He had neither gloves nor shovel, so Andrew put his hands in one of the black plastic bags and used it as a buffer as he picked up the pieces of dead animal and dropped them into another sack. He grabbed the cat’s head first and dropped it in, followed by the ragged feline body. The garbage sack started to get heavy well before he had cleaned up the entire mess. He didn’t want the bag to break on him, spilling everything out, so he carried what he had over to the line of trees to the east, behind the cabins and out of sight of the camp-ground. He turned over the garbage sack behind a bush. Furry heads and torsos, paws and tails spilled onto the ground, though it was so dark here that it was difficult to differentiate between the body parts. There was a slight breeze, and the sack itself he threw into the grass, hoping it would blow away somewhere.
Then he went back and did it all again.
Finally he was done, and he leaned the hoe against the wall where he’d found it, sneaked back inside, closed the front door, put the box of remaining garbage sacks under the sink and quietly washed his hands with cleanser. Twice.
He crept back into the bedroom, trying to make as little noise as possible.
Robin, thank God, was still dozing peacefully.
He got back into bed, his body wet with sweat, his muscles jumpy from both exertion and fear. He had no idea what time it was, but it had to have been getting close to morning, and he tried to think up legitimate reasons to explain his physical condition should Robin wake before the perspiration dried from his skin and the tension eased from his muscles. Breathing deeply and evenly, closing his eyes, Andrew attempted to fall asleep. He tried not to think of what had just happened, what he’d just done. He tried not to think of anything.
He had almost succeeded in nodding off when he heard a low, familiar noise.
His eyes snapped open. No, it couldn’t be. He must have been dreaming, his mind in that nether state between wakefulness and sleep.
But it came again.
He was wide-awake now, and the sweat felt cold on his skin, like ice water, as he heard the familiar low cry.
‘‘Meow.’’
Seventeen
‘‘Good work,’’ Wilson said admiringly, holding up the newspaper. Brian’s article on Stewart’s capture was above the fold, not in the coveted upper-right position, but still centered and accompanying a large eye-grabbing photo of a clearly deranged Stephen Stewart being led shackled and jumpsuited to his arraignment.
‘‘Thanks,’’ Brian told him. Wilson was the first person to offer congratulations, although Brian understood why no one else had. Even though they were essentially partners on this story, he was not sure he would have been as magnanimous if the shoe were on the other foot. Something about the competitive nature of the journalistic temperament forbade camaraderie.
‘‘You know the minister Stewart killed?’’ Brian said. ‘‘He’s the one at the church my mom goes to.’’ Brian had already come clean about his father and the letters when he’d called Wilson from Bakersfield.
‘‘That’s . . . very . . . interesting,’’ Wilson said slowly.
‘‘Isn’t it?’’
‘‘Keep it down over there,’’ Ted Sprague said, poking his head over the side of the cubicle. ‘‘Some of us are trying to work here.’’
‘‘On another poll about cartoons?’’ Wilson asked drolly.
‘‘Very funny.’’
‘‘Did you see my article?’’ Brian said with as much innocence as he could muster. ‘‘Jimmy told me that it’s been picked up by over twenty other newspapers nationwide.’’
‘‘Fuck you,’’ Ted said.
Brian laughed.
Mike Duskin walked by. ‘‘Hey,’’ the columnist said, clapping an arm around Brian’s shoulder. ‘‘Nice piece.’’
‘‘Fuck you, too!’’ Ted called out.
‘‘Jealousy is a bitter fruit,’’ Mike said.
‘‘I’m not sure I would call Ted a bitter fruit,’’ Wilson mused.
‘‘I’m not gay, and I’m not even going to dignify that with a response!’’
‘‘You just responded,’’ Brian pointed out.
‘‘Go to hell. I’m going back to work.’’
‘‘It really was a good article,’’ Mike said.
‘‘Thanks,’’ Brian told him. ‘‘I appreciate it.’’
‘‘We’ll talk later.’’ Wilson started back toward his desk. He poked his head in Ted’s cubicle. ‘‘Away from prying ears,’’ he said loudly.
Brian spent the rest of the morning on a follow-up to last week’s immigration article, and met up with Wilson for an early lunch. They were the only ones in the break room, and Wilson commandeered the large table in the center, opening his brown paper sack and pulling out a sandwich while Brian scanned the vending machines for something edible. He finally settled on a potato burrito and a Coke, and brought them back to the table.
‘‘So what is the connection between your family and Stephen Stewart?’’
Brian sighed. ‘‘That’s what I’d like to know.’’
‘‘You think there is one?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘And yet after killing his wife and putting his kid in a coma, murdering several other locals in an inexplicable frenzy, he traveled all the way across the country and ended up prancing naked around your mother’s front yard. Your mother who’s been receiving letters from her missing husband that match the messages scrawled in blood at the murder scenes.’’
‘‘And whose minister Stewart killed,’’ Brian said glumly.
‘‘Your family’s hip deep in this, my boy. Have you thought about getting some sort of protection for your mother? Or getting her out of Bakersfield for a while?’’
‘‘My sister and her husband are staying with her.’’
‘‘Do you think that’s enough?’’
Brian thought of his mother’s overgrown yard and remembered what Wilson had said about Devine’s wildly flourishing plants. He recalled the photo of Stewart’s bedroom with its junglelike vegetation, and the fact that Tom Lowry’s entire estate had been overtaken by exotic foliage.
‘‘No,’’ he said, standing. ‘‘I don’t. Excuse me. I’ll be right back.’’ Leaving his untouched burrito and drink, Brian hurried over to the newsroom and his desk to call his mom. As he’d hoped, his sister answered. It took a lot of convincing to get her to agree to take their mother with her back to San Diego. He couldn’t really tell her why—the reason was crazy and there were far too many gaps in the story to make any of it believable—but he was eventually able to get across both his fear and a sense of urgency, and she finally agreed to bring their mother home with her.
‘‘It’ll be good for her to get out of here anyway,’’ Jillian conceded. ‘‘Especially after what happened to Reverend Charles. If I can get her to go,’’ she added.
‘‘Get her to go,’’ Brian said. ‘‘Now.’’
He returned to the break room feeling a little better. His burrito was cold, and he popped it in the microwave. Wilson had finished his sandwich and was eating an apple. ‘‘How’d it go?’’
‘‘My sister’s bringing her back to San Diego with her.’’
‘‘Good.’’
Brian popped open the microwave and brought his food back to the table.
‘‘You know,’’ Wilson said between bites, ‘‘an epidemic of murders and suicides among our financial elite has happened before.’’
Brian unwrapped his burrito. ‘‘How did you find this out?’’
‘‘I did a little background research. As good reporters are wont to do.’’
He reddened. ‘‘Point taken.’’
Wilson smiled. ‘‘That wasn’t my point . . . but it’s still a good one. Anyway, this is not the first time this has happened. It may be the first time that it has occurred to such an extent, over such a broad geographical area and within so short a time, but there was a pattern already. I counted eighteen very rich men who either went on public killin
g sprees or murdered their immediate friends and family in the past hundred years or so. Eleven of them ended in suicide. What I find most intriguing, however, is that prior to this, almost all of the killings took place in California, the majority of those in San Francisco. The one exception appears to have been Otis Compson, who lived in Atlanta. But he was a recent transplant—his family came from Sacramento.’’
‘‘That’s interesting,’’ Brian said. ‘‘But does it mean anything? Conspiracy theorists have built a multimillion dollar industry out of coincidences and half-truths. Have you read any of that September eleventh numerology crap? There are nine letters in September, there are eleven letters in Afghanistan . . . None of it means anything.’’
‘‘Maybe not,’’ Wilson said.
‘‘But that’s what a good reporter does,’’ Brian filled in for him.
‘‘Exactly.’’
‘‘What do you think?’’
Wilson took another bite of his apple and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. ‘‘I’m not sure what I think.’’ He looked over at Brian. ‘‘But I’m open to ideas.’’
‘‘Well, my family’s certainly not rich.’’
‘‘Was it ever?’’
‘‘Not to my knowledge.’’
Wilson swallowed. ‘‘I suppose what I think is that we have a California-based phenomenon that causes heretofore sane and sensible individuals to go on murderous killing sprees and/or commit suicide in unusually violent ways. It’s accompanied by unusual plant growth and primarily afflicts the wealthy.’’ He looked at Brian. ‘‘Although perhaps not exclusively. And,’’ he added, ‘‘it’s been occurring on and off for well over a century.’’
‘‘Where does that leave us?’’
‘‘Without a paddle, I suppose.’’ Wilson paused. ‘‘But I do believe the fact that its rate has increased, that we’re getting all of this happening at once now, has some sort of significance. It’s like the pot’s about to boil. We’re in the right place at the right time, and if we just knew what we were looking for, if we only had a little more information, we might . . .’’
‘‘Might what?’’
‘‘That I don’t know. Prevent more murders?’’
Brian was silent for a moment. ‘‘Do you think Stewart’s . . . deformity, I guess you’d call it, has anything to do with anything? I did tell you about that, right? The hair and the slimy skin?’’
‘‘Indeed you did, although I noticed that you kept it out of your article.’’
‘‘Peripheral.’’
‘‘Maybe.’’
Brian looked at him.
Wilson shrugged. ‘‘At this point, anything’s up for grabs.’’
‘‘I just wish I could find my dad.’’
‘‘Have you thought about involving the police, telling them what you know, explaining that he’s missing?’’
‘‘He’s been missing for twenty years. And what do I know? Only what my mom told me.’’
‘‘But you have those letters.’’
‘‘And I believe they’re from him. But there’s no way to prove it.’’ Brian took a sip of his Coke and sighed. ‘‘So what’s the next step? Wait until someone else dies and we get a phone message or a videotape?’’
‘‘As a financial journalist, I have one overriding motto: Follow the money. It works for almost everything. Since, with the possible exception of your father, everyone involved with this story seems to be someone from my beat, I suggest we do exactly that. Maybe what all these men have in common can be ascertained from looking into their financial dealings and backgrounds. My hunch is that we will find connections we did not know were there.’’
‘‘That’s not a bad idea,’’ Brian said.
‘‘Thank you.’’
Brian tossed his wadded-up burrito wrapper into the trash can. Or tried to. He missed by about a foot and was about to pick it up and try again when his cell phone rang.
It was Jillian. His sister was uncharacteristically tongue-tied, and Brian got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. ‘‘Mom?’’ he asked quickly. ‘‘Is it Mom?’’
‘‘No,’’ she said, but there was a long pause after that, and for several seconds he thought his phone had dropped the call.
‘‘Hello?’’ he prodded. ‘‘Jill?’’
‘‘I just finished talking to the police. They matched the prints at the church. It wasn’t Stewart who killed Reverend Charles,’’ she said. ‘‘It was Dad.’’
He was almost getting used to the drive.
Brian sped up the Grapevine, stopping for coffee at a McDonald’s in Gorman before heading down the highway into the Central Valley. Wilson had offered to come with him, but Brian didn’t really want company. This part of the story was his own. It was personal, and he didn’t want to share it with anyone else.
The small towns flew by, the abandoned buildings and trailer courts, the fields, the orchards. He’d driven this route more in the past week than in the past decade, and he was actually starting to recognize some of the landmarks along this narrow stretch of highway.
Once in Bakersfield, he drove immediately to the police station, where he asked for Captain Disch, whom he’d interviewed extensively for the article. ‘‘Why didn’t you just call?’’ the captain said after the desk clerk had led Brian back to his office. ‘‘I could’ve told you we have no idea where your father is.’’
‘‘I figured that. But . . .’’ Brian took a deep breath. ‘‘Do you have any other information on him? I assume you’ve done some type of background check. Do you have any idea where he lives, where he works . . . what he’s been doing for the past twenty-some years? I don’t know if my sister told you, but my dad abandoned us. I haven’t seen him since I was a kid.’’
Disch nodded. ‘‘She told us the whole story. And of course we did a background check. Or tried to. But the thing of it is, your father’s off the grid. We have nothing on him more recent than the mid-eighties, when he abandoned your family. I have two men working on it, and I’m sure we’ll eventually dig up something, but for now we’re flying blind. In fact, I was kind of hoping you could help us. It’s obvious he’s here somewhere in the Bakersfield area. Do you know of any friends he might be staying with, places he might go, bars or restaurants where he might hang out? Is there anything you remember from your childhood, anything at all, that you could tell us about him, that might give us a clue to his whereabouts?’’
Brian thought back, seriously trying to recall information about his dad that might be of help, but all of his memories were from a kid’s perspective and involved his mom, his sister or himself. He knew nothing about his dad in relation to the real world; everything he remembered had to do with their family. He agreed to meet with a couple of detectives, however, to see what they could get out of him, and though he answered all of their questions, nothing jogged his memory, and he was unable to provide any new information.
‘‘You have my cell number,’’ he told Disch before he left. ‘‘Call me if you learn anything. Anything.’’
The captain nodded soberly. ‘‘I will. And, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know how tough all of this must be on you.’’
‘‘Thanks,’’ Brian said.
He drove to his mom’s house.
He pulled to a stop in the driveway. It was evening. The house was dark, and the yard seemed even more overgrown than before, though he didn’t see how that was possible. He got out of the car and looked around carefully. Was his dad here somewhere, hiding? There were plenty of bushes to conceal him, plenty of spots where he could be lurking.
What would his dad look like now? Brian wondered. He’d probably be gray, perhaps bald, and there’d be lines etched on his face that represented all of the years spent away. Thinking of his dad as an old man was almost as difficult as thinking about him as a murderer, Brian realized. He didn’t want to consider either option. He wished that his father had never shown up again and had left him with only untainted memories.
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He got out of the car and walked slowly up to the front of the house, alert for any signs of movement, listening for stray sounds. Opening the door with his key, Brian stepped inside and turned on the living room light. Rather than dispelling the darkness, it only pushed it back to the hallway and the kitchen, making those areas seem even blacker by contrast. He was suddenly filled with the absurd conviction that he was not alone in the house, and he called out, ‘‘Hey!’’ in the toughest voice he could muster. ‘‘Who’s there?’’
Silence greeted his query, and rather than moving slowly and cautiously through each room, Brian decided to take the bull by the horns and ran quickly through the house, flipping on each light as he passed, ready at any second to either jump away from danger or defend himself. He was alone, thankfully, and once the place was completely illuminated, he immediately set about to search every room. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he figured he’d know it when he found it.
Or maybe he wouldn’t find anything.
He was prepared for that, too. But he felt the need to be here, to explore the house and inspect his mom’s belongings in order to find out whatever he could about his dad.
Before rifling through closets and cupboards, drawers and dressers, Brian gave the room a quick once-over to make sure there was nothing he had missed. He’d been so concerned with trying to find an intruder that he hadn’t really paid attention to the contents of the individual rooms, and he walked from his mom’s sewing room to the hall bathroom to the master bedroom—
And stopped.
For lying in the middle of the flowered bedspread was a torn and dirty scrap of paper. It was easy to miss. The dull tan cast of the old paper matched almost exactly the hue of the background between the colored flowers, making it blend in. But he saw it now, and with tightly held breath Brian walked across the room to the bed.
He picked it up, turned it over. There was a message written on the opposite side in what appeared to be charcoal. STOP ME, the message said. The letters were written crudely, as though by a child.
The Vanishing Page 19
