Blood Ties (16 page)

It was one of the happiest times Stephen could remember. The future Crittenden Gables was still little more than a series of wooden skeletons, but the floors were laid and in several places the wiring already wound up from floor to floor like exposed nerve fibers. They walked around together, and Dad explained all the stages of construction while his son listened proudly. His father, he was quite sure, could have built the whole place by himself.

Then they went to the KFC and had fried chicken and biscuits. It was dark before they got home.

*   *   *

About ten days later, Dad didn't come home Friday evening. It was late Saturday when the van pulled up and parked in the garage by the side of the house. Stephen watched through his bedroom window. His father came back outside. He staggered slightly and there was what looked like a bottle clutched in his left hand. He walked toward the front of the house. He had forgotten to close the garage door.

Stephen went downstairs.

“Hi.”

Dad hardly seemed to have heard him, or to have noticed his presence. He went into the kitchen and collapsed into a chair, setting a pint bottle of Southern Comfort down on the table in front of him. The whiskey in the bottle was about a third of the way down.

He looked up and saw his son. It seemed to take a few seconds before he recognized him.

“Go to bed, Steve,” he said, in a toneless voice. He was pretty well boiled.

“Okay. 'Night, Dad.”

“Get me a glass first.”

“Sure.”

Stephen opened the cupboard and took down a water glass, setting it on the table next to the bottle. Then he turned and left the room.

In his bedroom he switched off the light, being careful to leave the door open about an inch. When his father came up, Stephen wanted him to think he had gone to bed.

Something was going on. Aside from a few beers, Dad wasn't much of a drinker. Once in a great while he would come home under the influence, but Stephen had never seen him like this.

He had to wait almost an hour before he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. His father's room was directly across from his, at the top of the landing. He heard muffled sounds and then the loud, protesting squeak of bedsprings. His father's light was still on. After a few minutes Stephen thought he heard a gentle snoring.

In his stocking feet, he went across the landing. Dad was belly-down on the bed, in his underwear.

Stephen switched off the light and went back to his own room to fetch his shoes.

On his way down the stairs, he told himself that he was just going out to close the garage door, but he knew that wasn't quite the truth. Something was wrong and nothing in his previous experience of his father could tell him what. Right now, the only place he could go to look for an answer was the van.

Standing in front of the open garage, he looked up at the house. His father's room was on the other side. Even if Dad was broad awake, he wouldn't be able to see a light from the garage.

Still, without turning on the overhead, Stephen put his hand on the driver-side door handle. He pressed the button and the door opened. Not surprisingly, Dad had forgotten to lock it.

Almost the instant he opened the door, he was assailed by a faint odor, like raw hamburger gone bad—but really like nothing he could have described.

The interior light had popped on and he could see that there was nothing in the front compartment to account for the smell.

That left the cargo space.

Stephen closed the door, and he was left once again in darkness. He turned on the overhead light in the garage. Somehow he didn't want to open the back of the van in the dark.

He pulled on the rear door handle and the interior light came on again.

At first he didn't realize what he was looking at. Just an object wrapped in the clear plastic drop cloths that painters use. And then he realized that it was a face.

A woman's face, staring out at him through the clouded plastic. Her eyes were open, and her mouth. She seemed to be screaming.

Of course there was no sound, because she was dead.

Stephen stared at her in fascinated horror. It wasn't real. It couldn't be.

But the smell was much stronger, the smell of a corpse beginning to putrefy.

Suddenly his stomach clenched and he experienced a wave of nausea. He couldn't help himself. He bent over and vomited.

When he stopped gagging he understood at once the significance of what had happened. His vomit, yellow and thick, was on the garage floor and all over the back of the van. It was on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. There was no point in trying to clean it up—the smell would linger for days.

And Dad would know, couldn't help knowing, that his son had come down here at night and found a dead body in the back of the van.

And Dad would surely kill him. Just as he had killed Stephen's mother. The fact that he would be murdering his son, his own blood, would not restrain him.

Stephen closed the rear door of the van and turned off the overhead garage light. He stepped out onto the driveway and looked at the house, which was dark.

And he realized that he could never enter that house again, not if he wanted to live. His one chance was to run.

And so he ran.

 

13

And by running, he entered into a life of desperate fear. Somehow it never occurred to him to turn his father in to the police. His only hope was flight.

All of the crucial decisions were made that first night. His father was a restless sleeper, almost an insomniac. He would wake up in a few hours and go downstairs to make himself a cup of tea. It would probably occur to him that he had forgotten to close the garage and, given what was in the back of the van, he would almost certainly go outside to correct that error. Then he would know everything.

The next step would be to get rid of the body. Then he would start hunting.

Stephen tried to think like his father. What would Dad expect him to do? To head into town probably. Or to try to hitch a ride. He would know that his son had no money, had nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

So Stephen made up his mind to stay off the roads and to head north, away from West Memphis. But if he just wandered around he would quickly become lost. Then someone would find him and call the police. And the police, eventually, would call his father.

He could imagine how that would go. By then the body in the van would have been left for the animals on some stretch of waste ground. Dad knew how to cover his tracks.

“The kid's crazy,” he would say. “He's been a problem ever since his mother died.”

And the police would nod and grin and turn Stephen over to his father's vengeance.

So, instead, he would follow the railroad tracks. He picked them up about two miles from the house and walked the tracks all night.

By dawn he was hungry and exhausted. He stopped by a shack, windowless, deserted and locked, about twenty feet from the rail line. He sat down, leaned back against a wall where he could not be seen from the tracks and instantly fell asleep.

He was awakened by a train whistle. What seemed like an endless line of freight cars began moving slowly past the shack. Stephen lay on the ground, concealed in the high grass, and watched. Just ahead there was a sharp curve in the tracks and the train slowed to walking pace in order to make the turn. He noticed that there were iron ladders on the sides of the freight cars, almost at the end.

Could he reach one of those ladders, without being seen, and climb up on the roof of the car? He might be able to hitch a ride for thirty or forty miles before one of the crew even noticed he was there.

He decided to try it.

It was easy. He just ran alongside, grabbed a rung of the ladder and swung himself up. He was on top of the car in maybe fifteen seconds.

On the roof he lay flat, expecting any moment someone would come and throw him off. No one came.

He rode all the way to Blytheville, a distance of some sixty miles, where the train stopped to unload a couple of cars. It was just past noon. Stephen climbed down and headed into town. He had to get some food somehow.

Blytheville was his baptism in crime. He walked into a convenience store, took a package of beef jerky, a box of cookies and a bottle of ginger ale, started toward the counter as if he had every intention in the world of buying them, and then bolted for the door. He was around the corner and lost from sight before the clerk behind the counter even realized what was happening.

Interestingly, there was no pursuit. There were several customers in the store and perhaps the clerk was afraid to leave.

Stephen found an alley doorway and sat down to feed. He ate until he was almost ready to burst. Then he stood up, took a huge pee behind a trash bin and headed back to the railroad yard.

For the next three months he lived a vagrant life, dodging the police and the welfare authorities. He bathed and washed his threadbare clothes in any stretch of deserted river he could find. He took odd jobs when he could and stole when he couldn't. He was running for his life, so he put shame and conscience aside.

By October he had gotten as far north as Ohio. Ohio was as good a goal as any. He remembered the address on his mother's driver's license.

Hitching the rail lines took him to Circleville. It was a walk of slightly more than half a mile to Route 9.

The house at 1380 was no palace. The lot was enclosed by a picket fence and the house itself probably hadn't been painted any time in the last five or six years. But the grass in the yard was freshly cut and there were clay planters full of ferns on either side of the front door. The place had a general air of struggling respectability.

Stephen knocked on the door, which after about a minute was opened by a woman who could have been anywhere between fifty and sixty. She was small and thin, and her face looked oddly familiar.

“Are you Mrs. Dabney?” he asked, his heart beating so loud he could hear it in his ears.

“Yes, I'm Mrs. Dabney,” the woman answered. “Do I know you?”

“No.” Stephen shook his head, as if the admission grieved him.

“Then what can I do for you?”

“Did you have a daughter named Elizabeth?”

Mrs. Dabney looked stricken. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“Yes, I did.”

“How long since you've heard from her?”

Taking a handkerchief out of a pocket in her apron, Mrs. Dabney wiped her eyes.

“A long time,” she said. “Almost thirteen years—thirteen years next month.”

“Then she must be dead. I'm her son.”

There was a long silence, after which Mrs. Dabney said, “I think you better come inside, young man.”

*   *   *

The first thing she did was phone her husband. Stephen could hear snippets of the conversation from where he sat in the kitchen.

“Yes, I believe him, Phil.… You should see him.”

Then she came back and asked him if he'd like anything to eat.

While he ate his sandwich and drank his milk, she sat across the table from him, holding her hands against her meager bosom. She didn't speak until he was finished.

“What do you know about my daughter?” she asked finally.

Stephen might have seemed to be considering his answer, but he wasn't. He wasn't even thinking about that. Instead, he felt a great wave of pity for this woman. It was almost as if he could feel her distress as well as see it. Then he shrugged.

“Very little, really. She disappeared when I was seven. One day she just wasn't there.”

“Then tell me about your father.”

“His name was—is—Walter Rayne. He travels around a lot. He can do just about any kind of work. He's tall and he has light brown hair. Like mine. He has a purplish birthmark on the back of his right hand.”

“That's him. That's the man Betty ran off with.”

“Is that what you called her? Betty?”

“Yes.”

She never took her eyes from his face. Sometimes she would squint slightly, the way some people do when they are trying to bring an object into focus.

“How did you know where to find us?”

“There was a suitcase. I found an old driver's license in her wallet. It had this address on it.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Some clothes and a wedding ring.”

“Then he did marry her?”

“I guess.”

A few minutes later Stephen heard a car drive up and stop, then a man came in through the outside door to the kitchen. He was wearing a canvas hat and a heavy Windbreaker with a plaid pattern. He wore rimless glasses and was just at the threshold of being old.

Stephen got to his feet.

The man stood beside Mrs. Dabney and put his hand on her shoulder, which took away any doubt about his identity. Then he held out his hand to Stephen, and Stephen took it.

“I'm Phil Dabney,” he said, giving Stephen's hand a vigorous shake. He didn't really seem that friendly. “My wife tells me you claim to be our daughter Betty's boy.”

“He
is
Betty's boy,” Mrs. Dabney broke in. “He knows too much to be anybody else. Besides, Phil, look at his eyes. Those are Betty's eyes.”

Phil Dabney stared into Stephen's face, and then, suddenly, he seemed to be afraid of what he saw there.

“By God,” he said, with a kind of awe, “so they are.”

The three of them sat around the kitchen table talking until it began to grow dark outside. Then Mrs. Dabney, whose first name Stephen still didn't know, got up and started her preparations for supper. When she was away from the table, Phil Dabney leaned forward and, in a low voice, asked the question that must have been preying on his mind ever since he came through the door.

“What happened to your mother?”

“She's dead,” Stephen answered. “My father killed her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because that's what he does. He kills women.”