The Storm King(103)
“Come on, O.”
“All those kids,” Owen went on. He shook his head and bit his lips like he was talking via satellite to a morning show host. “All those poor, dead kids.”
A knot tightened inside Nate. Three loops of fear tied with a through-strand of doubt.
“They never had a chance, really,” Owen continued. “Once you set the Night Ship on fire there was nowhere for them to go.” He tapped one of the red jugs with his feet. “Those poor innocents you had to make pay the price for your suffering. Because the pain doesn’t disappear on its own, does it, Nate? It’s got to be burned away.”
Twenty-two
Nate understood his mistake.
He’d told Owen that the vandals used Lucy’s journals as an instruction manual and that they met at the Night Ship. In the ferocity of Medea, they’d be at the abandoned pier as surely as Nate and his own friends’ high school selves would have been there. Nate told Owen that the kids would expose him, and now the killer knew exactly where to find them.
“How about Pete here?” Nate felt the powerful impulse to keep Owen in conversation, as if he needed to buy time for something. For anything.
“You kill him too, obviously. Not sure exactly how yet.” Owen smiled at the shag of Pete’s hair. “In a perfect world, you’d get rid of him with the others, but you can’t lug him all the way out there. Don’t worry, though, we’ll think of something good. You’ll kill him today, right after you get back from setting fire to the Night Ship.”
“But Pete’s been missing since last night. Where’s he been?”
“Grams’s house, the Night Ship, somewhere in the headlands. Who can say?”
“You haven’t thought this out.” Framing Nate for the murders seemed like an impossible dream. But was it? So few things were truly impossible. “Why would I keep Pete bound up for hours and hours before killing him?”
“The same reason I did: You needed to find out about the other kids from him.”
“Okay, so I kill him, then set the Night Ship on fire with the kids inside?”
“You set the fire first. You had to make sure Pete wasn’t lying about where to find the others. Then you kill him. Then you kill yourself. You’ll drown yourself in the lake, just like your family did. People will think it’s poetic. A full-circle kind of thing.”
“No one will buy it, Owen. Tom won’t believe a single thing about it.” Nate used to doze among the roots of an ancient tree and try to decrypt messages from the dead from the sibilation of its leaves. Now he tried to do the opposite. Through the walls of the basement and across the expanse of the steeping town, he willed the rain to tap his distress against the roof and windows of Tom’s cruiser.
“Tom’ll see that he got off lucky. Again.” Owen slid his arms into a shirt. Nate was out of time.
“They’re just kids, Owen. They’re angry, scared.” He’d never noticed how similar rage and fear were. More than cousins, they might be twins. Anger only looked like strength, but at least fear was honest. “Give them the mercy you didn’t get.” That’s what Nate most wished for the furious boy he’d been. That he would have learned the bravery of compassion. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They hurt Grams and Johnny, and almost killed me when they cut my brakes. They’re not innocent. If you were the guy you were in high school, you’d be begging to help me.” He finished buttoning his shirt and heaved the gas jugs from the floor. “I usually chain Mom’s chair up by the mirrors so she can admire herself. But I think I’ll leave her here with you.” He patted the stubble of the woman’s scalp. “You’ve got an audience today, Mom. What a treat!”
The woman shuddered when Owen touched her. “Thank you, yes, such a treat, such a nice thing—”
“See you soon, Nate.” Owen winked at him, and walked to where Nate assumed the stairs were.
Nate called after Owen but got no answer. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Owen possessed the conviction of the anointed, just as Nate had in his youth. It was a blind certainty that cannot be surmounted.
He listened to the man’s heavy ascent of the stairs capped by the dull thud of the basement door being closed. The stinking air of the room seemed to deaden all sounds. Nate couldn’t hear the door being locked, but he was sure Owen engaged its every deadbolt and chain.
“You got a plan, right?” Pete asked as soon as Owen was gone. The boy’s voice was splinters and creaks. His eyes were wet with terror. With Pete looking directly at him, Nate realized how astonishingly young the kid was. His forehead far outsized his jaw, as if his adult face was only half-inflated. “I know who you are. You look older than I thought.”
“No one’s looking their best today. Have you tried yelling for help?”
“For real? Yes. Like, a lot. Like, for hours once I was pretty sure he wasn’t in the house anymore.” Pete bounced his head in the direction of the spongy geometric material that layered the walls. “I think it’s soundproofing. They’ve got something like it in the practice rooms at school. I guess he didn’t want anyone to, you know”—he glanced at the woman in the wheelchair—“hear her.”