by R. G. Belsky
The one on top. The one who’d been identified as Becky Gale. I’d wondered if it was significant that she’d been buried separately from the others. But Anne Devlin had simply forgotten she’d killed that one until later. Sometimes facts are just meaningless like that. Not everything has significance.
“When it was done, I never set foot in that town house again. I just couldn’t, knowing the horrors she had committed there. I sold the place as quickly as I could, finalized our divorce, and never talked to Anne again. I was always haunted by the fear she might kill again and I would be responsible for the new deaths by not having her put away. But I don’t think she ever did. I think what happened was a burst of rage and insanity that ended when those bodies were in the ground.
“I made a new life for myself,” he said, looking around at the pictures of his wife and children. “I moved on, something Anne could never do. She dedicated the rest of her life to the pointless quest of finding Lucy, and now she’ll have to die knowing Lucy was dead a long time ago. She spent a lifetime chasing after a dream that was already gone. Me, I’ve just tried to forget. I try all the time to forget about those six bodies. Six lives Anne had taken away out of her insane grief over losing our own daughter. Maybe that’s why I went back to Mountainboro. To see the place where I buried those bodies a long time ago. To make sure I never do forget.”
* * *
The same nurse was on duty as the last time I was in Anne Devlin’s hospital room. I remembered when I saw the name Joyce on her name tag.
“She’s in a tremendous amount of pain,” the nurse told me when I arrived this time. “We’re giving her morphine and a lot of other painkilling drugs, of course. But after a while they lose their effectiveness. She’s suffering terribly. I wish there was more we could do, but we can’t.”
She left and I walked over to the bed where Anne Devlin lay, hooked up to breathing and feeding apparatus and monitors that flashed her vital life signs. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them as I got near. She smiled when she saw it was me. She knew who I was, that was important.
“Clare, I wasn’t sure you’d come back in time,” she said in a weak voice. “The doctors seem surprised I’m not dead yet. But I’m still here, hon. How are you?”
This woman was talking to me like I was her friend, but I didn’t even know her anymore.
“I talked to your husband today,” I said.
“I don’t have a husband.”
“Patrick.”
“Oh, him.”
“He told me about Mountainboro.”
“What’s Mountainboro?”
“The place where he took the bodies of the six children you murdered.”
She looked at me blankly, as if she hadn’t heard—or at least didn’t understand—what I was saying.
“I had a dream about Lucy last night,” she said suddenly. “We were together again, just the two of us. Me and Lucy. She was more beautiful than ever. I think Lucy is prettier than any other little girl I’ve ever seen. We talked and she told me how happy she was to see me. She said she’s been waiting for me all this time. All those years that I was looking for her, she was right there. I was just looking in the wrong place, she said. That’s when I realized where I was. I was in heaven. I was in heaven with Lucy and we were going to be there together forever and ever. I woke up then. But I think maybe that was a vision from God. A sign that I was really going to meet Lucy in heaven again when I die. What do you think, Clare?”
I leaned close to her so I could be certain she’d hear every word I said.
“You’re not going to heaven.”
“Huh?”
“You murdered six children.”
“Do you think Lucy still likes Cheerios? I’ve got to make sure that there’s enough in the house when she comes home.”
“Six innocent children,” I said. “Six children who will never get to live the lives they should have. Six families whose lives were destroyed, too. All because of you.”
She still didn’t seem to be listening. The nurse had said that the painkilling drugs made her delusional a lot of the time.
“Let me tell you about the day I brought Lucy home as a baby …”
“No, let me tell you about Lucy,” I said. “You’re the reason Lucy’s gone. You beat her, you abused her, you turned that house into a nightmare for that child. She would have died right there if she would have stayed. The same way those six children died. The ones you killed because you couldn’t stand to see them having a happy life if you couldn’t have Lucy.”
She heard me now, I could tell that from the look in her eyes. She smiled. A scary smile. A smile so indifferent to the suffering she’d caused that I wondered if Patrick Devlin was right about her being finished with the killing. Or were there more bodies out there? Dead children no one knew about yet?
“Why should they have their children if I couldn’t have Lucy?” she said, and I knew it wasn’t just the painkillers talking.
This was the real Anne Devlin.
“I used to see those mothers with their kids, looking so happy and pleased with themselves. And there I was all alone. It just wasn’t fair. Why did Lucy have to go away and leave me? Well, if I couldn’t have her, I decided they couldn’t have their children either.
“You want to know something? Afterward, I really enjoyed getting close enough to them to see the grief I was responsible for. They’d cry and look up to God and ask: why? But I knew why. I’d done this. I’d let them understand the pain that I felt. It felt good, so good.
“I did it for Lucy, you know. That’s the real reason I killed them. Those children died in memory of my Lucy.”
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I always figured that when I found the person responsible for all the killing, it would be different. The guilty person would be an obvious pervert, a twisted sex addict, some obviously terrible individual. There’d be a dramatic confrontation—a shootout, a chase—and then eventually this person would be brought to justice. That was the way it always happened in books and movies. But all I had was this sick woman lying in a hospital bed.
I wanted to tell her that Lucy was still alive, but that she would never see her again. I wanted to tell her that I was really Lucy’s mother. I wanted to tell her that it had been me who slept with her husband before Lucy disappeared. I wanted to tell her anything that would hurt her.
The nurse named Joyce came in and looked at her. Anne Devlin had closed her eyes now and seemed to be asleep now.
“She’s in the most terrible pain,” Joyce said, adjusting some of the monitoring devices.
“My father died of cancer some years ago,” I said, just trying to make conversation. “I remember that was very painful.”
“We know how to prolong life a lot longer now because of modern medicine,” she said, “but we can’t stop the pain.”
“She seems relatively peaceful now.”
“That won’t last. It’s only because we gave her so many painkillers. In an hour or so, they’ll have worn off and she’ll be in agony again. That will be the pattern until she dies. Only the periods of pain will get longer and the peaceful ones shorter, until it’s all pain and suffering until the end. The quicker that happens the better. Death would be a blessing for her at this point. Do you understand?”
Joyce looked me directly in the eye when she said it. I suddenly realized this wasn’t idle conversation anymore.
“What are you saying?”
“Mrs. Devlin has no family, no other visitors. Just you. We can’t pull the plug on her here without family authorization. It’s against regulations. She has no living will, no power of attorney that allows anyone to end her suffering. That’s such a shame. If someone were to just take her off life support, then it would be so much better for her. But I can’t do that. I’m a nurse. Do you understand now?”
I understood.
Joyce cared about being a nurse, she cared about humanity, she cared about her patient.
Of co
urse, she didn’t know what her patient had done.
“I used to see those mothers with their kids, looking so happy and pleased with themselves,” Anne Devlin had said to me a few minutes earlier. “And there I was all alone. It just wasn’t fair. Why did Lucy have to go away and leave me? Well, if I couldn’t have her, I decided they couldn’t have their children either … I’d let them understand the pain that I felt. It felt good, so good.”
I stared at the woman in the bed for a long time after the nurse left the room. Each breath was laborious now, her body shaking as she fought to hold onto the last vestiges of life. I could make it a little easier for her to go now. I could end it all right here and now, and no one would care. The nurse had practically pleaded with me to do it. To send her to the other side.
“Do you think I’ll see Lucy in heaven, Clare?” she had asked.
I thought about Lucy on the day she was born and holding her in my arms in the hospital. I thought about her as an eleven-year-old going off to school that last day. I thought about all the pain this woman had caused her and all those other families over the years.
“Go to hell,” I said to Anne Devlin.
Then I walked out and left her there to die alone.
CHAPTER 57
I HAVEN’T PUT any of this on the air yet.
I’m sure that I won’t make any decision until after the election when Grayson has promised to tell me the truth about Lucy.
And, even if he does, I’m not sure what I will do about the story after that.
I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve come at it from all different directions, making a case to myself for both sides of the argument. There’ve been days when I decided to go ahead and tell everything right now, no matter what the consequences, on that night’s Channel 10 newscast. Other times I convince myself I should destroy all the evidence I’ve accumulated—the tape recording with Grayson in the park, the stuff I took out of Louise Carbone’s house, even my notes on the story—so that I can’t ever take that fateful step.
I’ve considered, too, the possibility of going on the air with just a part of the story—how Anne Devlin murdered those six innocent children—without revealing anything that might jeopardize my arrangement with Grayson. But I quickly conclude that this is not a valid option for me. If I ever do tell this story to a TV audience, I must tell it the same way I’ve done it here—from beginning to end, with nothing left out.
In the end, I have done nothing.
Instead, I remain in a kind of perpetual limbo, unsure how to deal with the Hobson’s choice that I face.
* * *
Elliott Grayson won the Democratic nomination for the Senate in a landslide, as expected. He currently has a twenty-five-point lead over the Republican nominee in the upcoming general election. Unless something goes catastrophically wrong for him, Grayson will be the next US Senator from New York. People have already begun talking about him as a potential candidate for President four or eight years down the line.
Watching him give his victory speech in front of the cameras on primary night, I was struck by how different he seemed than the anguished man I talked to in Union Square Park that day. I wonder which one is the real Elliott Grayson, or if there even is one anymore. After all of this, he remains a contradiction to me. I loathe him, but I am also fascinated by him. I believe that some of the things he has told me are true. But that not all of them are. I’m convinced that he’s been motivated to carry out some of the things he’s done for good, moral reasons, but that he also has the capacity to be truly evil. The question is which will win out in the end: the good or the evil?
Grayson continues to promise that he will tell me how to find Lucy once the November election is over.
But what happens then?
I have given Grayson my word that I will keep his secret and not air the story if he tells me how to find Lucy—and my word, even after all this, is somehow still sacrosanct to me as a journalist.
But there are other problems, too.
If I do wait until after Election Day in November, find out the truth about Lucy—and then go ahead anyway with the story, how do I justify sitting on this information so long? My secret deal with Grayson would eventually be discovered. There’d be countless questions, justifiable ones, about my lack of journalistic ethics. I could be destroying my own career as well as his. Even worse, there could be a scenario where he survives the scandal and I don’t.
I only have Grayson’s word, too, that he even knows where Lucy is or that she is still truly alive.
For all I know, he could have made up the whole story as a trick to keep me from going public with what I know until he gets to Washington as a US Senator. Lucy might have been that little girl they dug up, just like he first said, or she might be lying in another grave somewhere.
My journalistic instincts tell me to be skeptical, but my heart wants so desperately to believe him.
And so, I am left in the unenviable position of having made a Faustian bargain with a man who I believe is evil, and yet I must depend on his honesty and integrity and conscience to tell me the truth that I want to hear.
* * *
Anne Devlin lingered on for nearly a week before she finally died.
All the newscasts eulogized her as a tragic figure—a loving mother who suffered the worst loss imaginable and devoted her life to the memory of her lost daughter. We did that on Channel 10, too.
“Somewhere up in heaven, Anne Devlin is holding Lucy in her arms at long last,” Brett Wolff intoned in a sober voice.
“Well said, Brett,” Dani said. “I don’t mind admitting that I have tears in my eyes tonight.”
After the newscast was over, I went home and got myself drunk, ate every bit of junk food I could find, and threw up for much of the night. By the next morning, I was all right again. I had purged myself of whatever guilt I felt for allowing that on the air.
It’s amazing how much we’re able to compromise everything we believe in and yet still live with ourselves.
* * *
Things are pretty much back to normal at Channel 10. We finished first in the October ratings sweeps, beating out the other stations by the biggest margin in our history.
This was due in large part to a two-week series we ran called “Bedroom Secrets of the Stars” in which Brett and Dani revealed whether celebrities like to sleep in pajamas, in their underwear, or in the nude. It concluded with a report in which Brett and Dani and Cassie and Janelle all talked about their own bedroom secrets—and posed on camera in sexy nighttime wear.
That series was pretty much my idea, and Jack Faron was ecstatic with me when the ratings went through the roof. He’s never really asked me too many questions about what happened that day in the park with Grayson. I simply told him afterward that there was no story there, and we ran an innocuous piece on Grayson that had no impact whatsoever upon the election. I suspect Faron knows there’s more to it, but he never brought it up again. I think he’s just happy not to have to make any tough decisions about taking on a man as powerful as Elliott Grayson. Jack Faron’s a good TV executive, but … bottom line … well, he’s still a TV executive.
Me, I’m riding high again at Channel 10, and I suppose I should be happy about that. Instead, I feel lost, I feel confused, I feel like a failure—even if other people can’t understand why.
“Are you okay?” Maggie asked me the other day.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
“I’m telling you, Maggie, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I just think you seem different.”
Maggie was right, of course.
I was different.
For a long time, I had told myself I was a real journalist—a person of intelligence and principles and serious values who just happened to be working in the world of TV news.
But that wasn’t true anymore. I had
lost something in the Lucy Devlin story, something I could never get back again. I can never make myself whole as a newswoman again, no matter how hard I try.
I feel an emptiness inside me now each day when I go to work that I fear will never go away.
* * *
Janet keeps trying to fix me up for dates and push me to maybe even try marriage one more time, albeit with little success. She says it’s because I’m not trying hard enough. I say it’s because she’s got lousy taste in men. She says that’s really funny coming from me since I’ve made so many bad choices when it comes to the men in my life. Hard to think of a snappy comeback for that one.
Why is it that I’ve had this attraction all my life to men like Don Crowell and Elliott Grayson? And then pushed away Sam and the other husbands I had? Why not a nice, uncomplicated relationship with a good guy? Why couldn’t I settle down and be happy with someone like that? I’d lost out on Sam, but there had to be other good guys out there just like him.
I thought about Louise Carbone and how much she and I were alike in some ways. She’d had a chance to live a normal life with a good husband and a daughter she loved. But she’d thrown it all away to join the Warlock Warriors and ride off with Sandy Marston. She just couldn’t handle the idea of living the rest of her life like everyone else in Lodi, New Jersey.
I understood that.
Of all the people involved in this, Big Lou is the one I feel the worst about.
I miss her.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions.
Such as who were the children actually buried in that mass grave up in New Hampshire?
