Wasn't he?
Of course he was. Safe and at peace, smothered beneath four feet of frozen, snow-covered earth. How could he be otherwise?
Shuddering, he shook off the horrifying possibility and accelerated, leaving it behind. But its ghost followed him south through the white limbo of the blizzard.
PART III
NOW
JANUARY
TWENTY
Pendleton, North Carolina
Saturday morning and it was top-down weather.
Bill reveled in the warmth of the sun on his shoulders and the back of his neck as he pulled from a parking slot on Conway Street. Warm for late January, even a North Carolina January. He'd just picked up a bargain-priced CD of The Notorious Byrd Brothers and he was itching to play it. How long had it been since he'd heard "Tribal Gathering" and "Dolphin Smile," tunes they never played on the radio, especially down here.
He pressed the scan button on his radio—one of the old Impala's few nonvintage accessories—and stopped it when he heard someone singing a plaintive, countrified version of "Yellow Bird." A wave of nausea sloshed against the walls of his stomach as he was jerked back to the Bahamas, back to the two lost years he had spent among that cluster of tiny islands straddling the Tropic of Cancer.
He'd arrived in West Palm by train late on New Year's Day. First thing the next morning he rented a sixteen-foot outboard, loaded it up with extra gas, and followed one of the tour boats out toward the Bahamas. He ran out of fuel a quarter mile short of Grand Bahama and had to swim the rest of the way in. When he came ashore at West End, he sat on the beach for a while, barely able to move. He was now on British soil, which meant he had to add his native country to the things he had left behind.
Besides his life, he had only one other thing left to lose. He wrote William Ryan, S. J. on the wet sand, turned his back, and began walking.
His clothes were dry by the time he reached Freeport.
He experienced most of the next year or so through a haze of cheap rum. There were drugs too. Why not? What did he care? He didn't trust God anymore, at least not the God he'd been raised to believe in. And he didn't think of himself as a priest anymore, either. How could he? He could barely think of himself as human. Not after what he'd done. He'd smothered a child he'd loved more than anything in this world. Buried him alive. No matter that he'd done it out of love, to put the boy out of reach of the forces that were torturing him—he'd done it! He'd dug the hole and placed the child within and then he'd filled it.
An atrocity—The Atrocity, as he came to call it. And the memory of the weight of the dirt-laden shovel in his hands, the image of that small, struggling, blanket-shrouded form disappearing beneath the cascades of falling earth, was more than he could bear. He had to blot it out, all of it.
He lived in back-street rooms in Freeport on Grand Bahama, in Hope Town on Great Abaco, in Governor's Harbor on Eleuthera. His money didn't last long and he soon wound up on New Providence, bedding down on the sand each night—as hollow as the empty shells scattered around him—and during the day wandering Cable Beach selling bags of peanuts or shilling for the ride operators off Paradise Island, getting two bucks a head for every passenger he rounded up for the banana boats and five each for the parasails, spending it all on anything he could smoke, swallow, or snort to blot out the memory of The Atrocity.
He spent more than a year continually stoned or drunk or both. He recognized no limits. Whatever it took, he'd take. A couple of times he overdid it and nearly did himself in. More than once he seriously considered getting together enough stuff for a fatal overdose, but he kept putting it off.
Finally, his body rebelled. His flesh wanted to live even if his mind did not, and it refused to stomach any more liquor. He sobered up by default. And he found a clear head bearable. The Atrocity had receded into the past. The wounds it had left hadn't healed, but they had evolved from open sores to a cluster of steadily throbbing aches that flared only occasionally into agony.
And that agony plunged him again and again into the blackest despair. He was in a drugged stupor at the time, so he didn't remember the first anniversary of The Atrocity, but he'd never forget the second: He'd spent most of that New Year's Eve with the bore of a borrowed snub-nosed .357 Magnum pressed against his right eyelid. But he couldn't pull the trigger. By the time the sun rose on the new year, he'd decided to live a while longer, to see if he could set what was left of his life into some semblance of order.
He found he hadn't lost his knack with the internal combustion engine, so he managed to land a part-time job at Maura's Marina on Potter's Cay under the Paradise Island Bridge. His way with motors soon won him the respect and admiration of boatmen on both sides of the law, so when he began entertaining the notion of returning to the States, he asked the right people for advice and was shocked at how easy it was to buy a new identity.
Born again… as Will Ryerson.
They'd advised him to choose a name close to his own to make it easier to cover slips when speaking or writing the new one. Will Ryerson now seemed more like his real name than Bill Ryan ever had.
But Father Bill wasn't dead. Despite everything that had happened, the priest part of him still wanted very badly to believe in God. The Jesuit within him still pushed at the envelope of Will Ryerson's persona. So he'd made concessions to it. He'd begun to say his daily office again. He kept hoping he'd find a way to go back. But how? There was no statute of limitations on murder.
But during these past three years in North Carolina he had found a new equilibrium. He was not happy—he doubted he would ever be really happy again—but he had come to terms with his existence.
And now, on this sunny Saturday morning, he spotted one of the few bright spots in his life strolling along the sidewalk. A slim knockout of a blonde trailing a wake of turned heads. Lisl. And she was alone. She was hardly ever alone anymore. He stopped at the corner, blocking her path as she stepped off the curb.
"Hey, girlie! Wanna go for a spin?"
He saw üer head come up, saw her upper lip start to curl as she readied a curt reply, then saw her smile. What a smile. Like the sun burning through low-lying clouds.
"Will! You've got the top down!"
"Perfect day for it. I'm serious about the spin. How about it?"
He was hoping she'd say yes. It seemed like an age since they'd had some decent time together to talk.
She hesitated for a second, then shrugged. "Why not? I'd have to be crazy to refuse."
He leaned over and pushed open the door for her.
"Been a long time, Leese."
"Too long," she said, sliding in and slamming it closed.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Anywhere. How about the highway? I want to go fast."
Bill headed out of town, wondering at the perversity of life. Here he was, a shabby, bearded, ponytailed, defrocked priest looking fifty in the eye, riding in a convertible under a perfect sky with a beautiful thirty-two-year-old windblown blonde. He felt like the high school burnout who'd just picked up the queen of the prom.
Maybe happiness wasn't an impossible dream.
"What are you grinning at?" Lisl asked.
"Nothing," he said. "Everything."
As he was overtaking someone on a bicycle, Lisl said, "Watch out for the geek."
Bill looked at her sharply. They'd passed this kid on his bike at least a hundred times in the past and she'd never made a crack like that. Although Bill didn't know his name, the kid was a familiar sight around town. He'd never spoken to him, but he could tell by his features, by the single-minded intensity with which he pedaled his bike, by his clothing and the incongruous fedora he wore every day, that he was mentally retarded. Bill could imagine the kid's mother making his lunch, stowing it in that dinky little knapsack on his back, and sending him off every morning. Probably worked at the Sheltered Workshop on the other end of town.