Locust Lane(43)

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He fell asleep in the recliner with his phone on his lap; he woke a few hours later when his next-door neighbor slammed a door. It was just after ten p.m. He checked Twitter. The Emerson youth had been named. Christopher Mahoun. Patrick was suddenly sober and very awake. Michel’s son. He’d seen him often, working at his father’s restaurant. In fact, he’d refilled Patrick’s water and cleared his plates just last month. He was a slight, attractive kid who looked a little like Prince. His permanently averted eyes suggested a shyness completely at odds with his father’s dignified gregariousness. Patrick couldn’t imagine him being violent.

He got his keys. It was unlikely that he was legally sober, but there was no chance that he’d be pulled. Not today. The cops were otherwise engaged. Nothing impeded his progress onto Locust now. The roadblock and yellow tape were gone. The authorities had their man. Their youth.

He parked just where he had after hitting the dog. His leg throbbed with a memory of pain. He found what he guessed to be the exact spot where he’d stood last night, a few yards onto the lawn. The lighting was different here, but he could see that silhouette in his mind’s eye. Just not clearly enough to discern a face. Only to know that the person who’d been watching him wasn’t Michel Mahoun’s son.

He walked back to the street and headed to the mouth of the Bondurants’ driveway, two dozen steps farther along the road. The house was almost entirely hidden behind the stand of trees in its front yard. He wondered if there was anyone home. He doubted it. Why would there be? Just a few hours ago there’d been a dead girl inside.

The scuff of an approaching footstep broke the spell. He turned, expecting to be challenged by a cop or a neighbor. But it was the woman he’d seen at the police station, with her jet-black hair and dark, suspicious eyes. Eden’s mother. She stopped a safe distance away.

“I saw you earlier,” she said.

“I remember.”

“Yeah, so I got a question. Who exactly are you?”





DANIELLE


She had not followed Gates’s advice. She did not go home. She did not change into her pajamas and start calling back the people who’d been filling her phone with messages. Her mother and her sister and Steve Slater; her friends and Eden’s friends and people she didn’t know from Adam. She stayed in Emerson, because going home would be an admission that this was out of her hands, that all she had left to do was remember and suffer.

That time would come. But not yet. There were still things that needed to be taken care of before she started wistfully looking at old photos. Such as making sure they caught the person who did this. How could she trust anyone else to look after Eden? That was on her. She’d known as soon as they’d placed her slimy screeching body on Danielle’s too-young chest. She’d worried about dropping her, but after a few seconds she understood that wasn’t going to happen. She stuck, like a bur you picked up cutting through a vacant lot. They’d always been attached. It had always been Danielle she’d called when there was trouble. And Danielle had always answered the phone.

Except for last night. Last night she’d failed. She’d missed the call. She’d neglected to move a switch a millimeter to unmute her phone; she’d allowed some towels to fall off the back of a chair to muffle its vibration. She’d done this because, somewhere inside her, she’d believed that the world had become a safe enough place for her to sleep with both eyes shut. Twenty years of vigilance and patience had prepared her for a brief interval of absolute need, and she’d failed. But that didn’t mean she could stop. Even if every last person on Earth told her to stand down, she wouldn’t do it. Because that would be the end of Eden.

She couldn’t imagine a world without her daughter. Even during their time-out, she’d been the most undeniable presence in Danielle’s life. Which was funny, because she hadn’t even wanted the stupid kid. When the dipstick turned blue, her first thought was to get rid of it. She was only seventeen. And although the father, Mike McMichaels, was good in the sack and a barrel of laughs on a Saturday night, he wasn’t exactly dad material. The only regular job he ever held was buying lottery tickets. But after the initial shock had worn off, the thought of a baby took hold. Having something that was hers, just hers. Something that would love her absolutely.

At first, that’d been exactly how it was. Eden had been such a sweet baby. Quiet and soft and warm. All the stuff that people said was going to be hard turned out to be true, and yet it also turned out not to matter. And Mike tried, bless him. He hung around, mostly; he was sober, basically. He got an actual job, roofing. He combed his hair when the occasion required. When she looked back to those first few years, she could honestly say that she was happy.

But then her luck turned, as it had a tendency of doing. Mike got a job offer in Texas and he took it without discussing the matter with Danielle. It seemed he’d had enough fathering. Eden was three when this happened. Not long after, she started to become a handful. It gradually became clear that there was something not quite right about her. It wasn’t like she was some dummy. She was perfectly smart. She was just different. She had trouble mastering the whole human-being-on-planet-Earth thing. She’d wander off. She’d get too close to strangers. Yes, it could be cute at first to have a child who insisted on hugging every last person at Price Chopper, but it was also worrying if you were the one in charge of making sure she didn’t wind up sold as a child bride in Saudi Arabia. Danielle often thought her daughter saw the world as a sort of psychedelic magical amusement park, full of wonder and adventure and cuddles. If ever a child was born to run with scissors, it was her.