10
I was certain that they didn't exist, that I'd tricked myself into seeing things. With a sense of unreality, I stared at them. Unsteady, I printed them out. Each was from a different state: Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Initially, their sequence was alphabetic, based on the sender's name, but after I reread them several times, I arranged them so that they formed a geographical and chronological narrative.
Mr: Denning, the first began. Your message so disturbed me that it took me a long time to face up to answering it. My husband told me not to pain myself, but I can't bear the thought that other people have suffered. The writer identified herself as Mrs. Donald Cavendish, and the details of her message paralleled what Mrs. Garner had told me. If a rape had occurred, Mrs. Cavendish didn't mention it, but I had a disturbing sense of a deeper hurt than even the strong facts of her message accounted for. He hadn't called himself Lester, though. He hadn't used any name at all. The night that he'd disappeared, he'd burned down their house.
This had happened in November, a month after he'd brutalized Mrs. Garner. What had occurred in the interval? I checked my maps and found that the town in Kentucky was two hundred miles from Loganville, Ohio. After Lester spent the money that he'd stolen from Mrs. Garner, had he wandered, subsisting on the proceeds from house break-ins and liquor-store robberies until his aimless path took him to Kentucky?
The next message (as I arranged them) was from the neighboring state of West Virginia and described events one year later, when Lester (he used only his first name) had been welcomed by a churchgoing family whose teenage daughter he eventually victimized. It was the daughter who sent me the E-mail, revealing what she'd hidden from her parents until she was an adult. Lester had warned her that if she told anyone what he'd done, he'd come back one night and kill her. To prove his point, he'd strangled her cat in front of her. The next night, he'd robbed the house, stolen the family car, and disappeared. The police had found the fire-gutted car two hundred miles away, but although Lester was gone, it had taken the daughter a long time before she'd stopped having nightmares about him.
The third message (from Pennsylvania) described events a surprising eight years later. He'd shortened his first name to Les. His methods had changed. In his mid-twenties now, he no longer had the air of vulnerability that had made it so easy to portray himself a victim and win the compassion of a small-town congregation. Instead, he'd showed up at the church and offered to do odd jobs in exchange for meals. His amazing ability to quote any Bible passage from memory had endeared him to the congregation. This time, it was the church that he'd burned.
But it was the fourth message that disturbed me most. It was from a man who described events thirteen years after the fire in which Lester Dant's parents had been killed. It came from a town in central Ohio. This time when Lester had disappeared, he'd taken the man's wife. She'd never been found. But Lester hadn't used his first name or its abbreviation, Les. He'd used an entirely different first name. It turned me cold. Peter.
Shivering to the core of my soul, I stared at the maps and the placement of the towns. From Brockton southeast to Loganville in Ohio, then farther southeast to the town in Kentucky, then east to West Virginia, then northeast to Pennsylvania, then northwest to the town in Ohio, a hundred miles from where I was raised in the middle of that state. One month. One year. Eight years. Thirteen years.
He'd been to far-off places in the country during the intervals (his FBI crime report made that clear), but something kept making him return to this general area, and I couldn't help feeling that the placement of towns on the maps wasn't random, that it had a center, that he'd been skirting his ultimate destination, each time getting closer, drawn relentlessly back to where everything had begun.
Part Six
1
It had been more than a quarter of a century since my mother and I had been forced to leave Woodford to live with her parents in Columbus. Payne had told me that the town was now a flourishing bedroom community for the encroaching city. But I hadn't fully realized what that meant. After I steered from the interstate, following a newly paved road into town, I tested my memory. I'd been barely fourteen when Mom and I had left. Even so, from all the times that she and Dad had taken Petey and me to visit her parents, I remembered that there'd been a lot of farmland on the way to the interstate. Much of that was gone now, replaced by subdivisions of large houses on small lots. The panoramic outdoor view that owners had initially been attracted to had been obliterated by further development. Expensive landscaping compensated.
On what had once been the edge of town, I passed the furniture factory where my dad had been a foreman. It was now a restaurant/movie theater/shopping mall complex. The industrial exterior had been retained, giving it a sense of local history. Downtown-a grid of six blocks of stores-looked better than it had in my youth. Its adjoining two-story brick structures had been freshly sandblasted, everything appearing new, even though the buildings came from the early 1900s. One street had been blocked off and converted into a pedestrian mall, trees and planters interspersed among outdoor cafes, a fountain, and a small bandstand.
The area was busy enough that it took me a while to find a parking spot. My emotions pushed and pulled me. When I'd been a kid, downtown had seemed so big. Now the effect was the same, but for different reasons-helplessness made me feel small. Despite the passage of years, I managed to orient myself as I passed a comic-book store and an ice-cream shop, neither of which had been in those places when I was a kid. I came to the corner of Lincoln and Washington (the names returned to me) and stared at a shadowy doorway across the street. It was between a bank and a drugstore, businesses that had been in those places when I was a kid. I remembered because of all the times my mother had walked Petey and me to that doorway and had taken us up the narrow echoing stairway to our least favorite place in the world: the dentist's office.
That stairway had seemed towering and ominous when I'd climbed it in my youth. Now, trying to calm myself, I counted each of its thirty steps as I went up. At the top, I stood under a skylight (another change) and faced the same frosted-glass door that had led into the dentist, except that the name on the door was now cosgrove insurance agency.
A young woman with her hair pulled back looked up from stapling documents together. "Yes, sir?"
"I… When I was a kid, this used to be a dentist's office." I couldn't help looking past the receptionist toward the corridor that had led to the chamber of horrors.
She looked puzzled. "Yes?"
"He has some dental records I need, but I don't know how to get in touch with him because I've forgotten his name."
"I'm afraid I'm not the person to ask. I started working for Mr.
Cosgrove only six months ago, and I never heard anything about a dentist's office."
"Perhaps Mr. Cosgrove would know."
She went down the hallway to the office that I'd dreaded and came back in less than a minute. "He says he's been here eight years. Before then, this was a Realtor's office."
"Oh."
"Sorry."
"Sure." Something sank in me. "I guess it was too much to hope for." Discouraged, I turned toward the door, then stopped with a sudden thought. "A Realtor?"
"Excuse me?"
"You said a Realtor used to be in this office?"
"Yes." She was looking at me now as if I'd become a nuisance.