by M. R. Carey
“It was such a horrible thing,” she told present-day Zac, a touch defensively. “And the little girl was almost the same age as you. I hated that you even had to live in a world where stuff like that could happen. I didn’t want you to have to know it was there.”
“You gave me the stranger-danger talk, Mom,” Zac pointed out reasonably. “I think that was when I was five.”
“Right, but I gave you the general one. Not ‘there’s a psycho who’s been living a few blocks over.’ It would have been different if he was still on the loose, you know? We would have talked you through it. We would have had to. But since they caught him …”
Zac continued his deep drilling operations in the ice cream tub, but he looked alert and thoughtful. There was nothing casual about his bringing up this topic. “Did he? Live just a few blocks away? None of the articles I found online were that specific.”
“He lived on Paulson Avenue, between Mayflower Street and Polk Way. And we were in the old house back then, obviously. On Stoebner. It felt close enough. Zac, why are you interested in this? It’s ancient history now.”
He looked up at her, his gray eyes—which were Marc’s gray eyes—candid and troubled. “She goes to my school.”
Liz was lost for a moment. “Who’s this now?”
“Fran Watts. The girl the Shadowman abducted. I was hanging out with her today.”
“Seriously?” Liz was amazed. She had always assumed the family had moved away. Why wouldn’t you, after something like that happened to your kid? Why would you make them grow up in a place that had such horrible memories attached to it?
“Seriously,” Zac assured her.
“How is she?”
“She’s … well, I guess she’s okay.”
“I mean, a trauma like that would have to …” Liz stopped, making the connection. “She was the girl at the clinic. In the waiting room. She went in right before me.” To the same room. To Dr. Southern.
She drew the obvious conclusion, and Zac watched her do it with equally obvious alarm. All these years later, and the kid was still suffering! Of course she was. You might come away from something like that alive, but that didn’t mean you came out intact.
“She didn’t say it was okay for me to tell you any of that,” Zac said. “We were talking about it in confidence, Mom. We’ve got to respect her privacy.”
“Of course we have.” Liz put a hand on his. “I wouldn’t say a word, Zachary. I’m not an idiot. Plus, she’s got the goods on me too, right? We’ll keep each other’s secrets.” She thought for a second. “Assuming I get to meet her. Will I?”
Zac got up, not exactly hastily but abruptly. “Maybe,” he said. “Some time.”
“Well, she’s welcome to come over for dinner any time you want to invite her.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ve got to go. Andrew is expecting me at six.”
He had been paired with his classmate Andrew Abramson on a physics assignment and tonight they were working together over at Andrew’s house. Mrs. Abramson had offered to sweeten the deal by calling out for pizza. But Zac’s sudden sense of urgency probably had less to do with the pizza and more with Liz having taken too much and too visible an interest in his having a friend who was a girl.
“Don’t stay out too late,” she said, giving him the lightest and most forbearing of hugs.
“I won’t,” Zac promised.
After he left, Liz found herself mulling over what he had just said. There really wasn’t anything surprising at all about the news that Fran Watts was at Julian C. Barry. There were any number of reasons why the family might have stayed in Larimer. But Liz couldn’t think about it even now without experiencing the same shiver of unhappiness she’d felt when Zac first told her.
When she said the Shadowman thing was ancient history, it was because that was how she wanted to see it. She had experienced that huge surge and plummet of relief when the man was caught, and a smaller one when he was sentenced, and then she’d barely thought about it since. But the news that Fran Watts was at Zac’s school—and even more, the fact that she was getting psychiatric therapy—made her painfully aware that the past is never really as dead as you want it to be.
Liz tried hard to shift her thoughts onto a more positive track. If it had been a little later in the evening, she would have gone up to her bedroom and done one of the meditations from the mindfulness book. As it was, she had three six-year-olds to entertain and she had been goofing off. She turned off the TV and herded them into the kitchen. Since the program had been about dinosaurs, she got them to make dinosaur masks for themselves, and then tails. While they worked, she told them how some dinosaurs had sneakily avoided going extinct by evolving into birds, which the kids thought was very cool.
“Which kind of birds?” Hayley Brake asked.
“How did they get so small if they started out as dinosaurs?” Molly added.
Liz tried to explain the theory of evolution in six-year-old terms, hampered both by the need to simplify and by her own ignorance of the fine details. She did the best she could, then when she ran out of road she put some music on. In the Hall of the Mountain King, in the Magnetic Melodies edition. “Dinosaur dance!” she announced.
The tiny dinosaurs went on a syncopated rampage. After which two of them got picked up by their parents while the third, who was wheezing a little, had to have a session with her inhaler and nebulizer sleeve.
Then there was dinner to make, and the clearing up, and the fractal business of putting Molly to bed and putting her back there a few times when she wandered. The Shadowman went right out of Liz’s mind.
But he came back again as soon as she ran out of distractions.
Probing the sore place, she did what Zac had done earlier in the evening. She googled all the articles from ten years before and read through them, awakening a ton of old, unwelcome memories.
Fran Watts, aged six, had failed to come home from school one Friday night, and her parents had called the cops straight out. They might have been fobbed off with a wait-and-see except that somebody had already seen. Fran had been grabbed off the street in broad daylight, and there was a witness. The man who took her was driving a white pick-up, maybe a Dodge, with a bolt-on camper sitting up on top of the flatbed. The man was wearing bib overalls, and he was short and overweight. Also bald, or balding, although the witness said he didn’t look that old.
The cops went from door to door around the neighborhood, showing Fran’s picture but also asking about the fat man in the overalls. There were road blocks at all the big intersections and a police copter in the air coordinating a search. Fran’s mom and dad popped up on the news appealing to Fran’s abductor not to hurt her but to bring her home safe to her family, who loved her and were missing her sorely.
There was some vigilante stuff too, Liz remembered. Small groups of serious-looking men, some white and some black but no mixed groups, walking up and down the cross streets off Negley Run with their hands inside their jackets to hide whatever it was they were packing.
And in spite of all this, twenty-four hours went by with no news. Not a thing. Liz remembered thinking—when that Saturday afternoon drained away into a pallid, rain-drenched evening—that the little girl had to be dead by now. She had wanted not to believe about the fat man and the pick-up, but now she couldn’t keep up the argument against her own fatalism. If a child just lost her way or got into some scrape on her own account, she surfaced again quickly. Kids didn’t stay lost, not in a city of two million people. A night and then another day meant Fran Watts had indeed been taken.
Liz had put Zac to bed. Moll hadn’t even been born back then. Liz read her son a Dr. Seuss book, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, and teared up ridiculously when she got to the part where the little creature who narrates the story gets stuck in a horrible tunnel full of garbage. It made her think too vividly of where Fran Watts might be, and what she might be going through.
Then on Sunday the police caught a break. They’
d been running down all the white pick-ups they could find that were registered to addresses in or near Larimer, which was needle-and-haystack territory but better than doing nothing. One of the trucks belonged to a man named Antony Picota. The address was right out at the edge of their search, on the south side of Homewood, but they went there anyway. No truck to be found, and Antony Picota was a gaunt man in his late fifties with a shock of white hair, so the two cops who went to his place were sure as soon as they saw him that they’d struck out.
Until Picota asked them if they’d found his son.
When they cross-checked, they discovered that he’d placed a missing person call the night before. The missing person was Picota’s adult son, Bruno, who lived in a basement apartment on Paulson Avenue and was the other registered driver of Picota Senior’s white Dodge 200. He had borrowed the car earlier in the week and was meant to have brought it back the previous evening. “You got a camper on that?” one of the cops asked, oh so casual. And Mr. Picota said that yes, he had a 1976 TravelMate that was still in perfect condition. He and his son took the car down to Ohiopyle State Park twice a year where they fished the banks of the Youghiogheny and lived on what they caught there.
“What does your son do?” the cop inquired, feeling like he was on a roll now.
“He’s unemployed,” Mr. Picota said. “He used to clean and do odd jobs at the Perry Friendly Motel over by the veterans center, but they let him go.”
It was something to go on, at last. They went on it. They called in an all-points alert on Bruno Picota, and while that percolated they swung by the Perry Friendly Motel just to see what they might see.
What they saw was a Dodge 200 with an eight-foot TravelMate parked in the service area at the back of the lot. They parked right behind it and walked on through to reception. At the first mention of Bruno Picota, the desk clerk rolled his eyes. Sure, he said, Picota used to work there. He’d been a strange one, kept himself to himself and was hardly ever seen. Spent most of his time in room 22, which was the furthest away from reception on the ground floor. Room 22 had been turned into a storage space some years before, and now contained only cleaning materials.
When the SWAT team kicked the door in less than three minutes later, they found that room 22 also contained Bruno Picota and Fran Watts. He hadn’t touched the girl, not sexually or in any other way, but he had a knife in his hand—an eight-inch folding hunter, probably part of the kit he and his father toted down to Ohiopyle for their fishing trips. He was waving it in front of the six-year-old’s face, one officer said in testimony later. Like a teacher with a pointer, but he was pointing at her eyes and who the hell knew what he was seeing in them? He didn’t try to hurt her, even then—just kept babbling incoherent explanations for why he was the good guy here and they should all help him to kill the kid because he wasn’t sure he could do it on his own. The cops put him down fast and hard, and it was all over.
That part was, anyway.
Liz was reading the articles out of sequence, just opening them as they came up on the search list. The early ones referred to Picota by his actual name. The later ones called him the Shadowman, picking up on something he said in the course of the trial. They didn’t explain the nickname though, and Liz couldn’t remember what it referred to—just the word itself, full of grim and slightly supernatural threat. It was an unlikely word to describe the lumpen, round-shouldered figure who stared out of some of the photos; a man who even when he was standing in place looked like he was shambling. That was one pretty solid shadow, right there.
The Perry was just a shell now. It had shut up shop eight months after that raid, bowing to the inevitable. And Bruno Picota was in a secure mental facility in Grove City, where he would most likely die.
Enough. Liz closed the search window in a mood of sour melancholy. Her own memories of the Perry Friendly sat very queasily with what she had just read. She had forgotten until now that Picota had chosen to take his intended victim to the place where she and Marc had first flicked the switch of their relationship from flirtatious to full-on carnal.
They hadn’t used the Perry Friendly for very long, though. On one of those nights of unbridled passion—the last, as it turned out—Liz had awakened in the night to hear a vicious altercation going on in the next room. A single voice, talking low and hard. It could have been a man or a deep-voiced woman. “If you get it wrong, I’m going to cut you,” it said. And then, “You dumb little bitch.” And finally something like, “I’ll kill you first.” The person who was being spoken to didn’t answer at all, or if they did Liz didn’t hear. She roused Marc, who said he couldn’t hear a thing. By that time, Liz couldn’t either.
She got dressed and went to the front desk, over his protests. It was none of their business, surely, and they didn’t need the hassle. But the desk clerk said the next-door room wasn’t rented out, and when he finally opened it with his master key there was nobody there.
Liz wished she could remember the number on the door of that empty room. She was seeing a 22 in her mind’s eye, but that didn’t prove anything except that she was pretty damn suggestible, which wasn’t news at all.
Zac still wasn’t home, and Molly had finally settled. This seemed like a really good time to find the stillness inside herself. Liz went into her bedroom, closed the door and put the headphones on. She chose meditation two: Know That You’re Here, and This Is Now. Lying full length on the bed, arms limp at her sides, she let the words wash over her and sink into her.
Surrendering to them was a luxury. The voice murmuring in her ear felt simultaneously very close and far away. Liz’s sense of spatial relationships was dislocated, the world becoming a tide that ebbed and flowed with her breath. The paradoxical message of relaxation and awareness came in on the same tide, and took her out with it.
It was just like the last time. She became a single point of consciousness in a space that had no measure.
And just like last time, she wasn’t alone.
Maybe it was because she had spent so much of the evening thinking about Fran Watts’ abduction, or maybe it was because she wasn’t drifting off to sleep this time, but the sense of proximity was much stronger. So was the sense of threat.
Her other self was there. Outside? Inside?
Circling.
Very close already, and getting closer with each breath.
With a violent shudder, Liz brought herself up out of the shallow trance, opening her eyes and sitting bolt upright.
Molly was sitting beside her on the bed, knees drawn up to her chest and lower lip thrust out in a belligerent pout. Liz took off the headphones. Peter Bateman was still talking, but with the headphones discarded on the bed he sounded like an erudite mosquito.
“Mommy,” Molly said. “I was talking to you and you weren’t answering me.”
“I’m sorry, Moll,” Liz mumbled. She opened her arms. Molly held out for half a second, still indignant, then folded herself into her mother’s embrace with a small grunt of acquiescence.
They dozed comfortably together. Molly often ended up in Liz’s bed at some point in the night so this was business as usual. Except.
“Mommy,” Molly whispered after a while.
“Yes, babe?”
“Who was that?”
Suddenly wide awake, Liz propped herself up on one elbow to look down into her daughter’s face.
“Who was what, babe?” she asked. Trying to make the question sound normal. Trying not to let her surging panic unstring her voice so it spooked her little girl.
Eyes closed, drifting away, Molly frowned with the effort of remembering. “The other lady.”
Under REASON FOR ABSENCE, Liz wrote “family illness” But she told her supervisor what the real deal was.
“My ex-husband is up on an assault charge. He beat me up, and the cops arrested him. So now I’m applying for a temporary restraining order so he can’t come near me and the kids until the trial date.”
“Roast the bastard alive,” N
ora DoSanto said. She picked up the APPROVED stamp and slammed it down on Liz’s application for leave with a lot more force than was really needed. Nora had been divorced twice and consequently had a low opinion of men in general and ex-husbands in particular.
Liz was grateful that there would be no fuss made about her missing her shift. It was bad enough that she was losing the day’s wages. The shortfall would play out in duller meals, fewer treats, harder choices. All of which would be feathers in the scale if she could finally get herself and her kids free from Marc.
Mr. Naylor had told her to be at the courthouse by ten. Liz drove the kids to school as usual, then came home and changed into a sober two-piece that made her look like an Amish housewife on a day trip. She drove over to Lincoln, parked her car on the street and took the P17 bus into town.
Naylor had promised to meet her at the courthouse, but Liz got there too early. She killed some time by walking around the block, stopping under the bridge on Ross Street that connected the courthouse to another building—maybe a jail, although it looked like a fairy tale castle with both round and square towers. She was ninety-nine percent certain that she had seen both the bridge and the castle in a movie some time, but she couldn’t dredge up the memory. She felt obscurely ashamed to have such big pockets of ignorance about the city where she’d lived her entire life.
When she got back around to the front of the courthouse, Naylor was waiting for her on the steps. They walked inside and went through security together, the young attorney telling Liz what to expect even though he’d already gone over it with her on the phone. “This is a meeting in chambers, not a hearing. The other side will be there, but there won’t be any formal arguments. It will mostly just be me and my opposite number, Mr. Quaid, talking to Judge Giffen about the situation you find yourself in. He’ll make a decision on the basis of our presentations and the police statements. It’s possible, though, that he’ll want to talk to you or your husband to fill in some of the fine detail.”
