The Piper

SIXTY




Dusk was thick as McTavish pulled his Cadillac into Sequoyah Hills Park. Tudor mansions lined up next to one level ranch houses, and smaller bungalows, prime Knoxville real estate that backed up onto a green space that Olivia had always thought of as a little swath of heaven. The parking lot was a gravel rectangle, and filled with patrol cars, lights flashing, a scene that was becoming familiar enough to Olivia to make her tired. The park was a stretch of meadow and green grass, with large leafy trees lining the edge alongside the river. People walked there, let their dogs run there, went fishing, or sat on green metal benches to enjoy the day.

‘We used to come here a lot when I was a little girl,’ Olivia said. ‘We used to throw a tennis ball in the water for Hunter. Hunter loved to swim.’

McTavish opened the door for her, and led her out.

‘What is it I’m going to be looking at here?’ Olivia asked.

‘The thing is. We’ve been dragging the river since early this morning.’

‘Oh.’

‘We found something a few hours ago. They’re not ready to move it yet, but . . . they’re pretty sure.’

‘How could they be sure?’

‘Just come with me, okay?’

They had a bit of a walk, and they went hand in hand like lovers. When Olivia had been a little girl at the park, running in the grass with Hunter, she had seen her mother and father walk hand in hand, and she always thought she’d come to the river with the man she loved someday. Be careful what you wish for, she thought.

The uniforms were knotted at a lovely spot. Next to a green metal bench and a shade tree that looked out over the water. An open bundle of wet blankets was plastered to the ground, but McTavish led her to the bench and told her to sit down.

‘Let me check and see if they’re ready for you.’

He wasn’t gone long. Olivia was aware that she was being stared at. Someone was putting up a floodlight. McTavish came back with plastic baggies. Inside one, a small heart shaped necklace, tarnished and covered with algae. Inside the other, a rotting dog collar, with a hook where the tags used to hang. Olivia reached for the baggies and he let her take them. She held them up, and studied them, but she knew. Inside, she knew.

‘My sister had a necklace just like this. A little heart with a small pink stone, an amethyst. Jamison gave it to her on her fifteenth birthday. She wore it all the time. I mean, there isn’t a stone in there now, but you see that little thing there, on the heart? That’s where the stone used to be. And Hunter had a collar like that. A circle of leather, just like this. But he had tags. I guess . . . the tags are gone. Where did they find these, McTavish?’

‘We snagged bodies, in the river. Wrapped together in a blanket. They were down really deep, but it helps when you know where to look.’

‘Will you let me . . . I want to see them. See what’s left.’

‘It’s not a good idea, Livie.’

‘It’s not up to you. And I’ve been waiting a long long time.’

He ran his hand through his thick hair, and grimaced. ‘Sit here another minute. Let me see what they say.’

Olivia looked out at the water while she waited. Heard a horn, and saw the lights of a barge inching closer.

In the end, they decided she had the right. McTavish led her to the wet blankets she had seen, lying in the grass. They had found the bundle, snagged on a rock, in the deepest part of the river, where the channel branched and opened. A bundle of gray wool army blankets, rotting, taped tight with duct tape, and tied with rope that had long disintegrated. But the tape had held.

The blankets were open on the grass, and Olivia saw the skeletons in the floodlight, while moths dodged in and out. One of the skeletons was human, and there was no flesh, just long hair, dark brown, Emily’s shade, so much like her own, winding through the shredded fragments of rotting clothes. Another skeleton lay beside it, close enough that it looked as if the two skeletons had died in a hug. A dog. Olivia saw the teeth, the canine fangs, the long nosed snout. Emily and Hunter, buried together, floating in a blanket in the river just three miles from her house, decomposing quietly in the water after all these years. What had happened to them, Olivia wondered. How exactly had Hunter and Emily died? And would Teddy die the same way?

Olivia looked at her watch. Counting the hours until three fifteen.

Or perhaps it was a date. Tomorrow was March the fifteenth. Tomorrow was three fifteen. And Decan Ludde had promised Olivia that everyone was coming home. Emily was home now. The promises were coming true.

The police had taken a cheek swab, to compare DNA, and the medical examiner had confirmed that the human skeleton was female, mid to late teens, and that the other was a canine, likely a German shepherd, with a break in the left hind leg that occurred shortly before death.

McTavish took Olivia back to the hotel room, sat holding her hand, telling her things she did not want to hear. The man on death row had known Emily’s killer. He had met him in jail, a monster with a predilection for children, boy or girl, it didn’t matter which, he just liked them young. The monster had talked about Emily one night, gently reminiscing. How opportune it was, how she had walked right into his arms, how he felt it had always been meant to be.

All because her dog had gotten out. Hunter, sensing something off, smelling the predator who watched the girls inside the house. The monster had heard the barking and the growls and gotten back into the car, wary and annoyed. He’d been after the little one, asleep on the couch, thinking he could snatch her up fast and bundle her off, but the dog had scared him away. He’d actually been in his car and on the street when the dog came barreling out of the fenced backyard and into the road, and he had hit him, okay, accidentally on purpose, he hated dogs like that. The other one had run after him, the big sister, too old really, but hey, why not. Crying over the German shepherd as he lay whimpering in the road. It had been so easy. Bundling the dog in the car, putting it in the girl’s lap, weighing her down, always planning. Promising to drive them straight to a vet. Of course, he hadn’t. He’d taken them to a place he had ready, well, he tried, but when he made a wrong turn the girl went nuts, got hysterical, and the dog bit him, and it was a big fat mess, and he had to shoot them both. There were scars, see there, on his biceps and leg, well, look there, under the tattoo, and see where the dog had actually bitten off a chunk of his ear? He’d gone back, actually, that little one was still there, all alone now on the couch, and God knows he’d earned it, actually paid in blood, might as well scoop her up in the net. But it was too late. Cars in the driveway and lights on all over the house. Time to cut his losses. He’d been smart that way. He’d bundled the bodies up in a blanket, anchored them well, and dropped them off in the river and moved on to the next town. Nobody had ever found him out.

Yeah. He was a bad one. And he liked them young. And he had such a knack for getting the kids to go with him. They used to call him the Pied Piper, because of that.

McTavish had not wanted to leave Olivia alone in the hotel room, angry that she would not come home with him, stung when she refused to let him stay.

But she could not be with him, be near anyone – it somehow made too much noise in her head. She wanted nothing more than to lie fully clothed on the bed, and to be absolutely, utterly still.

Her family had been normal and happy for such a short part of her life. But she liked to think about it. Liked remembering what it felt like, back in the day, it was an ideal of happiness she always held in her mind, an ideal she had been spending her entire adult life to try and create.

Olivia’s parents had dutifully attended the intimidating beautiful Presbyterian church on Kingston Pike. They went as a family each and every Sunday, and after Emily disappeared, Olivia’s parents had gone from Presbyterian light to devout. Olivia found the services tedious as a child, and as a teen she had rebelled at the hypocrisy of all religion. Hugh had been Jewish, and their marriage had been a comfortable if lazy truce of no services of any kind except on major holidays.

Over the years, Olivia settled into the conclusion that the various religious denominations were a sort of market bazaar of spirituality, offering various paths to the same place, with some taking you on more twists and turns to get where you wanted to go. There was no religion she agreed with completely, though perhaps that was too much to ask for the mere individual. She relied now on an inner guide, a sort of chiming she felt inside when she was deciding about right or wrong or what happened after death.

It was this instinct that had given her the wisdom to turn the Piper down – if wisdom it had been.

Now she was in trouble, and she did not know where to turn. There was no help for her in organized religion, no history of trust. Ackerman, maybe reliable, maybe not, had disappeared into the labyrinth of nightmare tunnels beneath Waverly Hills, and Olivia held herself to blame, but had no clue what to do about it.

If Ack was right, and help was there for the taking, who was she supposed to ask?

So Olivia decided to hedge her bets. She called on Mother God, and Father God, and spiritual guides, angels, Buddha, her mother, her father and Chris.

And afterward, she did not sleep well, but she did sleep, finding herself moving into a numbed sort of detachment that made her wonder if she was breaking apart completely or gaining strength. The only thing she felt sure of was that there were bad things to come, and she needed all the help she could get.