He follows me back down the house and I fill up his food bowl.
Six months ago I had a spare bedroom that seemed to be a magnet for all the crap in my life that I couldn’t seem to fit anywhere else in the house or garage. These days it’s an office — or at least was until last night. I sit down at the desk and drag a pad out from the drawer. I start writing down the names and the dates of the women who were killed. I start compiling as many of the notes as I can remember, but the last four weeks have been a haze of alcohol, of guilt, of anger at the priest and at myself, and the small details have all slipped away, drowned beneath an ocean of self-resentment. I do the best I can with the details I remember, and I start to create another timeline.
When my mother arrives she looks around the house, unable to stop herself from commenting about the mess, the smell, the stuffy air, the broken window. She looks me over. The gash in my head has closed back up, but it isn’t pretty. The bruises on my face she attributes to the accident, the same way Schroder and Landry did. There is a huge bruise running down the side of my neck, and she can’t see the bruise across my chest from the seatbelt.
I have cuts all over my hands; the end of the finger bandage is stained with blood.
My mum is in her late sixties but thinks she is in her forties and that I’m still nine years old. Her hair isn’t quite as grey as my neighbour’s, and her glasses aren’t quite as big — but I figure in ten years they’ll be a match.
‘You need to go to a doctor,’ she says.
“I’m fine. I’ve already been checked over.’
‘Doesn’t look like they did a good job.’
She starts to tidy up. I tell her not to bother, but the only thing she doesn’t bother to do is listen to my requests. Mum tells me how disappointed Bridget would be if she knew what was happening, not just about the drunk driving but also the way I’ve been treating myself lately. I keep saying “I know’ over and over, but she doesn’t seem to get tired hearing it. After nearly an hour she lets me drive her back home and I keep the car.
“I’m also strapped for cash,’ I say, ‘and I need a new phone.
I hate asking, but can you help me out here?’
‘There’s already some in the glovebox,’ she says. ‘We worry about you, Theo. More than you think. Are you going to come in and say hello to your Father?’
“I don’t know. I guess that depends on how disapproving he is that I’m borrowing his car.’
“Then you’d best be on your way’ she says, grinning at me.
She leans over then, and gives me a hug, and for the briefest of moments I feel like everything is going to be okay.
When I get to the library I open the glovebox and find an envelope with a thousand dollars in cash. She must have dropped into a bank on the way. She knew I didn’t forget to pay the phone bill, that I didn’t pay it because I haven’t worked in weeks. I suddenly feel like turning around and giving it all back — the money and the car — because I don’t deserve anybody to worry about me. But I don’t. There are too many dead girls, too many dead caretakers and a dead priest, all pressing me forward. Plus somebody out there tried to frame me for murder.
The library is warm and quiet. Plenty of people who live in different worlds from me are sitting down reading about worlds similar to the one I’m falling into. I find the newspaper sections on the computer and print out all the articles that mention the missing girls. There are the ones I got from beneath Bruce Alderman’s bed, plus the stories that have been in the papers since the girls were discovered. I spend the rest of the afternoon re-reading these stories and printing them out. I print out the stories about Bruce Alderman’s suicide and about his Father’s disappearance too. I end up with a stack of paper dedicated to the dead almost a centimetre thick.
I leave the library and hit five o’clock traffic. SUVs are blocking views at intersections, and not for the first time I figure they’re the reason everybody in this world is going nuts. It sure as hell was my reason. I look at the money my parents gave me, and the maths is simple — there’s enough here for me to drink my way out of this and every other problem for the next few weeks.
I could go into a bar — there are several en route — and things would be okay again, at least for a little while.
WWJD?
What would James do? I figure Quentin James would have pulled over. He’d have slipped inside and let five minutes turn into ten, ten into an hour, an hour into a night. Or maybe if I’d let him live things would be different now. Perhaps he’d have found redemption, or God, or something that would have kept him out of those bars. I don’t know, and thinking about James kills any desire to go inside. I drive past them all and don’t look back.
chapter thirty-nine