Gingerbread Man (40 page)

"My sister." She sighed, settling back in the
chair. "My sister. God, I like saying those words, hearing them. I
just want to hold her for days on end, you know?"

"Your mother is probably feeling the same way
about now."

"I remember now when all my symptoms started
coming back. It was right after that day when Mom was late for
lunch, and I had coffee with Amanda—with Ivy—in the cafe. Almost as
if something in me knew ... I just wish the families of all those
other children could have had the ending we did."

"So do I." He thought of Kara and Bobby
Prague, the lifeless eyes of their mother, and his regret was
bitter, despite that justice had finally been served.

"We should put a marker on that site." Holly
said. "Something to honor those children. Something to remind us
what can happen."

"I think it's a good idea." Vince got to his
feet. By now he knew his way around Doc's office pretty well. He
took cups from the rack, hot cocoa from the canister beside the
coffeemaker. Added water, and put the mugs into the little
microwave.

"So, it's over," she said. "You solved the
case. You found the owner of that mysterious missing library
book."

"Hell, you haven't seen the fine yet. You're
gonna need to mortgage the house." As an effort to lighten the
mood, he figured it was lame at best.

She smiled a little though. Softly,
halfheartedly. The timer bell pinged, and he took the cocoa out,
gave her cup a good stir, and put it into her hands. She sipped,
and seemed to absorb the heat.

"You did this, you know," Holly said softly.
"If you hadn't followed your instincts and that one silly book, and
come out here and dug into my personal hell, I might never have
known the truth. Marty might have gone on hurting kids for years to
come, and I might never have found my sister again. You did
this."

He shook his head. "You're the one who found
Marty, rescued Bethany. I was just doing my job."

She narrowed her eyes. "No, you weren't. You
disobeyed orders to come out here. I know you said you didn't want
to be anyone's hero, Vince, but there are a lot of people in this
town who think you are just that. And even though you didn't want
to be, you're a hero to me, too."

He couldn't look at her when she said that.
He didn't doubt that he wanted the job of being Holly Newman's
personal hero. Hell, in retrospect, it had never been that he
didn't
want
the job. It had been fear that he'd fail at it,
and let her down.

"I've learned something about you in the time
I've spent down here, Red," he told her.

"Really? What?"

"That you don't need a hero. You do just fine
playing that role for yourself."

She let her lips curl up at the corners. "You
know something? You're right, I do."

He smiled, glad she had reclaimed her
power.

"So I suppose you'll be going back to
Syracuse now. Back to the illustrious S.P.D."

He looked at her. "They'll probably give me a
promotion."

"You deserve a medal."

"Hey, you get the medal for this one, not me.
You and your sister. Hell of a team."

She shook her head. "Don't try to draft us,
Detective. We're gonna stick around here, where life is usually
slow and easy, and everyone knows everyone else. Nothing bad ever
happens in Dilmun, you know."

"So I've heard." He nodded. "I was thinking
along the same lines myself, as a matter of fact."

Holly lifted her head, frowned at him over
the coffee mug.

He pulled a chair up to face hers, and sat
down in it. "I misjudged this town and the people in it from the
start, Holly. It's tight, and close, and caring. I like that." He
drew Holly's bare feet up off the floor along with the tail end of
the blanket, which he tucked snugly around them. Then he set her
feet in his lap and rubbed them warm again. "Most of all, though, I
misjudged myself."

She tipped her head sideways. "About what,
Vince?"

"Oh, you're gonna laugh at this one. I
thought, I honestly thought, I could keep from falling in love with
you."

She went very still, not quite meeting his
eyes. "And you, um, you were wrong about that?"

"More wrong than I've ever been about
anything."

He took her cup from her hands, set it aside
on the doctor's desk. "So, what do you say, Red?" His stomach
clenched tight. Leaning forward in his chair, he took both of her
hands, held them in his own. "Jim Mallory says he could use another
officer."

"You're saying—you want to stay?"

"I want to stay. I like it here. And I want
to be where you are, where your family is."

Her eyes teared up again as she held his
gaze. If she didn't say she loved him back pretty soon he was going
to break something. But, damn, she looked so vulnerable right now.
Her lips were trembling. Maybe it was too soon.

"Promise not to hurt me, Vince," she
whispered. "And I'll promise not to hurt you. Not ever."

He closed his eyes, realizing she was still
scared of the same old thing. Of losing the one you loved. That
fear would probably never go away. He pulled her close and kissed
her tenderly. He took his time about it, made it long, and slow,
and gentle. It was a kiss of promise, and one of healing, he
thought. For both of them.

When he lifted his head, he looked into her
eyes, not blinking. "I won't hurt you, Red," he promised. "I swear
to God, I will never, ever hurt you."

A sigh escaped her, along with a lot of
tension, he thought. "I love you, Vince," she whispered against his
lips as he tasted her tears on them. "I love you so much."

"I'm damn glad to hear that."

* * *

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HE WATCHED THE body sink in slow motion
through the murky green water. Tears blurred his eyes, obstructing
his view, but he wiped them away. He liked to watch. It was
peaceful, the way the long tendrils of dark seaweed seemed to reach
up for the bodies. Like they were waiting, eager to welcome them
home. They parted, those tendrils, as the body sank deeper and then
closed up again as its descent continued. Like the fingers of a
loving hand, embracing them, wrapping them in the liquid softness
of death. He liked to think of them resting at the bottom, sinking
into the deep, soft mud. Peaceful. Easy. When the seaweed fingers
returned to their former positions, reaching toward the surface,
waving gently in the currents, it was as if they’d never even been
there.

As if he’d never killed them.

When the last ripple faded and the water
returned to green stillness, Eric backhanded the new tears from his
face and snuffled hard. It was done. Again. But this was it, it was
over. This would be the last time.

You say that every time. But you know
better.

Yeah, it was true, he’d said it before. Every
time, with every lanky, brown-eyed young man he bludgeoned to death
with his favorite framing hammer. It wasn’t that he took any
pleasure in killing them. It was just that he couldn’t help
himself. When he saw them, he got this persistent itch in the back
of his brain. And it would get worse and worse. You couldn’t
scratch that itch from the outside. It was
inside
. It
scratched and it scratched, a rat on a wall, working until it broke
clean through.

That other one inside him.
He
was the
killer. And once he got his rocks off beating them to death, he
crawled back into his rat hole, leaving Eric to clean up the mess,
to plaster over the hole and cover up the crime, and pretend there
were no rats in his house at all.

What rats? I don’t hear any rats. Look at
me, I’m just a normal guy. And yeah, my eyes are red, but not
because I’ve been sobbing over the poor fucking bastard I just
dumped into the lake. It’s probably allergies. There’s nothing
wrong with me. I’m fine. Normal.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Nothing could make the scratching stop except
killing. And it was getting so the rat demanded to be fed more and
more often. It was growing, that rat. It was almost too big to stay
behind the wall at all anymore.

But he told himself, as he always did, that
was not the case.
He
was in charge, not the rat. He was
patching that hole for the last time. He wouldn’t let the rodent
chew through it again. Not again. He was done with this. He was not
going to kill any more pretty, lanky young men with brown hair that
hung a little too long. He could beat this. He knew he could.

Nodding hard, Eric dipped his oars into the
green-brown water and pushed the boat into motion. The sun was
rising now over the pine forested eastern shoreline. It warmed the
surface, drawing misty spirals and pillars upward from the water.
They twisted higher, heading for the light like the spirits of
Eric’s beloved dead. He watched them rising, growing thinner,
vanishing altogether, while he rowed in the opposite direction,
west, toward the dock, the cabin.

A loon sang its heartbroken song. Tall black
trees rose up out of the water without a leaf or a limb. Weak and
rotting. Lily pads clustered thicker the closer he got to the
shore, until it was as if he was rowing through a lake made of the
waxy green leaves. There were lotus blossoms, too, mostly white, a
few bright pink ones, just starting to open up as the sunbeams
reached them. Bullfrogs croaked, and the birds in the forests
surrounding the lake chorused louder and louder. Their morning
choir. All around him, as the sun climbed higher, the Adirondack
Mountains changed their character entirely. By night they were a
dark world that seemed perfect for someone like him. A place where
death and decay were just a normal part of the whole process, and
where killing was everywhere. It was accepted. It was normal.

But when the sun took over, the mountains
changed. The lake water that had been murky and green, sparkled and
danced in the morning light. The forest came to life, no longer
deep and foreboding, but green and lush, the ground beneath the
trees, dappled in light and shadow.

He no longer fit, he with his rat-infested
walls. And by the light of day it was always clear that he never
really had.

He rowed the boat up to the long wooden dock.
Today he hadn’t even taken a life preserver or any fishing gear,
the way he usually did, figuring that would make him look normal if
he were noticed by some fish and game officer. Not that he ever had
been. The lake was isolated. He’d never seen anyone when he’d been
out doing his grim work. This time he hadn’t even bothered to take
those precautions. He’d just been eager to get it over with. To be
done with it. That was how determined he was to stop killing. That
was how sure he was that this would be the last time he would row
out across Stillwater Lake in the predawn chill to lay a young man
to rest at the bottom.

Looping the rope around a post, he climbed
out of the boat, pulled himself up onto the old wooden dock, and
realized that it was getting harder. He’d been putting on weight.
His joints ached. Thirty-eight. He shouldn’t feel this bad at
thirty-eight.

He walked toward the cabin, past the tire
swing that dangled from the giant maple tree at the water’s edge.
He and his kid brother used to swing out on that tire and try to
see who could land farther out in the lake. He smiled as he
remembered. They’d had a lot of fun here as kids. His own boys
played the same game. Or used to. He hadn’t had the heart to bring
them up here in a long, long time.

He’d polluted the water with the blood of his
victims. He should have found a different place to put them to
rest. Hell, he should have done a lot of things differently. But he
was broken, and he didn’t know why. He only knew that he had to
find a way to fix himself. To keep the rat sealed behind the wall,
keep it there until this time it starved to death.

He walked past the cabin, not going inside.
His pickup was parked in front. The hammer, already washed and
dried, was hanging back in its spot in the toolshed. There was
nothing more to do. And if he could just hold onto his willpower,
there never would be. He got into his white F-150 and drove. He
needed to be home with his family and to forget about this
morning’s task. Forget, if he could, about all of those pretty,
pretty boys.

IF THE BULLSHIT I wrote was true, I wouldn’t
have been standing in the middle of a beehive where all the bees
were cops—not one worker bee in the hive, either— trying to get
someone interested in finding out what had happened to my
brother.

Then again, if the bullshit I wrote was true,
I wouldn’t be holding a white-tipped cane in my hand, either. But
the bullshit I wrote was just that. Bullshit.