He Never Forgot

by P. D. Workman

  “How the public expects the police force to do their job when they won’t do their duty and report what they know, I’ll never understand.”

  Zachary had to agree. “I guess… she loves her daughter and didn’t want her to have to suffer the consequences of whatever she did.”

  “And she’s letting the woman live with her now? Knowing what she did to her own children?”

  “I don’t know if she’s living there or I just happened to catch her there, but yes, I think she is… it would appear that all is forgiven and Edith would prefer to forget about it.”

  “Do you think the father is living there too?”

  “Probably. They must be in contact with each other.” Zachary told him about the tail, the attempted car break-in, and Elizabeth immediately looking at the car and realizing who Zachary was.

  “So they might both be on the run now.”

  “Possibly.”

  Campbell pulled a form out of one of the stacks of paper on his desk and filled in a few details. He reached toward the young officer who was still standing by. “Get that to Judge Wilkes ASAP. He’s expecting it.”

  Zachary raised his brows. Campbell smiled.

  “I knew you would eventually get the information we needed. We’ll get the warrant and then see what we can find. How confident are you that the boy’s remains are buried in that house?”

  “Not one hundred percent. They could be buried somewhere else on the property, or taken out to the woods or dropped off a cliff or into a lake somewhere. But it feels to me like… the basement is the most likely place. That’s where the boys were kept. No one in the neighborhood knew they even existed. It feels to me like… they would have kept him very close.”

  “You think that even with Bobby there, they buried Allen in the basement.”

  Zachary turned this over in his mind. Had it happened right in front of Burton? Had he watched his brother being buried? Wasn’t that taking an unnecessary risk?

  “I can’t be sure, of course. But… I think so. They didn’t expect Bobby to get out. They didn’t expect to be discovered. They buried one boy there, and probably assumed they would bury the other there too. Maybe even used it as a deterrent for Bobby. ‘If you don’t do what we tell you to, the same thing will happen to you.’”

  Campbell grimaced. He didn’t argue with Zachary’s assessment. “I’ve got the equipment lined up so we can visualize what’s under the concrete floor without having to tear it all up. No guarantees, of course. Depends on how thick the cement is and how deep the bones are buried under that. We could be looking for something twelve feet deep. But I doubt it. These are not criminal masterminds. They didn’t think anyone would be looking for him. And they were right, in the beginning.”

  Zachary imagined that the grave would be very shallow. Just deep enough to cover the boy’s body. Elizabeth and Sam didn’t strike him as the industrious sort.

  Zachary had discouraged Burton from going back to the house for the search, telling him that it would probably take quite a long time and would be too upsetting for him. He’d already seen how Burton reacted to the empty basement and to talking about any of his memories or his family. It wouldn’t be good for him.

  He thought that Burton would agree and be happier staying at his hotel room drinking until Zachary got back to him with the results. Then he could be assured of getting the news at the earliest possible opportunity, but wouldn’t have to see the remains or deal with the emotion of being at the house again. It was the best possible solution.

  But Burton did not agree. As soon as he heard that they were heading over to the house and would begin the search the second they got word that they had the warrant, he wanted to be there. Nothing Zachary said dissuaded him, and eventually he agreed to pick Burton up so that he could stand outside the house until they got some word from the police. By the time they got to the house, the police were stringing yellow tape around the perimeter, even though they were still waiting on the warrant. They were staying off the property, stringing the tape on the outside of the fence.

  Zachary found Campbell, but stayed back, knowing that he would be busy and wouldn’t want Zachary getting in the way. Campbell noticed him after a couple of minutes and nodded to him as he continued to talk with his men and get things organized. There was a truck stopped in the street with equipment on it that Zachary assumed was the x-ray or radar or whatever the technology was to look through the concrete for the remains.

  Campbell eventually approached Zachary, looking at his watch. “We should be able to start any time now. Is this…?” He looked at Burton questioningly.

  “Yes, Sergeant Campbell, this is Ben Burton. Formerly Bobby Weaver. Ben, Sergeant Campbell.”

  Burton nodded. He held out a tentative hand. “Thank you for looking after this.”

  “I hope we can find something. Hate to drag everyone out and have it go belly-up. And it must be very stressful for you.”

  “Yeah.” Burton ran one hand through his hair. “I just feel like… I left Allen behind here. Everybody left him behind. And we need… we need to find him. Lay him to rest.”

  “I hope we can do that. And that we can bring your parents to justice.”

  Burton frowned slightly at this. He looked at Campbell, then at Zachary. “But… they’re already in prison, right?”

  Zachary took a deep breath, looking at Campbell. Campbell did not jump in to give Burton the bad news.

  “No,” Zachary said gently. “They’re out. I don’t know what their original sentence was; I don’t have the court documents yet.” He looked at Campbell. “Unless you know?”

  Campbell cleared his throat. “Father for two years. Mother for one.”

  Burton looked at him, wide-eyed. “One year? They only put her away for one year after what she did to us?”

  “After what she did to you. Not for what she did to Allen. That will have to be considered once we know whether we have a body or not. And yes… I realize it’s completely unfair. There’s no way that they should have been able to get out so quickly. Unfortunately, that is the law.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m just glad that she couldn’t find you. If she had come after you, tried to get you back…”

  “So that means… she’s out?” Burton looked around him at the strangers gathering on the sidewalk and in the street. “She could be here. She could be anywhere. She’s just out, walking free, as if nothing ever happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Allen.” Burton motioned to the house. “He’s still in there. And me. I’m still trapped in there.”

  Zachary touched Burton tentatively on the back. “I’m sorry. If he’s in there, the police will find him and get him out. And you… part of you will always be in this place, but the rest of you, you’re walking around free too. More free than her, because you don’t have the guilt for what happened.”

  “Oh, don’t I?”

  “Well… you may feel guilty,” Zachary knew that he still carried around a lot of his childhood guilt. He blamed himself for a lot of the things that had happened to him and his siblings. Even though, as an adult, his logical brain told him that they were not his fault. It wasn’t his choice as a ten-year-old to send himself and his siblings into foster care, where they would suffer more abuse and other terrible situations. “But you’re not at fault in any way. It doesn’t matter what you said or did as a kid; you did not deserve for this to happen to you. That was the choice of cruel, evil adults who had the responsibility to make better choices.”

  There was a shout from one of the officers gathered around a couple of squad cars. He straightened up and waved to Campbell. “We got it!”

  “We got the warrant?” Campbell demanded, double-checking. There could be no ambiguity. Not it, but the warrant.

  “We got the warrant,” the officer confirmed.

  Campbell nodded to the teams gathered around him. “Let’s go, then. Time to get started.”

  He and a cadre of experts walked into
the yard and up to the door. The householders had been watching everything from inside and opened the inside door to talk to them. Campbell explained that a warrant to search the house had been issued, and that they could let him in, or they could wait until the paper warrant got there so they could examine it.

  “We don’t own the house,” the woman told him, her voice screechy. “We just rent. I don’t know what you’re looking for. We haven’t done anything wrong. We haven’t broken any law.”

  “We aren’t looking for something that you did. We’re looking for something that has been here for many years, long before you moved here. Do you have the owners’ phone number?”

  She read it to him through the door, and Campbell called the owner and had a discussion with him. There was a lot of back and forth, and, by the time he was granted access, another officer had arrived with the freshly-inked warrant. They displayed it to the residents as they entered but, by that time, no one was asking to see it. They had been told to let the police in and didn’t have any argument to make.

  “Why don’t you go out for a while?” Campbell suggested. “Go out for dinner or a drink. We’re going to be here a few hours, at least.”

  “What are you going to do? You can’t go through all of my personal property!”

  “We won’t be pawing through your drawers, ma’am. We will be looking under the basement floor, in the backyard, maybe in closets or the attic. We will not be looking through your personal items.”

  She clearly did not believe him but, in the end, decided that she did not want to be on hand during the search. Zachary remembered what it was like to be trying to sell a house and having to vacate for people to look at it. He didn’t like the feeling of someone invading his territory, but it was just something a person had to put up with. As a child, it hadn’t been up to him to make that choice. Nor as a married man when Bridget wanted to upgrade to something nicer.

  She’d upgraded now. Zachary had seen her home with Gordon, and it was like a showcase.

  40

  Then there was nothing to do but wait. They couldn’t see what was going on in the house, though Zachary imagined it in vivid detail. The cops and experts going down the stairs to the basement. Turning on the dim lights and looking around the dismal little space. Getting out the equipment to be rolled across the rooms in narrow lines, back and forth and back and forth until they found something.

  Burton paced. He drank. He spoke to Zachary in fits and starts. Phrases and sentences that seemed to come out of nowhere, without a cogent connection. Blurting bits of what came to his mind as he stewed in his fragmented memories.

  Zachary saw the man who had stopped and talked to them the first day. The biker man. He was standing around in the crowd, curious like everyone else, wanting to know what they were looking for. People speculated on what the equipment that had come off of the truck was for, some of their guesses bizarre and some uncannily accurate.

  Zachary watched the biker, thinking about the motorcycle that had followed him. Had that been the neighbor? Was he Sam Dougherty, or did he know Sam? Was he the one who had decided to tail Zachary to see where he took Burton and where he lived afterward?

  Campbell was inside, and Zachary didn’t know which of the officers outside would listen to him and take his claims seriously if he suggested that the biker might know something about what was going on or where to find Sam Dougherty. He kept an eye on the man, trying to decide what to do.

  An hour later, his phone buzzed. Zachary took it out of his pocket. A text notification. He didn’t have them display on his lock screen, just in case it were something confidential that he didn’t want a client or interviewee to see. He unlocked it and touched the messaging app to see who the message was from. He tapped the bolded number and the message popped up. A photo. It was monochrome, lights and shadows. Like an x-ray or ultrasound.

  He remembered being dragged along to one of his mother’s ultrasound appointments. He had been on school suspension at the time and his mother had not wanted to leave him home alone in case he got into something.

  The ultrasound screen had seemed mysterious and magical. He could actually see the baby that was inside his mother’s belly. The ultrasound technician had pointed to a curved line of dots.

  “They call it a string of pearls,” she explained. “That’s the baby’s vertebrae. His spine.”

  Zachary had stared at it in amazement. He twisted his arm behind him, feeling the knobby bumps along his own back. He had a spine. And the baby, growing inside his mother, had a spine. And translucent little arms and legs that the technician traced on the screen. And a heartbeat, fluttering like a little bird.

  But the string of pearls that Zachary saw on his phone screen did not come with a heartbeat. There were limbs angled off this way and that, and a small, round, skull, but no heartbeat.

  Burton looked over Zachary’s shoulder. He grabbed at Zachary’s phone. “Is that it? What did they find? Did they find him?”

  Zachary couldn’t very well stop Burton. There was no point in telling him that they hadn’t found anything. There was no way to spare Burton’s feelings.

  “It looks like he is,” he said gently, holding on to the phone, but angling it so that Burton could see it better. “This here, what looks like a pearl necklace, that’s his spine. And…” he pointed to the chicken wings. “His arms. And his legs.” Drawn up to his chest, as if he had curled up into the smallest ball possible, knowing that he was going into the womb of the earth. Back to the dust.

  Burton sat down on the sidewalk. “Allen! Allen, oh Allen!” He drew his own knees up, rocking and sobbing. “They found you.” He cursed softly. “They found you, Allen.”

  He broke down and wept openly. Zachary circled an arm around his shoulders and squeezed, trying to comfort him. How could he make Burton feel any better when he had just had it confirmed that his brother was dead? After three decades of repressing all that had happened to them there in the basement of the cursed house, he finally had his answer.

  That was where he had lived, had been tortured, and where his brother had died. That was where he had been buried without ceremony or sanction. Buried where they hoped he would never come to light again.

  41

  Zachary tried to get Burton to move from the place he had collapsed to the sidewalk, but Burton wouldn’t budge. Zachary wanted to get him into his car, away from prying eyes and ears. Somewhere he could have a little privacy and gather his thoughts.

  But Burton didn’t care what anyone saw or heard or thought of him. He wasn’t moving from the spot. He was going to stay there forever, glued to that one place, the place he’d been when he found out that Allen had been murdered and buried just feet from him.

  Eventually, Burton’s tears and loud sobs and groans slowed. He leaned against the chain-link fence, hands over his eyes, body gradually relaxing. Zachary had ignored the men going past him with more equipment. Jackhammers and shovels and other heavy tools. He didn’t want to draw Burton’s attention to them. He was already going through enough without picturing them digging up his brother’s bones.

  Zachary rubbed Burton’s back and brushed back his hair a couple of times. “How are you doing? This is terrible for you. Is there anything I can do? Anything I can get you? Do you want to talk to someone on the phone? Your mom and dad?”

  He shook his head. “No, no one.” He felt his pockets for his flask and eventually brought it out, but it was empty. He threw it away from himself, sending it clanking into the street.

  Good riddance. Zachary hoped that Burton never went to get it back and that it got driven over by a truck, crushed flat in the street. He hoped that this one moment would sober Burton up enough to see that he was wasting his life crawling into a bottle, that it was time to start living. One of the Dougherty boys had survived, but his spirit was still stunted, like his body had been when they got him out of the basement. It had never been allowed to grow up. It was time for him to start living.

&nb
sp; “He was my brother and I let him die.” Burton’s words were anguished.

  “You were four or five. There was nothing you could have done to save him. You are not responsible for anything that happened.”

  “I should have been able to stop them. I should have helped him. He helped me. He protected me. And I didn’t do anything. I just… stood there!” There was horror in Burton’s voice as if he couldn’t believe it. How helpless and paralyzed he had been. He didn’t believe what Zachary had said. He saw himself as the cause of Allen’s death.

  “There was nothing else you could have done. You were too small. No matter how hard you’d tried to fight them, you couldn’t have saved him. And they might have killed you too.”

  “They should have! They should have killed me too, and I wouldn’t have to go through this. Why couldn’t I be the one who died?”

  Zachary continued to rub his back, trying to find some way to soothe him. “He wanted you to live. He was your big brother. He was trying to look after you.”

  Burton leaned forward and buried his face in Zachary’s shoulder. “Allen, Allen…”

  “He loved you. And your adoptive parents love you. You’re not alone. You should call them.”

  “No.” He choked the word out. Zachary wondered what his relationship with his adoptive parents was like. They had, by his account, done everything they could for him, and he had done everything self-destructive he could. He didn’t share with them that he was looking for his house, didn’t want to share the news about his brother. There was clearly a rift between them. He had, perhaps, been too old and too traumatized to bond with them properly. Those early years were vital for relationship development. Zachary wondered about his own ability to form normal relationships. He didn’t have a lot to show for his efforts. An ex-wife, a struggling relationship with Kenzie, one foster father.

  He did love his brothers and sisters. He’d developed those relationships early, like Burton. Before he was broken.