it there and back before the storm sets in for the night.”
“Then she comes with me.”
“Don’t be stupid, man! What do you think will happen when the sheriff gets here? Or the FBI?”
I stared at him. “So what do you propose?”
It was Karen who answered, with her fists clenched and her face crimson. “She must be eliminated! They are always eliminated! It is the only way!”
I thought of the two pathetic kids upstairs: her, a child of fifteen, robbed of her innocence, ripped from her family, enslaved, brutalized, and now abducted and sentenced to death—why? Because she looked nice, because she was selected by this maniac to talk to his son for a few hours. And the boy, an emaciated wreck who despite his twenty years had never made it to adulthood, sentenced to be smothered by his mother, fed little girls to talk to in some ghastly Freudian nightmare, and then have his ‘friends’ taken from him and slaughtered. It was insane.
But even as I thought about it, I knew I was missing something. I knew there was more to it than that. I had always known, since I’d seen them in the church, that there was something deeper, darker, about this family; something crucial that I was missing. I turned and walked out of the room, crossed the hall, and climbed the stairs. Karen came running after me, screaming, “What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you going to do? Stop! Stop!”
She clawed at my back. I turned, put my hand over her face, and shoved. She stumbled back, tripped over her own feet and fell, sprawling on the cold floor. Al hurried out of his study and went to help her up.
I ran up the stairs and made my way along the corridor to Arnold’s room. The key was in the lock on the outside, and the door was locked. I unlocked it and went in.
The sight that met my eyes was sickening. The girl was on his bed. She was dressed in a pretty frock. She had been bathed and her hair washed. She looked pretty, almost unrecognizable from the girl I had seen that morning. She was staring at me and her eyes looked close to terror. Next to her, Arnold was curled in the fetal position, dressed in his pajamas. His eyes were open, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t react at all. He just lay there.
I looked at the girl.
“Te llamas María?” Was her name Maria.
“Si, soy María.”
“Sabes manejar?” I asked her if she knew how to drive. Mexican kids learn young. She nodded. “Si.”
I jerked my head. “Come on!”
She hesitated.
I said, “Do you speak English?”
She nodded. “A little.”
“Well if you want to live, come with me. Your family is waiting. Hurry!”
I guess she figured she didn’t have much to lose. She jumped off the bed and ran to me. I grabbed her wrist and we moved along the landing. At the top of the stairs, I saw Al and Karen halfway up.
“Get back in your study or this story ends right here.”
He was unarmed and he backed down a few steps. Karen reached toward the girl and climbed another step, smiling, appealing, “No, honey, you can’t leave. You have to stay. We still have so much fun to have. We’ll have a party, I’ll bake a cake…”
I stepped in front of the girl and rushed the half-dozen steps between me and Karen. I thrust the Sig in her face and snarled, “I am serious, Karen. I swear I’ll throw you down the stairs. You get your damn kicks somewhere else!” She backed down to the hall and I shouted at her, “In the study!”
She ran sobbing to her husband. He took her in his arms, stared at me shaking his head, and they went inside and closed the door. I grabbed Maria’s arm and said, “Run, fast!”
We went out the door and ran down the drive. The sky was turning black again, the wind was beginning to rise and there were snowflakes drifting in the air. I ignored the Q7. I wanted the Feds to find it there, and in any case, if weather conditions got tough, she would need something with real grunt. We made it to the Dodge RAM I had ditched earlier. I climbed in, backed it out of the ditch and swung it around. Then I climbed out and held the door open for her. She looked at me a moment like I was crazy. I smiled.
“Go back to the mine. All the bad guys are dead. Los malo están muertos. Your parents are waiting for you. Tonight, maybe tomorrow, the sheriff will come. He will help you. Comprende?”
She nodded. Her eyes flooded. “Thank you.”
Next thing, she’d clambered in. She slammed the door and took off like a greyhound with a Carolina reaper up its ass. I watched her corner onto the blacktop at the end of the drive and head toward the mine doing eighty and climbing.
I stared toward Independence. The red Toyota with the broken windshield was there, beside me. I could probably make it work. Hell, I could probably walk it before the storm started in earnest. But I looked back at the farmhouse. There was unfinished business there, with Al—and Karen. But I didn’t know what it was, or how to finish it. So I just stood and stared as the darkness crept in around me.
Twenty-four
I didn’t know what it was, or how to finish it, but I did know where. So I turned and I walked along the frozen path, under the darkening sky, toward the farmhouse. The door was still open. It swung on its hinges, beating the wall in a broken tattoo, like a madman trying to beat memories out of his mind.
I step
ped inside and closed the door behind me. The big marble hall with the sweeping staircase was silent. There had been so much death in this house, what could you expect but silence? I looked down at my hands. They were still smeared with dry blood. They were the same hands that had held Marni; the same hands that had handed Maria the key to the Dodge. They were the same hands that just a few hours earlier had cut down eight men with an axe. Were they the hands that were responsible for this silence of death?
I looked at the study door. It was closed. I wondered what I would find inside, and instinctively glanced up at the landing: the dark corridor that led to the right, towards Arnold’s room. What would I find up there?
I crossed the hall and my heels echoed, loud, sharp ricochets like running feet going up the walls, and into the shadows beneath the ceiling. I took the cold, brass handle in my hand and pushed open the door, stepped inside.
He was sitting in his chair, staring at the flames in the fire again. In his hand he held a glass of whisky. He didn’t look up. My glass was still on the mock Queen Anne occasional table beside the chair where I’d been sitting. I picked it up and crossed behind him to the sideboard, refilled it, and went to sit in my chair. I felt exhausted. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to find somewhere in my body that didn’t hurt; somewhere in my mind where there was no ache. I found nowhere.
When I opened them again, he was watching me. When he spoke, it was the voice of a man preparing to depart, attempting to leave behind at least some kind of explanation, a justification for his life.
“You can’t understand,” he said, “unless you’ve had children.”
“The families at the mine,” I replied, “had children. Did you understand them?”
He looked away from me, at the wavering flames, at the logs being steadily consumed. “You think differently when you have children. They come before everything. Even before God.”
“Are you speaking for yourself, or for Karen?”
“She’s his mother.” He said it like it was an explanation, like it told me something I didn’t know. “He was everything to her.” He sighed heavily. For a moment he looked to me like a very old man, laying his head down upon a pillow for the last time. “I don’t know if you can begin to understand. I don’t know why God has chosen you as my judge, if you can have no understanding of what happened, of how it was.” He shook his head. “She did not live, she had not lived until he was born. And then…” For a second his face showed some animation. “Then it was as though she were born when he was born.” He turned to me. “I saw her that first day, holding him in her arms, and she was alive! She loved… him…”
He turned back to the fire, and the flicker of flame I had seen in his face drained away again. I asked, “What happened?”
He didn’t respond for a while. Then he shrugged. “Life happened. For almost fifteen years we were happy. Maybe that’s not such a bad run in this world. I ran the farm, grew crops, did the work a man is supposed to do in this world. I lived…” His face darkened with bitterness. “I lived an honorable life. And she cared for our son. He was never strong. At the age of ten or eleven he began to show signs of being sickly. He wasn’t stupid.” He looked at me as though I might challenge that statement. I didn’t and he turned back to the fire. “He was just different. It was as though, where the rest of us look out into the world, he looked within instead. It made him a lonely child.”
I pulled my cigarettes from my pocket, extracted one, and lit up. I inhaled and took a long sip of whiskey. “What about school?”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t be parted from him. We tried to take him to a nursery school when he was just a small toddler. They both became inconsolable. He was hysterical and so was she. So we opted for home schooling. We briefly employed a home tutor. But that was impossible, too. Karen made it impossible.”
“She interfered in the classes.”
It wasn’t a question. He nodded. “After a week, she left and Karen took over the lessons.”
I took another drag and breathed the smoke deep into my lungs. “So he never made friends. Never learned to play with other kids.”
He shook his head. “Karen said he was not like other children. They did not understand him. He was sensitive. She said he was fragile. All he needed was his mother.”
“You didn’t agree.”
“No. I believed that he needed friends, albeit sensitive friends, intelligent children who would not victimize or torment him.”
“Not easy in a community with barely twenty families.”
He gave his head a small shake. “You’d be surprised. This is not the wild west anymore, Lacklan. There are no more gunfights, no more Indians. This is…” He trailed off. “This could have been an idyllic community. It was. The children in Independence were happy and healthy. Wholesome. They were reared in the tradition of Christian kindness, tolerance, family…” His face twisted with grief. “If I had….” He threw back his head and looked at an empty spot in space. The flames washed his face and reflected like wet fire on his tears. “If I had only shown a little strength. If I had only cared enough to do something. The teacher and the children at the local school, all those good people in the village, they would have loved and nurtured him.”
“But Karen wouldn’t have it.”
He nodded.
I added, and watched his face carefully as I said it, “The sickness was hers, not his.”
He went very still. After a moment he took a deep, wet breath. “The sickness was hers, not his, and she passed it to him through the milk from her breast. And I stood by and watched it happen, may God forgive me.”
“When did it start?”
“Predictably, as he started to approach puberty. He would see the little girls of his age.”
“See them how?”
He smiled. “Through the windows of the car. He began to develop crushes. As we all did at that age. He would fall in love with this girl, or that girl…”
“Rose Gordon…?”
His face went gray. He sagged. Stared down at his hands in his lap. “Rose and Sally Gordon. Sweet, delightful girls. He loved them both. Who wouldn’t?”
He fell silent.
I smoked and drank for a moment, watching him, waiting. Finally, I asked: “What happened? They came to visit?”
He took another deep, shaky breath. “I suppose it must be told. She wouldn’t have it. She was adamant. They would not cross our doorstep. She would not have them in our house. They were not suitable, they were the wrong class, the wrong kind of people. You name it, she came up with every reason and every excuse in the book. But the more she said no, the more he cried, the more violent his tantrums became, until in the end he had a fit.”
I frowned. “A fit?”
He nodded. “It is hardly surprising. God alone knows what kind of Freudian nightmare was going on in that poor child’s mind. Every kind of emotional repression and blackmail you can imagine. The only emotion he was allowed was the adoration of his mother. Everything else, every other emotion was…” He held out his hand and clenched his fist. “…crushed! He was emotionally blackmailed into remaining a four-year-old, Lacklan. And finally, when he was about twelve, he snapped, broke under the strain. He became what you see today. He started to have fits, he would go into hysterical paralysis for days on end. Finally, she relented and asked the Gordon girls if they would like to visit with us. They were extremely kind to Arnold. They mothered him and spoiled him. They baked brownies with Karen and fed them to him, they read him books…”
Again he trailed off.
“How did Karen take that”
He snorted. “It was the happiest we had seen Arnold in years! And of course he was hopelessly in love with both of them. He demanded that they come back the following weekend, and the weekend after that.”
“How old was he by then?”
“Fourteen, fifteen.”
“How long did it go on?”
“From
fourteen to fifteen.”
“So when the Gordon girls were raped and murdered…”
“They were visiting Arnold, yes.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Karen had become increasingly unhappy with the girls visiting so often. It was practically once a week. Arnold lived for those visits. His focus of affection had shifted, as a teenage boy’s must, from her to the girls. She had become morose, bitter, unreasonable to the point of being irrational.” He opened his eyes again, stared into his drink and took a sip. “One day, out of the blue, she decided we had to promote a young hand we had recently employed.”
“Joe Vasco.”
“Yes, Joe Vasco.”
“And that was when it started.”
“Two weeks later, the Gordon girls were killed and their family disappeared shortly afterwards.” He paused, staring at his hands in his lap. I had the impression he was fighting back tears. Eventually he raised an eyebrow, drew breath, and went on, “The sheriff came over from Lovelock. He investigated, but there was no evidence. It was as though their parents had vanished off the face of the Earth. The sheriff went away and things returned to normal for a while. But pretty soon Arnold started hankering for a friend again. He had fallen in love with another little girl.”
He raised a hand and wiped a tear from his face.
I said, “Sally.”
He nodded. “Little Sally Ibanez. A ray of sun. She lit up the house. Her laughter…!” He laughed himself, but it was chocked off into a sob. He shook his head, barely able to talk, but needing to go on. “She couldn’t walk anywhere. She had to run. Run and laugh. She filled the house,” he waved his hand in an extravagant gesture, “she filled the house with noise, the way Arnold should have done, but never did… was never able. Was never allowed…”
