The Soul Hunter

by Melanie Wells

  “Ob-gyn. Yeah, it’s not like I wouldn’t know what to look for. But I’m a small woman. I didn’t gain any weight. I was nauseous all the time. But I was on pain medication and experiencing symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Nausea, vomiting, insomnia, anxiety, moodiness, fatigue. I’m sure you see it all the time. And my cycle is crazy anyway. Very irregular. So I really didn’t put it all together. Not until I was in my second trimester.”

  “And by then…” So much for my ambition to finish sentences.

  “I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.” She looked up at me, suddenly animated. “I mean, no one would have blamed me. I realize that. Everyone, or almost everyone, I guess—the pope springs to mind as an obvious exception—makes an allowance for rape.”

  “Did you think of adoption?” I asked, and instantly regretted it. Of course she had.

  “I obsessed about it. I don’t know how many nights I spent pacing the rooms of this house, like a caged cat. Back and forth. And that’s how I felt. Caged. Angry. So, so angry.”

  “Why did you keep him?”

  “You know why?” She smiled at me. “Because I was afraid. Afraid of how this poor little innocent child would turn out. The adoptive parents would have to know how he was conceived—and by that time, by the way, I knew I was carrying a boy. I’d already named him Nicholas in my mind. Nicholas is the patron saint of children. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “If I’d placed him for adoption, would his new parents look at him differently? Would they look at him and see a rapist?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. I absolutely do. But that’s the point.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Don’t you see? I know his father. I know how angry he is. How cruel. I know he has no capacity for empathy or for kindness or for anything that makes us…human. I know he has no conscience. But I don’t know why he’s like that. Is it because he had a terrible life? Or is there something in him, in his genes, that makes him…?” She looked up at me.

  “Evil?” I said.

  She nodded. “Evil. Is that a genetic trait? Or is it something that happens to you?”

  “Maybe it’s spiritual.”

  “Maybe it is spiritual. But the point is, we don’t know. I don’t know. And I wanted to protect this little boy from evil. I wanted to do everything I could to love it out of him. I knew that the second I saw the sonogram and heard his heartbeat. He needed someone who knew his story. He needed me.” She looked up at me. “I’m his mother.”

  “Surely you knew you’d be stuck with Gordon Pryne for the rest of your life. The minute he found out he had a son—”

  “He never found out. I’ve never told a soul. Not even my parents. No one knows who his father is. No one in the world. Other than me. And now you.”

  “But the police are the ones who told me he had a child. They obviously know.”

  “Jackson and McKnight,” she said. “I met them. The day after Pryne came by with the teddy bear. I called the police when I got home that night and he was here. But I never told them how Nicholas was conceived. Or even that he was Pryne’s child. I think they arrived at that conclusion on their own. He does look like his father.”

  “But they know about the rape.”

  She shook her head. “My name never appeared anywhere in the record. Except in the case file, which I’m sure they haven’t checked. They weren’t involved in my case. I agreed to a plea to settle the case without a trial. I never had to testify.” She leveled her eyes at me. “They don’t know I’m the woman he raped. You’re the only one that knows that.”

  “If Pryne doesn’t know about Nicholas, why did he show up with a teddy bear?”

  “And how does he know where I live? I was hoping you’d know the answer to both questions,” she said.

  “Me? How would I know? I’ve never even met him.”

  She rose and went to the kitchen. She came back with the wine bottle and a glass for me. I’m not wild about red wine, but I had the feeling I was about to need it. She poured us both a glass, set the bottle on the table and sat down.

  “I pulled a double shift today,” she began. “Three-to-eleven, eleven-to-seven.”

  I looked at my watch. She’d been up since about two in the morning. It was after eight p.m. now.

  “Three-to-elevens are always crazy. You know how Parkland is. Anything can happen. It’s where they take all the indigents and criminals for treatment.”

  “The unwashed and the unclean.”

  “Exactly. So around four this morning this homeless woman is brought in. Cervical tumor. She was in pain and had lost a lot of blood. Alcoholics do that. Their liver functions are way off. Their blood can’t coagulate. Sometimes you can’t save them. They bleed out fast.”

  “How did you know she was an alcoholic?”

  “The smell. You know that smell when it’s coming out of their pores?”

  “Happily, no,” I said.

  She chuckled. “Good for you. I wish I didn’t. Anyway, she was conscious when she came in, but not lucid. Hysterical. Babbling. We hung a couple of units of blood and tried to get her stable for surgery. I was the attending OB. That’s why they called me in. I’d never met her, you understand.”

  Stories like this one make me appreciate my job.

  “But she seemed to know me. Kept grabbing for my hand and calling me Maria. Shouting at me to listen to her. Maria is a pretty common name for a Hispanic woman. I didn’t think anything about it. I thought she was hallucinating. We gave her a shot of morphine and she settled down, and I went to check on a couple of patients who were in labor.

  “When I got back she’d crashed. Her heart had stopped. Too much blood loss, probably. And no nutritional base to start with. She’d probably been living on bourbon for years. You’re that malnourished, you really have no shot. But they were working on her. You know, with the paddles.”

  “My dad’s a heart surgeon,” I said.

  “Oh. Then you know. De-fibbing her. So I watched them work on her, but she was still flat-lined. And then all of a sudden, she came to. Just opened her eyes and looked right at me.”

  “Was she conscious? Or was it a reflex?”

  “She was conscious. And alert. You know what she said?”

  I shook my head.

  “She said, ‘Maria, I’ve spoken to the authorities about you.’”

  “The authorities? Did she mean the police?”

  Maria smiled. “I think she meant a higher authority than that. She said, ‘Maria, I’ve spoken to the authorities about you. Your help will arrive tonight.’”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know what to do. Everyone was staring at me. I just wanted to settle her down, so I answered her. I said, ‘But I don’t need any help.’”

  I leaned in. “What did she say?”

  She said, ‘The authorities have spoken. Your help will arrive tonight.’ And then she died. Just like that.” She paused and said quietly, “Her name was Willie.” She looked up at me. “And then you called. Just a few hours after that.”

  “You don’t think I’m the help?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “I can’t imagine any sort of help I could provide.”

  “Do you know much about nightmares, Dylan?”

  I felt my skin prickle. “Why? Have you been having nightmares?”

  “No, Nicholas has. He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. Always at the same time.”

  “What time?” I knew what the answer would be.

  “Three thirty.”

  “Has he told you anything about the dreams?”

  “No. But he’s been drawing them, I think.”

  She got up and let herself quietly into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a coloring book. She handed it to me and sat back down.

  I flipped through the pages. The book was published by the Audubon Society—Birds of the Americas. Simple o
utline drawings of cardinals and ducks and hummingbirds. In the margins of some of them, he had written his name in crude capital letters. The askew script of a five-year-old.

  Nicholas had colored the images in broad strokes of wacky, kid-chosen colors. The cardinal was lemon yellow, the Mallard duck Day-Glo orange and mint green. As I flipped through the book, the colors got darker, the strokes more unruly and wild.

  When I got to the picture of a dove, I froze. Nicholas had left the picture white, but x’ed out its wings with black crayon. He’d drawn a red slash between the bird’s wings on its back.

  I looked up. “Did he tell you anything about this?”

  “It’s the white man. That’s what he said. The white man from his dreams.”

  I flipped through more pages. The wings were crossed out in each image now, the red slash drawn violently across each bird’s back, the image left white, colorless.

  “He sang a song the other day while he was coloring,” she said. “To the tune of ‘Jesus Loves Me.’”

  “What were the words?”

  “Peter wants me this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak but he is strong. Yes, Peter wants me. Yes, Peter wants me. Yes, Peter wants me. The Bible tells me so.”

  I felt sick.

  “Who is Peter?” she said.

  “The man with the slash in his back. His name is Peter Terry.”

  “Who is he? Is he connected with Gordon Pryne? Some criminal friend of his? A pedophile or something? How do you know him?”

  “He’s not a person. He’s a…spirit, I think. A demon.”

  I watched her eyes. She didn’t flinch.

  “What does he want with my son?”

  “The same thing he wants with all of us. Peter Terry is a hunter,” I said. “He’s hunting souls.”

  15

  I left Maria’s duplex thoroughly spooked by our conversation and once again enraged at Peter Terry. The sky started to spit out little icy pellets, which were drumming onto the windshield of my pickup and already sticking to the roads.

  Once or twice a year maybe, during what Texans call a “hard freeze,” which means anything below twenty-five degrees, we get freezing rain or snow or some mixture of the two. Every exposed surface ends up coated with a glassy sheet of ice.

  Since Dallas has no winter storm equipment—snowplows, sanding trucks, and road salt are not urgent budget items in a city south of the Red River—roads are essentially impassable until the ice melts. The city simply shuts down to wait it out.

  This sort of event in Dallas excites a uniformly childish sense of glee. Meteorologists, suddenly thrust blinking into the spotlight and flushed with self-importance, chart the impending storm with morbid enthusiasm. A gossipy string of warnings is passed along by everyone you met the day before. And after the ice storm has arrived, everyone pops out of bed at 5:00 a.m. and flips on TVs and radios to see if schools and businesses have been shut down for a longed-for snow day. If our luck is good, we get to go back to bed, sleep late, and then start a pot of chili sometime that afternoon.

  Somehow, I’d managed to miss the buzz completely.

  I needed supplies.

  My favorite hardware store is called Elliott’s. I love Elliott’s Hardware because it is a real hardware store, not like those huge national chains that sell very little hardware and are in fact the place to go when you want track lighting or vinyl flooring or maybe a spiffy outdoor grill.

  Elliott’s is the sort of place where you can describe some obscure plumbing part from a faucet that was discontinued forty years ago, using words like thingy and doodad and doohickey. And the face of the sixtyish hardware expert you’re talking to will light up and he’ll say, “Follow me,” and he’ll walk you over to aisle twenty-seven and open a drawer of a hundred similar doohickeys and pull one out of a slot and hand it to you. And the part will cost twenty-five cents. And as an added bonus, they’re open until nine on Tuesdays.

  I steered my way over there, parked my truck in the lot, which had already been sanded and salted, and scooted in the sliding glass doors at ten minutes to nine.

  “Welcome to Elliott’s,” the man said cheerfully. “How can we help you tonight?”

  “Mice,” I said.

  “You have mice?”

  “Or rats. I’m not sure which.”

  “How big is the hole?”

  I made an okay sign with my fingers.

  “Rats,” he said.

  “Rats, then. My exterminator is supposed to come tomorrow, but with the weather, he might not be able to get there for a couple of more days. What do you think? Rat poison, maybe?”

  “Don’t recommend it,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You want rodents dying behind your walls and smelling up your living room?”

  “Nope.”

  “Follow me,” he said, and walked me over to aisle twelve.

  “You have your standard rattrap,” he was saying, picking up a sample to show me. “Bait it with peanut butter and clock ’em on the back of the head. Snapping sound can be a problem. Scare you out of your wits in the middle of the night. And then there’s the problem of carcass disposal. Plus you’d need a dozen or so of these little babies to do the job. Wouldn’t be my first choice. Next you have your glue traps, which are essentially trays of industrial glue. Little critters get stuck and either starve to death or rip themselves open trying to get out.”

  I winced. “Doesn’t sound too humane.”

  His eyes lit up. “Follow me.”

  He walked to the end of the aisle and gestured toward the shelf, like Carol Merrill on Let’s Make a Deal. Door number three.

  “Repeater Clear Top Multiple Rat Trap. We have two brands. Woodstream or Rover. Either one will do you just fine. Catch you some rats with this little beauty and then drive on over to your enemy’s house and let ’em go.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Excellent choice. How are you for salt? Ice storm tonight. Blue norther rolling in.”

  “Definitely need salt.”

  “Scraper for your windshield?”

  “Yep, need one of those.”

  “Flashlights or lanterns in case the power lines snap?”

  “I think I’ll use candles.”

  “Matches?”

  “Sure.”

  “What kind of car do you drive?”

  “A ’72 Ford pickup.”

  “You’ll need sandbags.”

  “Roger that.”

  He got me fixed up, loaded the sandbags into the bed of my truck himself, refused a tip, and reminded me to fasten my seat belt and drive slow.

  Elliott’s renews my faith in mankind. I should spend more time there.

  My next stop was the grocery store. I loaded up on chili fixings, of course—it never hurts to hope—along with other sundries I’d need, including peanut butter to bait my new humane Rover brand Repeater Clear Top Multiple Rat Trap. And then I headed home. The roads were already slick, but since everyone else had gotten the word about the storm, I was the only one dumb enough to be out. I had the streets to myself.

  My house was near arctic temperature when I arrived. I unloaded groceries and ran around the house kicking on space heaters and lighting the gas fire in the bathroom. I even turned on the gas stove and opened the door—which I know you’re not supposed to do (methane gas or something), but I needed all the heat I could get. I walked over to the water heater closet and leaned in to listen, breathing a quick thank-you to my good friend Jesus. It was knocking just like it was supposed to.

  It was late and I’d had a long day, but I wasn’t tired. I was wired. I turned on the stereo, changed into jammies and scooted into my slippers, made myself some hot chocolate (with marshmallows to reward myself for finding Maria Chavez), and sat down to think.

  What was Peter Terry up to? I’d articulated it for the first time to myself when I said the words to Maria. Peter Terry was hunting souls. But why Nicholas Chavez? And wh
at did that have to do with Drew Sturdivant? There was no doubt in my mind now that Peter Terry was connected to Drew’s murder. Somehow. The link to Maria Chavez and her son was too strange to be coincidental. With or without Willie the homeless person’s weird prophecy about Maria’s help arriving tonight.

  And what was I supposed to help her with, anyway? Protecting her son? How exactly did one go about protecting a five-year-old from a spooky demonic white dude with a slash on his back who enjoyed twisted practical jokes like breaking water heaters while wearing a lumberjack outfit and inserting his name into “Jesus Loves Me”?

  “What a sicko,” I said out loud.

  My phone rang. I checked the clock. It was almost ten thirty. Who would be calling at this hour?

  “Hello?”

  “Did you see this coming?”

  “Hey, Guthrie.”

  “Why is it that the worst specimens are the ones who insist on replicating themselves?” he said. “Have you noticed that? Ever been to a truck stop? Or, like, the state fair?”

  “How did you find out?”

  “They sent me a T-shirt.”

  “World’s Greatest Uncle?”

  “It should say brother, for starters. Kellee and her room temperature IQ.”

  “It’s about forty-five degrees in my house right now.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “There’s nothing to do but make peace with it, Guthrie.”

  “Why does this bother me so much? I’m an adult.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Happy birthday, by the way. I forgot. As usual.”

  “So did I, almost.”

  “What is this? Thirty-six?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “We’re old.”

  “Speak for yourself. How’s Cleo?”

  “She left.”

  “Left? What do you mean, she left?”

  “I mean she put her clothes in the new red Volvo I bought her and drove away.”

  “She left you?”

  “Is there another kind? Leaving is leaving.”

  “Cleo left you.”

  “Only after I asked her to.”

  “What happened?”

  “What didn’t happen? We never should have gotten married in the first place.”