by Jan Burke
“Wait,” I said, just as he started to open it. Deep breaths.
“You don’t have to do this now,” he said.
I shook my head. “Go ahead, I’m okay.”
He opened it and there I was. There someone was. I didn’t recognize it as me. Not entirely. My face was a mass of dark purple bruises, my right eye still swollen. My lips were puffy. There were cuts here and there. My hair was cut in clumps, some an inch long, some three inches long. Lots of lengths in between.
Frank moved up behind me, and gently encircled my waist. He looked over my left shoulder. “This isn’t how you look to me. And besides, this won’t last long. We’ve just got to let you heal.”
I’d like to report that I was a good little soldier, but the truth is, I burst into tears and started bawling like a baby. Frank rolled with it. He shut the closet door and took me back to bed, putting a pillow under my right hand to help keep it elevated.
“Sorry I’m such a pain in the ass,” I said, as he started undressing.
He moved over to me and sat down on the bed and said, “Don’t ever say that again. We’ll do whatever we have to do until you’re better.”
“I’m scared, Frank. Really scared.”
“I know you are. Anyone would be.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to sleep by yourself until — well, I’ll sleep in the guest room if you need some time.”
I realized that my despair was being misread. “No, Frank,” I said, taking his hand. “I want you to sleep by me every night until the day I die.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“A proposition, maybe. Lower those eyebrows. I’m not quite up to that yet — but soon. Come on, get in here.”
He finished undressing, turned out the light, and carefully crawled in next to me. Cody jumped up and settled between us. I was weary, but I was also afraid that if I went to sleep, the nightmares would return. Frank felt my tension and gently rubbed the back of my neck, taking care with the shoulder.
“Frank? Could you turn the light back on?”
He reached over and turned it on, watching me for a moment.
“Are you in pain? Can I get you something?”
I shook my head. “I’m just scared.”
“What would help?”
“I don’t know. Hold me.”
He did. Eventually, we fell asleep. I found out that even with the light on, the nightmares came back, so I let him turn it out.
JUST AS I FINISHED awkwardly eating a huge breakfast the next morning, friends and family started coming by: Pete, Rachel, John, Mark, Barbara, Lydia, and Guy. At first I felt uneasy and embarrassed over my swollen, bruised face, but Frank apparently had not only warned them about my injuries but told them not to ask me about my ordeal.
I was grateful. Even knowing that most of my visitors were professionally curious, I didn’t want to talk about it. I had had to go over all of it during a phone call from the sheriff, which was harrowing enough. While I managed to stay fairly calm and detached during that call, I found myself shaking afterward. I was unsure of my ability to keep my emotions in check; I would be fine one moment, irritable or on the verge of tears the next.
But my friends seemed to ignore both my bruises and my moods, providing both distraction and support. Frank never strayed far from my side. Normally, I would have rebelled against that kind of protectiveness on his part. But I was not inclined to make one of my typical declarations of independence: I only wanted to feel safe.
My sister even brought a little barbering kit with her and cut my hair, evening it out. She had to cut it quite short, but I felt much less freakish when she was finished.
I wore down easily. I sometimes fell asleep while people were talking to me. I inevitably woke up in a panic, struggling, sometimes screaming; the visitors would be long gone and Frank would be there, calming me down, trying to keep me from unhinging my shoulder. Sometime in the late afternoon, the doorbell stopped ringing, and he crawled in next to me for a much needed nap. Miraculously, I was able to sleep for a few hours without having a nightmare.
We were awakened when Jack called and offered to bring dinner over. We accepted, and when he arrived, I saw that he had apparently carefully thought out the menu: a savory stew with everything in bite-sized chunks. No one would have to cut up my food for me. “Here’s to Irene’s first full day back home,” Jack said, lifting a glass.
Throughout dinner he told us stories of his life on the road, which had included more than one stint as a cook. At one point, he glanced over at me and caught me touching my hair, regretting its loss.
“Make the most of it,” he said, rubbing his smooth pate.
“Of what?” I said bitterly. “At least you had a choice about shaving your head.”
“Irene—” Frank began, his voice full of protest, but he stopped, then looked over at Jack.
Jack just smiled. “Relax, Frank. I was going to tell her sooner or later anyway. Just wanted to give her a little more time, is all.”
“Tell me what?” I said, still irritated.
Frank looked uneasy, but Jack just grinned. “That I did have a choice,” he said, “but I gave up trying to have an elaborate hairdo after chemotherapy.”
30
“CHEMOTHERAPY?” Shock won out over chagrin, but chagrin was a very close second. “Made life simpler. I don’t even have to blow-dry this cut.”
I stayed silent.
“Leukemia, currently in remission,” he said with a bow, as if he had just finished singing a little song.
I stared for a moment, still not believing it. But as I looked at him, I gradually realized that I didn’t want to believe it. I had lost both of my parents to cancer. I liked Jack, and I didn’t want to hear that he had leukemia.
“I’d prefer,” he added quietly, “that you don’t let word of it get around. I told Frank and I’ve told you. But no one else.”
I agreed to keep his confidence, but I was still shaken.
“I’m sorry,” he said, watching me. “You don’t need bad news right now, do you?”
“I had it coming,” I said.
The subject was dropped for the moment. I stayed quiet, and allowed the two of them to distract me with their conversation as they cleared the table and washed the dishes. Frank built a fire and we adjourned to the living room. Cody, who had been staying close to me all day, opted for Jack’s lap.
As the evening progressed, I began to notice that Frank and Jack talked and laughed together with the ease of longtime chums. They looked to be about as unlikely a pair as could be imagined, but they obviously shared a growing friendship. I wondered about it as I listened to them. It wasn’t the only thing I was curious about.
“What’s wrong? Is your shoulder bothering you?” Frank asked. I became aware that my face had set into a frown.
“Not really. And nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to ask you about a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, where was I when you found me? Where was that cabin?”
He shot Jack a look, but answered, “You were in the San Bernardino Mountains, near Pine Summit. They took you up to the rental cabins. Mrs. Fremont’s rental cabins.”
“Your cabins? Those bastards took me up to your cabins?”
He nodded.
“That makes me furious!”
“Me too,” he said quietly.
I looked over at Jack. I suddenly felt bad about bringing the topic up at all.
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Keep asking those questions, Irene. You must have more than one or two.”
“How can you stand being around us, Jack? Don’t we just remind you of it all?”
“Do I ‘just remind you of it all?’”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you and Frank are just about the only people in Las Piernas I want to be around right now. You don’t pity me. What happened, happened to all of us. Differently for each
of us, but — I don’t know — I guess I’m not making any sense.”
“You’re making perfect sense,” I said. “Other people — well, it’s easier to be with the two of you. You were there.”
“That’s it.”
I turned to Frank. “What happened while I was gone? How did you find me?”
“I was home. I was worried about you and was just about ready to call the hotel and ask if you had left yet. If you were still there, I was going to have you paged and meet you there.”
He didn’t say anything more for a while. For long minutes, the only sounds were Cody’s loud purrs and the crackling of the fire.
He sighed, then went on. “I got a call from the department, saying they had Brian Henderson’s son on the line, and that he insisted on talking to me, that you were in trouble. They patched the call through; it was Jacob, and he was frantic. I guess he had found one of my cards in your car. When he told me what had happened, I told him I’d meet him back at the field. I made a quick call back to the department, then left. Drove like a maniac. I got there not long after Jacob. He was a mess.
“He told me that although he hadn’t seen them drive up, as he was leaving he had seen a Blazer parked on the corner.”
I smiled. “Thank heaven he saw it. I thought he would be too rattled by what was going on to notice it. I think that kid really is going to be a reporter someday.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “God help him. Anyway, Jacob was a big help. And not just with the Blazer. But to go back to what was happening that night, we weren’t there for very long when the black and white units were pulling up, and we had Jacob take us to where the body was. We made him take us along a different path, so that we wouldn’t disturb footprints in the places where the weeds were matted down.
“To make a long story a little bit shorter, we found prints of three people walking toward where the Blazer had been parked. No sign of where you might have been taken from there. None of the neighbors had seen a thing.
“Somebody took Jacob home. He was really upset; blamed himself. To be truthful, I wasn’t holding together too well by then myself. It was after dawn when we finished in the field.
“Jacob had told me about the message at the hotel. Pete tracked down the guy who had been on the switchboard at the Lafayette that night and woke him up to ask him about the call. Fortunately, they don’t get many messages that late, and this one was unusual, so he remembered it. He said the caller seemed to be a young man. Of course, he didn’t question a young man being named “Sammy.” Found out the same message had been left at the Cliffside. There was no doubt that the girl was dead long before the calls were made. So you had obviously been set up.”
“It was her heart on my doorstep, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said.
I motioned for him to stop for a while. I felt tears welling up and tried to keep them from falling, but once again, my emotions refused to be reined in.
“I suppose there’s nothing that can be done about her father?” I said.
Frank shook his head.
I wiped my tears away and asked him to go on.
“Whoever made the call had to know about your connection to Sammy,” he said. “That pretty much had to be someone at the shelter or the newspaper. I tried the shelter first. The girl you had talked to at the funeral — Sarah — was missing. Paul said he was really worried about her and asked if we would let him know if we located her. I had gone back over the journal and made a list of initials from it. I was thinking of going over them with Paul, but then I remembered you telling me about Sarah’s dramatics, sneaking the journal to you when he came into the room. For some reason she hadn’t wanted Paul to know about the journal, and it made me decide to hold off.”
Jack looked away from us when Paul’s name came up. I felt damned awkward and I guess Frank did, too, because he hesitated.
“Maybe we could finish talking about this some other time,” he said.
“No,” Jack said tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late. He wasn’t who I thought he was, that’s all. Go on, Frank.”
Frank waited, then hearing Jack sigh with impatience, continued with his story. “I went home and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. Jacob called me, and asked if I wanted to get your car — in all the excitement, he had gone home with your car keys. I drove over to the Hendersons’ and picked him up. We went back to your car and he followed me home. I invited him to come in, and Jack stopped by while he was there.”
“I was being a nosy neighbor,” Jack said. “I had just moved into my mom’s place and saw somebody else pulling up in your car, Irene. I wondered what was up.”
“Well, I for one am damn glad you were curious,” Frank said. “I don’t know how much longer it would have taken if both of you hadn’t been there at the same time.” He looked at me. “As far as I could tell, there were only four things that had gone on at the shelter that could have made you a target for someone: you had talked to Sammy, you had talked to Sarah, you had taken Sammy’s journal, and you had asked around about members of the coven, particularly this ‘Goat.’
“So I started asking Jacob if he knew the names of the people whose initials had been in the journal. I left out the ones for Romeo and Juliet.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up at this, but he didn’t get anything for the effort.
“When I got to the initials DM and RA, Jacob said, ‘Devon Morris and Raney Adams.’ And suddenly Jack looked like someone had slapped him.”
“I asked Jacob to repeat the names,” Jack said. “They were Paul’s cousins. Remember I told you he had lived with Cindy’s sister for a while? Well, Devon and Raney were two of her five kids.”
“Devon told me he and Raney were half-brothers,” I said quietly.
“They’re all half-brothers. I just didn’t know Paul still had anything to do with them. I didn’t know they were hanging out at the shelter. I doubt they were ever around at the same time my mother was there. She couldn’t abide any of that bunch.”
“You’re right — at least, on the day I was there with your mother, Devon and Raney weren’t around.”
Frank went on. “Things started to look a little different once we knew they were related to Paul. You had seen Paul order them around; Sammy’s journal mentions a connection between them and the Goat. Pete tracked Sarah down; she had gone to stay with an aunt in the San Diego area. She said she left because Paul had threatened her about the journal. She told Paul it wasn’t in the shelter any longer and that he’d never find it. He grabbed on to her and she thought he was going to hit her, when Mrs. Riley walked in. He walked off and she packed up and left.
“We asked Mrs. Riley about it and she said Paul had kicked Devon and Raney out the day before the funeral. But she also said she was convinced that Paul had received a phone call from Raney very early Wednesday morning — she answered the phone, thought she recognized the voice — and Paul had taken off not long after he got the call. He hadn’t returned until late that afternoon.
“So we put a tail on Paul, hoping he’d lead us to wherever Devon and Raney were. I figured he had to be the Goat. He was connected to the shelter, to Sammy, to Devon and Raney, and to Mrs. Fremont. And he knew about Jack’s leukemia. So he stood to inherit. He probably picked the goat and Satanism because of Jack’s tattoo. Paul was hoping Jack would be suspected of murdering Mrs. Fremont. I guess Sammy found out what they were up to. She probably threatened him by telling him she had a journal.”
“She knew Paul was the Goat. She saw the scars on his arms,” I said. “I saw them when — I saw them,” I finished weakly, trying to not feel the memory in my shoulder and thumb.
Frank waited, probably wondering if I was going to burst into tears again, and went on when I didn’t.
“I checked vehicle registrations for Devon and Raney. Devon had a registration for a Blazer. So now it was a matter of waiting and praying to God that Paul got back in touch with them before — well, before it was too
late. Jack knew them by sight and I didn’t; I only had a DMV photo. So he came with me to watch Paul and on Friday it paid off. We followed Paul to a place where he met Raney. Then we followed them up into the mountains. By then, we knew where they were headed.
“Sure enough, they took the Pine Summit turnoff. I didn’t know what the situation would be, and Jack and I weren’t really official—”
“You mean Carlson didn’t want you working on this,” I said.
“Well, actually, he let me work on it. I don’t know if he felt sorry for me or what. He told me I seemed to be personally connected to every murder in Las Piernas, so I could work on a missing persons case. He knew I’d look for you anyway. But he didn’t like the idea of Jack getting involved, and so we were sort of an unofficial back-up tail, you might say. Good thing, because Paul shook the official one.
“Anyway, like I said, I didn’t know exactly what the situation would be, but I knew there were at least three of them, and Paul had other cousins. So I stopped off at the sheriff’s station and told them what was going on. By the time we convinced the sheriff and his deputy to get up off their behinds and follow us up there, Raney had apparently started back down. We came across his truck — what was left of it. I was afraid… well, we stayed just long enough to determine there was only one body. The sheriff fooled around calling another unit but I couldn’t wait. Jack and I took off for the cabins. You know the rest.”
I know we all had our own mental pictures of what happened from there, and the silence that followed was an uneasy one.
“I don’t know how I could have been so wrong about Paul,” Jack said, just above a whisper. “I can understand why he hated me. I just never thought he was so bitter toward his grandmother.”
No one said anything for a long time. I felt myself wearing down and told them I was going to call it a night.
Jack stood up, gently putting Cody on the floor. “I’ll say good night, then. I’m glad we talked.”
“Stay if you want to,” I said. “I just don’t have any stamina. I wish—” I didn’t finish it.
