Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(19)
First things first, he thought, and paused for a moment, and looked around. Today is Tuesday. Thursday, you can see Annabel. So first things first: Find something to eat. Then find a place to stay. A warm place and dry.
Maybe somebody would help him, take him in. Give him a place to wait until Thursday. Who could he go to for help?
One by one, he considered his neighbors, his friends, his colleagues. Their faces seemed distant to him, people he had known a long time ago. Memories of memories. Only Annabel seemed clear and real, approachable. He had helped her and she would help him. But Annabel is Thursday, he told himself. Today is Tuesday.
Maybe you should go to the police. They will feed you and give you a place to stay. Yes, but they will want answers in exchange, and I have none. They will say where is the knife and I will say I drowned it. They will ask why did you drown it. I will say it was either that or cut myself to pieces with it.
And they will keep me from my job. My job is to find the meaning. Find the meaning and explain it.
Why can’t the police find the meaning?
Because they don’t know where to look.
You can tell them where to look.
No, I want to find the meaning myself. This is what I do. I will find the meaning and explain it, and then I will find my family again.
Do you really believe that is possible, Thomas?
I have to believe it. I have no choice but to believe it.
You stopped believing when you were fourteen, remember? Who was Cain’s wife? you asked. If God is the only God, why is he a jealous God? Who was God talking to when he said Let us create man in our own image? If God is love, why is there so much hate? You had so many questions that Mrs. Lehner got red in the face and called you impossible. If you are going to keep interrupting me, Thomas Huston, you can just stop coming to Sunday school altogether, how would you like that?
I liked it fine, he said. That was when I really started looking for the meaning. And I saw one good Christian after another sniffing at another man’s wife, another woman’s husband. I saw a deacon accused of pedophilia, then disappear and leave his wife and children behind. I heard my father’s friends laughing about payoffs to building inspectors, bribes to the zoning commission. I saw who was selling drugs and who was buying them. I saw who was keeping a woman on the side and who was being kept. I saw who cheated on their taxes and who liked to steal lipstick from Woolworth’s and who was collecting social security checks for dead spouses.
If God is love, you asked, why are we supposed to fear him?
Turn to page 193 in your hymnal, Reverend Barrett said. “How Great Thou Art.”
So if you remember all that, he told himself, what makes you think now that you can ever find your family again? If there is no God, there is no heaven. If there is no heaven, your family is gone.
And with that realization, the pain in his stomach exploded like a gasoline fire, it dropped him to his knees, to the leaf-matted earth. The fire was black and it devoured the sunlight; it sucked all the oxygen from the woods. It laid him down flat with his face to the wet leaves where there was nothing but the chill and the damp stink of rot.
Fourteen
DeMarco was still in his office at six that evening, still trying to piece together the disparate shards of Thomas Huston’s life. He thought of all the times he had seen the Hustons together at public events—the summer carnival, the Pumpkin Parade, a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser for a local girl with leukemia. In every case, they had appeared the epitome of a happy family, smiles on all their faces, Claire and Thomas holding hands, the kids laughing, little Davy all eyes and sloppy grin. They could have been poster models for the traditional family unit.
He knew how easy it is to mask the darker emotions from most people, to hide sorrow, anger, a glowering hostility in the shadows of the heart. Most people have no desire to peer into those shadows. Who needs the extra weight of other people’s burdens? But some people, the unlucky few, are wired to see the shadows first. DeMarco considered it a kind of handicap, like color blindness or extreme myopia. And on those occasions when he had seen Thomas Huston in public, DeMarco had sensed that the man’s happiness was genuine, the joy he took from his family. But there had been shadows too. They lurked in the corners of Huston’s eyes. They pulled at the corner of his mouth when he smiled.
And Huston noticed the same in me, DeMarco told himself. That sadness in your eyes, he'd written.
Because Huston had his demons too. He had been very good at keeping them caged, of channeling them into his fictions, at least until this past weekend. Then, for some reason, the beasts had escaped. But where had they taken him after the slaughter? And where would they lead him next?
A knock on the doorframe interrupted his thoughts. DeMarco looked up from the lined white pad on which he had been scribbling notes. Trooper Carmichael stood in the doorway, a plastic jewel case in hand.
“The Outlook Express files,” Carmichael said. He strode forward and laid the case atop DeMarco’s notepad. A small man with a tight mop of curly, black hair, Carmichael had a wide-eyed, nervous look that always reminded DeMarco of a Chihuahua his mother had had when he was a boy. The dog’s name was Tippy, a frenetic, little creature full of useless energy. It had had a passion for digging holes in the yard, then running from one to the next like a frenzied treasure hunter, shoving its muzzle in deep. Carmichael was like that with computers. He was happiest with his nose close to a keyboard, his fingers scrabbling to claw treasure from computer code.