Chapter 25

1

She liked to run after it rained. It had something to do with how the world felt cleansed after a downpour. And sometimes the world required that sort of baptism. Especially after reading the Post when she found it rolled up on her front step. After seeing what was happening to Reedy Creek as the seams came undone. A spiritual renewal required the washing away of one’s sins, and she figured a town was no different than a person.

            The morning was crisp and already humid, showing those first few tinges of coolness that meant autumn was coming. She’d found a path from Deer Run in the greenbelt behind Havenmount and Deermont and followed its loop nearest the trees, where the smell was freshest, and where she could still hear water trickling down the leaves, pattering the forest floor and dimpling the dirt for those tiny critters she sometimes found in her yard. Her footfalls on the path were spongy, and the coldness of the morning, the stillness of its air, stung her throat as she began to swallow at it, to gasp as her legs pumped like well-oiled pistons. Once she reached her zone, once she found her tempo, those sounds, the smells, they would disappear and it would just be her heartbeat. She was alone this morning. And she liked that best.

            Ahead the trail dipped toward a small bank where foot-trodden paths beat down most of the overgrowth so kids could skip rocks in the ponds or look for interesting insects. She sometimes saw the little brats, especially during the summer, weaseling through the brush, playing their mindless games, most likely that archaic and racist mainstay of youth where the good guys donned cowboy hats and holsters and the bad wore feathered headdresses and shot arrows, and the kids drew straws to see who was unfortunate enough to be the Indian. Because that over-simplified explanation of history hadn’t been explained away by their parents, and she was sure the few readings one might find about Reedy Creek in the library expounded its past efforts of territorial control as farmers banded to fight off the Indians who actually had legitimate claim to the land.

            There were no kids down there today. No. But there was something, and she only saw it because a part of her expected to find someone down there, playing in the woods, to break the isolation and serenity she’d discovered.

            Are those jeans?

            She thought they were. Poking like rumpled PVC pipes from the growth, like sewer pipes, she saw Levi’s folded over dirty Nike sneakers, the scuffed tips pointing toward the sky. For a moment she thought they were just old clothes, like something she used to see in Cleveland under the bridges; the homeless used to discard what they didn’t need, and that often meant soiled clothing. It was an eyesore, and she’d hoped coming to a town that the vibes of the city wouldn’t mar the tranquility of so pristine a space. But here she was and—

            No, somebody’s in those clothes.

            She stopped. Her pace was gone, and the frenetic intensity of her heart was like a bass drum. “You okay in there?” She stood still on the path, trying to catch her breath, suddenly feeling the warmth of the run, the machinations of her body as the gained momentum deferred. The owner of those jeans didn’t budge.

            Guy probably got loaded. If there’s one thing you’ve noticed about this town, it’s the number of drunkards. He probably wandered back this way and it rained. Found shelter under the tree and he just passed out. It’s still early. Let him be. Just run. Work’s in just over an hour and if you don’t get your run in, you’ll get cranky and that cute guy in Communications will probably bump into you as you meltdown and you’re out of a date. And you and I both know you could use a lay. You could.

            If only she’d listened. She would have saved herself many sleepless nights.

            She waded into the overgrowth; the grass was still wet and she could feel the chilled prickle of the blades bending away from her. Her bare legs trembled, her quads tensing. She heard a bird somewhere in the woods. And another. Heard their wings flap as they took flight. When the world was this still, nature opened itself to you.

            “Mister, come on. You okay? You’ll get sick…” She thought she sounded like her mother. It was a silly thing to say. She figured she would smell vomit soon. Or spilled beer. Something to prove the guy had partied. She came to the man’s legs. He’d fallen back. They were sixty feet or so from the path, where the tree line started in earnest.

            “Mister—”

            She wouldn’t find the voice to finish the sentence. It was choked from her. Like his voice was choked from him. His eyes were open, staring back at her with the glassy indifference of a statue; he’d fallen so that his chin poked with angular discomfort into his sternum, thankfully covering most of the bruising around his throat, that clotted and mottled purple that always meant something was spoiled. His skin was white. Like soap. His lips were blue and parted to a frozen sneer, both of his hands gnarled and rested on his lap. One of his wrists was slashed open. Blood had already soaked into his jeans and flowered in the grass next to him. In those few seconds of rationalization she understood the man had been strangled and the only reason the killer had slit open the man’s wrist was because he (or she, she would later remind herself, trying to find some reasonable calm; it could have been a she, too, a she maybe taking revenge) needed ink.

            Written in blood above the man’s open eyes, smeared most likely by fingertip, and dried in drips into the jagged furrows of his brow, was one word:

            RAPIST.

2

His captor threw the newspaper on the floor beside him. The sound startled him. Ned had been in and out, tracing his days only by the light coming through the windows or the infrequent meals that made their way to him, usually while he was asleep. Because boredom and fear clashed in the sort of combat that resulted in his finding escape elsewhere, in that great big Anywhere proffered by the imagination. He would usually be jolted awake when the handcuff grated into his skin; the wound on his wrist and forearm would be infected. He knew that. He couldn’t stop scratching at it, and when the steel did glide across the sore, that apoplectic explosion of pain, of raw pain, sent its sharp splinters up his arm and he’d wake up here, in this basement tethered to a gas line next to a silent furnace, usually only to find a nicely set platter of food, prepared with such elegance, the sort of cuisine one would spend a pretty penny on in a fancy restaurant where the chef spoke French and the waiter was better dressed than him. And though hunger would force him to scurry forward, to ignore the spoon and just tip the bowl of soup toward his mouth while he tore chunks out of the rye bread, its crust perfectly thick and crispy, the concern about just how much he could reasonably eat before shitting himself would surface with all the might of social anxieties. Because even then, even when you’re a prisoner, those pretensions of conduct still matter, they still exist. To be human is to be civil. Ned found the idea entirely fascinating considering its apparent irony; he was a prisoner, and he still admitted to himself that he remain civil in spite of how barbaric his situation was. When Ned pleaded to use the toilet that first time, just as he was certain his bladder would surrender, Norris Serkis only watched him piss his pants, smiling ever wider as that moist darkness spread on his crotch to his inner thighs. And Ned cried. It was all he could do. Because it was so de-humanizing. There he sat in a growing puddle of his own urine, stewing in it, saturating in it, in front of a leering audience. The piss had dried. But here he still sat in soiled jeans next to a 5-gallon pail with a lid. You shit in that. This psycho brought a bucket into this basement for you to shit in. You’re eating veal Orloff and ratatouille with fine silver and you’re shitting it into a fucking bucket. His life was a varying degree of contradictions. And he figured Norris appreciated that sort of poetry. A man with his reading list would.

            Today Ned awoke with a headache and a crick in his neck that looped the tendons into his upper back, spasming. When he did sleep, his head rolled to one side or the other, and soon, he figured, the thing might just snap off. Or maybe he hoped. Didn’t Norris say hope was stronger than fear? Was that the hope he meant? He didn’t think the distinction even mattered.

            “What? Is it?” His words were loopy. He wondered if there was a small gas leak down here, slow and persistent but over time making him crazier and crazier; he’d never felt this helpless before. Not just because of the handcuff or the tender, bloody skin under the jagged steel where he’d tried so desperately to squeeze out his hand, tempting himself to bite down hard on his lip as he dislocated his thumb the way criminals did in the movies to escape, but in real life that initial signal of pain once the thumb was moving in a direction it really wasn’t supposed to triggered him to quit and bang his head on the furnace, listening to its hollow drum reverberate into the ducts. It was because he couldn’t think. His mind didn’t work as well anymore. It wasn’t exhaustion but another sort of dislocation. He was outside what was normal. His routine had characterized him, and sometimes habit forms the comfortable bubble in which you can formalize your ideas, your thoughts; here he was removed from everything he knew. And the world hadn’t come looking for him. Not here.

            “You’re famous,” Norris said. At the doctor’s feet was a pleasant grey table cloth folded in half, a white plate with diced potatoes and herbs and a thick cut of pork belly, the marbled fat still sizzling. There was a glass of orange juice behind the plate, sitting on the cuff of the cloth, and next to it, near Ned’s outstretched legs where he could still imagine that warm fluid darkness blossoming down his thighs toward his kneecaps like some hell-weed, was the morning edition of the Reedy Creek Post. On its cover was a picture of two people with whom Ned had been rather familiar. Dr Halliburton and Sarah, the pharmacist’s darling assistant, who just so recently had tried to flirt with a man she had no idea was gay. And maybe he didn’t really know either. But he was here because he was. That was the truth. Halliburton’s picture must have been cropped from a vacation photo; his hair was windswept and his cheeks kissed by the sun, his eyes squinting against what must have been that tropical shine. Sarah looked innocent. And young. Her eyes full of life and expectation. But they were a lie. Above their images was the blatant headline:

            DOUBLE HOMICIDE.

            “Jesus…Christ,” he whispered, still looking at the front page, trying to ignore the smell of the pork, the sound of its still cooking fat. “What…did you…do?” His words, his voice, were broken.

            Norris got down on one knee and stared at Ned for a moment. He usually hunkered down like this, to be at eye level, to affront the illusion of comfort, of equality. “I didn’t do anything, Ned.”

            “You killed them…fucking killed them. He had kids…FUCKING KIDS!” His scream was as powerful as he could project it. The force hurt his chest. He remembered those kids, both so enamored by his service pistol, by the dangling handcuffs on his belt, not so different from the bracelets keeping him from using a real toilet, from seeing the actual sunshine, from being a civil human being.

            “No, Ned. The story’s already been written. I’ve been so excited to show you. You think just because you and your friend Cole Moore have been investigating Reedy Creek that you are privy to some truth, to some motive underlying my actions, underlying the council’s. And like somebody with such undeniable certainty, you’ve sought to reveal in your investigation some wrongdoing on my part. But you never had control of the story, Ned. And maybe that was confidence on your part. Think how you figured your own homosexuality was invisible. As long as you hid it from yourself. But we are each projections of instinct.”

            “Fuck you.”

            “The story’s already been written,” Norris repeated. “You are not just down here for the conversations, though they’ve been nice.”

            Ned, realizing something he hadn’t before, saw Norris’s eyes flit back to the paper. “What have you done?”

            “When you control the story, you control what people see.”

            “What the fuck have you done?”

            “Did you ever consider that denying to yourself what you might be would make you appear almost dishonest to those around you? That by suppressing your truth, you walked around with the lie written all over your face. And once people suspect who you are is a lie, then you become blank. And when you are blank you need to be filled with another idea. Because ideas define everything. Ideas are everything, Ned.”

            Ned looked down at the paper, at the pictures of the two victims of a double homicide he knew Norris was guilty of, and he flipped the page to Cole Moore’s article; he skimmed it, somehow knowing what he would find just as he saw it:

Details were relatively hazy on the scene due to the ongoing investigation, but what is apparent to the police as the case stands: the victims were murdered and the suspect left his gun on the scene and, presumably, fingerprint identification in the blood he used to “label” the bodies with the sins of their alleged act. Was this a crime of passion? Because the investigation itself is in its infancy, and with respect to those surviving the victims, description of the scene will not be released. But the police do have a person of interest. Police officer, Ned Stevenson, hadn’t clocked in at work on Monday and, according to witness testimony, was last seen at Up the Creek with Sarah Darling sharing a drink. His gun was found on the scene and will be investigated by the State Ballistics division.

            Ned stopped reading. He could barely breathe. “What did you do?”

            “You’re here now, Ned, my blank page. The story waiting to be written.”

            He thought he might be sick. He was a suspect. A fucking suspect in a murder because he was seen with Sarah at the bar and because the prick kneeling next to him took his service pistol and killed two people with it. He couldn’t speak. He wanted it to be a dream. He wanted to wake up for real now. He wouldn’t have even cared if his eyes opened to this same basement again, to the pain of the infection on his wrist. He just didn’t want to see the newspaper. To see Cole’s name above the article that was indicting him. That was turning him into a murderer.

            “It’s always those people you least expect,” Norris said, still staring at him, his eyes kind but so very empty. “You are Marcel Petiot now, Ned Stevenson. A man in an honorable position who did so many dishonorable things.” He gauged the way Ned was looking at him. Confused. Angry. All natural considering the events. Ned had every right to be upset. “Petiot was a French doctor, in a town called Villeneuve. If you’ve never been to France, Ned, I highly recommend it.” His smile flashed his perfect teeth. Ned only stared at him. Waiting for his point. There was always a point. Always. “Monsieur Petiot was elected mayor of this town, so apparent was his popularity among his neighbors, despite his fraudulent behaviour. Despite his secrets. But who is without flaw? He left for Paris in the mid-30’s and enjoyed success, but what is a taste, dear Ned, if it doesn’t incite the appetite for more? World War II ravaged Paris, and where some see the seeds of destruction, others see the opportunity for gain. Marcel Petiot did what any opportunist would: he concocted a scheme through which he could profit at the expense of those less fortunate than he. Yes, and so he wore his doctoral mask because it afforded him a level of respectability and faith, like the badge, dear Ned, or the pistol on your hip.” Norris chuckled. “He offered his medical aid to those Jews hoping to flee the occupying Nazis—”

            Ned only stared at the newspaper. He didn’t want to listen anymore. He didn’t want anything but peace. That was it. Peace of mind. An escape from the incriminations. His friends, the Websters and Neidermayers of the PD, guys in the bullpen with him, they all probably questioned what they knew about Ned, understanding the secrecy about his own relationships, his silence, could have meant he was hiding something that made what happened at the General even more convincing.

            “Well, this Monsieur Petiot offered these poor Jews medicine to combat disease, the sickness of migrancy, but he really poisoned them, and he watched them die. He watched them all die and took from them everything they owned, everything they hoped to take with them to build their new lives in a world unhindered by the Third Reich. And when this man, this doctor, was finally caught, he tried to convince the world that he was only a soldier, that he was murdering the Germans, that he was with the Resistance. But he was really the disease. You become what you have to become when the story’s being told, Ned. You can offer recriminations to me that your innocence means my guilt, but your audience out there won’t hear it. The people you wish to convince won’t hear it. The justice system is detached from human psychology, Ned, and the idea’s already been planted: a man in his cop mask has used the opportunity afforded him in this quaint little community to take out his frustrations on the woman who slighted his own advances and the man who took her instead. You labelled them for what they are, Ned. You are shedding a light on the darkness of man’s soul. The Adulterer and his Whore. Written in their own blood, to be marked by their own scarlet letters. Tomorrow a new story will have been written. And another after that. And another. Because the Cause demands sacrifices.” Norris’s eyes showed their first sign of life, of feeling. He was nearly emotional. Ned could see that, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. “The Rapist. The Addict. You are my muse, Ned.”

            “You’re psychotic.” He could only whisper. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. This was far worse than being chained down here. This was far worse than the limitations of his new world, his Basement World, where the plumbing was a bucket and his bed a furnace.

            “That’s what they always call dreamers,” Norris answered. “Copernicus. Darwin. Even Christ. Madmen of their time, but vindicated, revered, worshipped by history.”

            “You are not Christ,” Ned mumbled, clinking his handcuff against the floor.

            Norris brushed his hand through his hair. “Temples are built on blood. And betrayal, dear Ned. Look at how fast, how willing, Cole Moore was to turn you into a suspect.” Norris stood up and glowered down on Ned. “Now how fast will you turn on him? Tick tick tick.” He tapped his watch as he clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

            Ned closed his eyes and leaned back against the furnace. The world above thought he was a killer. The world above, his old world, made him the bad guy. Because stories needed a bad guy. Needed a good villain. And right now he fit the bill. He listened to Norris ascend the stairs to that world and Ned covered the plate of potatoes and pork belly with the fresh copy of the Post. He didn’t feel like eating.