When he’d seen little Lena, Marshall remembered Mack’s hand closing harder on the back of his neck. In the darkness of Danny’s room, he felt it happening again. The cop stepped over Lena, jerking him along behind. Terrified his feet would touch his sister’s blood, he’d grabbed the cop’s leg. Mack backhanded him.
Later, at the trial, the cop said he thought Dylan was going for his gun.
His mother had fallen in the doorway of the master bedroom. She was face down, her long brown hair thrown forward. The amount of blood and its bright, comic book color shocked him.
To get the cross from around her neck he would have had to fumble though the sopping mess, dig out the chain, and yank until it broke.
Trying to picture Dylan-himself-doing that, all he saw were the butterflies, how beautiful they’d been above Kowalski’s office, how they’d died.
The kiss, the last good memory.
Dylan hadn’t seen his father. At least not that Marshall remembered. So much of his life had been haunted by that phrase, “not that he remembered.” He’d come to accept that the origins of Butcher Boy were the only thing worth remembering and worth forgetting. The rest of the memories of his young life had been locked behind that paradox.
Once the monster had been laid over that little kid, Dylan, nobody ever thought about him again. Marshall hadn’t thought of him again. Butcher Boy in Drummond had not thought of him. In every way that mattered, Dylan had been murdered that night as surely as his mom, dad, and Lena were.
“God, I miss you.” Marshall heard himself cry the words. “I loved you.” Saying the words felt strange. He didn’t know if what he tasted in the back of his throat was the foulest form of hypocrisy or freedom. Before Drummond, maybe as early as the trial, he had forbidden himself to feel love for his family, to feel anything. The jewelry had brought it all back.
“I loved you,” he said again. Forty years of accumulated emotion hit him, and he began to dissolve, ice breaking away, glacial silences turning to liquid and pouring through the barren scoured places.
“Momma and Daddy, I loved you. Your boy Dylan loved you.”
Dylan, the real, live boy, the boy before that night, came back to life, and Marshall saw him, was him. Freckled in summer, hair blond from the sun.
Laughing.
It surprised him to remember how much he had laughed when he was a kid. How much fun it had been being a kid in Minnesota in the sixties. Maybe the last gasp of the Norman Rockwell times before drugs and twenty-four-hour news and school shootings changed small-town America.
He had friends; there’d been a gang of kids, their lives centered on sports: Little League in summer, hockey in winter. Between seasons, there were forts made from haystacks and riding the elevators when they could sneak into the downtown buildings and get away with it.
Riding bikes.
Marshall laughed aloud.
They had ridden thousands of miles. They rode all summer to each others’ houses, and the river, and the lake. They rode in the winter when the ice pulled the wheels out from under them. Boys on bikes were free.
Ricky, and David, and Charlie, and Al-God but they’d had fun.
Little boys who loved their moms and dads, their friends, their bicycles, John Wayne, and the Green Lantern, little boys like that surely didn’t turn psycho overnight.
Rich, though he wasn’t much older, wouldn’t have much to do with them except to give them a bad time.
A rotten time.
Rich had reinvented himself after Dylan’s trial. Marshall had forgotten that too. Dylan had been so glad somebody still loved him he’d have been willing to overlook just about anything. Rich had been his lifeline in Drummond.
That brother-the Drummond brother-had not always existed, Marshall realized. As Butcher Boy had hidden Dylan, Richard-the new improved Drummond Richard-had hidden Rich.
“A rotten time” was an understatement.
Rich had tortured the hell out of them. He was so good at it he almost never got caught. Half the time, Ricky, Charlie-none of them-knew he was doing it until it was too late, and they were screwed.
Rich had a hole where there should have been snips and snails and puppy dog tails. He didn’t care about things the way other kids did. He didn’t cry when he was hurt. When someone else got hurt, he’d laugh or, more commonly, study them like a scientist with a rat. If there was an accident, he’d call for help a little late or not at all. He’d know the cat was locked in the garage, or that the gate was open and Lena could wander out into the street, and he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Charlie’s mom didn’t like him playing with Rich, and Ricky’s wouldn’t let him stay for sleepovers if Rich was going to be there. They didn’t even want their kids in the same house with him.
How could he have forgotten that? How could he have forgotten eleven years of his life?
Because Rich became the big brother Dylan needed. Rich became the best part of Dylan’s confused, insane world. He came to see him, went to bat for him at Drummond. Dylan- Marshall -had forgotten his brother had ever been any other way. Maybe the loss of his family changed Rich on some fundamental level.
Three murders and Rich is a nice guy?
A damned thin silver lining.
Marshall remembered that Rich-the pre-Drummond Rich-could be funny, even fun, but when the littler kids hung out with him, things had a way of going sour.
Other than the usual punches in the arm or noogies, Rich didn’t hurt them. It was just that, when Rich was around, they got hurt. Charlie was nearly killed when Rich dared him to dive off the railroad bridge when the water was low. Charlie was Rich’s easiest patsy because he was always out to prove what a tough guy he was.
Nine, and we’re tough guys.
Ricky had a thing about snakes, a phobia, Marshall knew now. Then it was just Ricky being a sissy. Rich waited until they were crossing a log that had fallen over a ravine, then he’d tossed Ricky a water snake he’d been carrying in his pocket.
“Catch!” Marshall could hear him yell. A gleeful, boyish prank. Except that Ricky had fallen twenty-three feet and busted his right ankle and sprained his shoulder.
Rich facilitated, Marshall realized. Clumsy kids were led on tricky climbs. Sensitive kids were told scary stories. Fat kids were stuffed, bullies egged on, shy kids humiliated, evil kids taken to new heights.
Rich was shameless. Every now and then he’d get caught in lies or petty cruelties. If the punishment was severe, he was resentful; if it was mild, he was contemptuous. He was never sorry. He’d go through the motions if it was to his benefit, but he mocked them behind his folks’ backs. He never regretted what he did.
Marshall vaguely remembered starting to sense that Rich’s behavior wasn’t quite normal, but then his parents and little sister died, and he’d gone into Drummond, where Rich was the norm for big brothers, and fathers, and uncles.