Her face remained stoic. Nevertheless, her eyes said it all. Surprise, confusion—and anger, lots of it. “For how long?” she said tightly.
“I’m not sure.”
“That means a long time?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“I’m sorry, Beth, I—”
She shook her head. “I knew it. I knew it.”
“Beth…”
“I open up, I let myself feel again, trust again, and…and… Damn you, Harry!” Tears spilled from her eyes. She wiped them irritably and stood. “Excuse me.”
She vanished into the kitchen.
I stood. “Beth?”
She didn’t reply.
“Stupid,” I mumbled to myself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I paced back and forth, wondering whether Beth was coming back, whether I should just leave, when I noticed for the first time the five framed photographs lining the fireplace mantle. They were all of the boy on the refrigerator door, her son. Smiling wildly while on a swing in autumn. Standing in front of a Christmas tree holding a present almost as big as he was. Sitting at a table with what might have been chocolate cake on his face.
I picked up the largest photograph. The boy was plopped on a carpeted floor, still a toddler in this one, gripping a rubber He-Man figurine in his hand—
Bailey.
I almost dropped the photograph. I spun around, convinced Beth had returned and said the boy’s name. The room was empty.
I looked again at the toddler.
Bailey.
Why did I know his name? Why did I feel like I knew him?
Suddenly, bizarrely, I was nauseous to the point I might be sick. I leaned forward against the mantle and took several deep breaths.
“Harry, I think maybe it’s best if you left, if we just called it a night.”
I turned my head slightly, saw Beth in my peripheral vision. She was standing in the threshold to the dining room.
“Harry?”
I shook my head, no longer merely nauseous; I was woozy, disoriented, as if I’d been drugged.
“Your son,” I said, raising the photo of the toddler. “What happened to him?”
“Harry, please, you should just leave.”
I forced myself to stand straight and face her. “His name was Bailey.”
Beth blanched. “How do you know his name?”
“What happened to him?”
“How do you know his name?”
“He’s dead. How did he die?”
“Harry, I want you to leave. Now.”
“I need to know, Beth.”
“You need to know?” she said. “You need to know about my son? How he died? Are you sick? What kind of question—?”
But the rest of her words were drowned out in white noise. Beth’s living room disappeared, and I was in the nursery ward of a hospital, cradling a wrinkled, pink Bailey in my arms. Then I was pushing him from behind as he peddled his new Big Wheel along a sidewalk. Tobogganing with him down Pilgrim Hill in Central Park. Reading him bedtime stories with a flashlight in the dark. A dozen other memories.
“Tonka truck,” I said, exchanging the toddler photo for the Christmas one. “That’s what was in the present. A Tonka dump truck. He loved it—until he left it in the snow one winter and it rusted.”
Beth was backing away from me. She clapped her hands over her mouth and said something I couldn’t understand.
“What?” I said.
“You.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Barney?” she whispered. “Oh my God. Barney…”
I threw the photograph across the room into a wall. The glass shattered. The silver frame clattered to the floor. Beth yelped.
“What happened to Bailey, Beth?” I said, stepping toward her.
“You’re dead,” she said.
“I seem to be very much not.”
Beth ran. I caught her in the kitchen and slammed her against the refrigerator. “What happened to Bailey, Beth?”
“Barney, please—”
I pressed my right forearm against her throat, choking her.
“What did you do to him, you fucking bitch?”
“You did!” she cried, her face turning a beat red. “You killed him, Barney! You killed our son!”
A new tsunami of memories stormed through me, these of Beth. Meeting her at the cigar bar for the first time, the real first time, while I was there with colleagues from Rewind. Dinners with her at expensive restaurants, often Japanese, because that was her favorite cuisine. Talking about having children one evening while strolling down Fifth Avenue. Entertaining friends at our Park Avenue penthouse.
Returning from an overseas business trip two days early, stepping from the elevator into the triplex. Going first to the wine room and selecting a fine champagne to share with Beth, to celebrate the latest deal I’d inked. Calling her name but receiving no answer. Checking the master bedroom, then the sitting room, then the gym and the spa. Taking the gallery stairs to the second floor. Hearing music coming from the library. Pushing open the door to find a fire glowing warmly in the fireplace. Beth naked on the bearskin rug in front of the fire, sleeping in the arms of a man half her age. Walking to them calmly and bashing the man’s head open with the bottle of wine. Beth waking and screaming and telling me to stop. Chasing her through the ballroom, through the dining room, catching her in the foyer as she attempted to flee either to the upper or lower floors. Pummeling her with the bloody, broken bottle until Bailey appeared, crying, telling me to stop. Gripping the boy by his pajama top and shoving him away. Bailey flipping backward over the bannister and falling to the marble floor twenty feet below, breaking his neck, dying instantly.
Beth was yelling at me now, clawing at my face, trying to free herself. I leaned against her with all my strength.
“You made me do it,” I spat, seeing red.
She kept yelling, clawing.
I rammed my forearm harder into her throat.
She made a noise like she might retch.
“You did!” I repeated “You!”
“You—” she croaked.
“You!” I shouted. “You made me do it! You ruined my life!”
Breathing hard, like I’d just run a mile, I released her. She doubled over coughing, gagging. I seized the bottle of Merlot by the neck, which was still on the kitchen’s island, and smashed it against the back of her skull. She dropped to her knees. I bashed her again and again, wine and blood painting the kitchen red.
***
I cleaned myself up in Beth’s bathroom the best I could and walked back to The Plaza. In my suite I opened the laptop, requested the personal assistant, and spent the rest of the night and early hours of the morning learning about Barney Hunter. Everything Stanley Williams had told me turned out to be true. I was a genius. I revolutionized life in the twenty-first century. And I was also a coldblooded murderer. I’d killed the guy Beth had been sleeping with. I’d been charged and convicted with first-degree murder in absentia. Same with Beth and Bailey, convicted in absentia, though in Beth’s case it had been attempted murder, and in Bailey’s, second-degree murder.
Beth had dismissed the staff the night before the double homicide, no doubt so they wouldn’t witness her affair. The first maid to arrive the following morning found the three bodies. Beth remained on life-support for two days before making a full recovery. She had also been villainized in the media. According to a “close source” in one story, this was the reason she’d ended up back at the cigar bar; she was friends with the owner, and he was the only person in town who would hire her.
Most photographs of Barney Hunter were of a middle-aged man with gray hair, eyeglasses, and unremarkable features. In one photo I noticed he had brown eyes while I—Harry Parker, at least—had blue eyes.
It had been eight months since I’d returned from Tokyo early to find Beth and her lover in the library. A week to the day, the police speculated I’d committed suicide. Secu
rity video footage showed me—wearing a rudimentary disguise—renting a power boat from the Chelsea Piers Maritime Center. The boat was later discovered abandoned in the middle of the Hudson River. Because my body was never recovered there has been an ongoing debate as to whether I was still alive or not.
Most believed the latter. After all, I’d killed my own goddamn son, accident though it may have been.
At five in the morning I closed the laptop and took a long hot shower. I dressed in a fresh suit and tossed the bloodied one, along with all the other clothes I had purchased, into the plastic bags they had come in. Then I rang the concierge to order me a taxi. The bellhop loaded the waiting cab with my belongings—including the cardboard box and laptop—while I settled my bill in cash.
I arrived at the derelict Brooklyn apartment at 5.46 a.m. I opened the black door and stepped inside. Stan was sitting on the third step. He jumped to his feet when he saw me, an expression of immeasurable relief on his face.
“Thank God, Barn!” he exclaimed. “You came!”
“It’s Harry—Harry Parker,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
RUN
PROLOGUE
They had set up camp in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains earlier in the day. Located in the southeastern part of New York State, the area was a wilderness of mixed hardwood forests carved up by narrow valleys, rushing rivers, and a plethora of hiking trails. Now it was a little past midnight. The nippy autumn air was redolent with the smell of dead leaves. Overhead, the black expanse of night sky glowed with stars.
Sitting with her knees pulled into her chest, close enough to the fire to warm her hands, Charlotte recalled the time she’d come to a park somewhere in these parts as a kid. She’d spent much of the morning at a swimming hole, catching tadpoles and fishing with an eggbeater rod. Her grandfather showed her how to decapitate and gut a trout. He loved fishing, and he must have told her the story how he caught the twenty-one-inch largemouth bass mounted above the fireplace in his study a dozen times.
Her grandparents had raised Charlotte since she was eight. That’s how old she was when her parents were murdered in a home robbery. They’d been shot with a sawed-off shotgun. Charlotte had been the one to find them. She’d heard the shots but remained at her bedroom door, too scared to do anything except call out for them. When they didn’t reply, she eventually crept down the stairs to the ground floor. She saw the bloody footprints first. They zigzagged all over the marble foyer floor. She followed the bloodiest set to the kitchen, where her father had been on his back, his brains spilling from his skull, her mother on her stomach, her blouse frayed, the skin beneath shredded and wet with blood.
Charlotte didn’t remember any details after that. The memories of the rest of the night had faded to some dark corner of her mind. All she knew was that the neighbors had called the police. She was taken to the hospital. She talked to a lot of people, detectives and doctors probably. Then her grandparents arrived and told her she would be living with them.
The thieves, she’d learned a couple years later when she was deemed mature enough to be told how and why her parents were slaughtered, had stolen most of her mother’s jewelry, which had been valued at roughly two hundred thousand dollars. They were never caught.
Charlotte always found it strange how she had only known her parents for eight years of her life—really, only known known them on a cognitive level for half that time—but they remained more real and important to her than anybody else she’d met to date, her grandparents included. She could still recall their faces, their expressions, their voices, their laughter. How her mother would let her cook and bake with her at the stove. How her father would give her scratchy chin kisses when he didn’t shave.
Charlotte had organized the present camping trip because she had hoped the solitude and fresh air and raw nature would do her boyfriend Luke some good. And for a while it had worked. He’d seemed to be somewhat at peace with himself—until fifteen minutes ago anyway.
Emma said, “What do you think they’re doing?” She was sitting across the fire from Charlotte, dressed in an over-sized Icelandic sweater, black tights, and Timberland boots. Her glossy black hair fell past her shoulders, in stark contrast to her porcelain skin, which seemed timeless in the firelight. Her father was the CEO of an aviation-aerospace company, her mother a successful real estate agent, and she’d grown up likely believing credit cards only came in platinum. That being said, she was smart, a good listener, and one of Charlotte’s best friends.
Charlotte shrugged. “I guess they’re talking.” She was twisting the engagement ring on her finger unconsciously.
“I feel bad,” Emma said. “It was my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I can’t believe he got so mad at me.”
Ten minutes earlier Emma had been telling a ghost story about a girl who was burned to death at an orphanage and kept coming back to haunt the kids who had teased her. When she began explaining in detail what the burned girl looked like, blistering skin and all, Luke snapped. He went from being so quiet you almost forgot he was there to raging at Emma so viciously she shrank back in fear. Charlotte tried to placate him. He waved her away and stormed off. She explained to Emma and Emma’s boyfriend Tom what Luke had been through in Afghanistan, how small things could set him off. He wasn’t really mad at Emma, she’d insisted, he just needed some time to cool off. Eventually Tom went to check up on him while Charlotte remained with Emma.
“Like, he was normal one minute,” Emma went on, “and the next…”
“He’s still adjusting,” Charlotte said. “It takes time.”
“You said he was just quiet. You didn’t say anything about a temper.”
“He never had a temper before. This is all new for me too.”
“This happened before?”
“He hasn’t snapped like that. But like I said…he’s different.” Charlotte hesitated, wondering where to begin. Emma had never met Luke. Charlotte and Emma were friends from their time at NYU where they’d been neighbors in Third North, a residency on the Washington Square Campus. Luke had been in the army all that time.
“Different?” Emma said.
“Different—like, different. He doesn’t like talking. Not much anyway. We don’t sleep together. We did the first couple nights he was back. But now I usually find him on the sofa in the basement, with all the lights on.”
“Usually?”
“Sometimes he’s in the kitchen when I wake up.”
“What? Sleeping on the table?” Emma started to laugh, but seemed to think better of it.
“Awake,” Charlotte said. “Drinking whatever booze is around.”
“In the morning?”
“I think all night.”
“You never told me this.”
“It’s tough to talk about. You don’t know him.”
“So does he drink, like, all the time? I mean, every day?”
Charlotte nodded. “He’s…I don’t know what you call it. Self-medicating? Sometimes I wonder if he still thinks he’s in Afghanistan. He never leaves the house. And when he does, he’s all agitated. He hates crowds. They make him nervous. That’s why I thought this camping trip would be good.”
“A lot of army guys go through this when they come back, don’t they? Like that guy in Forest Gump. Not Tom Hanks. You know, the guy without the legs?”
“Yeah, but Luke’s injury is in his head. Think about it, Em. The army spends months training you to kill people, right? You go to war and see some horrible stuff, right? You probably do some horrible stuff too. Then you come back on a Thursday and everyone expects you to get a job on Monday. There’s no decompressing.”
“Can’t he go to VA, Veteran Affairs, whatever it’s called?”
“Don’t get me started on them.”
“What do you mean?”
“After what happened—you know, with Luke’s unit, the ambush—he began having a lot of problems with the guys above h
im. I don’t know the details, Luke won’t talk about it. But he did something and they wanted him gone. They ended up making him sign this thing called a Chapter 10. Pretty much it means you don’t get thrown in the brig, but you get a less than honorable discharge, which means you’re not eligible for medical benefits.”
“What did he do that got him in so much trouble?”
“Not following orders? Getting into fights? I don’t know. But what really gets me mad is that whatever got him kicked out was a direct result of the ambush. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that seeing your whole unit get wiped out is going to give you more than a few nightmares. Who’s not going to flip out a bit? The army should have tried some counseling with him or something, or gave him some time off. Instead, they just gave him a bunch of meds and kept sending him back out to shoot people, which made him worse and worse until he did whatever he did. What the fuck is that?”
“I don’t get it,” Emma said, her long-lashed, green eyes flashing with anger. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Why wouldn’t they just help him?”
“It’s too expensive. It would cost them billions to give ongoing treatment to soldiers with psychological conditions. It’s true. It’s all over the internet. It’s been going on for years. At first the army was misdiagnosing soldiers with something called a personality disorder, which they said was a preexisting condition to service, which again means no benefits. This is garbage because every soldier is screened before boot camp for stuff like personality disorders. They all have to pass psych tests and be deemed fit for duty to get into the military. So five or six years ago, when the media started getting wise to all this, there was this big backlash. So now instead of the army wrongfully diagnosing soldiers and screwing them out of their benefits, they’re just not diagnosing them at all. They’re pretending there’s nothing wrong with them. And when these guys, guys like Luke, start breaking down and getting in trouble while still enlisted, the army makes it look like it’s their fault, and they kick them out when it’s the army that made them that way.”
Dark Hearts: Four Novellas of Dark Suspense Page 13
