Redemption Road: A Novel (47 page)

Liz was real.

She mattered.

Flicking the curtain, he peered out at a fifteen-year-old Subaru he’d rolled off a dirt lot in exchange for a handful of coins. He’d been ready to leave before news of his wife broke. He was going to go west—Colorado or Mexico—but things were different now. His wife was dead, and there was this thing in Liz’s voice, a quiet desperation not every man would recognize.

“What do I do, Eli?”

He touched his lips where Liz had kissed him.

Eli didn’t answer.

*   *   *

The girl passed out as he carried her to a shady place beside the car. The tremble stopped, and she went limp on his shoulder, a tiny thing he could lift with a single arm. But she was a fighter, and there was clarity in the fighters.

They were more like Liz.

The eyes went deeper.

He put the girl in the grass and checked himself in the mirror. His neck was cut low, near the collarbone. He touched a bloody lump on his scalp, then pulled an old towel from the car and pressed it against his neck. The cut hurt, but he accepted the pain because he’d hurt the girl, too. It was the shock of pain and wounded pride. They drove him to needless harm, yet that was the cycle. Sin feeds sin. The spiral draws deeper and down. He studied the girl’s face, swollen and bloody, and it wasn’t the first time he’d hardened himself. Julia Strange was not an easy kill, either. He’d found her in the church, alone and on her knees. No one was supposed to be there, and even now he wondered what his life would be had he left a step sooner. But she’d heard him and turned. And when she’d looked at him with those bottomless eyes, the sight of her anguish jolted him. She’d been beaten and humbled, but the hurt ran more deeply than the swollen jaw or bloody lip. It plumbed the depths of her eyes and rendered her into something … more. The glimpse lasted but a moment, but he saw the hurt, and beneath the hurt, the innocence. She was a child again, and lost. He wanted to take away the pain; that’s how it started. But he didn’t know what he’d find in her eyes, or what the finding would do to him. Even now it was a blur: the whirl of emotion, the feel of her skin beneath his fingers. That’s where it started; she was the first. Thirteen years later, it would end with Elizabeth. It had to, so he hardened himself.

But for now there was the girl.

He was gentle as he stripped and cleaned her. He kept his thoughts chaste, as always, but wanted to be done because already it felt wrong. The altar he’d made was in the trees and was only of plywood and sawhorses. He tried to keep the frustration in check, but she didn’t look right when he roped her down and spread the linen. Too much yellow was in the light, and not enough church. He wanted the pinks and reds, the vaulted hush. He dragged a hand through his hair, trying to convince himself.

He could make it happen.

It could work.

But the girl was a mess, her face battered from the tree, a red stain where her stomach wound leaked through the linen. He was bothered because the purity mattered, as did the light, the location. Would it work like this? He pushed the question down. He was here. So was she. So he leaned close, hoping to find what he needed at the bottom of her eyes. It never happened fast. It took trial and error, his hands on the neck not once or twice, but many times.

He waited for her to wake, then choked her once so she would know it was real. “We’ll start slowly,” he said; then choked her like that so she would have no doubt. He took her to the edge of blackness and held her there. Small movements of his hands, whispers of air. “Show me the girl. Show me the child.” He let her breathe once, then rose to his toes and leaned into it as she fought and choked. “Shhh. We all suffer. We all feel pain.” He put more weight on his hands. “I want to see the real you.”

He choked her long and deep, then hard and fast. He used every trick he’d ever learned, tried a dozen times more, but knew it wouldn’t work.

The eyes were swollen shut.

He couldn’t see her.

*   *   *

Channing didn’t know why she was still alive. She knew pain and darkness, thought she was in the silo, then realized there was movement, too. She was back in the car. Same smell. Same tarp. She touched her face with bound hands and realized most of the darkness came from swollen eyes. She could barely see, but knew she was dressed and breathing and alive.…

A strangled sound escaped her throat.

How long?

She relived his hands and the blackness, the yellow trees and his hungry face.

How long had he tried to kill her?

She swallowed, and it was like glass ripping her throat. She touched her neck and curled more tightly in the dim, blue space.

Where was he taking her?

Why was she still alive?

Those worries ate at her until a more disturbing one twisted through the tangle of her thoughts: his face beneath the trees. No hat. No glasses. He’d looked different in a way she couldn’t process; but sober now, and desperately alive, she remembered where she’d seen him.

Oh, God …

She knew exactly who he was.

The revelation terrified her because the truth of it was so perverse. How could it possibly be him?

But it was, and it wasn’t just the face. She knew the voice, too. He was making calls as the car worked from one street to the next, making calls and muttering angrily between them. He was looking for Liz and getting frustrated that he couldn’t find her. No one knew where she was; she wasn’t answering her phone. He called the police station, her mother; and once—through a crack in the tarp—Channing saw the blur of Elizabeth’s house. She recognized the shape, the trees.

The Mustang was gone.

Channing sobbed after that and couldn’t help it. She wanted to be in the car with Elizabeth, or in her house or in the dark of her bed. She wanted to be safe and unafraid, and only Liz could make that happen. So she said the name in her mind—Elizabeth—and it must have leaked through into the real world, because suddenly the car slowed to a hard, rocking stop. Channing froze, and for a long moment nothing happened. His voice, when it came, was quiet. “You love her, don’t you?” Channing squeezed into a ball. “It makes me wonder if she loves you, too. Do you think she does? I think she probably must.” He went quiet, fingers drumming on the wheel. “Do you have a phone? I’ve been trying to reach her, but she won’t pick up. I think she might answer if she saw your number.”

Channing held her breath.

“A phone.”

“No. No phone.”

“Of course not. No. I’d have seen it.”

A long silence followed, heat under the tarp. When he started driving again, Channing watched a stretch of buildings and trees, then a span of chain-link stained with rust. The car started down, and she felt the sun disappear, caught glimpses of yellow houses and pink ones, the long slide into some dim hollow. When the car stopped again, he turned off the engine and silence filled everything for another terrible minute.

“Do you believe in second chances?” he asked.

Channing smelled her own sweat, the fog of her breath.

“Second chances. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be useful to me if I ask?”

Channing bit her lip and tried not to sob.

“Useful, damn it! Yes or no?”

“Yes. God. Please.”

“I’m going to take you out of the car and carry you inside. There’s no one around, but if you make a sound, I’ll hurt you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

She felt the car rock and heard the hatch open. He lifted her, still in the tarp. They crossed bare dirt, went up stairs and through a door. Channing saw little until the tarp came off; then it was his face and the four walls of a dingy bath. He put her in the tub and cuffed an ankle to the radiator beside it.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He stripped silver tape off a roll.

She watched it, terrified. “Please, I want to! I want to understand!”

He studied her, but she saw the doubt. It was in there with the crazy and the sadness and the grim determination. “Be still.”

But she could not. She fought as he slapped tape across her mouth and wrapped it twice around her head.

*   *   *

When it was done, he stood above her, looking down. She was small in the tub, and horrified, a tiny thing the color of chalk. She said she wanted to understand, and maybe she did. But no one looking in could appreciate the beauty of what he was trying to do. She’d use the same words as the cops.
Serial killer. Dangerous. Deranged
. Only Liz—at the end—would understand the truth that drove him, that he did these things for the noblest reason of all, the love of a precious girl.

*   *   *

Gideon liked the hospital because everything was clean and people were nice. The nurses smiled; the doctor called him “Sport.” He didn’t understand a lot of what was said and done, but followed parts of it. The bullet had made a small, clean hole and hit no organs or major nerves. It nicked an important artery, though, and people liked to tell him how lucky he was, that he’d made the hospital just in time and that the surgeon had stitched him just right. They liked to make him feel good, but sometimes, if he turned his head fast enough, he’d catch the whispers and strange, sideways looks. He thought that was about what he’d tried to do, because Adrian Wall was all over the television and he was the boy who’d tried to kill him. Maybe it was about his dead mother and the bodies under the church. Or maybe it was about his father.

The old man had been fine for the first day. He’d been calm and quiet, and even respectful. At some point, though, that changed. He got moody and sullen and short with the nurses. His eyes were red all the time, and Gideon woke more than once to find him staring out from under the bill of an old cap, lips moving as he stared at his son and whispered words Gideon couldn’t hear. Once, when a nurse suggested his father go home and get some sleep, he came to his feet so fast the chair scraped. There’d been a look in his eyes, too, something that scared even Gideon.

After that, none of the nurses lingered when the old man was in the room. They didn’t smile and tease out stories. But it worked out in a way. Gideon’s father stayed away most of the time. When he chose to appear, he curled on the chair or slept. At times he stayed under a hospital blanket, and only Gideon knew he had bottles under there, too. He could hear them clanking in the dark, the gurgle when his father lifted the blanket and tipped one back.

It was the pattern. And if the drinking went longer and deeper than usual, Gideon didn’t blame him. They both had reason to hate, and Gideon, too, knew the ache of failure. He didn’t pull the trigger, and that made him as weak as his father. So he tolerated the drunkenness and long stares, the time his father stumbled to the bathroom and vomited until the sun rose. And when the nurses asked Gideon about the mess, he’d said it was him; that the painkillers made him sick.

After that they gave him Tylenol and let him hurt.

He didn’t mind.

The room was kept dark, and in the gloom he saw his mother’s face, not as a photograph—flat and faded—but as it must have been when she was alive, the color of it, the animation of her smile. The memory couldn’t be real, but he played it like a favorite movie, over and over and bright in the dark. The confession caught him by surprise.

“She died because of me.”

Gideon started because he didn’t know his father was in the room. He hadn’t been for hours, but now he was by the bed, his fingers hooked on the rail, a look on his face of desperation and shame.

“Please, don’t hate me. Please, don’t die.”

Gideon wasn’t going to die. The doctors had said as much, but his father’s breakdown was complete: red eyes and swollen face, the smell from his mouth like something pickled. “Where have you been? When did you get here?”

“You don’t know how it is, son. You don’t see how it piles up—the things we do, the consequence when we love and trust and let others inside. You’re just a boy. How could you know anything about betrayal or hurt or what a man can do if he’s pushed?”

Gideon sat up straighter; felt stitches pull in his chest. “What are you talking about? No one died because of you.”

“Your mother.”

“What about her?”

Robert Strange pulled once on the rail, then rocked onto his knees as a bottle clattered from a coat pocket and slid across the floor. “It was just an argument, that’s all. Okay, wait. No. That’s a lie, and I promised no more lies. I hit her, yes, three times. But just the three, three times and done. I did that, but apologized. I swore to her son. I told her she didn’t need to leave me or go to the church. She’d done a bad thing. Yes, okay. But, I’d already forgiven her, so there was no sin to pray for, no need for God or the cross or reason to pray for me, either. All she had to do was stay with us, and I would forgive every bad thing she’d ever done, the lies and distortions and the secrets of her heart. Tell me you see it, son. So many years I’ve watched it eat you alive, to be motherless and stuck with me, alone. Tell me you forgive me, and I think maybe I could sleep without dreams. Tell me I did what any husband would do.”

“I don’t understand. You hit her?”

“It wasn’t like I planned it or enjoyed it.” Robert pulled at his hair and left it spiked. “The bad part happened so fast, my fists … that was twenty seconds, and maybe less. I never meant it. I didn’t want her to leave, didn’t think she’d die over twenty seconds. Just like that, one, two, three…”

He was moving his fingers—counting—and Gideon blinked as it all soaked in. “She went to the church because of you?”

“Her killer must have found her there.”

“She died because of you?”

The question was hard, and the father grew still, his head tilting so light caught in his eyes. “You still think she’s some kind of saint, don’t you, some perfect thing? I understand that, I do. A boy should feel that way about his mother. But she left you in that crib, son. I was angry, yes, and maybe I broke up the kitchen and smashed some things, and maybe I lied to the cops about what really happened. But she’s the one who left.”