The Absence of Mercy (32 page)

“Not a sign of him.” Her friend shook her head. “He was always an outdoor cat. Liked to wander through the woods out back, I suppose. Liked to stalk birds, too, although I don't know what he'd do with one if he ever caught it. Sometimes he stayed out all night. I never paid it much mind.” She offered Susan a thin smile. “He always showed up at the back door for breakfast and dinner, though. That guy could eat. Most afternoons he slept inside on the windowsill.” She pointed toward the vacant sill, which looked sad and deserted in the cat's absence. “Sally's been pretty upset about it. She sure loved that cat.”

“He'll show up,” Susan assured her, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt.

“I hope so,” Annie said. “I hope he didn't get hit by a car or anything. If Sally came across him in the roadway, I'd have a pretty traumatized little girl on my hands.”

”Don't think that way,” Susan responded, reaching over and squeezing her friend's hand. “Cats are very resourceful animals. They know how to stay out of harm's way.” She tried on a smile and found that it almost seemed to fit.

When she arrived home, she went to the tool shed, wanting a second look around. She found the door to the shed locked, just as it should be. She retrieved the key from the kitchen, removed the padlock, slid the door open, and stood inside. The interior was stagnant, and smelled vaguely of the combined scent of oil and earth. Being there reminded her immediately of the day she had discovered the wood rat. Recently cut grass clung to the wheels of the lawn mower. The bags of topsoil she'd purchased two years ago for her gardening were long gone. In their place was a spade-tip shovel, leaning against the far wall. Its tip was caked with dirt. She ran her fingers thoughtfully along the wooden texture of its long handle. The tool seemed to be the only thing out of place in the neatly arranged shack. Acting more on instinct than anything else, she picked up the shovel, exited the shed, and proceeded into the woods behind their house. It took her twenty minutes to find the recently dug grave, and only two minutes to exhume the body. Her right hand automatically went to the back hip pocket of her jeans, pulling out the heavy-duty black plastic bags she'd absently brought with her. She had no recollection of grabbing the bags from the shed, but she'd obviously done so. She must've known all along what she was bound to find.

She double-bagged the animal as before, barely taking notice this time of what had been done to it. She made the trip to the dump and disposed of it in a manner that, if discovered, would not lead to her son. She returned home, showered, and took a nap. Ben woke her from a dreamless slumber when he arrived home an hour and a half later.

“You okay, honey?” he asked, brushing the hair back from her eyes and feeling her forehead with the back of his hand. “You were sweating in your sleep. Are you sick?”

“No,” she responded, looking up at him, her thoughts still muddled with sleep.
But your son is,
she almost added, but again chose not to, leaving him out of this for the second time. God only knew why. “Just tired,” she muttered, and rolled away from him, trying to find her way back down into the merciful nothingness from which she'd been disturbed.

Part 6

Terms of Survival

Early May. Dr. Ben Stevenson pulled the dark blue Honda into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lingering caress of winter had grudgingly slipped away two weeks ago, giving way to warm sunshine, a multicolored tapestry of blooming things, and the frenzied flurry of insects eager to begin the new season. Normally, the nicer weather would have lightened Ben's spirits, which tended to be darkest during Ohio's cold, grim, intractable winters. This year the change of season only heightened his sense of loss. It reminded him that life went on, and subtly suggested that wounds, however deep, might someday heal, and that loss, however poignant, was but a temporary condition that would fade ever so slightly with each successive year.

He climbed out of the car and closed the door, glancing behind him as he crossed the parking lot. No one watched from the driver's seat of an unmarked police car. They'd stopped following him two months ago, and
even that
had saddened him.
Have they given up that quickly
, he wondered,
or have they just decided I have nothing further to contribute?
If their assumptions coincided with the latter, they were right. He was in the dark as much as they were—perhaps more.
There must be leads they are pursuing,
he told himself. There
have
to be. A mother and two children cannot simply disappear from the face of the earth without a trace.
Could they?
No. Surely, there must be something.

On the day they'd disappeared, Ben had been detained for further questioning. For eight hours they'd interrogated him, asking the same questions over and over in a thousand different ways, trying to get him to contradict himself, not believing he hadn't known. “You mean to tell me,” Special Agent Culver had asked, looming over him behind the chair in which Ben sat, “that you examined the bite marks on those victims, photographed them, discussed them with the investigating detectives, and
never noticed
that they matched the dental architecture of your own son? I mean
, look at the pictures
!” He'd thrown photographs of Thomas down on the table all around him, framed pictures that had been prominently displayed in Ben's own home. “You don't see that gap between the upper left canine and the first premolar—the one we've been focused on throughout the investigation?
You don't see that?!
”

The truth was, he hadn't. Or more precisely, he'd seen it every day, and had never made the connection—had never
allowed
himself to make the connection. During medical school, one of Ben's mentors—a surgeon with the last name of Zaret—had been fond of telling his students, “The eyes cannot see what the mind does not know.” If you don't consider the possibility of a particular disease, in other words, you won't recognize the signs and symptoms for what they truly are. “You have to think about it here,” the scrub-clad surgeon would say, pointing to his forehead, “before you can see it here,” he'd finish, the index finger descending to the level of his eyes.

Ben shook his head. He hadn't seen it—hadn't allowed himself to see it. But what if he had? Would he have been able to intervene somewhere along the way, before it became too late for all of them? And what about Susan? How much had she known, and when? Why had she not come to him with that knowledge? More important, why hadn't she done anything to stop it? And the question he kept asking himself more than any other: Why had she chosen to run?

He wondered if perhaps she'd been trying to tell him all along, and that he simply hadn't been listening. Bits of conversation stuck out in his mind like thistles, catching him when he wasn't looking, wounding him with their missed significance.

. . .
“I don't think he should be dating that girl. One way or the other, he'll end up hurting her
.
”. . .

. . . “Why don't you talk to
him
about it?”
. . .

. . .
“You have
no idea
about the measures that I am prepared to take—
that I have already taken
—to safeguard the lives of those children. . . . I would do anything—
anything
—for them
.
”
. . .

. . .
“Mom says everyone deserves forgiveness
.
She says it's not up to us to judge each other. It's up to God
.
”
. . .

. . .
“We have to take care of each other. Just as we always have
.
”
. . .

. . .
“I just don't want to lose him
.
”
. . .

Ben recalled how, after the first murder, he'd asked his wife—nearly pleaded with her—to take the boys away for a while. Their safety was the most important thing, he had argued.

“It won't make any difference,” Susan had told him, and now he realized why.

The sliding glass doors of the hospital's front entrance retracted dutifully. He crossed the lobby, turned right at the first intersection, and proceeded down the familiar hallway leading to the west stairwell. He passed several people in the corridor but said hello to no one. These days, that was best. He was a well-known presence in this town, but he walked the streets and buildings alone, like the ghost of a soul who has not yet realized that he is dead. People studied him with sideways glances, drew their children close in his company, and gave him wide berths as they passed. His son had decimated this town like a disease, an infection, a plague of one—and at the very least Ben was guilty by association, although there were many within Wintersville who claimed that his culpability ran far deeper than that. As a result, he was not only unwelcome here—he was suspect. And he would have left this place months ago if there were anywhere else for him to go.

But it was here, within this town, that he had lost them. For although Susan and the boys had been on the other side of the country when they disappeared, he had lost them long before that—in the lines of communication that had fallen short, in the clues that had gone unnoticed, in the innumerable opportunities he had had to stop this, if only he had listened carefully to the messages all around him. No, he couldn't leave—couldn't abandon the only tangible connection with his family that remained, couldn't walk away from the things they had once touched, the rooms they had once occupied, the place they had once called home.

Distracted by these thoughts, he almost ran into her as she exited the gift shop.

“Monica,” he said, but she grimaced and stepped backward as if he were contagious, as if he might suddenly reach out and try to grab her.

Ben looked at her anyway, trying to see her as his son might have seen her. It was true that Thomas had pursued her through the woods, had torn apart her body, had left her lying there in the rain to die. She would never be the same because of it, would never be truly free of what his boy had done to her. But was it possible that Thomas had also come to care for her, to love her in some perverse way?
Was he capable of that?
Or had he only been toying with her all along—fascinated with Monica because of her survival, a living display of his handiwork. At the same time, Ben wondered what she might have once seen in him, if there was some shred of goodness and kindness she had discovered hidden within his son, a saving grace within his deep pit of damnation.

“I . . .” He faltered, searching for some means to connect with her, for some way to ask her about the things he was thinking. “How are you?”

She stared back at him without answering, her body poised in a defensive position.

“I heard that your father was in the hospital.” Ben stumbled onward. “Pneumonia, is it? I . . . I just want you to know that I've been thinking about him. I hope he's feeling bett—”

“You stay away from my father,” she responded with such vehemence that for a moment Ben thought she was on the verge of striking him.

“I'm sorry,” he said, stepping past her and continuing down the hallway. “I didn't mean to . . .”

“You stay away from both me
and
my family,” she called after him.

Ben reached the end of the hall and placed a hand on the doorknob leading to the basement.

“
Do you hear me?
” Her tone was loud and defiant within the tiled passageway.

Ben pushed the door open, stepping into the stairwell. It was quiet in here, but the sound of Monica's voice carried through the open door as it swung slowly closed on its pneumatic piston. Her words snapped at his heels as he hastened down the concrete steps toward the floor below. “
You stay away from us. Do you hear? You and the rest of your twisted family. You stay away from us all!
”

Sam Garston drove by the residence for the third time that day, stopping at the entrance to the driveway. Ben's car was parked in front of the house, and Sam pulled the cruiser in behind him and turned off the engine. He sighed. He had no business here, he knew. Ben was no longer under formal investigation. There was no piece of news they had to discuss, no change in the situation between them.
So,
w
hy do I keep coming here?
Sam asked himself.
What am I looking for? What do I expect to find?
Perhaps nothing, he thought as he stepped out of the vehicle and approached the front door, the soles of his shoes clicking lightly on the warm pavement. As odd as it sounded, Sam still considered himself Ben's friend—one of his
only
friends, he realized. Perhaps he came here more as an ally than an adversary, to see how Ben was holding up under the strain of the last several months. He had seen the way people in this town treated him—their collective judgments raining silently upon him without mercy or reservation—and although Sam had difficulty blaming them, he also couldn't help but feel empathy for the man. There was no one Ben could talk to now, no one in his corner. And so he had stopped by once again to check up on him, to let him know there was someone in this town who still worried about him, who was available if Ben wanted him to be.

He ascended the steps and rapped three times on the door.

From inside came the heavy rush of a hurried approach down the front hallway. For a brief moment, Sam was struck with the certainty that Thomas had returned. In his mind, he imagined the door swinging open, the boy's face staring back at him as the long, sharp instrument in his hand fell in practiced and determined swings into the side of Sam's neck—an arch of pulsing blood jetting upward into the fine spring air.

Something large hit the door with enough force to make it shudder on its hinges, and Sam took a reflexive step backward, his right hand falling instinctively to the grip of his firearm. Then the guttural bellows of the dog erupted from the other side of the thick wooden slab that separated them: “WHOOOOOOH!! WHOO! WHOO!! WHOOOHHWHOOH!!”