She let go of her coat and stepped back toward me, grabbing my arms tightly and stooping down just slightly to bring our faces mere inches apart. "But the most important thing is that we're in this together. I will not let them take you anywhere, and I will not leave you, ever. We are a family. I will always be here for you."
Something clicked into place, deep inside of me, and I realized that I had been waiting to hear those words for my entire life. They crushed me and freed me at the same time, fitting into my soul like a long-lost puzzle piece. The tension of the night, of the whole day, of the last five months, flowed out of me like blood from an opened vein, and I saw myself for the first time as my mother saw me—not a psycho, not a stalker, not a killer, but as a sad, lonely boy. I fell against her and realized, for the first time in years, that I was capable of crying.
In the few minutes before the police arrived, while Mom went in to the Crowleys' house to check on them, I took Mr. Crowley's cell phone from his discarded coat. Just in case, I looked through Neblin's pockets and took his as well. I didn't have time to dispose of them properly, so I hurled them—and Kay's phone—over the Crowley's back fence and into the forest beyond. There were no footprints back there, just acres of unbroken snow, so I hoped they'd stay safe until I could find and get rid of them more permanently. At the last moment, just in time, I remembered my GPS set, and pulled the second unit out from where I'd hidden it in the Crowleys' car. I hurled them into the forest as well, just as the first siren grew close enough to hear.
Soon screaming sirens were followed by flashing lights and a long line of squad cars, ambulances, a hazmat team, and even a fire truck. The neighbors watched from porches and windows, shivering in their coats and slippers, as an army of uniforms spread throughout the street and secured the entire area. Neblin's body was found and photographed; Kay, still unconscious, was treated and rushed to the hospital; Mom and I were interviewed; and the mess in our mortuary was carefully studied and catalogued.
The FBI agent I'd seen on the news, Agent Fornian, interviewed Mom and me in the mortuary for most of that night— first together, then one at a time, while the other cleaned up.
I told him, and everyone else who asked, the same story I'd told Mom—that I'd heard a noise, gone outside, to check on it, and watched the killer go into the Crowleys' house. They asked if I knew where Mr. Crowley was, and told them I didn't know; they asked why I had decided to move Neblin's body, and I couldn't think of a reason that didn't sound crazy, so I just said that it seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge in our back room we pretty much ignored: we said that we had no idea how it got there. I couldn't tell if they believed us or not, but eventually everyone seemed satisfied.
Before they left, they asked if I needed to see a grief counselor to help me deal with the simultaneous disappearance of two men I knew relatively well, but I said that seeing a second therapist to talk about my first therapist seemed land of unfaithful. Nobody laughed. Dr. Neblin would have.
By morning, the story had spread and mutated: the Clayton Killer had killed Bill Crowley while he was out driving late, and then killed Ben Neblin on his way back to Crowley's house. There, the killer had started to beat and torture Kay until her neighbors—Mom and me—noticed something was wrong and interrupted him. The killer came after us, but ran away when we resisted, leaving behind nothing but the mysterious black sludge recognizable from the previous attacks. No one would believe that the attacker was some kind of disintegrating monster, so we didn't bother to explain it that way.
There were just enough loose ends in the story, of course, that rumors began to fly—there were no bodies for the killer or for Crowley, so of course they might still be alive somewhere— but I knew that the long ordeal was finally over. For the first time in months, I felt peace.
I imagine that more suspicion might have fallen on me if Kay hadn't been my staunchest defender—she swore to the police that I was a good boy, and a good neighbor, and that we loved each other like family. When they found my eyelash in her bedroom, she told them how I'd helped Mr. Crowley with the door hinges; when they found my fingerprints on the windows of her car, she told them how I'd helped to check the oil and the tire pressure. Every question they had could be answered by the fact that I'd spent almost every day at their house for two straight months. The only truly damning evidence was on the cell phones, but so far, no one had found them.
Besides all of that, I was just a kid—I don't think they ever really took me seriously as a suspect. If I'd tried to cover up what had happened that night I'm sure I would have seemed more suspicious, but by going straight to the police with everything, we seemed to have earned a bit of trust. After a while, it was almost like it had never happened.