Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

Despite her blurry vision, she saw the change come over him, his own terror mounting, then mutating. Hardening.

  “Now, Wayne, you get out of—”

  The second shove happened completely outside of time. One moment the two of them were standing several feet apart, and the next she was on her knees at the base of the tree. She wanted to move a hand to her head again, but for some reason she couldn’t. The only sound was a low, low hum, as if the earth itself were shifting and cracking beneath her. Something was badly wrong. Wrecked. She tried to stand but couldn’t. She would have cried out, screamed, wailed, but her voice was already beyond reach.

  Wayne came toward her again, crouching low, and like before his hands moved toward her face, and like before his hands were on her throat, and like before their bodies were pressed so closely together they could have been dancing or making love.

  27

  September 29, 2006

  Melanie was pleading with Officer Bauer to get Detective Isaacson. She struggled to catch a breath while the officer left the room and pried the detective away from David Magruder. The moment the detective entered the office, Melanie blurted out, “He’s talking about my uncle Wayne. He was here at the hotel.”

  “Wayne is in Silver Bay?”

  “I should have said something.” Her whole body was shaking. “But I didn’t know—” The young one on guitar. Magruder’s words were blackening out everything else. “I thought—”

  “Okay, try to relax.” The detective put a hand on Melanie’s arm. “What kind of car does he drive?”

  “A black Ford Escort.”

  “Plate number?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he go into your hotel room?”

  She nodded. “That’s where he was when I left to come here.”

  “What room number?”

  She gave the number and handed her room key to the detective, who hurried away. But Melanie knew there was no need to rush. Wayne was long gone. She had left him at the hotel almost three hours earlier and practically dared him to run. By now, he’d be halfway across Pennsylvania. Or in Maryland. Or Connecticut. New York. Delaware. For someone whose whole life was centered around hiding, a three-hour head start was an eternity.

  In the video monitor, David Magruder sat perfectly still in his chair, hunched over the table, head in hands.

  Officer Bauer, perhaps feeling the need to fill the silence, began talking about procedure: “Officers will head to the hotel,” he was saying. “If the suspect is still there, hopefully he’ll surrender peacefully. Usually, people do. If he’s not there, they’ll put out a bulletin with the information about his car. More than likely, highway patrol will spot him heading back to West Virginia. Especially if he doesn’t know he’s being—”

  “I need a bathroom,” Melanie said. The image that Magruder had painted in her mind of Wayne strangling her mother overtook everything. “I’m going to throw up.”

  Officer Bauer led her quickly down the hallway, toward the station lobby. “I’ll wait out here,” he said, and Melanie barely made it into the stall before vomiting. She sat on the bathroom floor until the nausea subsided. Her throat screamed, and her headache had returned full force. When she felt steady enough on her feet, she went to the sink and splashed cold water on her face and cried and splashed more water. When she left the bathroom, the officer was waiting for her, and from the lobby she heard her name being called.

  Phillip looked bedraggled and anxious. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  She was so completely not okay that she went to him and for a full minute all she could do was keep holding on, unable to speak. When she finally found her voice, she disregarded Detective Isaac-son’s directive to say nothing by saying everything.

  No one seemed to care. One of the officers, a young woman, offered Melanie a bottle of water and joined the chorus of reassurance. The truth was finally out, everyone was telling her (word traveling quickly around the station), and Melanie could take solace in the knowledge that she was finally safe, finally free, and that the guilty would soon be brought to justice.

  So well meaning, all of them, and so naïve.

  Wayne had murdered her mother and let her father take the blame, and his disturbed version of atonement, apparently, was to kidnap Melanie and raise her. Yes, the truth was finally out, but where was the solace in a truth like that? And the worst part, she thought, sitting beside Phillip now on the wooden bench in the lobby and looking out the windows at the dark street, is that it had worked. All these years, Melanie had grown up feeling indebted to her mother’s killer. All these years, she had felt loved, and she had felt love.

  “Where’s my father?” she said to Phillip.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “If he didn’t...” She choked back a sob. “Where has he been all this time?”

  He put an arm around her. “I don’t know.”

  They sat there together saying little else, while across town a team of officers surrounded, then entered her hotel room. And when they finally radioed in, Officer Bauer knelt down and told Melanie what she already knew.

  “Don’t worry, though—we’ll find him,” he added, his words sounding so scripted that Melanie could only shake her head.

  In the meantime, she wasn’t allowed to return to her hotel room. Everything there was now evidence. “We can check you into another hotel,” Officer Bauer said. “We aren’t expecting it to be long, but I’m sure you could use some rest.”

  If she weren’t exhausted and hurt in every way, she would have laughed at the officer’s optimism.

  Officer Bauer called ahead and reserved a room for Melanie and Phillip at the oceanfront Atlantic Hotel. After giving them directions, he wrote down Phillip’s cell number and promised to be in touch the moment there was any word.

  “And you should feel free to call the station anytime,” he told the two of them.

  “Okay,” Melanie said.

  “And check in with either me or Detective Isaacson in the morning, regardless.”

  What the hell for? Melanie thought. Despite everything that had happened and everything she had learned, her mother’s killer was out there, same as before. Nothing had changed. Or rather, it was so much worse now. Ramsey Miller at least had the courtesy of being a bogeyman. But Uncle Wayne had handcrafted a puppet theater for her, a birthday present when she’d turned six, with shiny gold curtains that opened and closed when you pulled a string. He made the puppets himself, too, out of foam and felt and yarn—a pig and a frog. He watched her endless performances. When she asked, he would play the frog. Or the pig. His pig voice made her laugh. For some reason it had a British accent. Later, for other presents in other years, he added to the menagerie. A horse. A wolf.

  “Melanie? Will you do that?”

  “Sorry?” Melanie asked.

  “Will you call one of us in the morning?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sure. Whatever.”

  The police station sat on a lonely side street between a tire store and a plasma donation center. Everything was closed at this hour, and only a handful of cars were parked along the curb.

  Melanie walked beside Phillip toward his car, her arms crossed for warmth. It had stopped raining but remained dreary. The sidewalk and street were wet. They had passed the tire store when Melanie’s peripheral vision caught movement near one of the parked cars—someone coming their way. By the time she turned around, Wayne had a hand on her arm and was saying, “Come on—let’s go.”

  She yanked herself free. “Get away from me!”

  “Mr. Denison.” Phillip approached Wayne. “Leave her alone.”

  “You?” Wayne dismissed him with a head shake. “Melanie, I waited for you, but there’s no time now. Please—you have to trust me.”

  When he reached out to take her arm again she tried to pull away, but his grip was firm. Phillip grabbed her body and got her away from Wayne, and then stood in front of her, creating a barrier, protecting
her body with his own.

  “Now listen, don’t you come one step—” Phillip started to say, but he never finished the sentence, because Wayne smashed his face with a lightning-fast punch and he stumbled backward into Melanie.

  A second punch caught Phillip in the gut when he was already teetering, and then he was thrown to the ground—where he was headed, anyway. He hit the wet pavement with a thud and curled into himself.

  “Damn it, we don’t have time for this,” Wayne said, and motioned to his car. “Now please, honey, let’s go—we have to get out of this town.”

  Melanie was on her haunches, a hand on Phillip’s face, trying to get a look at him without taking her eyes off Wayne, whose face was full of anguish. He should have been long gone by now, and she couldn’t understand why he would have stayed behind. How could he think she’d go with him? Of course—he had no idea that Melanie knew the whole truth. And where the hell were the cops? For God’s sake, the station was right there.

  “If you scream,” Wayne said, reading her mind, “I swear to God I’ll bust his head in.”

  “I know you will,” she said, terrified but enraged, too. Because that’s what he did. He killed the people who loved her. “Murderer.”

  “What?” He shook his head. “No. No—don’t say that. It’s not—”

  “Someone saw you.”

  He froze for a moment. “You don’t know anything about it. Who? Who said he—”

  “David Magruder. He saw you in the backyard, choking her. He saw you kill her.”

  “You’re gonna believe that guy?” A police siren wailed in the distance, someone else’s tragedy. “No, your mind’s been poisoned, honey—it’s this goddamn town.”

  “No. It’s you. You did it.” She wasn’t even trying to make him believe her. She was saying it because it was true. And yet she wanted him to deny it again. The longer he denied it, the longer a tiny part of her could deny it, too.

  “It was... I was just a kid.” His gaze shifted, and it seemed to Melanie that he was no longer seeing her or this street. “I never meant to.”

  Hearing Wayne’s admission made all the breath escape her body as if she’d been the one he’d stomach-punched.

  “You killed my mother,” she said, unsteadily, trying out the words. They seemed to bring Wayne back to the present, to this cold wet night.

  “I gave you a home,” he said. “I raised you right.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Of course I did!” He looked deeply hurt. He must have been repeating that refrain to himself for years. I’m giving her a home. I’m raising her right. Maybe that was how he slept at night. “I loved you like—”

  “Don’t you use that word.”

  “It’s true. And look at you now—so beautiful and smart.”

  “I fucking hate you,” Melanie said.

  “You don’t. Don’t say that.”

  Phillip let out a groan. When Melanie glanced down at him, he said, “I think I’m okay.” But he wasn’t. Blood pooled under him.

  “Come with me,” Wayne said. “You know you’re not staying here with him.” Wayne could have left town the minute she got into that police car back at the hotel. He must have known that the longer he stayed, the greater the risk. By now he could have been hundreds of miles away. Yet he had stayed for her. Did he really expect her to go home with him again? Return to Fredonia? Live under his roof? Or did he think the two of them would escape into the night, find some new place to disappear? It was terrifying to think he might be that deluded, but even scarier was the possibility that he didn’t know what he wanted from her, just that he had to have her because she’d always been his.

  “I’m staying with Phillip,” she said.

  He shook his head sadly. “Oh, Mel—this isn’t the good-bye I wanted.” For an instant she felt positive he was about to reach for her throat, do to her what he’d done to her mother. Instead, he backed up a step toward his car. “You’re going to let me go, and when I’m gone you’re going to help your boyfriend get to his car. You’ll leave with him. You’ll both leave town tonight and won’t come back. Not ever. You’ll do that for me, Melanie.”

  “I won’t do anything for you.” Another glance toward the front of the police station, where absolutely no fucking officers were coming or going.

  “Don’t be a brat, Melanie,” he said, voice rising. Then it softened again. “If the cops find out from you that I stuck around, I’ll still get away. You know I will. You know I can hide. But I’ll come looking for you both.”

  “You love me, but you would—” He caught her eye, and she stopped talking because she could see that yes, he did, and yes, he would. She shivered.

  “This isn’t hard,” he said. “If you ever loved me even a little, you’ll let me drive away. Let me go, and you’re free. It’s the freedom you always wanted.” Three more steps toward his car. “Now promise you’ll let me go.”

  She held his gaze for a couple of long seconds.

  “Go,” she said.

  “Melanie,” Phillip said.

  “Good girl,” Wayne said. Five more steps. He’d almost reached the car. “Melanie?”

  “What.”

  “Tell me you love me.”

  She almost screamed right then, and biting her lower lip hard enough to draw blood probably saved Phillip’s life. She gritted her teeth and, still looking at Wayne, forced the words out. “I love you, Uncle Wayne,” she said.

  For an instant, his face softened.

  Then he got into his car. It started right up. His cars always did.

  She watched him drive away, and then she was alone with Phillip on the wet street.

  “Can I leave you here a minute?” she asked.

  “Melanie, how could you let him—”

  “It’ll only be a minute. Is that okay?”

  A raspy breath. “Where do you think I’m gonna go?”

  In the station, she hurried through the lobby, past the dispatcher, and shouted for help. When Officer Bauer appeared, she said, “Wayne was just out front, and he drove away in a tan Honda Accord with New Jersey plates—BZM-18A. He turned left on the far side of that bar. And Phillip is hurt outside. He needs help, and something to stop the bleeding—a rag or paper towels. I’ll be out there with him.”

  She said it all with the calm efficiency of a pro. And then she left the station.

  When she woke up, the room was dark but a door was cracked open to a lit hallway. Then she remembered. Hospital. She lay on a narrow folding cot beside Phillip’s bed. Half his face was bandaged. The one exposed eye was shut. She listened for his breathing, and when she heard it she reached out and found his hand under his sheet and gently squeezed. No response. So he was either asleep or heavily sedated. Those two punches had done a job on him, the doctor told her. Broken eye socket. Ruptured spleen.

  It had taken the police just minutes to spot Wayne’s car and arrest him. So in that way, Wayne had been right—for the first time, she was free. Yet lying there in the dark, with all the strength she’d demonstrated in the police station now gone, all the adrenaline depleted, she felt sad and guilty and overwhelmed—homesick, but with no home to root the emotion to. She held on to Phillip’s hand, and that made it better, though it wasn’t enough. Maybe someday it would be. But right now she was seventeen years old and she wanted her mother. And for the first time, she wanted her father, too.

  28

  September 23, 1991

  Ramsey Miller awoke in panic, heart racing: I fell asleep while driving!

  But no. The boom he’d heard—felt—was no head-on collision, but thunder. The deep sway was no deadly truck roll at 80 m.p.h., but a wave moving his boat. And boats were made to roll.

  As he assessed his actual situation—on my boat, in the ocean—another wave blasted the boat, sending it rolling again. Lightning splintered overhead like shards of a giant windshield, giving Ramsey a couple of seconds to take in the whipping ocean, to notice the absence of stars, and to understan
d the magnitude of the storm that had moved in while he slept. Understanding came just seconds before the rain began—almost as if his understanding had caused the rain to start.

  The fucking weatherman. Though still shaking off sleep, Ramsey could see the comedy in it: The fucking weatherman had it right all along.

  The narrow band of man-made light—land—was clear enough to the east, but he had no idea how far his boat might have drifted. He wasn’t even sure how long he’d been asleep, though the sharp pain in his neck from lying against the seat suggested hours, not minutes. He didn’t like the idea of being in a metal boat during a storm, but that fact was nonnegotiable, so he put electrocution out of his mind and leaned over the engine to pull the starter. Not easy, given the boat’s swaying, but on the third try the little engine revved to life.

  The rain fell in torrents, carried by gale-force winds. Lightning and thunder intensified into the sort of storm that made you say “Holy shit” even from inside your house. But the waves were his concern. The flat-bottom boat wasn’t made for this. He’d turn into the waves if he could tell where they were coming from, but they seemed to come from everywhere. So he headed east, toward shore. Too far away to recognize any landmarks, but he’d deal with his position once he got closer. The main thing was to get moving.

  The wave that knocked him overboard came out of nowhere, a huge roller that sent the boat onto its side. Ramsey hit the water and forced his head to the surface so he’d keep sight of the dark boat in the dark water. At first he couldn’t spot it. Then, as he rose on a wave, he saw it bobbing in the water fifteen feet away: to the west, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. The fall into the ocean had sent him spinning, and with only his head above water now, he could no longer see the shoreline. He could see nothing at all except the wave in front of him.

  He swam toward the boat, but when he rose again he was dismayed to see that the boat’s position had shifted. He should swim east, to shore. But which way was east? He had a sense. Yet he might be able to catch the boat, which, without his hand on the throttle, seemed to move in a wide arc. If he swam toward where the boat might end up—