Nine Lives(71)

The FBI never located the real Jay Coates. I wonder if he even got the list in the mail, because I did hear that a Jay Coates in Georgia had stepped forward to say that he had received one. It doesn’t matter either way, but it did make Jay’s death one of my easier tasks. I followed him around Los Angeles on a Saturday night, just waiting for an opportunity, and unless I imagined it, he was stalking someone as well. A young inebriated woman that he’d followed from a bar. I wonder if my killing Jay prevented something terrible from happening to that girl. Maybe the karma I was returning to the world was already paying off in dividends?

Caroline Geddes was the daughter of Meg Gauthier (my first kiss, also that summer), and Ethan Dart was the son of Paula Shepherd, the quietest of our bunch. How odd that the list brought Caroline and Ethan together just before the end.

Arranging their deaths was not easy. But I knew in advance that they would be together in Makanda, Illinois, and then it was just a matter of two very large bribes, one to a local police officer and one to an employee at the Rolling Brook Cabins who provided me with a master key. The hardest part was lying underneath their bed and listening to their final moments together. But as in the killing of Arthur Kruse, I made sure that neither Ethan nor Caroline suffered any pain. And I do know for a fact just how happy they were in their final moments. Maybe I’d done them a favor, ending their lives then. I wonder what I saved them from: A crushing breakup? A bitter divorce? A loss of a child? I certainly saved them from something. Happiness is always a temporary state.

And Alison Horne, of course, was the daughter of Danny Horne. Not only had Danny helped orchestrate Faye’s death when he was twelve years old, he would eventually abandon his own family for a tawdry love affair. I wonder what Danny’ll think of all this if it comes out that his old childhood friend had an affair with his daughter before murdering her in Bermuda.

I felt bad about Alison, of course. It was a pleasure to spend time with her in Bermuda. I’d been wanting to go back there for years, and it was nice to see the old haunted place through her eyes. And it was nice to be able to tell her about my sister, about what happened to her. I suppose the psychologists out there will say that was what I was doing all along, that my entire plan was an elaborate way to tell the world about my sister. They’ll say I wanted to get caught, and maybe that is true as well.

I know that I’ve left some questions behind that have not been answered in this letter. Like why did I even bother to mail the letter to myself and then give the FBI information about the Windward Resort? I don’t really have the answer to that question except that it felt like the right thing to do. I am guilty, as well, in the death of my sister, and I deserved to be on the list, just as I deserve what is about to happen to me.

Maybe you will wonder why I even wrote the list in the first place, sending it to the victims. It made my job harder, and it made their final moments more filled with dread, but, again, all I can tell you is that it felt like the right thing to do. Their deaths were an attempt to add order back to a chaotic world, and the list itself was just part of that order. And being on that list only told them something that they should already have known. That death is coming for us all.

And what about Eric Miles, my neighbor in Hartford? All I will say about him is that he deserved to die, more than most of us. Think of me as a garbage man, just out doing my job of picking up the bagged garbage left along the side of the road. Eric was just a piece of trash that floated into my path at random. It wasn’t a whole lot of effort for me to throw him into my truck, as well.

My time is up, I think, and I won’t bore you any more with self-reflection. I’ll hide this letter in an appropriate place, then take my remaining whiskey out to the jetty. I’ll be joining Faye soon. I don’t mean in heaven, because I don’t believe that such a place exists. I mean that other place. The cold nothing that awaits all of us when we finally leave this world.

May your gods have mercy on all your souls.



Sincerely,

Jack Radebaugh né Jonathan Borland Grant

June 21, 1944—November 2, 2014





ONE





1





SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 5:14 A.M.


She’d been hearing voices for so long—some she recognized and some she didn’t—that they had begun to mean nothing to her. But then some of the voices began to break through, and one of them said, “Her eyes just opened.”

Or maybe she’d dreamed it.

She was in the darkness again, but there had been a flicker of light.

One of the things she liked about the darkness was that there was no pain.

But then she heard a voice she recognized—her mother’s voice—the words floating in her head, and she remembered that once upon a time she had opened her eyes. So she tried to open them again, and this time there was nothing but darkness, and the sound of machines. The sound of the room she was in, doing whatever it was that rooms do.

When she next heard voices, and felt a hand on her arm, she opened her eyes again and this time a face looked back at her. She didn’t recognize it, but it smiled. A woman’s face, dark freckles along the hairline, a razor thin scar on her chin. “Why, hello, you,” she said.

Later, there were so many faces around her hospital bed that just looking at them made her happy and tired all at once. Her mother was by her side, holding her hand.