Mrs. Dushku glanced nervously back at the living room, her husband’s voice was growing more and more agitated, Sarah pressed her for an answer. “Please, anything you can remember might be a big help to us.”
“Well, there were a few of them. Can’t remember their names offhand but Paul said they were kind of a group, you know?” Sarah nodded but remained silent. “Not sure, but I think he said the one that was giving him the most trouble was Sandy? No, that wasn’t it.”
Sarah drew out her notebook and quickly flipped through it to the page where she’d made notes of the names of Paul Dushku’s classmates and quickly rattled off a dozen names before the woman stopped her.
“That’s the one,” she said with certainty. “Randy, that’s the boy Paul said was beating him up all the time.”
Sarah and Mrs. Dushku rejoined the men in the living room. John caught a gesture from the detective to wrap things up so he graciously thanked them for their time and for answering their questions before they showed themselves out. Sarah placed a business card on the coffee table with her contact information printed on it and asked them to give her a call if they thought of anything else.
Once they were back in the patrol car, they fell silent once again. John suspected that she might have learned something useful but if so, she wasn’t ready to share it with them. That suited him just fine. Any information she had gathered would come out eventually. In the meantime, John was content to be left in the dark. He had bigger issues to worry about.
He started the car and looked back at her over his shoulder. “So . . . where to?”
Sixteen
Mark looked at the clock for the two hundredth time. He’d spent his entire day waiting for three o’clock, checking the wall clock of his various classes at a rate of about twice a minute. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t focus on what the teachers were saying, he wouldn’t even be able to differentiate what class he was in if it weren’t for the titles on the textbooks. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about the kid they’d found in the woods. Some people, mostly the girls, were crying and acting like they knew him, though he’d yet to hear from a single person that actually did.
Mark had his own problems.
Though he felt bad for what had happened (it was a shame whenever anyone had their lives cut short), in the grand scheme of things he wished people would just shut the hell up about it already. They even brought in grief counselors and set up tables in the gymnasium where people could vent their feelings. What a joke. The kid had been out of the school for years, so what were they grieving over? It seemed to Mark that they were just using it as an excuse to get angry about something, a cause to rebel against. But what were they protesting against, exactly?
Murder?
Injustice?
In that case, they should have been rallying around Mark because he was suffering injustice on a daily basis. While Randy was bumbling his way through a second attempt at the twelfth grade, Lisa was a year behind him, Mike and Bob a year behind her. That meant they had different classes in different parts of the school and every time the bell rang, it was virtually impossible to make it to his next class without seeing at least one of them. No matter which classes he went late to, or ditched, he just couldn’t avoid them. It was becoming more obvious to Mark that in order to avoid them he’d have to ditch the entire day.
Today, Mark ditched his last two classes and found his way up to the top floor of the school. From there, he was able to get out onto the roof where he sat by himself, feet dangling over the side, smoking and thinking about his life. It occurred to him several times that maybe he should jump. He’d go SPLAT right in front of the main entrance. Then Mrs. Ross could put that in her pipe and smoke it.
Maybe then his mother would give a shit about what she’d done.
This roof wasn’t high enough. In all likelihood, he’d end up a cripple, chained to a bed for the rest of his life. But the Ratcliff high school on the other hand, both the roof and even the diving tower were more than high enough to kill him if he jumped.
Mark decided to come down from the roof and head over to Beamer’s field so that he could be close to where his bus would pull up in another hour or so. Between two massive evergreens a beaten path led to a pair of wooden benches the farmer had cleverly constructed out of long boards and sawed off tree stumps. Since he was alone, he stretched out on the makeshift bench and lit the joint that Kyle had given him. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the wind whistling through the trees and the long grass, almost smiling as a beam of sun peeked through the clouds, brilliantly orange even through his eyelids and warm on his cheeks. The glow of the sun disappeared and Mark waited for it to return, feeling his face cooling off in the breeze. He took one last drag off of the joint he was smoking and was about to sit up so that he could put it out, saving the rest for later, when a gob of something hot and wet splattered on his lips and into his partially open mouth. He tried to sit up and raised one arm to wipe off what he assumed was bird shit on his face when both of his arms were seized, slamming him back down onto the bench on his back.
Randy stood above him, smiling widely as he wiped the spit from his lips. Bob and Mike were on opposite sides of the bench holding his arms while Lisa stood at Randy’s side, grinning to ear to ear in a way that made Mark’s blood boil. He tried to sit up but was hopelessly pinned down and couldn’t do more than raise his head.
“Well looky here,” Randy sneered. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“What do you want?” Mark managed, trying to sound tough even though his heart was pounding in his chest.
“I told you I wasn’t done with you, faggot. I’m going to beat on you every time I see you, I don’t care if you’re here, in town, doesn’t matter.”
Mike and Bob began giggling like a couple of schoolgirls, but they kept their firm grip on his wrists. Randy threw one leg over the bench and dropped his full weight down on Mark’s chest. He looked up at Lisa, “Smoke.”
Smiling, she opened the zipper of her tasseled purse and fished out a package of cigarettes and casually lit one, handing it to her boyfriend. Randy hunched forward until his face was mere inches away, grabbing Mark’s chin with one powerful hand while holding the cigarette under Mark’s left eye.
“I could blind you right now, if I wanted to,” Randy said, understating the obvious.
Mark squeezed his eyes shut and tried to turn his head, feeling the heat of the ember on his eyelid. Randy got up off of him and turned away as if he was finished but nothing could have been farther from the truth. He nodded to Lisa who, grinning ear to ear, placed both of her hands on Mark’s knees, forcing his legs apart. Before Mark could wonder what she was about to do, she rammed one of her knees into his groin. A blinding flash of white light exploded through Mark’s head as a pain more intense than he had ever felt before coursed through his guts like a wildfire.
The hands holding his arms back released him, allowing him to roll off the bench, landing face down on the grass, writhing in agony. Suddenly, their hands were all over him, patting him down and rifling through his pockets. Mark felt his watch vanish from his wrist and his cell from his back pocket. He tried to protest but he couldn’t draw enough breath to make anything more than a gasping sound.
He tried to raise himself up on his knees but a boot-clad foot caught him in the stomach, knocking him over onto his back beside the bench. As he fought to remain conscious, Mike and Bob walked over to where he was laying and stood over him. The sun had cracked back out from behind the clouds, blinding him, and he struggled to hear what the two boys were whispering to each other.
A few seconds later, he figured it out when something hot and wet streamed down from one of them, followed by the another, and yet another. Urine soaked his back and ran down both sides of his jaw and off his lower lip. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life.
When they were finished, they were zipping up when Mark heard a voice say; “What are you guys doing?�
�
“Mind your own business fatboy!” Lisa said angrily.
A few seconds later, Mark heard the sounds of a scuffle and the sound of somebody who could only by Kyle hitting the ground with a grunt. Then Randy said something that made no sense to Mark, “Tell your old man that BB says hello.”
Footsteps faded down the path and then they were alone.
“Are you okay?” Kyle said, rushing over to him and kneeling at his side, his right eye flushed red and beginning to swell.
“I don’t think so,” Mark said trying to get up on his knees, wishing he were dead. He could clearly remember being sacked in the groin a couple of times in gym class, but the pain he was in now was on an entirely different level.
“Do you want me to go and get some help?” Kyle asked anxiously.
“No,” Mark managed to croak. “Don’t tell anybody!”
“I tried to warn you!” Kyle cried pathetically, as if what had just been done was his fault. “You were supposed to be in Khoeli’s class so I went looking for you but you weren’t there.”
Just then Mark heard the steady rattle of diesel engines amble up the driveway from the other side of the bushes. The bell would be ringing any second and kids would literally flood from the school, many of them headed right for the dugout for one last smoke before the long bus ride home. He pulled himself up to a seated position and tried to catch his breath. The dull agony in his groin seemed to have grown to include his guts and continued to expand. Using his arms to pull himself up and eased his rear end back onto the bench and discovered yet another brand of white-hot pain. “I’ve got to get out of here,” Mark managed to say. “Help me, please.”
Kyle nodded dutifully and helped him up from the bench as if he were a ninety-year old woman and any jerky moments might fracture limbs or dislocate his joints. “My older foster brother, not Bob, the one that moved out. He’s got a car.”
Mark wasn’t sure which direction Kyle was taking him but it was away from the school.
And that was fine by him.
Seventeen
John didn’t know what to make of the invitation. Everybody knew that Foster Harrington could make you or break you on a whim, so when he called him at the station and invited him to his home for dinner, he accepted without a moment’s hesitation. He’d seen the man every day since he arrived in town but being asked to come to his home was another matter. John suspected that he wanted to grill him for information regarding the Dushku case, but even if he could tell him, there wasn’t anything new to report. The only detail that was not public knowledge already was the word carved into the victim’s chest and that was held back to help weed out the crackpots calling into the tip line claiming to be the killer. John wouldn’t have been surprised if even that had been leaked to the most powerful man in town.
After his shift of escorting Sarah Cannon around town and responding to inquiries on the tip line, John headed home to change into his street clothes and found Mark in the attic, right where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t to leave the house except for school until John said otherwise and, so far, he’d been complying. But something about him seemed a little off.
Maybe what John was sensing was just normal anxiety and typical teenaged angst, an understandable reaction for a boy to have when his life is suddenly ripped out from under him. Maybe. Maybe the abrupt departure of his mother and her behavior since then was causing some sort of a mental breakdown. Whatever it was, John had a distinct feeling that he was losing him and everyday he returned home and found Mark was still there (alive) was something of a surprise. He was unraveling, almost to the point where he didn’t even look like himself.
That night, when he told Mark where they were going for dinner, he had expected an argument. Instead, for the first time in months, he actually seemed excited. By the time John finished his shower, he was already waiting for him on the porch.
They rode out to Harrington Manor in silence. It wasn’t until they reached the iron gates with the H in the center which then split in half as they swung open did he finally speak.
“Holy shit,” he gasped, shaking his head in disbelief. “What did you say this guy does again?”
John hesitated to criticize his use of language, the fact that he had agreed to go anywhere with him was surprising in itself and there was no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth. “He runs a bindery . . . watch your language, please.”
“What’s that, like books and stuff?”
“Exactly like that, books and stuff.”
The driveway was lined with box hedges, perfectly squared, already carefully wrapped in burlap to protect their sensitive leaves from the bitter cold of the upcoming winter. The Jeep’s odometer registered two tenths of a kilometer paved with colored interlocking bricks numbering in the tens of thousands. It seemed to take them a long time before they reached “the house”.
Some house.
Standing three stories high at the tallest point and spanning at least two hundred feet across, Harrington Manor was what one would expect in Beverly Hills or the shores of Malibu rather than rural Ontario. The entire property was brilliantly lit up with light spilling from the dozens of windows as well as dozens of frosted globe shaped lamps placed throughout the grounds. Although it was only about half a decade old, the massive structure had a cold almost medieval appearance that was exacerbated by the archway gave passage under part of the house leading into an interior courtyard.
Designed after a nineteenth century Victorian country house, a steep mansard typed roof with long dormer windows towered above them. Three tall stone turrets bisected the home evenly and were capped with cupolas and ornate balustrades. John drove under a stone archway into the courtyard where a five car garage stretched away from the main body of the house to their left while a single floor extension lined with framed windows ran parallel to their right forming a U shape. At the open end of the structure, a stone bungalow the size of an average home sat behind a lavish kidney shaped swimming pool surrounded by flagstones bordered by an iron fence. An elaborately built stone waterfall had been built along one side and steam drifted out of from the grotto concealed within.
“I take that back,” John said as he brought the Jeep to a stop in front of one of the garage bays. “Holy shit is right.”
A wide set of concrete steps led up to a concrete terrace guarded by two ominous looking gargoyles. In the center, a tall pair of cathedral shaped doors with heavy iron handles.
John could already hear Audrey’s voice in his head, pointing out that no person of class would mix so many different tastes, and only the nouveau riche’ would build a house like this in a speck of a little town like Ratcliff. She’d be right too, since there were no other properties like this one in the surrounding area, it would tend to wreak havoc on the neighboring property values and their taxes, making the owner of said property very unpopular. But, what if the property owner in question also ran the only industry in town and could turn Ratcliff into a mortuary by the simple act of walking away from it?
Without the bindery nearly every business in town would fail. If that happened, their motto; If you can’t get it here, then you probably don’t need it, wouldn’t be worth the cow-shit it was written in. If Harrington decided that Ratcliff was more trouble than it was worth and pulled up his stakes, the town might limp on for another five or six years, maybe even ten, but it’s demise would be inevitable. Within a decade, Ratcliff would join a long list of failed rural towns in the province which had sprung up from the dust, failed to flourish and died, slowly. Foster was the town’s white knight. He rode into town in his big sedan and saved them all from insolvency. Now, everyone who lived there owed him to one extent or another, including John.
“This place must be worth like a million dollars,” Mark gawked.
“I don’t think a million dollars would pay for half of this place,” John admitted, equally impressed.
As they climbed the steps leading up to the terrace, John counted si
x surveillance cameras; newer state of the art infrared numbers enclosed in tinted domes that offered a 360 degree view of their surroundings. If he could see six, there was bound to be more, maybe a lot more. Factor in the seven-foot anti-scaling fence that surrounded the property, the electronic main gates and the dozens of lamps lining the property, it became clear that Foster Harrington knew a few things about home security and took it very seriously.
As they approached the tall doors, they swung inwards revealing a massive foyer. Although there appeared to be no mechanical apparatus attached to the doors, nor any box or lens for a motion sensor, the doors swung closed behind them after they were safely inside. As they did, John heard a metallic ‘thap’ which he knew from experience came from an electromagnetic lock being activated. Beneath the wooden façade, the doors were likely made of iron and the entire frame of the entrance was a powerful magnet that could be activated by the press of a button. They were fairly common place in penitentiaries and mental hospitals but you didn’t see them often in private residences. But then, most people don’t live in palaces like Harrington Manor. Just the same, when the doors sealed shut behind them John couldn’t help but feel a little trapped.
The main hall they had entered into was the size of a small gymnasium floored in travertine and paneled in dark walnut with two massive staircases curving up to the second floor. Framed oil paintings the size of bed spreads were hung over hand carved wainscoting between elegant sconces. Under the paintings, over stuffed chairs and long couches stitched in red Italian leather were flanked by end tables and Tiffany lamps. A massive crystal chandelier the size of a Smart car hung from the center of an elaborately designed plaster ceiling three stories above them where he saw Foster Harrington standing on a small balcony, waving down at them.
“Thanks for coming, glad you both could make it,” his voice echoed down to them. “I’ll be right down.”
“You can get all this stuff from making books and stuff?” Mark asked, dumbfounded, “Maybe you should have gone into that.”
Rage: The Reckoning Page 16
