Sorrow's Point (2 page)

“Before I saw the house, I saw the town,” he said. Troubled, that’s the word I’d been searching for to describe him.

“You have to admit, Sorrow’s Point is a great name for a town," I said.

“Oh, it gets better than the name.” He took another breath and smiled. The smile did not reach his eyes. Last I remembered, he had bright pale blue eyes; the eyes were much darker now.

“The first thing you need to know about Sorrow’s Point is that it is like small towns everywhere,” he said. “Everyone knows everybody else’s business, the police chief has doubled as the town librarian on more than one occasion, and nothing ever happens there — at least that’s what they tell you.”

He stared into the palms of his hands. His nails were scraggly, as if he’d been biting them. I didn’t know if he was expecting to see blood like Lady Macbeth, but he was focused on his hands – a little too focused.

“It has no Starbucks,” he said. “No Wal-Mart, and only one fast food restaurant. There is a small elementary school, and the middle school and high school exist comfortably in the same building. Just looking at the town, you feel transported back in time.”

He paused, looked up from his hands and turned to me. “Is the coffee done yet?”

“I dunno, I’ll check.” I got up from the sofa and walked into the kitchen. I grabbed a couple of mugs from the dish rack and checked the coffee maker. When it finished making gurgling sounds, I poured Will and myself a cup. “You take anything in it?” I asked him, sticking my head out of the kitchen so he could hear me.

“Black is fine,” he said.

I grabbed the mugs and walked back into the living room. He’d finally made himself comfortable, having taken his shoes off and placed them next to his coat on the floor.  I handed him a mug and placed myself back on the couch.

He took a sip of his coffee and placed the mug on the table next to the recliner. “Where was I?” he asked.

“The town,” I said.

He nodded. “Sorrow’s Point is located among the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. At one time, coal was big business, but now, its main income comes from the adventurous hikers passing through the Appalachian Trail.”

He took a sip of his coffee. After a few moments, he continued. “When I first saw it, I thought it was the perfect small town. But like all small towns, there are secrets, hidden away like Aunt Marge’s Christmas present that you pretend never existed. I never really thought about how dangerous secrets can be, but as I found out, in Sorrow’s Point, the secrets can kill you.”

“Jesus, Will. Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?” I asked. He seemed to be trying to distance himself from anything that caused him pain, but I wasn’t sure it was working very well. I was in way over my head.

He smiled at me. “That’s why I came to see you. You are the only one I know crazy enough to believe me.”

I shook my head. He was anything but believable. I wiped the sleep out of my eyes. I was so damn tired, but Will was worse off than I was. I honestly didn’t know how he was sitting upright, let alone putting together sentences.

And yet, I reminded myself, he was here, not for himself, but for his kid. “And your daughter?”

“Lucy.” He dug into his pant’s pocket, pulling out his wallet. He flipped through it and held it out to me.

I took the wallet. It was made of nice leather, but it was worn around the edges. He obviously used it a lot. The photo that I saw in the plastic envelope was of a beautiful girl. Blond hair, blue eyes — the type of kid we’d all like to have. Honestly, she was too pretty to have come from Will. At one time, my sister had had a crush on him, I never could understand why. His mouth was too big for his face, but I guess she liked his dirty blonde hair. Blonds were rare where I grew up. But beyond his hair and his mouth, there was Will’s nose. It was so big, I can remember that when we were kids, Will got teased because he had to turn a pop can sideways before he could drink out of it. “How’d you end up with her?”

He laughed. “She takes after her mother.” Then his eyes seemed to change. They darkened, and his lids drooped. He pulled out his cell phone and fiddled with it for a few minutes. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw on that small screen.

“This is Lucy, this morning,” he said.

The blond hair hung limp around her face. Her eyes looked odd, like the blood vessels around the whites of her eyes had burst from pressure. Her skin had a strange yellow cast, almost like the color of an old bruise. Her face was thinner. She looked sunken. The basic facial features were there, but I could hardly tell it was the same little girl. “What the fuck happened?”

He took the phone back and looked at me. “The house.”

It was hard to believe. I tried to think if any abuse could cause what I saw, but I came up short. The blood in her eyes was clearly from some sort of internal pressure. Punches to the face would have caused intense bruising outside the eye and around the socket, but that wasn’t what I saw in the picture. There were scratches on her face, but they were thin, as if cause by her own fingernails. I was dumbfounded. What did he expect me to do?

“Are you going to help her?” he asked.

I don’t know what he thought I could do. She needed a doctor, not an ex-priest who might have had a cowboy as an ancestor. “Well,” I said. “How can I help her?”

“You know what to do.” He was still in that chair. Nothing, no part of his body moved. He didn’t even blink.

I stood up and turned away from him. I couldn’t face him. I wasn’t even sure he’d listen to reason. “She needs a doctor.”

“Goddammit!” He grabbed me from behind and spun me around to face him. His face was red again. His grip on my shoulder was so tight it hurt. “She’s had a doctor! She’s had twenty fucking doctors. She’s been to internists, psychiatrists, G.P.’s, neurologists, and they all keep passing the fucking buck.”

I reached over and removed his hand from my shoulder. I wanted to beat the shit out of him for grabbing me, but I knew he was unstable. If something didn’t give soon, he was going to have his own nervous breakdown. “What do they all say?”

He threw himself back down in the recliner, the rage now gone. I had just let the air out of his basketball. “The shrinks aren’t sure what she has, maybe a split personality or schizophrenia. I took her out of the last hospital because the quacks were considering electroshock therapy. ECT on a six-year-old! Jesus Christ.” He put his head in his hands.

I walked over and sat back down on the sofa. “What makes you think she’s possessed?”

“Because she’s not my little girl anymore.”

“We’d been living in Washington, D.C..” He ran his fingers through his hair.

I wished I could tell what he was thinking, but beyond seeing that he was distressed, I couldn’t tell anything else from his body language.

“Did you like D. C.?” I asked.

“It was a big city. We thought Lucy would have a better childhood living in a small town. Now, I wish we’d never left.”

Just living in a big city didn’t seem like much of a reason to move to me. Plenty of kids grow up in big cities, not to mention the fact that usually if you escape small town life, you never return. “Why’d you really leave?”

He stared at me. He became a bit more fidgety. “Too much shit was happening, if you really want to know the truth. Bad shit that was too close. There’d been an incident at Lucy’s daycare, a rape in the parking garage of our apartment building, and Tor and I just couldn’t live with ourselves if anything bad had happened to Lucy. We decided to leave the city.”

“Tor?” I asked.

Will chuckled. “I’m sorry, I forgot. Again. Tor, Victoria, is Lucy’s mom, my wife.”

The continuous reminder that I hadn’t been a blip in his life for years was starting to irritate the fuck out of me. I nodded. “Maybe I should take notes.”

He froze.

I couldn’t help but snark. Here he was, expecting me to save the day. I wasn’t Mighty Mouse for Christ’s sake. What did he expect, Super-priest? Too bad I wasn’t a priest anymore. Whether he knew I was no longer of the cloth or not, it wasn’t like I was equipped to help him, even if I still had my old job.

He sat back in the chair, deflated. “I know it’s shitty, Jimmy, but I didn’t know anyone else I could turn to for this.”

I really didn’t want to help him. He’d pissed me off, and right now he was being a pain in the ass. But the “good” part of me wouldn’t let me kick him out of the house. He was too distressed, and that little girl needed help. I couldn’t refuse. “Well, just get on with it. I’m tired. I’m supposed to go to work today, but I guess that’s shot.” I got up, pulled back the curtain and looked out the window next to the sofa. The sky was beginning to lighten just slightly – the dark blue that the sky becomes before it turns periwinkle.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said.

I took a breath and turned around. “It’s all right.” I looked around, didn’t see my phone. I felt around for it in my pocket. It wasn’t there. Then I remembered, I’d left it upstairs. “Let me get my phone, call work and we’ll go from there.”

“Fuck.” I looked over at the window. The sun began to creep above the sky line.

Staring at the bookcase, I noticed I felt off, like someone had fed me something that just didn’t sit right. I looked over at the clock. It was six. Great.

I rolled over and stared at the wall. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t butterflies, and it sure as Hell wasn’t happy memories. It was more like a cramp you get before you have to run to the bathroom. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but my brain wouldn’t stop cycling around in my head. ”Fuck it.” I sat up, shook out my hair, threw back the covers and got out of bed.

I scratched the sleep out of my eyes and stared at the wall. What the Hell was I going to do with this much time on my hands? I popped my back and stood up.

Class wasn’t until eleven, so I had time to work on my grading, but I would rather sleep than grade papers. Being a Ph.D. graduate student sucked sometimes, but it was better than working at McDonald's, trying to scrape my life together.

I walked down the hallway and felt my cat, Issac, brush against my legs. He was a Siamese with unusual habits. My mother had found him, a stray. Not often do you find a purebred Siamese wandering around with nowhere else to go. When I saw him, he reminded me of Isaac Newton. Why, I didn’t know.

I walked across the living room, turned on the lamp and sat down on the futon. Isaac trotted over and rubbed his fang on the back of my hand. He tended to do that when he felt like showing affection. He was a really odd cat.

I looked around, trying to figure out what had me so uneasy, but I didn’t see anything. The only sound in the apartment was the ticking of the clock that hung above my television. I wiped my eyes again. It was too early.

I got up from the futon and walked into the kitchen. I paused and looked down at Isaac’s food bowl. It was empty. I filled it quickly and walked over to the sink so I could get a glass of water. I pulled the glass from the cabinet above the sink, filled it with water from the tap and turned around. The plants on my table were dead. All the flowers had fallen off, and they drooped over their pots, brown with rot. They’d been fine the night before.

It was a bad omen. About what, I didn’t know. Until I did know, those plants were getting the Hell out of my house. I grabbed a garbage bag from the pantry, loaded them all in it and unlocked the door to the deck. I put the plants out there. When I left to go to class, I’d make use of the dumpster.

I walked back in the house and paused. I sniffed, but I only smelled my normal apartment scent. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I walked over to the altar, grabbed a sage bunch and lit it. It was best to do the cleansing now before anything else happened. From the looks of things, I was going to need all the help I could get.