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“Yeah, we all know the history, chief.”
Phillip just ignores him. “The mood those days was almost borderline hysteria. Curfews were established and parents refused to let their children out of the yard, even in broad daylight. Those of us who were old enough to follow what was happening speculated all the time about who might be next.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then on August 21 my friend and I were out on one of the back roads, hanging out at this old playground on the edge of town—a stupid idea considering everything that was going on. Anyway, we saw a car idling alongside the fence. It looked like a Plymouth, and it was burnt orange. We noticed that the man inside was wearing overalls and—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Damien cuts in, “hold on here. Are you actually going to tell me that you and this buddy of yours saw the Engineer in person?”
“That’s right.”
“Unbelievable. So what did you do?”
“We discussed for several minutes what should be done, whether we should alert the police about the man. I won’t go into the specifics of what happened next, except that it wasn’t long before we no longer had a choice.”
“What do you mean—you no longer had a choice?”
There’s a long silence hissing from the tape, long enough for Sue to think, Don’t say it, Phillip. Don’t you dare say what I think you’re about to.
“That afternoon,” Phillip says, “my friend and I killed the Engineer.”
“Excuse me?” Damien says. “You didwhat ?”
“It was horrible and we never spoke of it to anyone, including the police. But the murders stopped after that, so we know it was him.”
“Hold on, go back—”
“First we got rid of the car. I was only eleven but I got up behind the wheel and drove it out to an empty field by the edge of a forest. We took everything out of the car and dumped it. Then we went back and buried the body where we knew it would never be found.” He stops as if to gather his thoughts and pull himself together. “To those who delight in such things I say only that the Engineer isn’t some supernatural ghoul or bogeyman under the bed. He was a sick man who liked to kill children, and he is now very, very dead.”
“Stop, hang on a damn second,” Damien says. “You honestly expect us to believe that you and your pal killed the Engineer and stashed the body and that’s why the killings stopped?That’s your story?” He waits. “Hello, caller? Are you there…?”
But Phillip is gone. Sue hears DJ Damien let out a long sigh, audibly shaken. “Well, children, I think I can safely say that this has been one of the strangest midnight shifts in recent memory. I’m going to throw on some tunes and pour myself abig cup of coffee. Not to belabor the obvious, here’s Rob Zombie with ‘Living Dead Girl.’ And for all of you insomniac freaks and geeks out there, the topic of the Engineer is officially closed.”
Sue hears grinding guitar cut in and, within a few seconds, the recording ends. She fast-forwards briefly but there’s nothing more on the tape.
“Phillip,” she says. “Why did you have to tell them? What were youthinking ?”
Of course she knows the answer already. Phillip made his anonymous confession to DJ Damien and the insomniac listeners for the same reason he woke up bathed in sweat night after night, screaming or close to it. Because he needed to. Because the past is never done with us, not in any substantial way.
She can see it now. To her post-exhausted mind, it all clicks with a kind of chilling certainty, a puzzle whose pieces can’t possibly fit together in any other way. She knows that Phillip never got past what happened that afternoon between them and the Engineer. For him, calling in to this show would be a combination of relief and self-flagellation, touching on old scars that had never quite healed. She imagines him on the other side of the continent, hunkered over his phone, drinking black coffee and poring over the old photos and scanned news items from the past, reliving the terror that they both felt so acutely that summer.
For as long as possible he must have tried to cope with his fears that he was being followed, sublimating them into nightmares. And when he couldn’t stand it anymore he’d done the one thing he thought he must do—he’d left Sue and their baby girl with the simplest excuse imaginable, abandonment, gave up everything and tried to disappear, for their own protection. He went to California. Severed every tie save the most essential ones. Communicated with her only by phone and e-mail.
Until that night back in August when he called in to the radio show. It wasn’t long after that that Sue stopped hearing from him completely.
Almost without realizing it, she passes the sign on the right:
WICKHAM—ESTABLISHED1802
If not for the sign, she would have thought she took a wrong turn. Of all the stops along the route, Wickham is the most developed yet. It’s almost quaint. Down the main thoroughfare she can see a toy store, a real estate office, clothing boutiques, and a pizza parlor, all with hand-painted wooden signs hanging down that remind her of the storefronts of Concord Center. On the right is an ice cream place, and next to it a bookshop called Bound to Please.
It’s still dark, of course, and she doesn’t see any residents, but there’s a smattering of lights on in the windows of Main Street. Sue tries to think. Are the towns along the route also coming to life as she enters them?
Up ahead she can see a snow-dusted triangle of ground, slightly raised, with the main road bending around it. In the center, bracketed by park benches, is a pedestal with a figure on top of it. Isaac Hamilton, who else could it be? And from here she can see clearly that the figure has no arms or legs, just a slender body with head, held up at the same proud tilt. At least the angle of the headused to look proud to her; now it looks defiant. As she lowers her foot on the brake, the Expedition’s tires encounter an unexpected patch of black ice and the vehicle swerves a little. Sue instinctively steers in the direction of the skid, correcting it without thinking—ambulance driver reflexes coming into play again.
Then, halfway through Wickham, as she passes the statue, it starts snowing again, heavily. She sits forward, switches on her wipers, visibility compromised. The flakes are thick and seem to strike her windshield with real weight. It’s becoming distinctly more difficult to see.
Up ahead, at the next intersection, the gray van is pulling out of a side street, emerging from a snowfall so thick that it actually seems to materialize out of the air. It turns right, and now it’s driving in front of her, fifty feet up the road, heading out of town. The van is moving slower than she is and she taps the brake slightly to maintain her distance. At the same time the snow falls even harder, thicker. The wipers are at their fastest setting and they still can’t keep up. Sue slows down even more, hovering between twenty-five and thirty. The van’s taillights fade in the distance, and then they are gone. She feels pressure in her skull, building in her sinuses. It’s her headache coming back. Her foot goes down on the gas. She’s going thirty-five, forty.
Sue’s still picking up speed when the snow suddenly stops coming down again, the road clear in front of her. With complete clarity she sees the van is right there, less than twenty feet away.
It’s directly in her path.
And it’s not moving.
“Shit!” She grabs the wheel with both hands and smashes down on the brake. The Expedition goes into a skid, the back end swerving, coming around faster than she can control it, and Sue realizes there’s no choice—she’s going to hit the van, and she’s going to hit it hard. Everything slows down, the details of the moment laser-clear in her mind, and there’s a loud, complicated crash as the rear of the Expedition smacks violently into the van. The impact hurls her hard against the seat belt, which catches her between her breasts, the Expedition’s airbag deploying with a pop that she feels more than hears, the synthetic smell of fresh plastic whacking her in the face and driving her head back against the seat. Then it’s deflating, letting her sag forward, as she looks out her windshield at nothing. The en
gine has stalled. It’s dead quiet.
Sliding out of her seat, she jumps down and walks around the back of the Expedition. From here she can see that the rear door of the van has been knocked open and hangs crookedly from its hinges. There’s a faint light on inside. Sue takes two steps, hearing her feet scrape the snow off the road as she advances toward the van, then cranes her neck for a closer look.
All the seats have been removed, creating a featureless cave. Sprawled on the floor, not moving, are two corpses that by now she recognizes immediately—her nanny, Marilyn, and Jeff Tatum. Marilyn is on her side, her legs flopped at an angle, one arm across her face. Jeff Tatum is facedown.
There’s nothing else back here.
Keeping her distance, Sue walks sideways around the van. She sees a child’s car seat on the front passenger side.
Veda’s car seat.
It’s empty.
The driver’s seat is empty as well.
Sue slowly opens the passenger door, leaning in, placing one hand on the padded car seat, fingertips brushing over the stale cracker crumbs and dried raisins that have found their way into its creases over the months. The fabric upholstery is still warm. Pressing her nose against the seat’s headrest, Sue smells Veda’s hair, where the back of her skull probably lay just a few seconds earlier.
Veda, what did they do with you? Where are you now?
Behind her in the darkness, she hears the trill of the cell phone in the Expedition. She starts walking toward it and thinks she sees something moving in the back of the vehicle, the shape in the garbage bags sitting upright against the rear window.
Watching her.
6:01A.M.
Sue blinks, squinting. It’s too dark to tell whether she’s imagining him there or not. Up front the phone is still ringing. That’s definitely real. She opens the driver’s side door, takes the phone, and steps away. Her headache is gone again, drowned in adrenaline.
Sue hitsTALK .
“Where’s my daughter?”
“Oh, that’s right,” the voice on the other end says. “You thought she was in the van, didn’t you? Well, it’s a good thing she wasn’t, Susan. You could’ve really hurt her when you crashed into it.” He pauses. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about where she is now, just where you’re going to be in another ninety minutes, when her life is on the line.”
“White’s Cove. I’ll be there.”
“That’s good,” the voice says. “Meanwhile it looks like your passenger is showing some life of his own.”
She glances into the back of the Expedition. The shape against the glass is no longer there. He must’ve lain down again or lost his strength. Maybe he wasn’t sitting up at all. Walking to the driver’s side, the phone clasped to her ear, Sue looks in but doesn’t see the thing in the garbage bags poking its head up. The Expedition is silent inside. She climbs behind the wheel, starts the engine. “You want me to—”
“Get back on the road,” the voice on the other end says. “Get moving.”
Sue puts the Expedition in gear. She drives the rest of the way out of town. The yellow lines leap through her headlights, behind the snow, a peculiar feeling of dislocation filtering through her mind. Something is happening here. She’s going forward, but she’s also traveling backward. Backward in time, more than twenty years, to the day that she and Phillip saw the man at the park. This is not a voluntary remembrance. It’s like the memory is being leached from her pores.
Looking through the windshield of the Expedition, Sue can already make out the worn-out assortment of leftover playground equipment through eleven-year-old eyes, wilting in the muggy heat of that lost August afternoon. She and Phillip were sitting on the cracked plastic swings, idly kicking their legs at the small patches of muddy earth underneath them, the last remnants of a weak rain two days earlier. Twenty yards away, two younger children, scrubby-looking toddlers in dirty shirts and skinned knees, giggled and shrieked as they ran up and down through the low weeds while their mothers, mobile-home women in Spandex pants, watched anxiously, smoking cigarettes.
They were the only other kids here. Most people had stopped letting their children venture beyond the center of town that summer. Instead they went to the movies or the mall or played at Sheckard Park in the middle of town, or their parents packed them off to band camp or chauffeured them to the gated community pool two towns over. Sue’s mother didn’t know that she and Phillip had ridden their bikes out here today—she thought they were at the East Town Mall catching a matinee—and Phillip’s parents…well, Phillip’s parents never really seemed to question where Phillip was. When in doubt, they assumed that he was at the public library, studying. And more often than not, they were right.
But today, he and Sue had come out here to sit on the swings, kick their feet up and catch a too-infrequent breeze lifting from the empty field down the road, bringing the smell of industrial solvents from the mill in town. Phillip had bought them both Cokes from the 7-Eleven on the bike ride out, the wet plastic bottles covered with dirt and wood chips. Sue wasn’t sure why they’d come here, except that they liked it—the conversations they had here seemed different from any conversation she ever had with anybody else, ever. Sure, she and Phillip would talk about school and TV, and how screwed up their parents were. But they also talked a lot about the future—Phillip had already decided he was going to be some kind of millionaire, Sue said she wanted to be an Alaskan bush pilot or possibly a doctor. Sometimes they didn’t talk about anything at all, just sat in comfortable silence.
It was during one of those silences, disturbed only by the soft creak of the swings, when Phillip had glanced up and said, almost conversationally, “Hey. Do you recognize that car?”
Sue looked past the dirty playground equipment over to the flattened patch of dirt that served as a parking lot. She saw two rundown cars that the trailer-park moms had arrived in, a rusted-out Chevy and a Ford station wagon with fake wood paneling, parked right in front of the gate. Across the lot, in the shadow of a giant elm tree, sat a long, boxy sedan, a Plymouth or something, she wasn’t sure. It was burnt orange with a black roof. From where she and Phillip sat now, there was just enough of a glare on the windshield that she couldn’t tell whether or not there was someone behind the wheel.
“It’s been there for a while,” Phillip said. “It pulled up right after we got here. Did you notice?”
Sue shook her head, still swinging back and forth, dragging the toes of her Chuck Taylors in the cracked and drying mud. Shehadn’t noticed, which was strange—her mother was always telling her what an observant girl she was. But the Plymouth had arrived so silently that it must have completely escaped her attention. Like it materialized out of nowhere, she thought, and shivered.
“What if it’s him?” Phillip asked abruptly.
She glanced at him. “Cut it out.”
“I’m serious. You know he’s out there somewhere. It could be him.”
“Oh, please,” Sue said, in the drabbest voice she could muster. They almost never talked about the Engineer. Not because it scared them, but quite the opposite—it was old news, almost boring to them. All summer the Engineer was all that everybody in town talked about, certainly their parents and teachers and neighbors never gave the topic a rest.
He jumped off his swing. “I’m going over there to check it out.”
“Oh, right.” She was used to this from him. “What are you going to do, tap on the glass and ask him, Excuse me, do you mind if I check your trunk for human heads?”
“He always goes for the eyes,” Phillip said, not looking back at her. “He shoots them out. He doesn’t keep souvenirs.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s true and you know it. It’s in all the papers. And he only gets kids twelve and under.”
Sue stopped swinging. Phillip was still walking briskly away from her, headed through the high grass toward the makeshift parking lot, and that was when she realized that he was serious. He was really
going. The clarity of his intention startled her so much that the first word out of her mouth—“Wait!”—came out garbled and almost inaudible. Jumping off the swing, she cleared her throat and hurried to catch up.
“Phillip, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Just what I said. I’m going to check it out.”
“You can’t do that.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Why not?”
She sighed. It was his favorite question, and half the time she couldn’t answer it. She decided to discard whatever remained of her sarcastic detachment and address the issue head-on. “Okay, what if it is the guy?”
