“He could be someone else,” Kelly offered. “He might not be the son.”
Harry nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “But I know this town, and I know Abraham Snow’s story better than anyone, and call it a hunch, but if there’s a young man here looking for the funeral home, it’s Abraham’s son.”
Elle was surprised to find that her eyes had filled with tears. The story had had a greater impact on her than it ordinarily would have. Something about the way the man had been in the diner, and the way he’d been in his truck when she found him there asleep, seemed to make sense. The way he’d asked for the funeral home, the things he’d said about family, she knew it was him.
“What happened to the baby?” she said.
“That, you don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do,” she insisted.
“You sure? Because if you think the story’s been hard so far, it only gets worse.”
“You can’t tell us this much and not finish the story,” Kelly said.
“All right,” Harry said, “but first we need another shot.” He poured another round of the whiskey and they knocked back their drinks. He gave the girls fresh beers. Then he continued.
“The baby had about as hard a life as you could imagine. If you thought Abraham was cruel before, you can only imagine how he was after he lost his wife. He blamed the baby for it.”
“What did he do to it?” Kelly said.
“I don’t know all the details. The child services people were constantly fighting with him but when they threatened to take the boy out of Abraham’s custody, he just moved up into the mountains where they couldn’t watch him. There are a lot of creeps that live in the mountains around these parts. Abraham fit right in with them. That poor kid grew up in the hands of a monster, all alone in a cabin in the woods. When he finally got a state medical exam, when he was twelve, they found his body covered in cigarette burns. It seemed the old man liked to use him as an ashtray.”
Elle put her hand in front of her mouth. She couldn’t believe that such things had happened to the man she’d been with in the diner.
“The police finally went in when no one had seen the kid for a month. The school board had sent countless letters, and eventually the authorities took action.”
“They took their sweet time,” Elle said.
“Well, around here, things don’t move quite as fast as they might in a more modern part of the country. Around here, they give a man a little too much liberty to treat his own family as he sees fit, if you want my opinion.”
“How was the child?” Elle said. “When they found him?”
“It wasn’t pretty. The old man had stripped the boy naked and locked him up in a windowless cabin, or a basement or something, with four fighting pit bulls.”
“What?”
Harry just nodded.
“Dogs like that,” Elle said, unable to finish the thought.
Kelly did it for her. “Dogs like that would kill a child, especially if they were hungry.”
“They were hungry,” Harry said. “They were starving to death. So was the boy. But the strange thing was, even though they were the meanest dogs anyone could have ever locked up with a child, and even though Abraham had bought the dogs from the meanest breeding kennels in the entire region, the dogs didn’t harm the boy. Not a single hair on his head.”
“What?” Kelly said.
“By the time the boy was rescued, the dogs were completely tame. The police broke into the cabin, or basement, I don’t remember that detail, and they found the boy cuddled up with the dogs. Somehow, despite all of them starving to death in that little room, the twelve-year-old boy had managed to tame those dogs. In fact, they loved him so much that they cried and howled when the police took him away.”
“That’s incredible,” Elle said.
“Where did they take him?” Kelly said.
Harry shrugged. “They took him into care. I’m not sure exactly what happened. I heard he went into a group home in the city or somewhere. A few years later, someone told me he got adopted by a mysterious rich guy and his daughter in California.”
Elle didn’t know what to make of it. “That story is incredible,” she said.
“Every word of it’s the truth,” Harry said. “Ask anyone who was here back then.”
“I can’t believe that the man I saw in the diner today might have been that boy.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” Harry said. “Abraham Snow didn’t have any other children. I know that much. And he sure as hell didn’t have any friends. He was alone in the world, as he deserved to be. If there’s a boy here for the funeral, it’s that very same boy. What was his name? Let me think.”