Stillhouse Lake, Page 5

  "Fine," Lanny gasps. "Peachy. Hi."

  I don't quite laugh. "This is my daughter, Atlanta. Everybody calls her Lanny. Lanny, this is Mr. Claremont. Easy, for short."

  "Atlanta? I was born in Atlanta. Fine city, full of life and culture. Miss it sometimes." Mr. Claremont nods decisively to Lanny, who returns the gesture after a guarded look at me. "Well, I'd better get myself on home. Takes me a while to get up that hill. My daughter keeps after me to sell my place and move somewhere easier to get around, but I'm not ready to give up this view just yet. You know what I mean?"

  I do. "You going to be okay?" I ask, because I can see his house, and it's an impressive distance uphill for a man with a bad hip and a cane.

  "Fine, fine, thank you. I'm old, not decrepit. Not yet. Besides, the doctor says it's good for me." He laughs. "What's good for you never feels good, my experience."

  "Boy, is that true," Lanny agrees. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Claremont."

  "Easy," he says, starting his way up the hill. "You run safe, now!"

  "We will," I say, then turn a sweaty grin on my daughter. "Race you the rest of the way."

  "Come on! I'm practically dead here!"

  "Lanny."

  "I'll walk, thanks. You run if you want."

  "I was kidding."

  "Oh."

  2

  We've almost made it home again when my phone pings with a text message. It's an anonymous number, and hackles immediately go stiff at the back of my neck. I come to a stop and step off the road. Lanny gleefully jogs on by.

  I swipe and open. It's from Absalom; it has his cryptic little text signature as the first character: A. Then, Are you anywhere near Missoula?

  He never asks exactly where we are, and I never tell. I type back, Why?

  Somebody's posted a thing. Looks like they got it wrong. I'll try to head off and divert. Bad for whoever they're tagging. CYA.

  That was Absalom's standard signoff, and sure enough, no more pings arrive. I assume he uses disposable phones, just as I do; his number changes every month like clockwork, always unrecognizable, though his symbol usage is totally consistent. I can't afford that many burners, so mine stays the same for six months at a time, the kids' phones for a year. A little stability in an unstable world.

  The second that someone gets close, though, I burn everything--phones, e-mail accounts, everything. If there's a second close call around our location, Absalom notifies me, and we pack up and go. That's been our routine for the past few years now. It sucks, but we're used to it.

  We have to be used to it.

  I realize I'm looking forward to receiving that treasured concealed carry permit in the mail with an almost physical hunger. I'm not one of those jackasses who feel the need to strap an AR15 to their back to pick up groceries; those people live in a dystopian fantasy where they're the heroes in a world full of threats. I understand them, in a way. They feel powerless, in a world full of uncertainty. But it's still a fantasy.

  I live in the real world, where I know that the only thing that stands between me and a thriving, violent, organized bunch of angry men could be the sidearm I carry. I don't need or want to advertise that fact. I don't want to use it. But I'm ready and willing.

  I'm fully committed to our survival.

  Lanny's celebrating wildly up ahead, and I let her have her victory. We stop at the mailbox for the day's haul of mostly junk mail. Lanny's stopped limping by now, charley horse smoothed away, but she continues to pace as I sort through the envelopes. I'm just a couple in when I realize that someone's walking toward us down the road, and I feel my body shift into a balanced stance, a different state of alertness.

  It's the man from the gun range, the one who'd de-escalated Carl Getts from murder to general mayhem. Sam. I'm surprised to see him here, on foot. Have I ever glimpsed him around here before? Maybe at a distance. He looks vaguely familiar in this context. I must have seen him out walking or jogging, like so many others.

  He continues walking in our direction, hands in his pockets, headphones in. When he sees me watching him, he gives me a vague wave and nod and keeps walking right past us, heading the opposite of the route we took around the lake. I keep my attention fixed on him until he goes over the slight rise that branches off to the upper homes--the Johansens', a little above ours, then Officer Graham's place--and he disappears. Just taking a walk. But where is he coming from?

  It's probably obsessive that I feel I need to know.

  As we enter the house, I turn to enter the alarm code. My fingers touch the keypad before I realize that I don't need to enter the code, because the alarm isn't beeping.

  It isn't on.

  I freeze, standing in the doorway, blocking my daughter's way in. She tries to push past, and I give her a fierce, wild look and put my finger to my lips, then point to the keypad.

  Her face, pink from the exercise and sun, goes tense, and she steps back, and back again. I keep an extra set of car keys in the potted plant just inside the door, and now I scoop them out and toss them to her as I mouth, "Go!"

  She doesn't hesitate. I've trained her well. She turns and runs for the Jeep, and I shut and lock the front door behind me. Whatever's inside, I want to keep it focused on me. I put the mail on the closest flat surface, careful not to make much noise, and the house lays itself out for me, all my options running fast through my mind.

  It's only four steps to the small gun safe under the couch. I kneel down and press my thumb to the lock, and the door springs open with a small, metallic click. I pull out the Sig Sauer. It's my favorite and most reliable weapon. I know it's loaded and ready, one in the chamber, and I keep my pulse slow and my finger off the trigger as I move quietly across to the kitchen, the hallway, down.

  I hear the Jeep start up and pull away with a hiss of tires on gravel. Good girl. She knows to keep driving for five minutes and, if I don't give her the all-clear, to call the police, then head for our rendezvous point almost fifty miles away and dig up a geocached stash of money and fresh IDs. If she has to, she can disappear without us.

  I swallow hard, because now I'm alone with the fear that something terrible has happened to my son.

  I'm drawing close to my bedroom. When I steal a look inside, I see nothing out of order. It's just as I left it, down to the shoes tumbled carelessly in the corner.

  Lanny's bedroom is next on the same side, across from the main bathroom that we share. For an awful moment I think someone's ransacked her room, but then I realize that I never checked it before heading out to the range this morning, and she'd left the bed unmade, discarded clothes slumped over half the floor.

  Connor. The pulse in my temples throbs faster, and all my self-control can't slow it down. Please, God, no, don't take my baby, don't.

  His door is shut. He's put up a KEEP OUT, ZOMBIE INSIDE sign, but when I carefully, slowly try the handle I realize that it isn't locked. I have two choices: enter fast or slow.

  I enter fast, banging the door open, gun coming up in a smooth arc as I brace myself with a shoulder against the rebounding wood, and I scare my son half to death with the whole production.

  He's lying on his bed, headphones on and music audible from where I stand, but the percussive bang of the door against the wall brings him bolt upright, clawing the headphones off. He yells when he sees the gun, and I instantly lower it, but not before I see blind terror in his eyes.

  It's gone in a second, replaced by boiling fury. "Jesus, Mom! What the hell?"

  "I'm sorry," I say. My pulse is hammering perversely much faster now, responding to the adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream by the shock. My hands are shaking. I put the weapon down carefully on his dresser, ejection port up, barrel pointed away from both of us. Range rules. "Honey, I'm sorry. I thought--" I don't want to say it out loud. I manage to drag in a trembling breath and sink down to a crouch, hands pressed to my forehead. "Oh God. You just forgot to turn it on when we left."

  I hear the music shut off in midscream, the headphones cla
tter to the floor. The bed creaks as Connor sits on the edge of it, looking at me. I risk a glance at him, finally. My eyes feel red and hot, though I'm not crying. I haven't in a long time.

  "The alarm? I forgot to turn it on?" He sighs and bends forward, as if he has a sore stomach. "Mom. You've got to stop going off the rails; you're going to kill one of us, you know that? We're out here in the middle of nowhere--nobody else even locks their doors!"

  I don't answer. He's right, of course. I have overreacted, and not for the first time. I have pointed a loaded gun at my child. His anger is understandable, and so is his defensiveness.

  But he hasn't seen the pictures I get when I go through the Sicko Patrol postings.

  It's a hobby of a particular subset of online stalkers. Some of them are very good at Photoshop. They take gruesome crime scene photos and graft our faces onto victims. They alter images on child pornography so I see my daughter and son brutalized in unimaginable ways.

  The one that haunts me, and I know will always haunt me, is the image of a young boy Connor's age mutilated and left lying in a tangle of blood-soaked sheets in his own bed. That one popped up recently with a caption: God's justice for murderers.

  It's right that Connor's angry at me. It's fine that he feels unfairly blamed and hemmed in by stupid, unnecessary, paranoid rules. I can't help that. I must defend him from very real monsters.

  But I can't explain that to him. I don't want to have to show him that world, the reality that runs like a black river underneath this one. I want him to stay in the world where a boy can collect comics and put fantasy posters on his walls and dress up like a zombie for Halloween.

  I say nothing. I stand up, when my legs are capable, and pick up the gun. I walk out and shut the door quietly behind me.

  Through it, my son yells, "Wait until I tell Social Services!" I think he's joking. I hope.

  I walk to the gun safe, put the Sig back in, and lock it away before I call my daughter and tell her to come home. I reset the alarm as I do. Habit.

  I've just finished the call when I pick up the mail and carry it to the kitchen. I badly need water; my mouth has a dry, metallic taste like old blood. As I'm drinking, I sort through the circulars, charity pleas, local business mailings. I pause on something that doesn't belong: a manila envelope with my name and address printed on the outside and a postmark from Willow Creek, Oregon. That's my last remailing service. So whatever's inside has followed a long, broken trail to reach me.

  I don't touch it. I open a drawer and take out a pair of blue nitrile gloves. I slip them on before I carefully, neatly slit open the top of the envelope and pull out the other one, business-size, that sits within it.

  I recognize the return address in a flash and drop that envelope unopened to the counter. It isn't a conscious decision, no more than if I'd realized I was holding a live cockroach.

  The letter is from El Dorado, the prison where Mel is held waiting for his execution day. It's been a long wait, and the lawyers tell me it'll be at least ten years before his appeals are exhausted. And Kansas hasn't carried out an execution for more than twenty years. So who knows when his sentence will finally be imposed. Until it is, he sits and thinks. He thinks a lot about me.

  And he writes letters. There's a pattern to them that I've figured out, and that is why I don't immediately touch this one.

  I stare at the envelope for a long time, and it catches me by surprise when I hear the front door open and the alarm starts beeping. Lanny's fast fingers cancel and reset.

  I don't move from where I am, as if the envelope might attack if I don't stare it down.

  Lanny puts the keys in the potted plant and walks past me to open the fridge and pull out a bottled water, which she cracks and gulps thirstily before saying, "So, let me guess. Brain-dead Connor forgot to turn on the alarm. Again. Did you shoot him?"

  I don't answer. I don't move. From the corner of my eye, I'm aware she's staring at me, and that her body language shifts as she realizes what's going on.

  Before I can guess what she's planning, my daughter grabs the envelope off the counter.

  "No!" I turn on her, but it's too late; she's already sliding a black-painted fingernail under the flap and ripping it open, revealing pale paper inside. I reach out to snatch it away. She steps back, agile and angry.

  "Does he write to me, too? To Connor?" she asks me. "Do you get these a lot? You said he never wrote!" I hear the betrayal in her voice, and I hate it.

  "Lanny, give me the letter. Please." I try to sound authoritative and calm, but inside I am drowning in dread.

  She focuses on my hands, sweating inside the blue gloves. "Jesus, Mom. He's already in jail. You don't have to preserve any damn evidence."

  "Please."

  She drops the torn envelope and unfolds the paper.

  "Please don't," I whisper, defeated. Sick.

  Mel has a schedule. He'll send two letters that are perfectly, wonderfully the old Mel I married: kind, sweet, funny, thoughtful, concerned. They will show exactly the man he pretended to be, down to the last, loving declaration. He doesn't protest his innocence, because he knows he can't do that; the evidence was never in doubt. But he can, and does, write about his feelings for me and the children. His love and care and concern.

  Two times out of three.

  But this is the third letter.

  I see the exact moment when all her illusions are ripped away, when she spots the monster in those carefully inked words. I see her hands tremble, like the needle of a seismograph signaling an earthquake. I see the numb, scared look in her eyes.

  And I can't bear it.

  I take the paper from her suddenly unresisting hand, fold it shut, and drop it on the counter. Then I put my arms around her. She's stiff for a moment, and then she melts against me, face hot against mine, fine little shakes convulsing her body like wild current.

  "Shh," I tell her, and stroke her black hair as if she's six years old, a child scared of the dark. "Shh, baby. It's okay."

  She shakes her head, pulls away, and walks to her room. She closes the door.

  I look at the folded paper and feel a surge of hate so strong that it nearly tears me apart. How dare you, I think to the man who's written those words, who's done that to my child. How dare you, you fucking bastard.

  I don't read what Melvin Royal has written to me. I know what it says, because I've read it before. This is the letter where the mask comes off, and he talks about how I've disappointed him, taken his children away and poisoned them against him. He describes what he'll do to me if he ever has a chance. He's inventive. Descriptive. Repellently direct.

  Then, as if he hasn't threatened to brutally murder me, he switches gears and asks how the kids are doing. Says he loves them. And of course he does, because in his mind, they're just reflections of himself. Not real people in their own right. If he meets them now, recognizes they're not the little plastic dolls he loved before . . . they'll become other. Potential victims, like me.

  I put the letter back in the envelope, pick up a pencil, mark the date on it, and put the envelope back in the larger remailing service packaging. I feel better once that's done, as if I've disposed of a bomb. Tomorrow I'll send the entire package back, marked NO SUCH ADDRESS, and the remailing service will have preexisting instructions to FedEx it to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent in charge of Melvin's case. So far, the KBI hasn't been able to figure out how he gets those letters past the prison's normal screening process. I still hold out hope.

  Lanny is wrong about why I put on the gloves. It isn't to preserve evidence. I wear them for the same reason doctors do: to prevent infection.

  Melvin Royal is a contagious, fatal disease.

  The rest of the day is deceptively quiet. Connor says nothing about the incident in his bedroom; Lanny says nothing, period. The two of them boot up a video game, and while they're at it, my time is my own. I make dinner, like a normal mother. We eat in silence.

  The next day, Lanny stays locke
d in her room, since she's banned from the classroom. I decide not to interfere; I can hear her binge-watching a TV show. Connor's off to school. It itches at me to have him go alone to the bus stop, and I watch from the window until he climbs on board. It would irritate him beyond measure if I actually walked him there and waited.

  When he returns that afternoon on the bus, I step out to greet him but cover it by pretending to poke around in the small flower garden at the front of the house, as if his arrival is completely incidental. He gets off the bus, heavily burdened by his backpack, and two other boys pile off after. The three of them talk, and for a second I worry about bullies, but they seem friendly. The strangers are both blond, one about Connor's age and one a year or two older. The older one is alarmingly tall and broad, but he gives Connor a friendly wave and grin, and I watch the two of them jog off to take the trail to the left. They certainly don't belong to the Johansens, who are an older couple with grown kids who've visited them exactly once since I've been here. No, they must be Officer Graham's kids. Graham is a uniformed member of the Norton police force. Unlike me, Graham's family is Old Tennessee; from what I've heard, he's the last of several generations of solid country people who had property here at the lake well before it ever turned into the playground of the wealthy. I still need to drop by, introduce myself, assess the man, and try to start a quiet alliance. I might need law enforcement on my side at some point. I've tried a couple of times but gotten no answer at the door. That's understandable. Cops work odd hours.

  "Hey, kid. How was school?" I ask Connor as he trudges past me. I pat the soil I disturbed more firmly back around a spray of blooms.

  "Fine," he says, without enthusiasm. "I've got a paper due tomorrow."

  "On what?"

  He hitches his backpack into a more comfortable position. "Biology. It's okay. I've got it."

  "Do you want me to read it when you're done?"

  "I'm okay."

  He goes inside, and I stand up to rub the dirt from my palms. I worry about him, of course. Worry about the scare I gave him (and myself) yesterday. Worry about whether or not he needs more counseling. He's turned into such a quiet, introverted kid, and it scares me as much as Lanny's outbursts. I don't know what he's thinking most of the time, and every once in a while I see a look, a tilt of his head, that reminds me so strongly of his father that I go cold inside, waiting to see that monster look out of his eyes . . . but I've never seen it. I don't believe that evil is inherited.