Kin

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  Until it took his brother from him.

  Danny.

  The last he’d seen his face had been on the main evening news, his gangly arm thrown over the shoulders of his girlfriend Claire. Now he was dead, hacked to pieces by an insane doctor.

  But of course, that wasn’t true. Not if Claire was to be believed, and why shouldn’t she be? Who else alive could tell the world the truth about what had happened down there in that dirty little town? Except, they refused to believe what she’d told them because they had already celebrated the end of their grisly case weeks before Claire was even conscious, buried it in the same pit with the remains of the old doctor, who they knew without a shadow of a doubt had, despite having no previous history of violence, gone berserk and hacked up a load of kids. Backs had been slapped, folders had been tossed into filing cabinets, and sudsy beers had been tossed back while they grinned at each other, dug into steaks and thick fries smothered in ketchup, before going home to their wives and girlfriends, maybe to sleep after a hard day’s work, maybe to make love to put the proper end to a case they hoped someday to tell their grandchildren about.

  The Sheriff who’d seen to Claire in Birmingham, a man by the name of Marshall Todd, had called Finch’s mother to offer his condolences for the umpteenth time, to let them know Claire’s release was imminent, and that they might do well to prepare for all kinds of questions from left-field. The girl’s story, he informed them, ran contrary to what they knew to be true. He suspected she was out of it from the painkillers, was misremembering things as people do in the aftermath of such a terrible trauma. All it would take to inspire a story like that, he said, would be repressed memories and a shifting of the wrong ones. She could be remembering the scenes but superimposing things over them that hadn’t been there at all. He could understood completely how a woman forced to endure such an awful ordeal, crazy with pain, disorientated from the abuse she’d taken, would see phantoms where there had been none. Even so, he’d conceded, if it turns out Wellman had an accomplice, we’ll look into it, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the main figure at the center of this atrocity is dead, and I hope that brings you some little peace of mind.

  Finch shook his head as rain beaded the glass and the SUV squeaked slightly to a stop close to the front door of the house.

  It hadn’t brought them peace of mind, and, standing in the kitchen, trembling, his mother had yelled at the Sheriff, questioning his foolishness in thinking it might when her son was dead.

  The driver side door of the SUV opened and Claire’s mother got out. A high school teacher at least two decades his senior, he nevertheless recalled fantasizing about her during those halcyon days back when everybody lived forever, and happiness was daydreaming about taking your teacher over the desk during detention, or asking a girl out and having her look at you like she thought you’d never ask. It was a basketball victory, a smoke behind the bleachers, a Friday night cruising with your friends, sipping beer outside Wal-Mart until the cops came, the smell of the air, electric with possibility.

  Then the war had come, and he’d taken it home with him, only to find a worse one waiting.

  He shuddered the smoke from his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then raised his head.

  Mrs. Lambert didn’t look nearly so appealing now. Her face was wan and pale, her eyes liquid smudges peering out at a world she no longer took for granted, or trusted. Her long curly brown hair was in disarray, her clothes shabby and wrinkled from a long drive.

  The year Finch graduated, Mrs. Lambert retired from Hayes High School after coming home one night to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk after his heart gave out while he was getting a drink. Surviving him had aged her considerably. Finch suspected what had happened to Claire would push her further to the grave than time alone could ever manage.

  He watched Mrs. Lambert move to the side door of the SUV and, with visible effort, wrench it open. She looked like a scarecrow trying to throw wide a barn door. At the same time, the front passenger door slammed shut, and Kara emerged, looking like a younger but just as harried version of her mother. Finch felt something akin to excitement in his stomach, but it was immediately quelled by the memory of what had happened between them, how she had managed to move on with her life and he had gone to war to forget his, only to have bullets compound the fear that wherever he turned, he’d still be punished.

  Unlike her mother’s, Kara’s hair had been cut short. Finch didn’t approve of the style, but figured that would hardly send her world careening out of orbit if she somehow got wind of it. Besides, when they’d been together, she’d had her hair long to suit him. The new cut was to suit someone else, or maybe just herself, as whenever he saw her around town she was alone, and not looking at all put out by it.

  It made him ache to see her.

  Now she joined her mother and reached in, pausing a moment to look around, probably to ensure no cameras were rolling. Finch guessed that the hospital might have leaked news of Claire’s discharge to the media, but the date would have been intentionally inaccurate, allowing the Lamberts to get Claire home a few days before the vultures descended. The reporters would figure it out, of course, but by then there’d be little they could do, assuming they’d care.

  Kara’s gaze settled on his Buick, where he’d parked it facing out of a driveway two houses down on the opposite side of the road. He had to resist the urge to duck and felt his insides squirm the longer she watched him. She would recognize the car of course; he’d had it since their dating days, had driven her to Niagara Falls in it, made love to her in the back seat one drunken summer night then laughed about the immaturity of it, and the rearview mirror still held the memory of her standing at her front door six months later after she told him he scared her, that she couldn’t tolerate his moods or his temper any longer.

  A pair of emaciated arms reached out from the darkness inside the SUV and Finch rolled his window down, just a little. The breeze snatched the smoke from the car, dragging it out into the rain.

  Claire stepped out into the dim daylight and raised her face to the clouds, as if challenging God to throw his next unpleasant trial at her. She looked frail. Had Finch not known who she was, he might have thought her an elderly woman, some long-lost grandmother come to visit her relatives.

  They raped her.

  Slowly, one hand clamped on her mother’s arm, Kara’s hand on her back for support lest she should fall, they guided her toward the house and the shelter of the eave.

  They cut out her eye.

  Claire took the steps on her own, but paused at the top, as if the three stone steps had been enough to exhaust her.

  They cut off her fingers.

  Finch tossed his cigarette out the window. In the rearview, he was startled to see an old man in a check shirt and dungarees emerge from the house that belonged to the driveway and squint at the Buick as he started toward it. “Hey!”

  Finch started the engine. He wasn’t going to think of this as a missed opportunity. After all, he’d had no intention of approaching the Lamberts. He’d only wanted to see Claire, to get as accurate a picture as he could of what they had done to her, so he could add it to the bloodstained collage he was developing in his own private darkroom.

  They killed Danny.

  He pulled out of the driveway and the old man slowed, then stopped as Finch turned out onto the road. He sped up, driving in the direction of the Lambert house but not stopping, the windshield wipers laboring to clear the glass of the strengthening rain. As he passed by, he looked and saw that Claire and her mother had already gone inside. Kara followed, but turned as she shut the door, and hesitated.

  She saw him. There was no way she couldn’t have. But her expression remained the same.

  Again, his stomach jumped.

  Then she was gone.

  Finch hit the gas.

  Not today, he thought. Not now.

  He would return, and when he did it would
not be to offer his sympathy, or to torture himself by looking into the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.

  It would be to see Claire.

  -16-

  Louise prayed he wasn’t home, but of course, considering the way the day had gone thus far, she wasn’t at all surprised when that prayer went unanswered. Upon entering the apartment, she found Wayne asleep on the sofa in front of the television, his bare feet propped up on the battered pine coffee table. A cigarette he’d set in the ashtray had burned itself out, a long worm of ash dipping down into a sea of its crumpled comrades. The apartment reeked of stale sweat and spoiled milk. Louise sighed and tossed her purse on the floor, inches from where Wayne dozed, his head to the side, a thin string of drool dangling from his jaw. He awoke at the sound, and yawned, then frowned and made as if to go back to sleep.

  “Wayne.”

  Sluggishly, he opened his eyes and straightened, squinting, struggling to make out who was standing before him.

  “Hey,” he mumbled. A smile turned into another yawn and he stretched, sat up and reached for pack of cigarettes, but froze, his hand still in the air as he registered another presence in the room. “Who’s here?” He rose unsteadily, shaking himself alert. Louise thought she detected fear lurking in his eyes. What are you afraid of? she wondered, casting her mind back to all those nights when he’d jumped at sounds outside the apartment or on the street below, sounds she hadn’t even heard. His nocturnal walks did little to reassure her that he was not up to something. Lately, the caution she had initially interpreted from him as protectiveness had become something dangerously close to paranoia, and it worried her. She liked to assume he did nothing while she was at work. He had all day to himself but was always right there in his spot in front of the TV when she left and when she returned, so it was easy to pretend he hadn’t done much else. Now, she wondered.

  But such concerns would have to wait.

  She stepped aside, allowing Wayne to see the teenager who’d been standing between her and the door.

  Wayne frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

  Pete smiled and snatched off his wool cap, as if it might make recognition easier. The boy’s eyes were wide, desperate.

  “Pete,” he answered. “Lowell.”

  Still confused, Wayne looked to Louise.

  “Jack Lowell’s boy,” she told him.

  Recognition did not come. “Jack Lowell?”

  “The man I was with before you. Back in Elkwood. The farmer. This is his boy.”

  Wayne’s features softened. “Ah shit, right. I remember. Christ, you got tall.”

  Pete’s smile held, but he looked uncomfortable.

  “Well, come on in. Sit down. You look chilled to the bone, son.”

  “Cold out there,” Pete told him, but waited for Louise to extend the invitation.

  “Go on, sit,” she urged. “How about I make us some coffee? You drink coffee Pete?”

  “You got any hot chocolate?”

  “Sure.” She headed into the small kitchen, which was little bigger than a walk-in closet, the room further constricted by the cupboards and small table on one side, the sink on the other. As she set about making the drinks, she noticed how hard her hands were shaking. She clenched them and closed her eyes. It was going to be all right. It was. Pete’s arrival was an omen that there was still some hope for the future. Maybe he was just visiting; maybe he was here for money—in which case he would leave disappointed—or maybe he was here to stay, his father finally having given up on him. As Louise retrieved the container of hot chocolate from the cupboard, and rinsed out a chipped mug and a spoon from the sink, she realized that Pete might very well be part of a life she wanted after all, a life she hadn’t realized she’d yearned for until she’d walked out and left it to be erased by the dust from Wayne’s tires. Perhaps the boy was part of a grander picture she could not yet see, a picture that did not have Detroit as its background.

  Listening to the shy monotone muttering of the boy as he answered Wayne’s cheerful queries, she tried not to think about what she had to tell Wayne later. Aside from everything else, Pete’s presence had bought her some time. Time to work out in her mind what she was going to tell him, if anything. Time to try to grasp those elusive threads and weave a better story in which she was the victim, not the villain.

  But isn’t that the truth? she asked herself, and realized that she was no longer thinking about the diner and what had happened there.

  With a deep breath, she hurriedly brushed her hair away from her face and took the hot chocolate and coffee into the living room. It was a mess, but Pete didn’t seem to notice. She supposed he wouldn’t. The farm had hardly been well maintained, inside or out.

  “So,” she said, handing him the mug. “How on earth did you find me?”

  Wayne took the coffee from her without looking away from the boy. “And what made you think of lookin’ for her now?”

  This was going to be Louise’s next question, and she wished Wayne had let her ask it. She would have put it to the boy with less suspicion in her tone.

  Pete looked from Wayne to Louise, then down into his hot chocolate. An expression of deep sadness came over his face and Louise felt her chest grow tight. Somethin’s happened. The boy confirmed this a moment later when, eyes still lowered, one gloved finger running circles around the top of the cup, he said, “My Pa’s dead.”

  Louise gasped, a hand to her mouth, though in truth the shock was less potent than she pretended. Something about the boy’s posture once she’d recognized him outside the apartment had suggested loneliness, and his face when he removed the scarf seemed thinner than she remembered it, the light in his eyes dimmer than before.

  “What happened?”

  Knowing how close Pete had been to his father, despite the man’s utter inability to express any kind of love for the boy, she fully expected to watch him crumble, to see the tears flow as his face constricted into a mask of pain.

  What she saw instead surprised her.

  There was grief, and pain, but presiding over them all, was anger.

  “They kilt him. The Doctor too.”

  Wayne’s eyes widened. “Shiiit. I think I seen that on the news.”

  Louise turned to look at him. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  He shrugged. “It was half over and I was drunk when I switched it on. Didn’t get no names. All I remember thinkin’ is: ‘Damn, Louise used to live somewhere around there.’”

  “We’ve talked about the farm, Wayne, don’t give me that shit. I must have mentioned Pete and his daddy a hundred times. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Wayne’s face darkened. “I said I didn’t hear the goddamn names, all right?”

  Not now, she cautioned herself. The kid doesn’t need this, and I don’t either. She returned her attention to Pete who seemed to be preparing to withdraw into himself. She scooted close and put her hand on his wrist.

  “Who killed them, Pete?”

  “We found a girl, in the road. She was messed up pretty bad.”

  “Messed up how?” Wayne asked.

  “Beaten. Cut up. She were naked, all covered in blood. Me and Pa… we stopped to pick her up, brung her to the doctor’s house to get her fixed up.” There was no emotion in his voice now, as if this was a story he had grown weary of telling. “Pa told the doc it’d be better if he didn’t ask any kinda questions about it all. I didn’t understand that. Not then. I was worried about the girl. We went home, left her with the doc. But then my Pa… he got his rifle out and sat there like he were waitin’ for the devil to kick down the door, and he… he told me I needed to get in the truck and go to the doc’s house again, even though we’d just come from there. He said the doc would tell me what to do. So I went, and when I got there the doc said to me I needed to bring the girl to the hospital ’cuz she was in real trouble.”

  “Who was the girl?” Louise asked. “Did you know her?”

  Pete raised his head, shook it once. “Her name
was Claire. She were pretty like you wouldn’t believe. Least I guessed she was. It was hard to tell because of all the blood and they had cut out one of her eyes.”

  Wayne frowned. “Jesus.”

  “You took her to the hospital?” Louise asked. “Why didn’t your Pa go with you?”

  “He stayed home,” Pete said. “And he shot himself. Don’t know why, but I guess he were too afraid of what was comin’ to want to be there when it did.”

  Louise buried her face in her hands. “Oh God.”

  “I didn’t know, or I’d never have left him. Maybe if I was smarter I’d have known, but I ain’t, so I didn’t. I just drove the girl outta town to the hospital.” Something like a smile turned up the corners of his mouth. “She were real nice, though. The girl. We talked some on the way. Just a little because she was tired. But I liked her. Wished I could have stayed with her a while.” He dipped his head, sipped at his drink, and his smile grew. “This is real good. I always liked your hot chocolate.”

  Louise’s vision blurred with tears, her throat tightening as she struggled to keep her composure. It’s not fair, she told herself. Not fair that I left them. Not fair that he died. And when a grimmer thought followed, What if I had stayed with them? Wouldn’t I have died there too? The answer was: Maybe you should have. Maybe that was where your true path ended and now you’re wanderin’ blindly ten miles farther along the same road ’cept now you know for sure it ain’t goin’ nowhere.

  “You tell the cops what happened?” Wayne asked, his interest apparently sincere.

  Pete frowned. “When?”

  “When you got the girl to the hospital?”

  The boy shook his head. “I didn’t want to answer no questions. I was afraid, so… so I just got the girl inside and let the hospital men take her away. One of them asked me my name and I told him, but then he told me to wait and I ran. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve.”