A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  Of what value is a life spent in anger? Of what value is a day spent without hope, without a dream?

  These lives we are living now might someday prove to have been computer simulations or holograms, as contemporary science theorizes. Time itself might prove to have been nothing but an illusion. But we cannot live that way now. We must live as if every day is real, and as if every minute of every day is significant. We must give ourselves meaning even when everybody else is attempting to strip us of meaning. To fill your life with the negative charge of nihilism is to deny the very real beauty and joy of life that exists all around you.

  A positive life, a meaningful life, is one that is lived inside that beauty and joy, even if you have to work hard from time to time to remain inside. Don’t look for beauty to be flamboyant or loud or startling; it usually isn’t. Look for it in the meals your mother sets before you, and in the warmth of your father’s hand on your shoulder. Look for it in a baby’s smile, or in the way your dog greets you at the door. In your friends’ laughter, or the tears they share with you. Look for it in the good work you do, and in the satisfaction of knowing, at the end of each day, that you performed to the best of your ability. Be that beauty and that joy. When you do that, your life becomes art. Be the artist of your own life.

  DeMarco laughed softly to himself, and closed the book, and laid his forehead against the edge of the mattress, and wept.

  One Hundred

  DeMarco patted the dirt back into the small hole he had made with the trowel he had brought along, and in which Jayme had placed the two bunches of marigolds purchased at a small nursery on the edge of town. Both filled their hands with topsoil from the bag beside the headstone, then smoothed the dirt and wiped their hands on the grass, then knelt there together for a while holding hands, looking down at the tiny grave atop Ryan Jr.’s grave, looking down at the bright-yellow flowers.

  Vee had saved the tiny remains inside a gauze pad wrapped in half, and then had placed the pad in a zippered plastic bag, and had placed the bag in the small wooden box. DeMarco was glad she had done that for Jayme, was glad to have the Brinkers as friends. Daksh’s letter had been, and still was, unsettling, but he was determined to not allow it to dominate his thoughts or cast this time with Jayme into shadow. The air was fresh and clean here, and the sun was warm on his shoulders and the top of his head, and what he felt for Jayme was stronger and more resilient than any madman’s curse.

  “Can you say something?” she asked.

  “You mean…a prayer?”

  “To your son. He doesn’t know me.”

  Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. DeMarco wished he knew the answer to that and a lot of other questions. Speaking out loud to his son would make him feel foolish, but if that was what Jayme wanted, what she needed…

  “This is your little brother or sister, my son.”

  “Sister,” Jayme said.

  He turned to look at her.

  “I just know,” she told him. “When I close my eyes, I see pink.”

  Okay; he did too. Right from the start, from the very moment Ben gave him the news. He always saw Jayme with a pink bundle in her arms. Again, maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t. But that was a discussion for another day.

  “This is your little sister, Ryan. Please love her and take care of her. Until we’re all together again.”

  Jayme smiled and nodded and pressed her hand flat atop the replanted sod. After a while she turned to look at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen, eyes he wanted to shine again, to flicker with the flame of her spirit and the fury of her love. They were brimming with tears now, her mouth quivering. “Does a baby this small, this early, even have a soul?”

  “Of course,” he told her.

  “How do you know?”

  He had no answer.

  “Ryan. How do you know?”

  “We have to believe it does,” he said.

  “Then what happens to it? To the soul of a baby that was never even born?”

  “I wish I could answer that for you, sweetheart.”

  He was certain that she was going to break down sobbing, would stretch herself across the grass and never want to leave. Instead, her eyes turned hopeful. “Do you think Lathea would know?”

  He was quiet for a while, felt the dampness of the ground on his knees. Felt the warmth of the sun on his face and the coolness of the tears on his cheeks. He smelled the grass he had overturned and the dirt drying on his hands. He must not let that fire in her emerald eyes go out.

  He pushed himself to his feet and brushed the dirt from his palms. Then he looked down at her and smiled and extended a hand. “Let’s go for a drive and find out.”

  Read on for a look at book one in the Ryan DeMarco Mystery series.

  One

  The waters of Lake Wilhelm are dark and chilled. In some places, the lake is deep enough to swallow a house. In others, a body could lie just beneath the surface, tangled in the morass of weeds and water plants, and remain unseen, just another shadowy form, a captive feast for the catfish and crappie and the monster bass that will nibble away at it until the bones fall asunder and bury themselves in the silty floor.

  In late October, the Arctic Express begins to whisper southeastward across the Canadian plains, driving the surface of Lake Erie into white-tipped breakers that pound the first cold breaths of winter into northwestern Pennsylvania. From now until April, sunny days are few and the spume-strewn beaches of Presque Isle empty but for misanthropic stragglers, summer shops boarded shut, golf courses as still as cemeteries, marinas stripped to their bonework of bare, splintered boards. For the next six months, the air will be gray and pricked with rain or blasted with wind-driven snow. A season of surliness prevails.

  Sergeant Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police, Troop D, Mercer County headquarters, has seen this season come and go too many times. He has seen the surliness descend into despair, the despair to acts of desperation, or, worse yet, to deliberately malicious acts, to behavior that shows no regard for the fragility of flesh, a contempt for all consequences.

  He knows that on the dozen or so campuses between Erie and Pittsburgh, college students still young enough to envision a happy future will bundle up against the biting chill, but even their youthful souls will suffer the effects of this season of gray. By November, they will have grown annoyed with their roommates, exasperated with professors, and will miss home for the first time since September. Home is warm and bright and where the holidays are waiting. But here in Pennsylvania’s farthest northern reach, Lake Wilhelm stretches like a bony finger down a glacier-scoured valley, its waters dark with pine resin, its shores thick on all sides with two thousand acres of trees and brush and hanging vines, dense with damp shadows and nocturnal things, with bear and wildcat and coyote, with hawks that scream in the night.

  In these woods too, or near them, a murderer now hides, a man gone mad in the blink of an eye.

  The college students are anxious to go home now, home to Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukah, to warmth and love and light. Home to where men so respected and adored do not suddenly butcher their families and escape into the woods.

  The knowledge that there is a murderer in one’s midst will stagger any community, large or small. But when that murderer is one of your own, when you have trusted the education of your sons and daughters to him, when you have seen his smiling face in every bookstore in town, watched him chatting with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America, felt both pride and envy in his sudden acclaim, now your chest is always heavy and you cannot seem to catch your breath. Maybe you claimed, last spring, that you played high school football with Tom Huston. Maybe you dated him half a lifetime ago, tasted his kiss, felt the heave and tremor of your bodies as you lay in the lush green of the end zone one steamy August night when love was raw and new. Last spring, you were quick to claim an old intimacy with him, so eager t
o catch some of his sudden, shimmering light. Now you want only to huddle indoors. You sit and stare at the window, confused by your own pale reflection.

  Now Claire O’Patchen Huston, one of the prettiest women in town, quietly elegant in a way no local woman could ever hope to be, lies on a table in a room at the Pennsylvania State Police forensics lab in Erie. There is the wide gape of a slash across her throat, an obscene slit that runs from the edge of her jawline to the opposite clavicle.

  Thomas Jr., twelve years old, he with the quickest smile and the fastest feet in sixth grade, the boy who made all the high school coaches wet their lips in anticipation, shares the chilly room with his mother. The knife that took him in his sleep laid its path low across his throat, a quick, silencing sweep with an upward turn.

  As for his sister, Alyssa, there are a few fourth grade girls who, a week ago, would have described her as a snob, but her best friends knew her as shy, uncertain yet of how to wear and carry and contain her burgeoning beauty. She appears to have sat up at the last instant, for the blood that spurted from her throat sprayed not only across the pillow, but also well below it, spilled down over her chest before she fell back onto her side. Did she understand the message of that gurgling gush of breath in her final moments of consciousness? Did she, as blood soaked into the faded pink flannel of her pajama shirt, lift her gaze to her father’s eyes as he leaned away from her bed?

  And little David Ryan Huston, asleep on his back in his crib—what dreams danced through his toddler’s brain in its last quivers of sentience? Did his father first pause to listen to the susurrus breath? Did he calm himself with its sibilance? The blade on its initial thrust missed the toddler’s heart and slid along the still-soft sternum. The second thrust found the pulsing muscle and nearly sliced it in half.

  The perfect family. The perfect house. The perfect life. All gone now. Snap your fingers five times, that’s how long it took. Five soft taps on the door. Five steel-edged scrapes across the tender flesh of night.

  Two

  DeMarco took the call at home just a few minutes after kickoff on Sunday afternoon. He was halfway through his first bottle of Corona. The Browns, after only four plays, had already driven inside the red zone. Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain appeared made of aluminum foil. DeMarco was settling in for an afternoon of mumbling and cursing when the call came in from Trooper Lipinski, who was working the desk at the State Police barracks.

  The bodies of the Huston family had been discovered approximately twenty minutes earlier. Claire’s mother and father had driven up from nearby Oniontown, just as they did every Sunday through the fall and early winter, “to watch the Steelers beat themselves,” as Ed O’Patchen liked to say that season. The O’Patchens went up the walk and onto the covered porch as they always had, Ed lugging two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Rosemary cradling her Crock-Pot of cheese and sausage dip. As always, they walked inside without knocking. Rosemary went searching for the silent family upstairs while Ed tried to figure out how to work the remote on the new wide-screen Sony.

  The Browns scored while DeMarco was taking the call. He saw no more of the game.

  Later that day, DeMarco and three other troopers began interviewing the Hustons’ neighbors up and down Mayfield Road. Not a single resident along the tree-lined street had anything negative to say about the family, and none were aware of any financial or other marital problems between Thomas and Claire. All were stunned, most were grief-stricken.

  Two residents, however, a homemaker and an elderly man, reported that they had seen a man who might or might not have been Thomas Huston walking through the neighborhood in the weak light of false dawn. “Kind of shuffling along,” the homemaker said. “Looking confused,” said the elderly man.

  Both witnesses had been standing close to their own homes while keeping an eye on their dogs as they sniffed through dewy yards and saw the man from the rear as he was walking away from them. The woman hadn’t yet put in her contact lenses and saw the man as “Just a shape, you know? Just the shape of a man.” The elderly gentleman, who saw the man at a nearer distance, reported that the man who might have been Huston stopped twice, paused with his head down, and once turned fully around to look back down the street. The elderly gentleman asked from two houses away, “You lost?” But the man in question did not respond, and eventually he continued moving away again.

  Four women traveling north on Interstate 79 at around eight thirty Sunday morning, on their way to breakfast at Bob Evans and then a day of shopping at the Millcreek Mall, telephoned 911 at around ten that morning to report passing a man as he leaned over the low concrete bridge abutment where the highway spans a spindly extension of Lake Wilhelm. He was staring into the dark water, they said. They agreed with the other witnesses as to what Huston was wearing: khaki trousers, a dark blue knit shirt, brown belt, and brown loafers or moccasins. They could not agree as to whether the man looked as if he were about to jump into the water or if perhaps he were watching something as it fell and disappeared beneath the surface. Only one woman claimed to have seen the object in his hand before it disappeared into the lake. “It was shiny,” she said. “Like a knife. But a big knife.” They would have called sooner but had come up from New Castle and weren’t aware of the tragedy until a salesclerk mentioned it to one of them.

  In the chill of the following morning, just two days before Halloween, a gray mist hung over the lake, clinging to the water like a spirit reluctant to tear itself free from the memory of flesh. DeMarco stood next to the same bridge abutment where Huston had paused the day before. Two dozen men and women from the criminal investigation units of Troops D and E huddled close on either side—primarily troopers from the two county stations affected by the apparent homicide in Mercer County and consequent search for the primary suspect in Crawford County. All wore blaze-orange plastic vests over black jackets. Four of the troopers knelt beside their search dogs, keeping the leashes snug for now. The dogs, all of mixed breed, were certified in tracking, search and rescue, and cadaver identification.

  DeMarco’s eyes stung from the morning’s cold. A thin pool of dampness lay in his left lower lid, blurring his vision. The left eye was DeMarco’s weak eye, the one he had injured long ago. It watered up at the slightest provocation these days—from a gust of wind, a blast of air-conditioning, an invisible speck of dust—and no matter how often he blinked, he could not whisk away that tiny pool of dampness that warped a corner of the world behind a rain-streaked window. Sometimes the eye would water for no reason at all, most frequently in the stillness of a new morning when he sat in his dark house with the television on, a glass of tepid Jack in his hand. Now, there on the low bridge, his eyes felt heavy from a lack of sleep. But that was nothing new either; his eyes always felt heavy.

  Along the entire length of the bridge, and for some distance on either side—a total of two hundred yards or so—the right lane of the two northbound lanes of Interstate 79 had been blocked off to traffic with orange cones and yellow flashing lights. The passing lane, however, was still open, so DeMarco’s voice as he spoke to the troopers frequently rose to a shout to carry above the rumbling approach and passage of a vehicle.

  “If he managed to get ahold of a tarp or a blanket of some kind,” DeMarco said, “he can last out there for two weeks or so. He might still be carrying the murder weapon with him. You should assume that he is. And according to the lab, it’s no piddling little switchblade. Think machete, Bowie knife, maybe even a decorative sword of some kind. Where he might be headed or what might be going through that brain of his is anybody’s guess, so do not attempt to apprehend. You are here to assist in the tracking of a suspect in a multiple homicide. Tracking is the full extent of your job. Any other action you engage in had best be warranted.”

  An eighteen-wheeler roared over the bridge now; the vibration rattled up through DeMarco’s boots and into his knees. “Under no circumstances should you lose visual contact with t
he trooper nearest you. You see anything, and I mean anything, you radio it in to me. You see tracks, you call me. You find a recent campfire, you call me. You see Huston, you back off immediately and call me. Do not approach. The order to close in and apprehend will come from me and me alone. Also, be aware that there are field officers from the Game Commission stationed all around the perimeter of these woods to keep the public out, but that doesn’t mean one or two of them won’t slip past and come sneaking up on us. Therefore, you will exercise all due restraint.”

  Now DeMarco gazed out across the tannic water, squinted into the wisps of rising fog, and wondered what else he needed to say. Should he mention the uneasiness he had felt in his gut all morning, the sense of being slightly off balance, as if the floor were canted, ever since the moment the day before when he had walked into the Huston home? Should he attempt to describe the peculiar ache of grief that buffeted him like a bruising wind each time he considered Huston’s smallest victim, the toddler with whom DeMarco shared a name? Should he tell them he had read all of Huston’s novels, that autographed first editions stood side by side in the armoire his wife had left behind, one of them personally inscribed to DeMarco, all sharing the top shelf with his other prized first editions, nearly all of them gifts from Laraine, including the jewels of his collection, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea?

  Should he tell them of the three lunches he had shared with Thomas Huston, the fondness and admiration he felt for the man—the growing sense, and hope, for the first time in far too many years, that here, perhaps, was a friend?