Offspring (2 page)

Blind to heartbreak forever.

George Peters dreamed that Mary, his wife—dead three years now—had given birth to a son.

Their son was two years old and playing on the floor.

There were wooden blocks all around him and toy trains ran on a track that began beneath the Christmas tree and disappeared down the hall into the Peters’ bedroom, returning, somehow, right through the living room window.

Peters was sitting in an armchair reading the paper. It was a bright sunny day in May or June but the Christmas tree was there and the trains ran round and round.

Mary was out visiting. Peters was minding the boy.

Then someone was knocking on the door, urgent. Calling his name.

He got up and it was Sam Shearing, dead
eleven
years now, telling him he had to get the hell out of there, he had to get out of there
now
, he had to grab the boy and run because the train was coming.

Peters told him he knew the train was coming. The train went round and round.

You don’t understand!
said Shearing.
You don’t fucking understand!
And he started to run. Which wasn’t like Sam Shearing at all.

Peters blinked and Sam was gone. He closed the door and went back to the living room where the boy was playing, banging his blocks together.

Which was when he heard the train.

Rumbling, barreling toward the house.

Peters snatched up his son. He ran past the tree into the kitchen—a younger Peters,
fast
—while the engine smashed through the living room window and burst across the room, coming at them faster than any man could run, the boy hysterical in his arms and the huge black head of the thing ramming past refrigerator and dishwasher . . .

Bearing down
. . .

He woke and it was as though he
had
been running, his ticker was beating so fast. He was sweating. The sheets were wet and smelled of old, stale scotch.

At least there was no headache. He’d remembered the aspirin, for a change. But sitting up his brain felt foggy. He guessed the booze was still working in him.

He looked at the clock. It wasn’t even four in the morning. He’d never get back to sleep now.

And sleep was what the scotch was supposed to be about in the first place.

Mary wouldn’t have approved, but she would have understood. There was only so much thinking and so much loneliness you were supposed to be asked to handle. Since she died it wasn’t just the nightmares that got to him, that made him want to start drinking at four in the afternoon and keep on drinking right on into the night, it was the simple fact of living in the house without her.

Retirement with your best and oldest friend was one thing. Retirement
period
was another.

He heard the knocking again. But it wasn’t in the dream this time, it was at his door. And he guessed the other had been that, too.
Insistent
.

“I’m coming! Hold your horses!”

He got up from the bed. A naked old man with a belly.

He went to the dresser for his shorts and to the closet for his pants. Whoever it was had heard him, because the knocking stopped.

But who the hell was coming after him at a quarter to four in the morning? Friends, drinking buddies—they were few and far between now. Half of them dead, half just moved away.

Dead River was almost all strangers these days.

And there he was again. Feeling sorry for himself.

Whiner
, he thought.

He had a brother in Sarasota who kept telling him about the good life down there. He and his wife lived in a mobile-home park with a windmill out in front about a mile from Siesta Key. He’d visited once and one thing was sure, they weren’t lonely. People dropped by day and night. There was a lot of walking
and bike riding going on, people with heart conditions or circulatory conditions or whatever out getting some exercise, and folks would see his brother and sister-in-law sitting in the shade of the screened-in porch and come on in for a beer.

They went to dances, played golf, went out to restaurants and clubhouses, ran social affairs and potluck dinners.

It wasn’t for him.

There was the heat for one thing.

He was a man who liked his seasons. The bare trees in January and the green in May. Even the winter, the way the cold could take your breath away mornings, the shoveling that steamed you up inside your clothes and the wood fires in the grate.

What you had in Florida was just heat. Heat that was fine and pleasant about a third of the time, a little uncomfortable about a third of the time, and a third of the time like walking through steam. Like walking through clouds of your own sweat.

The second thing was that he’d never been that social.

There were times he’d thought it would be good to meet another woman. You could do that down there. Nobody ever seemed to stay single all that long in his brother’s park. But you had to go to the dinners and dances to do that, you had to have a certain spirit for the thing.

While he didn’t even have the spirit to answer this goddamn door here.

He put on a robe and pair of slippers and shuffled
over. He’d forgotten to turn on the porch light again so he flicked it on now and opened the door.

“Vic.”

Vic Manetti was standing in the yellow light. There was a trooper leaning on the squad car behind him but at that distance Peters couldn’t make out who he was.

Manetti was “the new guy.” Sheriff of Dead River for well over two years now but still “the new guy” to most people because he came from New York City and wasn’t local.

“Sorry to wake you, George.”

“That’s all right.”

Peters respected him. He’d pushed a few back with Manetti in the Caribou from time to time—and talking about what went on in town these days, sort of keeping in touch, Peters had the impression that he was a pretty good cop. He was calm, he had brains and he was thorough. You couldn’t ask much more in a sawdust-and-cinders little burg like this.

But now, standing there, Peters thought he’d never seen the man so uncomfortable.

“I need to talk to you, George,” he said.

“I guess you do. You want to come inside?”

“Actually I was hoping you’d be willing to come with us.”

He watched the man shift around inside himself looking for the right thing to say. Then he guessed he found it.

“I need you to look at something for me. I need your expertise on something.”

“Expertise?” He had to smile. It wasn’t a word you heard much in Dead River.

“I got to warn you. It’s ugly.”

And Peters had a feeling then—maybe it was the word
expertise
clicking in—but some kind of light went off in his brain telling him that he knew what Manetti was talking about.

He managed to hope he was wrong.

“Give me a minute.”

He walked back inside and took off the robe and slippers, found a shirt in the drawer neatly folded—neatness, even with the drinking, being something he knew Mary would have wanted him to hold on to—and a pair of shoes by the bed. He went to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of orange juice and gulped a couple of swallows. Then he went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face and brushed his teeth. The face in the mirror looked all its sixty-six years and then some.

He walked back to the bedroom and took his wallet off the dresser. Her photo stood there smiling at him, an aging woman but still handsome. Way before the cancer.

Out of habit, distracted by the sight of her picture the way he guessed he almost always was, he opened the top drawer and had the .38 and its holster halfway out before he realized he wasn’t going to need it this time.

He could leave the guns to the youngsters.

Vic was in the squad car waiting for him. The trooper he couldn’t make out before turned out to be
Miles Harrison. He’d known Miles since he was just a kid. For a while he’d been their paperboy. For some reason he could never quite hit the porch. They’d cursed him every winter.

He said hello, asked after Miles’ mom and dad, who were fine, thanks, and got in back. They started up. And then he was looking at the backs of their heads through the plate-glass-and-wire-mesh screen.

A funny place, he thought, for an old ex-sheriff to be riding.

Half an hour later the scotch was trying to slide up out of him and he was remembering his breathing, trying to keep it the hell down.

The kitchen was a goddamn slaughterhouse.

He stood there looking at what was left of the woman and the sitter and he knew right away what he had here. He’d known since seeing the urine sprayed across the stairs outside . . . that someone had
marked
the place.

And so, he guessed, did Manetti.

“You see why I wanted you,” he said.

Peters nodded.

“The babysitter’s mother called it in. Her name’s Nancy Ann David, by the way, sixteen years old last March. The mother said it was getting late so she started phoning, but nobody answered. She tried some more until it got her worried and then she called us.”

“The woman?”

He looked down at the body on the floor. Like the sitter on the table it was naked and both its arms and
legs were gone. There was a hole cut in the chest that somebody had pulled wide apart, breaking up the rib cage, and there was nothing in there where the heart was supposed to be. The skull was split and the brains were gone. Intestines trailed across the linoleum floor.

“Her name is Loreen Ellen Kaltsas. Thirty-six years old. Separated. Husband’s name is Dean Allan Kaltsas. We’ve got him in custody and I talked to him down at the station. Evidently they didn’t much care for each other. And he admits to smacking her around. But I don’t think there’s any connection. He seems pretty damn worried about the baby.”

“The baby’s how old, did you say?”

“Eighteen months. No sign of her anywhere. No blood on the crib, none in her room. Nothing.”

He stepped around the blood and urine to the girl on the table. Max Joseph, the county coroner, was working on her.

“George.”

“Hello, Max.”

“How do you like this? Here we go again, huh?”

“Christ, Max, I hope not.”

He made himself look at her. On this one most of the left breast was gone too, sliced away.

“Well I’ll tell you, the reason I think we’ve got another go-round, George, is what’s
not
here. All the meaty bits, if you catch my drift. Familiar?”

He didn’t answer.

“Cause of death?”

“Hell, George, they ripped her heart out.”

He looked down at the open blue eyes. Nancy Ann
David had been pretty once. Not what anyone would call a beauty, but pretty. He’d bet there were boyfriends out there. People who’d miss her.

“What about the woman?”

“Blow to the head. Probably an ax or a hatchet. Died instantly.”

He walked back through the kitchen. Manetti was waiting in the dayroom. Together they walked outside. He needed some air.

Vic offered him a cigarette. He took it and they lit up. The sky was starting to brighten now, it had that nice early-morning glow, and you could hear the birds starting to replace the crickets.

“What do you think?” asked Manetti.

He heard the subtext.
You’re the only one left who’s been there. You’re the only one who’d know for sure
.

Everyone else had either died that night or had moved away—to someplace they wouldn’t have to think and remember so much every time they walked out into the woods or went for a swim by the shoreline.

He ought to have done the same.

But for Mary maybe he would have, but Mary had been born in Dead River and wanted to stay.

Still the nightmares should have been enough to tell him.
Go. Get out of here
. The nightmares and all that came to him unbidden practically every day until he lifted that second or third glass of scotch. Mostly the boy, naked, drifting toward him through his sights and Peters telling him to stop but him not stopping and the shotguns roaring, all opening up at once and . . .

And Mary was dead now. He had no family.

The town was strangers.

He should have gone.

He could still go.

Fuck the heat in Sarasota. They had air-conditioning, didn’t they?

“Some kind of copycat, do you think?” Manetti’s voice was trying to sound hopeful.

Peters looked at him. He looked tired, his thin, wiry body starting to curve into one big question mark. Manetti wasn’t so young anymore either.

“After eleven years, Vic? A copycat? After eleven years go by?”

He threw down the cigarette. The stink of flesh and blood was still there in his nostrils. The cigarette couldn’t compete.

That and the other stink.

The one he remembered like a stab wound somewhere that had never healed—that would probably never heal.

The woman, bleeding, hurling herself down the cliffside, her knife slashing Daniels ear to ear
. . . .

“What I think,” he said.

He stepped on the cigarette guttering in the grass and looked out across the hills, gray but visible now, leading down through the forest to the cliffs and to the sea. Not so far away.

He listened for the birds. A good clean morning sound, dependable and real as daylight. The bird sounds helped.

“What I think,” he said, “is that we missed some last time. And I think they’ve been away for a little while.”

By the time David Halbard looked up from his Mac it was dawn.
Enough
, he thought, though he felt no strain.

He pushed away from his desk in the leather swivel chair, released the floppy disks from their disk drives, and filed them.

The night had gone by fast and well. Ever since college he’d been able to do this—pull all-nighters—if there was sufficient challenge to the project.

College was thirteen years ago. He had the thinning hair to prove it. But his energy hadn’t diminished. Just keep the coffee coming and he was fine.