“So, who is this guy you’re writing about? What did he do?” She pushed her hair behind her ears, waiting for the story while Lucas squinted at the highway.
Even when talking about his projects with Caroline, it had always been awkward. She’d been just as into The Cult and Dead Can Dance as he had, but she’d always found Lucas’s fascination with the dark and dangerous to be a bit too all encompassing. Like maybe he was harboring an inner psychopath that was itching to get out—a dark passenger à la Dexter Morgan.
His own parents considered his work deplorable, not that they had said as much, but Lucas knew it just the same. When he had started college, he had done so with the hope of becoming a criminal profiler. But his love for the written word had overridden his interest in police work. When he told his parents he wanted to be a writer in the middle of his sophomore year, Barbara and Harold Graham hit the roof. A writer? his dad had barked. More like a piss-poor teacher getting shot at by his own ghetto students. Now that’s a future! Lucas moved out several weeks later, finally tired of taking shit from them about what he wanted to do with his life. That had been nearly twenty years ago, but his pop still muttered contentions beneath his breath during every family gathering.
Writing about tragedy like that, his father had stated the last time they had gotten together. It’s no wonder your career is on the rocks. People don’t want to remember the folks that make our world ugly. They want to forget, and that’s why they aren’t buying your damn books.
“Don’t you think I deserve to know?” Jeanie asked. “He’s the reason you’re moving, right? The reason you’re dragging me out here with you?”
“Dragging you?” Lucas didn’t like what that implied, as though she was his captive and he was the worst father in the world.
She shrugged, said nothing.
If he didn’t tell her, she’d only hate him more.
“Okay,” he said, squaring his shoulders and pushing back against his seat. “But not a word, all right? Your mother will kill me.”
“Like I even talk to her,” Jeanie murmured.
“Well, you should talk to her.”
“Whatever.” She dismissed the suggestion with a glance out the window. “You know she doesn’t even like me, right? I don’t know why she bothered having a kid.”
“That isn’t true.” The defense came tumbling out of him without so much as a beat of hesitation; his tone, sterner than he had intended. “Your mother loves you.”
“Oh yeah, then why . . .” Jeanie’s words trailed off. Rather than finishing her statement, she coiled her arms across her chest, pulled into herself, and went quiet.
She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Then why would she run off with another guy? If she loved me, loved us, why would she be doing this? It was the very question he wanted to find the answer to, but dwelling on it would only make things worse. Lucas tightened his grip on the steering wheel and sucked in air. Change the subject, he thought. Don’t talk about Caroline. You’ll end up saying something you’ll regret.
“Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s the bad guy,” Lucas began. “He’s the one I need to see.”
“You’re seeing him?” Jeanie perked beside him, her silence abandoned. “You mean he’s not dead?”
“Nope, he’s in prison. He manipulated people into following what he said, and in the end, he convinced them all to kill themselves. This guy has a special ability: the power of persuasion. He can make certain people do or believe almost anything.”
“But not all people?”
“No, not all people. You know how we all have different personalities?”
Jeanie nodded. “Some people are more gullible than others,” she said.
“That’s exactly right. Sometimes people are so vulnerable they’re willing to do or believe anything. All the person telling them to do or believe that thing has to do is promise them something they want.”
“Like money?”
“Well . . . more like love or companionship or a place to belong. He would look for people who were pretty desperate—runaways who didn’t have a place to live, loners from broken families who were eager to have a friend. He . . . collected them. It took him years. And the longer these people stayed with him, the more they saw him as the key to their own happiness. They believed whatever he told them so that he wouldn’t abandon them, and eventually they began to seriously believe in the things he told them.”
“Like what?”
“Well, that’s the whole trick of it. Nobody really knows for sure.”
“What do you mean, nobody knows? He’s in prison, right?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah, but he’s not talking.”
“Well, why don’t they just, like, squeeze it out of him or something?”
“Squeeze it out of him?” He cracked a faint smile. “Just give him the ol’ boot heel, huh?”
“He did something bad, right? So, why would he have the choice of not talking about it? How come he wouldn’t have to tell, like, a judge or the court or the cops or something?”
“Because he’s still got rights, kiddo.”
She didn’t like that answer. “Well, that’s dumb.”
“Dumb or not, that’s the way the justice system works. Just because you’re in prison doesn’t mean people can make you do what you don’t want to do.”
Jeanie remained silent for a long while, as though chewing on this newfound fact. Lucas couldn’t help the grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth when he caught her expression. She looked more serious than he’d ever seen her, her eyebrows pinched together and her mouth pressed into a terse line.