UNABLE TO SLEEP, I REACHED FOR HER IN THE NIGHT. “Tell me you love me,” I said. “Tell me everything will be all right.”
“I do love you, darling,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.” But a moment later, as my hand slid up her hip and toward her breast, she laid her own hand over mine, immobilizing it. “I’m still out of commission, honey. I’m sorry.”
I pulled back to look at her in the dim light of the bedroom. “You still have your period? How can that be? It’s been almost two weeks. You need to go to the doctor.”
“I called. Nothing to worry about. But if it keeps on much longer, I’ll go in.” She gave a short, ironic laugh. “Funny way for menopause to start, huh—the nonstop period? Like having a month of monsoons just before a forty-year drought sets in.”
She was trying to be game about it, but her words gave me a sharp pang. Was it hearing her use the word “drought” to describe the change her womanly body was about to undergo? Or was it the combination of images—drought and flood, a pair of biblical-sounding plagues—that suddenly made me feel the grip of cold, bony fingers closing around my heart like some scaly and pitiless claw?
IS IT POSSIBLE, AS PRIESTS AND MYSTICS BELIEVE, to conjure up evil beings simply by speaking their names—out loud, or even silently, in the fearful shadows of the heart and mind? Earlier in my life, I would have scoffed at the suggestion. Yet now, in my hand—my trembling hand—I held powerful evidence to the contrary. Unscientific evidence, yet no less convincing and frightening for all that.
Satterfield read the return address on the padded envelope I had just taken from the mailbox. Nothing more, just the name. But the name was enough. More than enough.
Standing there at the end of the driveway—one hand clutching the envelope, the other still holding the tab on the mailbox door, which I’d noticed was ajar when I’d walked out to retrieve the newspaper—I wheeled and scanned in all directions, as if Satterfield might somehow have slipped through the bars of his cell and returned to haunt us.
Apart from the alarms shrieking in my head, it was an idyllic Sunday morning in a pretty, woodsy neighborhood. A few doors down the street, a dad in shorts and T-shirt jogged alongside a small bicycle, which a girl who looked about Tyler’s age was pedaling proudly. “Good job,” the dad praised. “Pretty soon you’ll be too fast—I won’t be able to keep up!” Behind me, in the small park across the street from our house, a young mother—the bicyclist’s mom?—was pushing a swing, evoking burbles of delight from the toddler cradled in the seat. My quiet street, shaded by maples and hemlocks, was the very picture of suburban safety and tranquility. It had been, that is, until I’d seen—until I’d silently said—the name on the envelope in my hand.
Tucking the package back in the mailbox, I fished my cell phone from my jeans. Scrolling through my contacts, I found Brian Decker’s name and pressed “call.” After four rings he still hadn’t picked up, and I began mentally composing a voice mail—one I hoped would sound more rational than I felt—but on the fifth ring he answered. “This is Captain Decker,” he said.
“Deck, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said.
“Hey, Doc. How the hell are you? Haven’t talked to you in way too long.” He sounded pleased to hear from me, but there was an understandable undertone of sadness in his voice, too.
Decker headed the Knoxville Police Department’s SWAT team. We’d met twelve years before, at the end of Nick Satterfield’s string of sadistic serial killings, when Decker arrived at my house just in time to help keep Satterfield from murdering my family and me.
“Deck, can you check on a prisoner for me?” The words rushed out without preamble. “Make sure he’s still in custody?”
“Sure, Doc. City, county, state, or federal?”
“State. South Central Correctional Facility. In Clifton.”
“Ah,” he said. “Prisoner’s name wouldn’t happen to be Satterfield, would it?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
He knew because no one understood Satterfield’s menace better than Decker, whose own brother had died while searching Satterfield’s house for booby traps. I heard a deep breath on the other end of the line. “You sound spooked, Doc. What’s going on?”
“I’m standing at my mailbox, Deck. There’s an envelope here—a padded envelope—with a return address that just says ‘Satterfield.’ Nothing but the name.”
“Shit—don’t open it!” I’d never heard alarm in Decker’s voice before, but I was hearing it now, loud and clear.
“Okay, I won’t open it.”
“Put it down—very gently—and get away from it.”
“You think it’s a bomb?”
“The guy has a thing for explosives.”