Devoted(60)
“The kid was present then?”
“Lying right here, as he is now.”
“You shot toward the kid?”
“I had to. Shacket threatened to gouge out his eyes.”
“Is he blind?”
“What? No. He’s not blind.”
“The way he’s just lying there, that fixed stare.”
“He’s not blind.”
“High-functioning autistic. So have you had him evaluated to see if this is the best environment for him, he shouldn’t be in some special care facility?”
Megan needed to change the dynamics of this. She let go of Woody’s hand and stood up, eye-to-eye with Carrickton. “This isn’t about whether Woody is in the best environment. Is anyone looking for Lee Shacket? He’s crazy and something worse than crazy. Is a search party being organized?”
“That’s not my job,” Carrickton said. “My job is to get your statement, which I’ll need if we’re going to convict this guy.”
“All right. But let’s stay focused on what happened here tonight, what Lee Shacket did and tried to do.”
Carrickton met Megan’s stare in silence for perhaps ten seconds, her Wedgwood-blue eyes as brittle as a china plate, and then said, “You’ve got a nice big house filled with all the best stuff. But with a problem kid like him to look after and unstable boyfriends from the past liable to show up, the best stuff doesn’t mean much.”
Inexplicable animosity, emanating from a total stranger who presumed to know you, was not a frequent occurrence when you were face-to-face with someone. Social media was a hotbed of it, which was why Megan didn’t go online every day. However, in a situation like this, in the physical presence of the apparent hater, she could not just click off and shut down her computer.
“I’m not going to go over this endlessly. I’m not a suspect in this. I’m the victim. I’ll give you five more minutes, that’s all.”
Two minutes later, Sheriff Hayden Eckman arrived.
64
In the high redoubt of the southwest tower of Castle Wyvern, Woody was lying in abject self-disgust. This time he knew that he would never be able to pay penance for his weakness, that he would never be going home again. No bluebird would appear to sing a song of forgiveness, and the furry white rat would never dance in delight as a sign that he had paid a proper price for what he’d done—or, as was more often the case, hadn’t done.
The bad man had called him a dummy, but Woody was no dummy. No one could make him believe that he was stupid just because he never talked. But the bad man also called him useless. Although it was a bad man who made the accusation, that didn’t mean the judgment had no merit. It was true, all right. The man had insulted Woody’s mom, had worse than insulted her, had told her to take her clothes off, had been going to force her to have sex. Woody was innocent, but he wasn’t naive. He knew what sex was. Sex could be a beautiful thing when it was making love, or it could be as ugly as murder when no love was involved. That’s what he knew.
Through all of it, Woody had done nothing. Nothing. The crazy man’s light touch—stroking his cheek, his nose, drawing circles on his chin, tracing his lips with one fingertip—had so shocked Woody, embarrassed him because of his helplessness, that his arms and legs became leaden, and he couldn’t lift his head. Though he hadn’t at once gone away to Wyvern, he had remained as paralyzed in his own bedroom as he was now here in his crude bed of reeds.
He had finally traveled to Wyvern after the shooting was done, when he couldn’t rise from the bathroom floor where he’d curled in a corner. His mother had to lift him and carry him and put him on the bed, and his helplessness had never been more mortifying.
Now he lay gazing up at the high windows, at the swollen black bellies of the clouds behind which lightning pulsed without shaping itself into bolts, like waves of acid eating through the impending storm. Dragons were in flight in numbers he’d never seen before, flocks of them with long spiked tails and scalloped wings, fearsome harbingers of some apocalypse. No thunder followed the lightning, and no shrieks escaped the dragons, for all was ever silent in this realm, as silent as Woody, until the bluebird sang or the white rat danced, allowing him to go home, but neither of them would appear this time.
When there was so much you wanted to say but the words wouldn’t form, when you had never spoken to anyone but a few deer in the backyard, you learned to live with your voice locked inside you. What he said to the deer—“You’re beautiful. I love you”—was what he wanted to say to his dad, before his dad was gone forever, and it was what he wanted to say to his mother, who might one day be gone forever, too, but he was such a mess that he could only say it to the deer, so he learned to live with that, too.
When your mother’s arms around you were the best feeling in the world, then you knew that, if you could just put your arms around her in return, it would be even better yet, but you learned to live with not being able to hug anyone. He had told himself that she knew how he felt even without the hugs, and most of the time he really believed she did know. But sometimes, like now, he thought maybe she didn’t know, that she only hoped he loved her—and he’d even learned to live with that doubt.
He wasn’t able to live with this: that his mother was almost raped, almost shot, and he did nothing. Nothing, nothing. Not only was he incapable of helping her; in his paralysis, he had been a burden to her, had almost gotten her killed because he couldn’t bring himself to touch—to strike out at—the bad man. He couldn’t even run for help. And all this that had happened was maybe because he had visited Tragedy on the Dark Web and had written “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil.”