The Dead Soul (14 page)

25

Monday, September 8, 7:52 P.M.

What the mailman didn’t know about Mary O’Keefe was that she was a two-time all-American swimmer for Northrop High School before an illness saddled her. Not that she could swim to shore. But what if Mary had been able to finagle one of the small life rafts free from its ties? Several minutes had passed, he quickly realized, since he had taken his eyes off his victim. That was plenty of time for Mary to untie a raft and jump into the water.

“Bitch!” he screamed into the darkening skies above him, the stars now beginning to shine. “You are going to wish you …”

Mary was not afraid of the water. She could probably find her way somewhere. Maybe not back to the harbor. But damn it all, she might be able to find life again by morning. She had no chance aboard
The Grand Pause
. Mary was a survivor. She needed to do whatever she could. God’s plan or not, she wanted to live. This was all rather clear to the mailman now that she was gone.

After the splash, he ran over and checked on the life rafts.

All were accounted for.

He panicked. Looked down into the water. Anxiety rose in him. From one side of the boat to the other, he walked the deck. Held his forehead. Scolded himself.

“Mary?”

Where was she?

“Mary? Mary?”

Nothing.

He paced. Rubbed his temples. Shouted. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. I am going to find you. Then I am going to
gut
you from belly button to throat and watch you
bleed
. You should have never done this!” Spittle projected from his mouth as he screamed over the side of the boat. “Do you realize what you’ve done? Oh, Mary, I was going to be nice. I was going cut your spinal cord first so you didn’t feel anything—‘a poor man’s epidural,’ the coroner would call it at the morgue. But now you will suffer. You bitch. How could you
do
this.”

With his favorite knife in hand, the mailman walked back and forth, pacing. He needed to figure out what to do. He had lost control of the situation. It was the first time he had felt a sense of losing control since he started killing. And he didn’t much like it.

The furnace. His hands tied behind his back. The Teacher.

“Don’t hurt me, no …”

What the hell happened? He let Mary O’Keefe have a little bit of freedom and she took advantage of it. Damn, she had lied about being seasick. She had fooled him.

He thought of sitting down, cutting his thigh deep, teaching himself a good lesson. It would relieve the pain. But as he put the knife to his skin and began, an idea stopped him.

He stood. Found his search light. Scanned the water around the boat, lighthouselike, paying careful attention to anything in the water that moved. A ripple. A splash. Any noise.

He realized rather quickly, however, that seeing a person out on this water at this time of the night, you had a better chance of reaching up and touching the stars.

He had let his guard down.
Damn-it-tall!

Dropping the light. “Mary!”

What would it hurt, he thought, not tying Mary O’Keefe up way out here? How far could she go? He had control of the radio. He padlocked the life rafts. No one was around for miles. All his weapons were locked up. She had vomited most of the way out here, for crying out loud.

There was nothing but water.

“Mary?”

Where there’s a will ...

And now his next victim was gone. Poof! Swallowed up by the darkness. Mary O’Keefe was going to ruin everything.

26

Monday, September 8, 8:09 P.M.

There was a pulse of discontent and anger surging through the mailman’s veins as he wondered how he was going to fix this problem.

“Mary … oh, Mary … where are you?” It was a game now. He could not let the young woman know that he was in stage-four panic mode. So he mocked.

“Mary?” He talked slow and peaceful.

Rain came down heavily, large droplets drenching the deck of The Grand Pause, making loud popping noises on the fiberglass. Off in the distance the sky brightened in flashes as lightning zapped the water in near perfectly staggered Harry Potter bolts.

The mailman stopped. Another idea. This one better.

He stood with his hand on the ignition key.

No.

Yes
. Turn on the engines and make a series of passes around the area. He thought about this while grinding his teeth. His temples, two small drum skins, pulsating like a frog’s throat.

He was just about ready to crank the engines over, when …

8:15 P.M.

Mary O’Keefe was underneath
The Grand Pause
, floating with the slow, up and down motion of the swells. Her toes were numb. Her blonde hair as soaked and salty as algae. Despite the grim outlook she faced, Mary relied on the same faith that had gotten her through all those lonely nights in her room by herself, rehabilitating from that bout of mono.

“ ‘Seek good and not evil. Hate evil and love good.’ ”

She whispered passages from the Old Testament to herself she had memorized as part of a penance Father John had once given her.

The back of Mary’s head was inches away from one of the engine’s two window-fan-like propellers. She didn’t know how close she was to having the back of her scalp peeled off by the blade—a sharp knife through the end of a watermelon. As much as Mary O’Keefe knew about swimming, she knew nothing about boats. She could not see two feet in front of herself out here in the darkness. She’d found a pocket of space inside the engine cavity. It was enough to keep her head above water while holding on to a steel bracket. Yet unbeknownst to her, the back of Mary’s head was in the direct path of the propeller.

8:25 P.M.

The mailman started to crank the ignition key to the right. The engine turning over once would provide enough power to the engines to slice a good chunk of Mary’s head clean off.

No … wait …

Another idea stopped him.

The mailman lowered the rescue boat, a small rubber raft, down into the water.

A splash.

He climbed onto it with a search light, then tied the small boat to the stern of the main vessel with two hundred feet of rope. He used an electric trolling motor to maneuver his way around
The Grand Pause.

Mary stayed still as a bobber.

“Come on, Mary. It’s over. I will find you.” He sounded as if he and Mary were playing a friendly game of hide-and-go-seek. “I tell you what, Mary, if you give yourself up, I’ll go easy on you.”

He laughed.

There were quiet splashes of waves cresting and falling over. Gulls squawked overhead, but he couldn’t see them. The rain had stopped. A white beam of light from the moon trembled reflectively across the water. The mailman focused on it. The menacing shadow clouds were gone. Tomorrow was going to be a beautiful day.

Mary was out here somewhere. He could almost smell her cheap perfume.

“Come on, Miss O’Keefe. You’re a million miles from nowhere.” He was twenty-five yards south of the main vessel. His searchlight passed over Mary’s head twice already.

8:34 P.M.

Mary stayed composed. She thought about what to do. As she let go of the bracket to rub the salt from her eyes, a great swell came up and pushed Mary out to sea. She swam, pumping her legs with all her might. Her teeth chattered. All she thought about was dying out here, in the water, alone, without a hand from God. She’d heard drowning wasn’t such a bad way to go. It was like being drugged, she’d read. You delight in the euphoric nature of a slow death after accepting your fate and allowing that first full breath of water to fill your lungs.

She heard him. “Mary?” That light again. A flash. It scanned over her head, just missing her. “Mary O’Keefe. Now you come back home to me, darling, so we can finish what we started.”

“ ‘Let justice surge like water.’ ” Mary prayed. She tasted salt on her lips. Her eyes stung. A cut on her elbow burned as though rubbing alcohol had been poured on it.

She saw him motor around to the bow. With his back to her, in one quick move, Mary gave everything she had, swam out a few feet, hopped up on the back of the boat deck, then ran for the steering console.

Start the boat and take off.

It would work. She had thought
it through.

Yet what Mary had failed to consider was that he had taken the keys with him.

The mailman was crazy—yes. Stupid—no.

Mary looked around in dread. Where was he? She couldn’t see him. He had turned off the light.

Pray.

“ ‘The man brought me back to the entrance to the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold.’ ” Tears ran down Mary’s face. Her whole body shook. She kept repeating the psalm.

8:45 P.M.

He stood quietly at the bow. Mary had her back to him, her head down, hands on the steering wheel. When she turned, Mary O’Keefe dropped to her knees.

He wiped a wrist across his forehead, aimed the crossbow at Mary’s chest.

“I told you, Mary O’Keefe, you cannot hide from me out here.”

That soldering iron in his hand. “If you say anything at all,” the Teacher breathed in his ear, “I will finish what I started.”

He squinted one eye, brought the bow shoulder level, aimed it at Mary’s heart, pulled the trigger.

Mary closed her eyes, her lips moving in one final prayer.

For safekeeping, he walked over, picked Mary’s limp body up, exposing the right side of her neck, and slit her throat.

The blood gushed. A stream of it, like a burning wick, ran down a groove on the deck of the boat. White against red. Such a contrast.

“This is the cup of my blood,” he shouted. He dipped two fingers into Mary’s exposed larynx, then wiped the blood across his face, underneath both eyes. He stood still. Then took out his filleting knife and sharpening steel—that long, round tubular wandlike apparatus chefs use at carving stations—and ran the blade across the grooves.

Confident his knife was sharp enough, he looked down at Mary. Before making that first cut on her leg, he felt a strong sense of letting go. Such joy. A numbing high, as if he’d taken a tranquilizer.

The dawn of a new day. I win.

After the initial buzz of the kill wore off, every splash of blood on the boat irritated him. He knew it was going to take the rest of the night to get the deck clean. He’s be on his hands and knees, scrubbing and cursing Mary.

Then again, what did it matter?

As he rested the edge of the knife on Mary’s shin, he knew what he had to do with Mary’s body once he was finished. It would send a direct message to those investigators he had plastered all over the walls of his living room. Yes, he was going to speak to them now. It was time to say something. Mary had pushed him into it.

When he hit bone, he put the knife down and picked up the hacksaw.

They think they’re smart?
He sawed back and forth, back and forth.
I’ll show them
.

27

Tuesday, September 9, 9:48 A.M
.

The last place Angela Bizzetti wanted to be on a Tuesday morning during the second week of her sophomore year was aboard the Boston Tea Party Ship. “It’s not even, like, real,” Angela told a friend as they stepped on the school bus. “It’s a replica.”

The ship was an accurate model. The hull tar black, with two yellow pinstripes running bow to stern, two masts centered perfectly on the vessel’s deck. Beyond that, it was your typical tourist trap. People from Wichita who had never been to Bean Town were wowed by the vessel. And that was the idea.

“Smells like dead fish,” Gina Belanger said as the children stepped off the bus and filed into a single line in front of the boat.

“Rat shit,” Mark Tassel shouted, getting a roar from the group.

The boat swayed to the motion of the bay as the children, antsy and impatient, waited for their guide.

“He’s not bad-looking,” Angela said, staring at the guy as he made his way to the front of the line, a clipboard in hand.

“I’m glad it’s rather chilly this morning,” the guide explained, “because on that cold night, December 16, 1773, when a group of patriots, disguised as native Americans, raided three tea ships like the one in back of me, dumping their cargoes of tea overboard and into the Boston Harbor to show their distrust of the King and disloyalty to taxes, all of your little iPod, text-messaging, boy- and girl-crazed lives changed forever.”

As the guide explained the rules of the ship, Angela tapped out and sent a text to Bernadette Alden. Angela was pissed about what Bernadette and Marcus Hardy had done the previous night in the storage room of the Abercrombie and Fitch.

YOU SKANK. U 2 BETTA HOPE

I DONT FIND YOU. 4 2DAY YOU

SAFE. 2MORROW YOUR ASS MINE.

The tour guide wore jeans, a blue hoodie, SAVE THE WHALES written on the front, DON’T BUY CORPORATE COSMETICS on the back. He was able to project his voice like an opera singer. “The rebellion would have started about right here.” He pointed to an area near the stern. The props—a chest, boxes of tea—looked like leftovers from the set of a Peter Pan play.

It was an awful thought: Sandy Duncan in green tights.

The ship was crowded. Boys and girls bunched together, talking, joking, making fun of how people lived back then. Their teacher stood with folded arms, captivated by the guide’s tutorial.

“The rebel boycott reached a terrible climax when a band of irate colonists raided these British tea ships on Griffin’s Wharf, right here, where we’re all standing.”

Angela got a text back.

LOL! WTF. BITCH. LET’S GO. ANYTIME.

“Look at this, Jackie.” Angela turned the screen toward her friend.

“As they dumped the three-hundred-and-forty-two tea chests into the harbor, the rumor is that they all shouted what are now infamous words, ‘Taxation without representation.’”

“You betta not, like, let that skank get away with that,” Jackie said. “She stole yo man
and
dissed you?”

Angela tapped out another text. As she did, something fell on the screen. It startled her.

“What the …?”

The wind whipped a flag above them. It sounded like a sheet hanging from a clothesline on a blustery day.

The substance that dropped on Angela’s cellphone screen was red and tacky, thick and creamy, the texture of Tabasco sauce.

“What in the heck?” Angela said. She couldn’t figure it out.

Then she felt several taps on her shoulder.

Was it raining?

Angela and her two friends stood below the front mast of the ship. It was the only section of the boat you couldn’t see getting on. Angela looked up instinctively, hoping to see the source of the red droplet on her screen. As she did, her mind didn’t quite register at first what her eyes focused on.

Mary O’Keefe’s legless, naked corpse was strapped about ten feet in the air, where a yardarm crossed the mast. She hung there as if some sort of a grotesquely dissected Christlike figure. Mary’s chest cavity was filleted open. It was clear that her insides, at least partially, had been crudely removed. Her legs were lopped off directly below the knees.

Angela couldn’t take her eyes off the dead woman as blood droplets peppered down onto her neck and into her mouth.

Then she screamed, a piercing howl startling everyone aboard the ship, grabbing their attention, beckoning them to gather around.

A gust of wind kicked up as mayhem ensued.

Two dozen teenagers ran for the exits at the same time. Two or three of them jumped into the water, swimming for the dock.

The tour guide stood on the deck staring up at Mary O’Keefe, calling someone on a walkie-talkie he pulled from his back pocket.

The devil had done his work aboard this ship, tainting this stop along the Freedom Trail forever. Generations of future schoolchildren would climb aboard the ship, then point—“Right there, on that mast. That was where the girl saw the dead woman with no legs, her insides hanging out of her like
The Walking Dead.”