Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(12)
P&W: Now that you have some distance from those events, have you found some peace, some acceptance of what happened?
TH: Distance? You’ve never lost anyone you loved, have you? There’s no such thing as distance.
At that point in the profile, the interviewer shifted gears, moved on to a consideration of the author’s work in progress, a novel tentatively titled D. Still, DeMarco found Huston’s brief responses revealing. It was clear that Thomas Huston, like his character, suffered some very dark moments. But dark enough to cause him to slaughter his own family?
DeMarco knew The Desperate Summer well; it was his favorite of the author’s three books. The fictional Joshua Kennedy, in anguish over his daughter’s rape and his son’s arrest for dealing drugs, vents his frustration with the judicial system and with life in general by resorting to petty crimes—first graffiti, then shoplifting, then vandalism of municipal property. He finds his son’s stash of ecstasy, but instead of destroying it, he samples the drug and spends the next three days in a motel room with a twenty-four-year-old girl, one of his son’s friends. Did that necessarily imply that Thomas Huston himself had ever resorted to crime, drug use, and infidelity as a release from his pain? Of course not. But DeMarco found it interesting that the author would conceive of those activities as emollients for his character’s anger and grief.
The sting of his parents’ deaths was still raw in Huston after three and a half years. Maybe it was still raw last Saturday night. Maybe it had been festering in him all this time, and some trivial thing—a sarcastic comment, a telephone call—had sent the poisons coursing through Huston’s bloodstream, igniting in him a fury that literary palliatives could no longer suppress.
DeMarco made a mental note to pull Huston’s phone records from that night. If he could get a handle on Huston’s frame of mind, maybe he could make an intelligent guess as to where to look for the writer.
In the meantime, he returned to surfing the Internet. Forty minutes later, he came across a promising article Huston had written for The Writer magazine, “Becoming Your Fiction.” It cost DeMarco thirty dollars to subscribe online and access the article.
In the article, Huston advised aspiring writers on the importance of honing their observational skills, of listening for nuances of speech patterns, finding the gestures and body language that reveal the nature of hidden thoughts, those small but telling physical details that reveal underlying character traits. “Get into the habit of watching people and listening,” Huston had written. “This is your research. Anywhere you can conduct it—at the mall, at a sidewalk café, on a bus or a train or a busy city street—this is your classroom.
“Next, you must learn to translate this observational skill from real people to your characters. You have to come to know your character inside and out, know her history, her childhood, all the traumas and triumphs that made her who she is at the moment your story begins. Only then can you become that character as she makes those choices that will propel the story forward. You, the author, sitting there in your comfortable chair, typing away, must simultaneously be the character who is reacting to her lover’s betrayal, her promotion, or to that bus speeding toward her down the highway. Because only by becoming that character can you know with any authenticity how she will react to those situations. And only then will she be a credible, believable character. Only then will she be real.”
DeMarco leaned back in his chair, stared at the blinking curser. He put himself in Huston’s place, saw himself coming to each of the bedroom doorways, tried to envision Huston’s horrific moment of recognition. Wife dead, throat slit. Son dead, throat slit. Daughter dead, throat slit. Baby dead, stabbed through the heart.
The rage, the grief, it would have gone off in his head like a mushroom cloud, DeMarco thought. The cloud would have blossomed and swelled and filled every crevice and crenellation in his brain. It would have seeped into every cell, numbed and choked and suffocated them.
It was not difficult for DeMarco to imagine. He could see himself inside Huston’s house. He staggered from one room to the next. He had to see, make sure, prove wrong what he already knew. The recognition that they were gone, all gone, would be too much to bear.
How could he bear it? DeMarco wondered. One child alone was too much to bear. You never get over something like that, can never shut out the images. The glass will always be shattering, spraying across your face. Laraine will always be screaming, always pounding her fists against your chest. He was slipping back into his own memory then, and he knew it, but he didn’t care. Sometimes he even wanted to feel sliced apart again by the pain of it, needed to go sliding down that dark, rain-slick street…
He felt a shadow in the doorway then and looked up. Trooper Morgan was watching him. “Aerial report is negative,” Morgan said.
“Yeah,” said DeMarco, his throat dry and hoarse. He could feel the stream of dampness on his left cheek, could taste salt in the corner of his mouth.
“Park commissioner wants to know if they can open up the trails again.”
DeMarco took a slow breath, swallowed hard. “Please remind the park commissioner that in all probability, there is still an armed suspect in those woods. So he can open the fucking trails when I am damn good and sure no more throats are going to be slit open.”
Morgan nodded but otherwise did not move.
“That’s it,” DeMarco told him. “Thanks.”