NOS4A2 A Novel

Haverhill


ON THE FIRST OF JULY, VIC AND WAYNE PUT LAKE WINNIPESAUKEE in the rearview mirror and drove back to her mother’s house in Massachusetts. Vic’s house now. She kept forgetting.

Lou was flying into Boston to spend the Fourth with Wayne and see some big-city fireworks, something he had never done before. Vic was going to spend the weekend going through the dead woman’s stuff, and trying not to drink. She had a notion to sell the house in the fall and move back to Colorado. It was something to talk about with Lou. She could work on Search Engine anywhere.

Traffic was bad on 495. They were trapped on the road, under a headache sky of low, fuming clouds. Vic felt that no one should have to put up with a sky like that cold sober.

“Do you worry much about ghosts?” Wayne asked while they were idling, waiting for cars in front of them to move.

“Why? You creeped out about staying the night at Grandma’s? If her spirit is still there, it wouldn’t wish you any harm. She loved you.”

“No,” Wayne said, his tone indifferent. “I know ghosts used to talk to you, is all.”

“Not anymore,” she said, and finally traffic loosened up and Vic could ride the breakdown lane to the exit. “Not ever, kid. Your mom was screwed up in the head. That’s why I had to go to the hospital.”

“They weren’t real?”

“Of course not. The dead stay dead. The past is past.”

Wayne nodded. “Who’s that?” he asked, looking across the front yard as they turned in to the driveway.

Vic had been thinking about ghosts, not paying attention, and hadn’t seen the woman sitting on her front step. As Vic put the car into park, the visitor rose to her feet.

Her visitor wore acid-washed jeans, disintegrating to threads at the knees and thighs, and not in a fashionable way either. She had a cigarette in one hand, trailing a pale wisp of smoke. In the other hand was a folder. She had the stringy, twitchy look of a junkie. Vic could not place her but was sure she knew her. She had no idea who the visitor was, but felt in some way she had been expecting this woman for years.

“Someone you know?” Wayne asked.

Vic shook her head. She was temporarily unable to find her voice. She had spent most of the last half year holding tight to both sanity and sobriety, like an old woman clutching a bag of groceries. Staring into the yard, she felt the bottom of the bag beginning to tear and give way.

The junkie girl in the unlaced Chuck Taylor high-tops raised one hand in a nervous, terribly familiar little wave.

Vic opened the car door and got out, came around the front to get between Wayne and the woman.

“Can I help you?” Vic croaked. She needed a glass of water.

“I hope s-ss-ss-sss—” She sounded as if she were hung up on a sneeze. Her face darkened, and she forced out, “So. He’s f-f-fuh-free.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Wraith,” Maggie Leigh said. “He’s on the road again. I think you sh-sh-should use your bridge and try to f-f-f-f-find him, Vic.”


SHE HEARD WAYNE CLIMBING OUT OF THE CAR BEHIND HER, HIS DOOR thumping shut. He opened the rear door, and Hooper leaped from the backseat. She wanted to tell him to get back in the car but couldn’t without signaling her fear.

The woman smiled at her. There was an innocence and a simple kindness to her face that Vic very much associated with the mad. She had seen it often enough in the mental hospital.

“I’m s-s-ss-sorry,” the visitor said. “That wasn’t how I mm-mm-muh—” Now she sounded like she might be gagging. “—mmmMMmmeant to begin. I’m m-mm-mm—oh, God. Mmm-mm-mMMM-MAGGIE. Bad st-stammer. S-s-s-s-suh-suh—apologies. We had tea once. You s-scraped your knee. Long time ago. You weren’t much older than your s-s-suh-ss-ss—” She stopped talking, drew a deep breath, tried again. “Kid here. But I think you really m-must remember.”

It was awful listening to her try to talk—like watching someone with no legs dragging herself along a sidewalk. Vic thought, She didn’t use to be so bad, while at the same time remaining convinced that the junkie girl was a deranged and possibly dangerous stranger. She found herself able to juggle these two notions without any sense of contradicting herself whatsoever.

The junkie girl put her hand on Vic’s for a moment, but her palm was hot and damp, and Vic quickly pulled away. Vic looked at the girl’s arms and saw they were a battlefield of pocked, shiny scars: cigarette burns. Lots of them, some livid pink and recent.

Maggie regarded her with a brief look of confusion that bordered on hurt, but before Vic could speak, Hooper barged past to poke his nose into Maggie Leigh’s crotch. Maggie laughed and pushed his snout away.

“Oh, gee. You have your own yeti. That’s adorbs,” she said. She looked beyond the dog to Vic’s son. “And you must b-b-be Wayne.”

“How do you know his name?” Vic asked in a hoarse voice, thinking a crazy thing: Her Scrabble tiles can’t give her proper names.

“You dedicated your first s-ss-s—book to him,” said Maggie. “We used to have them all at the library. I was so suh-suh-sssssssspsyched for you.”

Vic said, “Wayne? Take Hooper into the house.”

Wayne whistled and clicked and walked by Maggie, and the dog shambled after. Wayne firmly shut the door behind both of them.

Maggie said, “I always thought you’d write. You said you would. I wondered if I mm-mm-my-mm-my—might hear from you after M-M-Muh-MmmManx was arrested, but then I thought you wanted to put him behind you. I almost wrote you a few times, b-but first I worried your puh-p-puh-pp-p—I worried your folks would question you about me, and later I thought muh-mm-mm—perhaps you wanted to put m-me behind you as well.”

She tried to smile again, and Vic saw she was missing teeth.

“Ms. Leigh. I think you’re confused. I don’t know you. I can’t help you,” Vic said.

What frightened Vic most was her feeling that this was exactly backward. Maggie wasn’t the one who was confused—her whole face glistened with lunatic certainty. If anyone was confused, it was Vic. She could see it all in her mind’s eye: the dark cool of the library, the yellowing Scrabble tiles scattered on the desk, the bronze paperweight that looked like a pistol.

“If you don’t know me, how come you know my last name? I didn’t mention it,” Maggie said, only with more stuttering—it took close on half a minute to get this sentence out.

Vic held up a hand for silence and ignored this statement as the absurd distraction it was. Of course Maggie had mentioned her last name. She had said it when she introduced herself, Vic was sure.

“I see you know quite a bit about me, though,” Vic continued. “Understand that my son knows nothing about Charles Manx. I’ve never talked to him about the man. And I’m not having him find out from . . . from a stranger.” She almost said a crazy person.

“Of course. I didn’t m-muh-mm-mean to alarm you or s-s-suh-s—”

“But you did anyway.”

“B-b-buh-b-but, Vic.”

“Stop calling me that. We don’t know each other.”

“Would you prefer if I called you the B-B-Buh-Brat?”

“I don’t want you to call me anything. I want you to go.”

“B-b-but you had to know about Mm-Mm-Mmm—” In her desperation to get the word out, she seemed to be moaning.

“Manx.”

“Thank you. Yes. We have to d-d-d-decide how to d-d-deal with him.”

“Deal with what? What do you mean, Manx is on the road again? He isn’t up for parole until 2016, and the last I heard he was in a coma. Even if he woke up and they did set him free, he’d have to be two hundred years old. But they didn’t cut him loose, because they would’ve notified me if they had.”

“He’s not that old. Try a hundred and ffff-ff-f-f”—she sounded like she was imitating the sound of a burning fuse—“fifteen!”

“Jesus Christ. I don’t have to listen to this shit. You’ve got three minutes to beat it, lady. If you’re still on the lawn after that, I’m calling the police on you.”

Vic stepped off the path and into the grass, meaning to walk around Maggie to the door.

She didn’t make it.

“They didn’t notify you they released him ’cause they didn’t release him. They think he died. Last Mmmm-MmMay.”

Vic caught in place. “What do you mean, they think he died?”

Maggie extended the manila folder.

She had written a phone number on the inside cover. Vic’s gaze caught and held on it, because after the area code the first three digits were her own birthday and the next four numbers were not four numbers at all but the letters FUFU, a kind of obscene stammer in and of themselves.

The folder contained perhaps a half dozen printouts from various newspapers, on stationery that said HERE PUBLIC LIBRARY—HERE, IOWA. The stationery was water-stained and shriveled, foxed at the edges.

The first article was from the Denver Post.

ALLEGED SERIAL KILLER CHARLES TALENT MANX DIES, LEAVES QUESTIONS

There was a thumbnail photo of his mug shot: that gaunt face with its protruding eyes and pale, almost lipless mouth. Vic tried to read the article, but her vision blurred over.

She remembered the laundry chute, her eyes streaming and her lungs full of smoke. She remembered thoughtless panic, set to the tune of “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”

Phrases from the article jumped out at her: “degenerative Parkinson’s-like illness . . . intermittent coma . . . suspected in a dozen kidnappings . . . Thomas Priest . . . stopped breathing at 2:00 A.M.”

“I didn’t know,” Vic said. “Nobody told me.”

She was too off balance to keep her rage focused on Maggie. She kept thinking, simply, He’s dead. He’s dead, and now you can let him go. This part of your life is done because he’s dead.

The thought didn’t bring any joy with it, but she felt the possibility of something better: relief.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell me he was gone,” Vic said.

“Mmm-mm—I bet ’cause they were embarrassed. Look at the next page.”

Vic glanced wearily up at Margaret Leigh, remembering what she had said about Manx being on the road again. She suspected they were getting to it, to Maggie Leigh’s own particular madness, the lunacy that had driven her to come all the way from Here, Iowa, to Haverhill, Massachusetts, just so she could hand this folder to Vic.

Vic turned the page.

ALLEGED SERIAL KILLER’S CORPSE VANISHES FROM MORGUE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT BLAMES “MORBID VANDALS”

Vic skimmed the first few paragraphs, then closed the folder and offered it back to Maggie.

“Some sicko stole the body,” Vic said.

Maggie said, “D-d-d-don’t think so.” She didn’t accept the folder.

Somewhere down the street, a lawn mower roared to life. For the first time, Vic noticed how hot it was here in the front yard. Even through the overcast, the sun was baking her head.

“So you think he faked his death. Well enough to fool two doctors. Somehow. Even though they had already begun an autopsy on the body. No. Wait. You think he really died but then, forty-eight hours later, he came back to life. Pulled himself out of his drawer at the morgue, got himself dressed, and walked out.”

Maggie’s face—her whole body—relaxed in an expression of profound relief. “Yes. I’ve c-come so f-f-fff-far to see you, Vic, because I knew, I just knew you’d b-b-buh-believe me. Now look at the next article. There’s a mm-mm-muh—a guy in Kentucky who disappeared f-f-from his home in an antique Rolls-Royce. Mmm-Mmuh-Manx’s Rolls-Royce. The article d-d-doesn’t say it was the one that belonged to Manx, buh-buh-but if you look at the p-p-p-p-picture—”

“I’m not going to look at shit,” Vic said, and threw the folder in Maggie’s face. “Get the f*ck out of my yard, you crazy bitch.”

Maggie’s mouth opened and closed, just like the mouth of the big old koi in the fish tank that was a central feature of her little office in the Here Public Library, which Vic could remember perfectly, even though she had never been there.

Vic’s rage was boiling over at last, and she wanted to scald Maggie with it. It was not just that Maggie was blocking the way to Vic’s door, or that with her mad babble she threatened to undermine Vic’s own sense of what was true—to steal from Vic her hard-won sanity. It was that Manx was dead, really dead, but this lunatic couldn’t let Vic have that. Charlie Manx, who had kidnapped God knew how many children, who had kidnapped and terrorized and nearly killed Vic herself—Charles Manx was in the dirt. Vic had escaped him at last. Only Margaret f*cking Leigh wanted to bring him back, dig him up, make Vic afraid of him again.

“Pick that shit up when you go,” Vic told her.

She stepped on some of the papers as she proceeded around Maggie to the door. She was careful not to put her foot on the dirty, sun-faded fedora sitting on the edge of the bottom step.

“He’s not d-d-done, Vic,” Maggie said. “That’s why I wanted—was hoping—you could try to f-f-find him. I know I told you n-not to b-b-b-back when we first met. But you were too young then. You weren’t ready. Now I think you’re the only one who can fff-find him. Who can stop him. If you still know how. Because if you don’t, I’m worried he’ll try and f-fuh-fuh-find you.”

“The only thing I plan to find is a phone to call the police. If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when they show up,” Vic said. Then, turning back and getting into Maggie Leigh’s face, she said, “I DON’T KNOW YOU. Take your crazy somewhere else.”

“B-b-b-buh-but, Vic—” Maggie said, and lifted a finger. “Don’t you remember? I g-guh-gggave you those earrings.”

Vic walked inside and slammed the door.

Wayne, who was standing just three paces away and who had probably heard the whole thing, jumped. Hooper, who was right behind him, cringed and whined softly, turned and trotted off, looking for someplace happier to be.

Vic turned back to the door and leaned her forehead against it and took a deep breath. It was half a minute before she was ready to look through the fish-eye spyhole into the front yard.

Maggie was just straightening up from the front step, carefully placing her filthy fedora on her head with a certain dignity. She gave the front door of Vic’s house a last forlorn look, then turned and limped away down the lawn. She didn’t have a car and was in for a long, hot, six-block walk to the closest bus station. Vic watched her until she was out of sight—watched and idly stroked the earrings she was wearing, favorites since she was a kid, a pair of Scrabble tiles: F & U.





By the Road


WHEN WAYNE WENT OUT HALF AN HOUR LATER, TO WALK Hooper—no, check that, to get away from his mother and her mood of pressurized unhappiness—the folder was sitting on the top step, all the papers neatly shuffled back into it.

He glanced over his shoulder, through the still-open door, but his mother was up in the kitchen, out of sight. Wayne shut the door. He bent and picked up the folder, opened it, and glanced at a thin stack of printouts. “Alleged Serial Killer.” “Morbid Vandals.” “Boeing Engineer Vanishes.”

He folded the sheaf of paper into quarters and put it in the back pocket of his shorts. He shoved the empty folder down behind the hedges planted along the front of the house.

Wayne was not sure he wanted to look at them and, at just twelve years old, was still not self-aware enough to know he had already decided to look at them, that he had made his decision the moment he shoved the folder out of sight behind the hedge. He crossed the lawn and sat on the curb. He felt as if he were carrying nitroglycerin in his back pocket.

He stared across the street, at a lawn of wilted, yellowing grass. The old guy who lived over there was really letting his yard go. The guy had a funny name—Sig de Zoet—and a room full of little model soldiers. Wayne had wandered over the day of Gram’s funeral, and the old guy had showed them to him, being nice. He had told Wayne that once upon a time his mother, Vic, had painted a few of his figures. “Your mother hoff a fine brush even then,” he said, with an accent like a Nazi. Then his nice old wife had made Wayne a glass of frosted iced tea with slices of orange in it that had tasted just about like heaven.

Wayne thought about going over there to look at the old guy’s soldiers again. It would be out of the heat, and it would take his mind off the printouts in his back pocket that he probably shouldn’t look at.

He even got as far as pushing himself up off the curb and getting ready to cross the street—but then he looked back at his own house and sat down again. His mother wouldn’t like it if he wandered off without saying where he was going, and he didn’t think he could head back into the house and ask permission yet. So he stayed where he was and looked at the wilting lawn across the street and missed the mountains.

Wayne had seen a landslide once, just last winter. He had been up above Longmont with his father, to tow a Mercedes that had slid off the road and down an embankment. The family that had been in the car were shaken up but unhurt. They were a normal family: a mom, a dad, two kids. The little girl even had blond pigtails. That’s how normal they were. Wayne could tell, just looking at them, that the mom had never been in a mental asylum and that the father didn’t have storm-trooper armor hanging in his closet. He could tell that the children had normal names, like John and Sue, as opposed to bearing names lifted from a comic book. They had skis on the roof of the Mercedes, and the father asked Lou if he took AmEx. Not American Express. AmEx. Within minutes of meeting them, Wayne loved the whole family with an irrational fierceness.

Lou sent Wayne down the embankment with the hook and the winch line, but as the boy edged toward the car, there came a sound, from high above: a splintering crack, loud as a gunshot. Everyone looked up into the snowy peaks, the sharp-edged Rockies rising above them through the pines.

As they stared, a white sheet of snow, as wide and long as a football field, came loose and began to slide. It was half a mile to the south, so they were in no danger. After the first crack of its letting go, they could barely even hear it. It was no more than a low roll of distant thunder. Although Wayne could feel it. It registered as a gentle thrum in the ground beneath him.

That great shelf of snow slid a few hundred yards and hit the tree line and exploded in a white blast, a tidal wave of snow thirty feet high.

The father who had an AmEx lifted his boy up and set him on his shoulders to watch.

“We are in the wild now, little guy,” he said, while an acre of mountaintop forest was smothered under six hundred tons of snow.

“Isn’t that a goddamn,” Lou said, and looked down the embankment at Wayne. His father’s face shone with happiness. “Can you imagine being underneath it? Can you imagine all that shit coming down on you?”

Wayne could—and did, all the time. He thought it would be the best way to die: wiped out in a brilliant crash of snow and light, the world roaring around you as it slid apart.

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last.

His mother had been crazy for a while, had believed that the phone was ringing when it wasn’t, had conversations with dead children who weren’t there. Sometimes he felt she had talked more with dead children than she ever had with him. She had burned down their house. She spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, skipped out on a court appearance, and dropped out of Wayne’s life for almost two years. She spent a while on book tour, visiting bookstores in the morning and local bars at night. She hung out in L.A. for six months, working on a cartoon version of Search Engine that never got off the ground and a cocaine habit that did. She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to.

Wayne’s father got sick of Vic’s drinking, Vic’s wandering, and Vic’s crazy, and he took up with the lady who had done most of his tattoos, a girl named Carol who had big hair and dressed like it was still the eighties. Only Carol had another boyfriend, and they stole Lou’s identity and ran off to California, where they racked up a ten-thousand-dollar debt in Lou’s name. Lou was still dealing with creditors.

Bruce Wayne Carmody wanted to love and enjoy his parents, and occasionally he did. But they made it hard. Which was why the papers in his back pocket felt like nitroglycerin, a bomb that hadn’t exploded yet.

He supposed if there was any chance it might go off later, he ought to have a look, figure out how much damage it could do and how best to shelter himself from the blast. He pulled the papers out of his back pocket, took a last secretive glance at his house, and folded the pages open on his knee.

The first newspaper article featured a photo of Charles Talent Manx, the dead serial killer. Manx’s face was so long it looked like it had melted a little. He had protruding eyes and a goofy overbite and a bald, bulging skull that bore a resemblance to a cartoon dinosaur egg.

This man Charles Manx had been arrested above Gunbarrel almost fifteen years ago. He was a kidnapper who’d transported an unnamed minor across state lines, then burned a man to death for trying to stop him.

No one knew how old he was when they locked him up. He didn’t thrive in jail. By 2001 he was in a coma in the hospital wing of the Supermax in Denver. He lingered like that for eleven years before passing away last May.

After that the article was mostly bloodthirsty speculation. Manx had a hunting cottage outside Gunbarrel, where the trees were hung with hundreds of Christmas ornaments. The press dubbed the place the “Sleigh House,” which managed two puns, neither of them any good. The article implied he had been imprisoning and slaughtering children there for years. It mentioned only in passing that no bodies had ever been discovered on the grounds.

What did any of this have to do with Victoria McQueen, mother of Bruce Wayne Carmody? Nothing, as far as Wayne could see. Maybe if he looked at the other articles, he would figure it out. He went on.

“Alleged Serial Killer’s Corpse Vanishes from Morgue” was next. Someone had broken into St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver, slugged a security guard, and made off with dead old Charlie Manx. The body snatcher had swiped a Trans Am from the parking lot across the street, too.

The third piece was a clipping from a paper in Louisville, Kentucky, and didn’t have a damn thing to do with Charles Manx.

It was titled “Boeing Engineer Vanishes; Local Mystery Troubles Police, IRS.” It was accompanied by a photograph of a tanned and wiry man with a thick black mustache, leaning against an old Rolls-Royce, elbows resting on the hood.

Bruce frowned his way through the story. Nathan Demeter had been reported missing by his teenage daughter, who had returned from school to find the house unlocked, the garage open, a half-eaten lunch on the table, and her father’s antique Rolls-Royce gone. The IRS seemed to think Demeter might’ve skipped out to evade prosecution for income-tax evasion. His daughter didn’t believe it, said he was either kidnapped or dead, but there was no way he would’ve run out on her without telling her why and where he was going.

What any of this had to do with Charles Talent Manx, Wayne couldn’t see. He thought maybe he had missed something, wondered if he ought to go back to the start and reread everything. He was just about to flip back to the first of the photocopies when he spotted Hooper, squatting in the yard across the street, dropping turds the size of bananas in the grass. They were the color of bananas, too: green ones.

“Aw, no!” Wayne cried. “Aw, no, big guy!”

He dropped the papers on the sidewalk and started across the street.

His first thought was to haul Hooper out of the yard before anyone saw. But the curtain twitched in one of the front windows of the house across the street. Someone—the nice old guy or his nice old wife—had been watching.

Wayne supposed the best thing he could do was go over there and make a joke out of it, ask if they had a bag he could use to clean up the mess. The old guy, with his Dutch accent, seemed like he could laugh at just about anything.

Hooper rose, unfolding from his hunch. Wayne hissed at him. “Yer bad. Yer so bad.” Hooper wagged his tail, pleased to have Wayne’s attention.

Wayne was about to climb the steps to the front door of Sigmund de Zoet’s house when he noticed shadows flickering along the lower edge of the door. When Wayne glanced at the spyhole, he thought he saw a blur of color and movement. Someone stood three feet away, right on the other side of the door, watching him.

“Hello?” he called from the bottom of the steps. “Mr. de Zoet?”

The shadows shifted at the bottom of the door, but no one acknowledged him. The lack of a response disquieted Wayne. The backs of his arms prickled with chill.

Oh, stop it. You’re just being stupid because you read those scary stories about Charlie Manx. Go up there and ring the bell.

Wayne shook off his unease and began climbing the brick steps, extending one hand for the doorbell. He did not observe that the handle of the door was already beginning to turn, the person on the other side preparing to swing it open.