“How will you do that?” She struggled to sit and wrapped her arms around her chest in an effort to warm herself. “You can’t just walk into the police station and announce that you’re not dead after all.”
“I can tell them . . .” His fingers slid through his hair, front to back, in one smooth motion. “I’ll tell them that I had amnesia. Yeah. People get amnesia. I read about it.”
“You’ll still need to prove somehow that you are Ian. You’ll have to take some tests.”
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t need any DNA tests. I can prove I’m Ian. I have proof right here.” His hands slid into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. “See. I have the picture.”
He held it up and she squinted to see it in the growing light of dawn. It was Ian’s seventh-grade photograph.
“You kept that wallet all these years?” she asked, puzzled. “Why?”
“So I could prove I was Ian.” He looked at her as if she were stupid. “Why do you think?”
His voice had taken on the tone of a man younger than the one who stood before her.
“That’s not going to prove it to the police.”
“It’s always proved it. I showed it to everyone. Everyone knew I was Ian Smith.”
“Who’s everyone?” The sun was starting to come up, but she was getting colder by the minute and she began to fear hypothermia. She could no longer feel her fingers or her toes. From somewhere sirens shrieked through the stillness.
“Everyone in San Francisco. Everyone on the street. They all knew I was Ian. The police will know, too, when I show them the picture.”
“I’m freezing. You have to take me back to the house. I have to get warm.”
“I can’t take you there now. Didn’t you hear the sirens? I’ll bet they’re there already, to fight the fire. What? You thought I was kidding about that?” He laughed at her. “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire . . .”
“I’m really cold,” she told him, the status of her beloved home suddenly secondary to the immediate matter of her lack of body heat.
“There are blankets there behind you. You can use one of those.” He sat cross-legged on the ground in front of where she sat but made no move to assist her. “I brought them when I used to come to watch you through the windows. Sometimes I watched even after the lights went out.”
“You came inside, too. You were in my room,” she said, remembering the feeling of someone watching her while she slept.
“Just a few times. The house always smelled funny. Like a pipe or something. I hate that smell.”
She stopped and turned to look at him. “You don’t know what that smell was?”
“Tobacco, I guess. I didn’t know that you smoked. I never saw you smoke.” He pointed toward the small pile of blankets and said, “Don’t take the blue one. That’s mine. Give it to me. I’m a little chilly now, too.”
“Which one?” She stopped abruptly and turned to stare at him.
“The blue one.”
“This one?” She lifted the corner of a green plaid quilt.
“No, the blue one. The other one. What’s the matter with you, are you color blind?”
She tossed him the blanket.
“No, I’m not.” She gathered the quilt around her and shivered into it, wondering how long it would take for her to warm. “But Ian was.”
Adam drove over the crushed stone drive behind Father Tim’s Mission of Hope and turned off the engine. He’d been calling every fifteen minutes on his drive from the airport and was more than a little concerned that he’d gotten no answer at Selena’s house, but he’d been unable to get past Father Tim’s answering machine and the recorded message that cheerfully announced that the Mission closed at nine P.M. but would reopen at eight in the morning. Emergency calls could be made to a different number, which Adam had tried several times without success. He glanced around as he got out of the car, looking for Kendra’s old Subaru, but it wasn’t in the lot. Maybe she’d come with her friend Selena, he thought, recalling the cars that were parked out on the street.
The back-porch lights were on, Adam noticed as he walked toward the house, and inside several lights were on. He tried the back door, then tried the knob when his knock was unanswered. It opened without hesitation.
“Kendra wasn’t kidding about people around here leaving their doors unlocked at night,” he muttered, frowning, as he stepped inside.
A shadow passed through the hall.
“Father Tim?” Adam called out to the figure.
“Father Tim isn’t here.” An elderly man who appeared to be missing several of his front teeth stepped from the darkness. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Kendra Smith’s,” Adam explained. “I thought she might be here.”
“Kendra’s friend, eh?” The old man turned on the kitchen light. “If you’re her friend, how come you’re not over there fighting the fire with Father Tim and everyone else?”
“What fire? Over where?”
“Fire down the road. Father Tim and the others went down about an hour ago, right after we got the call. Thought it could be the Smith place. Hey, we’re all volunteer firemen, you know, Father Tim insists on it. Way to do a little for the community, you know, while we live here. Though these days I mostly man the fort. But I drove many a pumper when I was younger, fought many a fire back here in the Pines.”
Adam took off through the back door while the old man was still talking.
Given all he’d learned that day, Adam could not get there quickly enough. He hoped he’d remember the way, and he prayed he wouldn’t be too late.
“What happened to my brother, Zach?” Kendra asked.
He stared at her thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “That gave me away? The blanket thing?”
She nodded.
“But up until then, I had you convinced, didn’t I?”
“I admit I was wavering.”
“Then I’m pretty good, huh? Of course, I’ve been Ian for ten years now.” He nodded, a touch of pride in his voice. “I’ve got it down pat.”
“You’ve been Ian?”
“Yup. You ask anyone on the streets in San Francisco. They all know Ian Smith.” He laughed and added, “Hell, I’ve been Ian almost as long as Ian was Ian.”
“What happened to him, Zach?” Shielded from the cold by the quilt, she rubbed her hands together hoping to regain lost circulation.
“That little shit.” The smile curled into a snarl. “And he was a little shit, Kendra, make no mistake about it. Your precious little brother was a first-class prick.” He leaned forward, close to her, and she drew back instinctively.
“Look, Ian could be an annoying little kid sometimes, and yes, he could be a pain in the ass, but—”
He grabbed her arm. “I hated him. Hated every one of you. Self-righteous, sanctimonious, better-than-everybody-else bastards.”
Kendra stared, wide-eyed and dumb. She hadn’t known that a body could contain that much hatred without exploding. It whipped around her like a blinding wind and pounded at her with its fury.
“All of you, patronizing me. Oh, our poor little cousin Zachary. Let’s bring him out for a few weeks in the summer so he can see how the real Smiths live. Stupid little Zach.” He looked at her with eyes now filled with the remembered pain of the child he’d been. “I wasn’t stupid. I just never got to go to school.”
“Zach, it was never like that. Nobody thought you were stupid.” She sought to quell the storm she saw building within him, knowing if it was released, there would be no chance to survive its fury.
“Do you know that the great state of Arizona didn’t even know I existed until they thought I’d died? They never knew I was there until my mother called them in when I didn’t come home for days.” He snorted. “And even then, she told them I’d been home-schooled. Home-schooled,” he repeated for emphasis. “Want to know what I learned in my home school?”
His voice quivered with hot anger.
; “I learned how to cultivate weed and how to sober up a drunk. I learned how to avoid the advances of my mother’s girlfriends—and sometimes her boyfriends, too. I learned that if I didn’t get away, I was going to die there long before I ever got to live.”
He tossed his cigarette on the ground and crushed it under his heel.
“I could have been just like you. Just as good as you. She had inherited just as much money as your father had. I used to see the checks. But it all went to drugs and liquor and supporting that flophouse she called a ranch. Everything she had went into the ranch, into having fun with her friends.”
Tears formed in the corners of his eyes and began to slide down his cheeks.
“And then I’d come East every year for two weeks, and see what it was like to be a Smith. A big, beautiful house that was always clean, always smelled good. I remember everything about that house. Everything.” He closed his eyes for just a second. “There was always good food. We went places. Places I’d never even heard of. Museums. Amusement parks. We watched television. We did things. For those two weeks I was just like you. Only not as good. Never as good.”
Zach felt in his chest pocket for his cigarettes. The bitter, brittle words came ever more quickly, and his hands were beginning to tremble. How long before the rage boiled over?
“I had to watch you to see how to act, listen to how you spoke, so that I’d know how to speak right. But Ian knew. And Ian never missed an opportunity to remind me. Made fun of me because I didn’t talk as good as he did. Because I didn’t know about all the things he knew.”
“For God’s sake, Zach, why didn’t you say something?”
“Say what? Hey, Aunt Elisa, did you know my mom’s a junkie who’s putting all that Smith money up her nose?”
“Yes.” She looked him directly in the eye. “Yes, that’s exactly what you should have said. Ian should have told us if you couldn’t. I don’t understand why he always painted such an idyllic picture of the ranch.”
“Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Ian loved that little walk on the wild side he got to take for two weeks every year. And he loved that he was younger than me, but that he knew so much more. That he was so much smarter.” He looked up at Kendra smugly. “I guess, in the end, he wasn’t so smart after all, was he?”
“What did you do to him?”
“You really want to know?” He smirked.
“The body they found in the cave . . . that’s Ian, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s Ian.”
“What happened?” she asked again. After all these years, Kendra needed to know. She would have begged him for the truth if she’d had to, but it seemed that Zach was now as eager to tell as she was to listen.
“Ian was so hot to trot to find this old Indian guy. He wanted that Cochise bow, let me tell you. He wanted it in a big way.”
“Was there really a bow?”
“What do you think?” He looked at her as if she had sported an extra head.
“Then why did you tell him?”
“Because I needed him to have money with him. And I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist something like that. It was the only way I was going to get out of there, don’t you see? I couldn’t stay there any longer. That TV program I told you about, I saw it the first night I was at your house that summer. All those kids, living together on the streets. It looked better to me than what I had. And I got the idea to go there. I figured I had nothing to lose. But I needed a little something to take with me.”
“So you got Ian to bring money out so you could kill him and steal it.”
“No, no, you gotta understand this. I never planned on killing him. I was just going to take his wallet, that’s all. I figured I could make him believe that he’d dropped it someplace on the trail, that it fell out of his backpack or something. The other stuff . . . it just sort of, you know, happened. I mean, like it was fate.”
“What exactly happened?”
“It was cold. I said I’d make a fire, but he didn’t want to sleep outside again. He went up the hill. I saw him going into the cave. For a minute, I almost called to him to not go in there.” Zach swallowed, remembering. “But as soon as he got past the mouth of the cave, he started to scream. Man, did he scream. I never heard anything like it.” A look of triumph crossed his face, as if he was reliving that moment, savoring Ian’s agony. “It seemed like he screamed forever. I thought he was never going to stop.”
“And you did nothing to help him?” A horrified Kendra shivered.
“Hey, what could I do?” Zach shrugged cavalierly. “The minute he went in there, he was as good as dead. If I went in, I’d have been stung to death, too. What good would that have done?”
“So you just stood there and listened to him scream.”
“Couldn’t avoid it, Kendra. He was loud.”
“And you left him to die.”
“Couldn’t avoid that either.”
“So that you could take his money.” Kendra swallowed hard.
“Yeah, well, his wallet was in his backpack there on the ground, so I figured, what the hell? I wasn’t looking that gift horse in the mouth. I took the backpack with his stuff in it, threw my old pack into the cave with him, and just walked away.”
“What about Christopher? Was he there?”
“Christopher? Oh, you mean the kid from the ranch? Yeah, he was there,” Zach said. “He followed us. We let him camp with us, but sometimes he had trouble keeping up. I told him to go back to the ranch, but he didn’t. He’d followed Ian up the hill, he was maybe twenty or thirty feet behind Ian when he went into the cave. He just stood there with his hands over his ears, whimpering and crying, all the time Ian was screaming. He was still crying the next morning.” He paused for a moment, reflected briefly, “I wonder if he ever stopped crying.”
“No,” Kendra said softly. “He never did.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him when I was in Arizona recently.”
“You were in Arizona? Did you stop at the ranch?”
She nodded.
“See, that’s another thing. That ranch should have been mine, but she left it to her friends. I always knew she cared more for them than she did for me. She cared for everybody more than she cared for me. She was one damned poor excuse for a mother, Kendra. I deserved better. I deserved more.” His jaw settled hard again. “It should have been mine. She should have left it to me. I wasn’t even in her will.”
“She thought you were dead, Zach,” Kendra pointed out.
“Even after she found out I was alive, she wouldn’t change it.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “Bitch. Why couldn’t she have done that much for me? She never did a damned thing for me my whole life. And you know what the first thing she said to me was, when she saw me? She said, ‘Where’s Ian?’ ” He sniffed and wiped at his nose with his shirtsleeve. “Five years I’m gone, and the first thing she says is ‘Where’s Ian.’ ”
“What did you tell her?”
“Oh, I showed her. Showed her where the cave was. She wanted to know how I pulled it all off.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Same thing I’ve been telling you.”
“You didn’t finish the story.”
“There isn’t anything left to tell.”
“Where did you go after Ian? How did you get there?”
“I walked most of the night. I figured I could hitch a ride and get to California once I got out to the road. The kid followed me, but I had to leave him when I got a ride with some college kids who were on their way to Sacramento. He was still crying but I told him someone would come along and pick him up and take him home. These kids, they took turns driving straight through the next couple of days, and after they dropped me off, I got a ride with a trucker to San Francisco. I lied and told him my dad lived there. And once I got there, I found a lot of kids, just like me, and that’s where I stayed, mostly. And then I was Ian. No more Zach.”
“There’
s a man serving two consecutive life sentences in prison in Arizona who was convicted of killing you and Ian,” she told him.
“Yeah, I read about that.” Zach laughed dryly. “Dumb shit pedophile. I know all about what those guys do. You have no idea what they . . .” He shuddered, as if something terrible had touched his soul. “He belongs in a cell. They all belong in jail. I hope he rots there.”
“He may belong in prison, but not for the crime he was convicted of.”
“So what? What difference does it make, what crime he’s in for? He hurt little boys, you have any idea what that means? You think he deserves to be out walking the streets?” Zach took on a decidedly righteous expression.
“It matters, if he’s being held for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s wrong, Zach.”
“I don’t care. They’re all creeps and they all deserve to die.”
“Why didn’t your mother call us after she found out that you were still alive?”
“Because by that time she, too, had gone to that big Smith reunion.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that right after she and I had our little chat,” he glared at her, his eyes blazing, “she took a little tumble off the side of the hill.”
“You pushed her.” Kendra shook her head. She’d begun to think there was nothing Zach could say that could shock her after learning how he’d gleefully listened to her brother’s agonizing death. How many more terrible secrets could this man possibly harbor?
“Let’s just say accidents happen and leave it at that.”
“Why? Why would you do such a thing to your own mother?”
“Sierra, as you now know, was hardly June Cleaver,” he said coolly. “Not exactly Mother of the Year material.”
“But all those other women you killed, they were.” Kendra’s stomach lurched every time she thought of the beautiful young women, the loving young women, who had been so devoted to their children, so brutally taken from them.
“Yeah, and you think those kids appreciated them? Those kids had everything. They got to do everything, go to school and everything. They got to play baseball. Soccer. Had friends to play with. Bikes to ride. They had nice houses to live in.” His voice rising, he turned to her with the eyes of an angry, spiteful child. “I watched them. They did not appreciate what they had, Kendra. And you know what happens when you don’t appreciate what you’ve got, don’t you? It’s taken away from you, that’s what, because you don’t deserve to keep it. They didn’t deserve.” His words began to free-fall from his mouth in a jumble. “They did everything for their kids, you know that? Everything.”
Until Dark Page 28
