Last to Know: A Novel(72)
Again, Len asked himself why, and immediately understood the answer. Rose was everything Bea was not. Admittedly Bea was the more beautiful, but Rose was also lovely. Rose was warm. Rose was the good wife, and the good mother. Her children adored her. Her friends adored her. Her husband still adored her, though Bea had gotten him off the rails with drugs until he’d almost lost his mind. And then she’d latched on to Roman, who was young enough and dumb enough to be completely taken in by her. Though not dumb enough to be caught up in her evil. Rose had the man, the good husband, the family, the home. Bea wanted everything Rose had and was. She wanted Rose’s life, and she had been prepared to do anything to get it. She had succeeded with Wally; she’d known just how to get into his very soul, and now, she had their boy. The perfect element for the final deed of torture.
Just yesterday Len had stood by, right there by the Osbornes’ jetty where he could see and hear everything, watching Bea doing her act, leaving Rose’s house, apparently beseeching Rose to give permission for her to help search for her missing son.
“If you can’t forgive me, at least allow me this,” Bea pleaded again, practically on her knees.
Len watched Rose lean in toward Bea, saw her put a hand on her shoulder, heard her say quietly, “I so appreciate your concern, Bea. Let’s forget the past. The future is my missing son. We must all help find him.” And all the while Len had known that Bea knew exactly where Diz was. He was where she had taken him; where nobody would ever find him. Diz was as good as dead.
A grim smile cracked his face. Bea had forgotten that Len Doutzer was the eyes and ears of the small world of Evening Lake. Forgotten he knew every inch of the land, every hill, every tributary, every dip and rise, every small sandy lane, every thicket and woods and cave. No place at Evening Lake was a secret to Len. What he needed now, though, was to find in which of those secret places Bea had hidden Diz. And whether the boy was still alive, or if Bea was planning on being the one to “come across his body”; the woman who would comfort Rose and the family on the death of their boy, the woman who would move into their lives again as silently and stealthily as a snake, so gently and easily they would never know she had taken them over until it was too late. Rose was the doyenne of the Osborne house, but the whole family would be beholden to Bea for finding their dead son.
Len stood outside his shed, staring into the stand of trees halfway up the hill opposite. Unlike Diz he needed no binoculars to sharpen his vision. He was as clear-eyed as the red-tailed hawks circling above in search of prey. He knew now exactly where Bea Havnel had gone.
He went back inside and stood for a minute under the eviscerated carcass of the German shepherd, still swinging by its legs on cables strung from the slatted ceiling beams. He studied the array of knives arranged neatly in front of his workbench, selected a ten-inch, very thin surgical blade that he particularly liked, fitted it into a scabbard, hitched up his worn cord pants, tightened his belt, and stuck the sheathed knife in over his right hip. He pulled himself up straight; took a deep breath; looked for a long time at his place of work, at the pelts of the badger and the coyote, at the dog swinging overhead. This time would be different.
He jogged down the hill, taking the route through undergrowth only he knew, emerging lakeside. He pulled his small boat from its hiding place, dragged it into the water, climbed in, and began sculling rapidly across the lake toward the wreckage of the Havnel house, which, with his powerful arms, took only a few minutes. He stepped out into the shallow water, dragged the boat after him, and left it partially hidden in the copse of birches. Then he took the same route as Bea up the hill in back of the burned house.
It took a little longer than he’d thought. Ten minutes. This disturbed Len because he knew time was of the essence, and he increased his pace, careless of any sound he made: the crackling of leaves and small branches underfoot; the startled bird calling the alarm; the pair of hawks hovering, outstretched wings completely still as they floated on an air current, seeming to watch events below with a coldly calculating eye, almost as cold and calculating, Len thought, as his own.
He found Bea exactly where he’d anticipated he would find her, standing at the rim of the old well, pumped dry a hundred or more years before, leaving a great rift in the ground and where, Len was sure, Bea now had Diz Osborne.
The well was a perfect burial ground. Nobody had been here for donkeys’ years, no one would ever come here because no one except Len, and Bea, remembered it existed. And the bitch knew only because she had followed Len when he’d gone on one of his taxidermy-ing expeditions, when he’d hoped to find something new to add to his collection, a snake perhaps. He’d thought a snake would be exciting. He knew that several pythons had been abandoned by owners of “curiosity” pets. They quickly had proliferated, the way they had also in the Florida Everglades, but not here in such big numbers, the winters were too cold for them. As yet he had not found one.
He stopped, stood silent when he saw Bea with the boy. She held him by a rope around his neck. His hands were tied in front of him, his ankles loosely bound together, leaving just enough leeway for him to walk while rendering him unable to escape.
Bea was so intent on what she was doing, so secure in the absolute privacy of the location, that despite Len’s heavy-footed progress through the trees, she seemed not to have heard him. Len could hear her, though. She was talking to the boy.
“So, young Diz, you watched me often enough through those binoculars of yours. Took note of every move I made, didn’t you?”