At the end of the hall, the door to Zach and Theresa’s bedroom stood wide open. Vi approached carefully, as though she might wake them, pulse racing, a pounding in the side of her neck.
She did not deny or curse the fear. Squatting down, she prayed, I don’t feel You in this house. Go with me into that bedroom. She rose, felt just as alone, but walked on until she stood in the threshold of the master bedroom, eyes watering from the smell.
Vi had no tricks for steeling herself up to see innocence eviscerated. It punched the wind out of you and then you carried on or you quit. Sgt. Mullins had told her that early on. He’d been right.
With the tip of her pencil, she flicked the light switch.
The room shrieked at her and she let slip a bated whimper. Her stomach fluttered as she took three steps forward and looked straight into the worst of it.
Mr. and Mrs. Worthington stared back at her, despoiled of any scintilla of dignity.
Vi jotted on her notepad, relieved to look away.
When she finished she walked back down the hall into the foyer and opened the front door.
It felt so good to breathe fresh air again. She wanted to wash her hands for an hour.
As she stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door closed after her, she felt Sgt. Mullins and the CSI techs studying her, reading the abhorrence on her face, reflecting it in their own.
“The parents are torn up,” she said to everyone. “May be a ritual-type thing. And the boy under the table is holding something in his right hand.”
One of the techs said, “You know Andrew Thomas used to live just across the lake. Bet you ten beers this was him. He’s come back out of hiding. Wanted to do it with a flourish.”
As Vi stepped across the sidewalk into the grass, she saw a local news van parking in the cul-de-sac.
The patrolman stood in the street with his arm around Brenda Moorefield and as Vi walked toward them, cold again, she called her husband and told him not to wait up.
23
ON the day he planned to interview Andrew Thomas, Horace Boone woke to the frozen pitiless darkness of his singlewide shithole on the outskirts of Haines Junction. The kerosene heater had gone out again during the night and despite five layers of quilts and blankets he lay on the mattress on the floor, shivering uncontrollably. Having woken cold for the last two weeks he was beginning to realize that he would not survive a Yukon winter in this rundown shelter, when the temperature fell to minus forty and the wind howled through the thin walls.
He threw off the covers and came to his feet, already fully clothed in a camouflage bib and down hunting jacket he’d purchased last week at The Woodsman, one of the local outfitters. Moving out of the tiny bedroom, he crossed the “living room” in three steps and entered the kitchen. The refrigerator was the hotspot of the trailer this morning and he pulled open the door and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Shaking it up, he took a long sip of the acidic slush and then began foraging the kitchen cabinets for his breakfast.
While he consumed a stale Poptart he leaned against the sink and glanced through the living room at the wretchedness he’d called home for the last month. The mattress, the television, and that disgusting couch comprised the furnishings of his trailer. You could only sit on the left end of the couch where the springs still held weight. And if you smacked the brown cushions on a clear day, you could watch them emit a mushrooming cloud of dust into the sunbeams from their inexhaustible store.
He’d been doing most of his writing in the village at Bill’s diner, sitting in a booth near the window, drinking obscene amounts of coffee. In the last two weeks he’d written the first three chapters of his book on lined college rule notebook paper. They chronicled his first encounter with Andrew Thomas at the bookstore in Anchorage, his journey to the Yukon, and his sneaking into Andrew’s cabin. He kept the purple notebook with him at all times during the day and stored it in the freezer while he slept so that if the trailer caught fire his manuscript might have a chance.
On October 30, the seventh anniversary of my mother’s death, I discovered that my life in Haines Junction, a life I loved madly, was over.
Just before noon I was sitting in the computer lab of the public library reading an emotional Live Journal entry from an internet friend I knew only as Tammy M. Midway through a hefty paragraph in which she analyzed her incapacity for shallow social interaction, the Champagne woman sitting at the computer beside me turned to her husband and said, “Look at that, Ralph. Andrew Thomas is back.”
Adrenaline shot through me, I felt the bloodheat color my face, but when I glanced over at the couple I saw the woman pointing to a news headline on her monitor. Feeling my gaze, she looked at me.
“Horrible, isn’t it?” I couldn’t speak. “Says he slaughtered a whole family.”
“Where?” I choked on the word.
“I’m not sure, let me see.” She scrolled to the beginning of the article. “Here it is. Davidson, North Carolina.”
Something inside of me died right there. I found the website and skimmed the article and the names of the victims. In the third paragraph I read these words:
The next door neighbor of the Worthingtons, Elizabeth Lancing, was kidnapped on Monday. Though unforthcoming with details at this time, authorities have alluded to their belief that her kidnapping is related. Her husband was Walter Lancing, a former friend of the suspected serial killer, novelist Andrew Thomas, and is believed to have been one of Mr. Thomas’s victims, though his body was never recovered.
My head ached and I feared losing consciousness so I sent the article to the network printer and logged off the computer. Taking my printout, I walked out of the library into the fierce noonday cold.
I reached my Jeep, climbed inside, pored over the rest of the article.
The description of the lighthouse and what had been done to poor sweet Karen broke me.
My safe little world had just been blown the f**k apart.
On the off chance that Andrew Thomas was in fact a psychopath, Horace Boone stopped to use a payphone on the way to his cabin.
It took him a moment to recall the number.
The phone booth stood in an alley against the building that housed The Lantern. It was a clear day, blue and very cold. He looked at his watch. There was something awfully depressing about knowing it was lunchtime when the sky shone no brighter than 9:00 a.m. and wouldn’t for months to come.
She answered, “Hello?”
“Mom?”
A brief pause and then, “Hello, Horace.”
“Look, I should’ve called before. I—”