“I’m sorry, Toni,” I said. “For everything I’ve ever done or didn’t do, I’m sorry.”
She let me touch her, and instead of wincing or recoiling, she fell into me the same as she had years ago, before we knew the future.
“Me too.” She kissed my cheek.
“Come home.”
“I can’t,” she said faintly. “And you know it.”
I sat back, away from her, only then aware that for her, our embrace had been a goodbye. She was already there, already living a different life, a life apart from me.
As Donald had said, nothing would ever be the same again.
She began to cry, though silently, one hand pressed flat against her forehead and the other gripping her side, her delicate frame bucking subtly. “I love you, Alan,” she finally said, her voice shaking. “But we can’t do this anymore.”
“I always meant to protect you, Toni. Not to drive you away or to hurt you, never to hurt you.”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks, and I envied her. I wanted to do it, to be the one to dry her tears like I once had. “I’m not having an affair.” She said it in a way so void of emotion it startled me to silence. “I didn’t leave you for someone else. I just left.”
Despite the ghosts, we had once found safety in our love; it had protected us. But now our very presence tied us to a past we both wanted to forget enormous pieces of, and no matter how much we loved each other we could never undo that which was already done. Our pain had always outweighed our joy, but in these recent seasons of violence and blood, memory and nightmares, death and rebirth, it had become impossible to segregate one from the other.
“Gene’s just a friend,” she said. “He helps me sometimes. He’d help you too, if only you’d let him.”
“If I did… would you stay?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Like a drowning man still clinging to a life preserver he knows he’ll eventually lose the strength to hold onto, at first I refused to let go. In my mind I fell into bed, asleep in her arms while we nursed each other back to health. I was whole and she was happy loving me. But then I let the life preserver go, felt myself slip beneath the surface and slowly sink, deeper and deeper, further and further away from her.
Although the finality was frightening, there was also something peaceful about it.
Our secrets were safe with each other, even if we no longer were.
I pictured Claudia as I sat there stupidly, not for reasons of guilt or anger or even revenge, but because despite her very brief but real influence on my life—on my still being alive—she seemed make-believe, in a sense. And Toni did not.
I stood, wrapped my arms around her and kissed her forehead. She held on tight, but only for a while, and when she left, all I could think of was the escape sleep might once again provide. I wanted to sleep away the rest of this awful summer. I wanted to sleep until it all went away. I wanted to sleep until I learned how to live again without this madness creeping through my brain.
I’d already seen what was behind the curtain, and I didn’t want to look anymore. I didn’t want to look ever again.
I only wanted to sleep.
FALL
CHAPTER 39
Summer eventually left us but it refused to go without a fight. Though nothing of significance was ever found in the ruins of the mill itself, after its dramatic collapse the town selectmen ordered the remains bulldozed and immediately set out to have the rest of the old mills either destroyed or inspected for structural damage.
In late July, while crews were still working onsite, a worker accidentally came upon a shallow grave when he wandered into the neighboring forest to urinate. The skeletal remains of two more bodies were uncovered, and dental records identified them as a woman and her young son. They had lived in a low income section of a nearby city, and though both had been reported missing months prior, because the woman had a minor criminal record and drug problems police assumed she and her son had moved away in order to skip out on their rent. From the location described in the newspapers and on television, Rick and I must have walked right by it. Another of Bernard’s slight-of-hand tricks, perhaps.
The bodies brought the total number of victims in town found to four. The fact that one was a child caused even more press and greater anger and fear from residents and local politicians alike.
No one was safe now, they said. Imagine that.
But summer became fall and still the police had no answers or even any decent leads. Little did they know, they never would. A few people were paraded about as possible suspects in the press but all were quickly exonerated, and the violent transient theory remained the favorite of the day with both Potter’s Cove residents and the media. By the time September rolled around the town and the “unsolved” murders had been featured on numerous national media programs, written about in scores of newspapers, and even two books were authored on the subject and quickly released. But nothing came of any of it.
Oddly, by October the murders were becoming a thing of the past, and people had gone back behind their picket fences and into their tidy homes, content with the knowledge that whoever perpetrated these hideous crimes was gone. Like someone who wakes up terrified but just as quickly slips back once they realize it was only a nightmare, the people of Potter’s Cove closed their eyes and went back to sleep. The same quiet secrets, the same quiet screams still resided here, but townsfolk were no longer listening. A few well-meaning law enforcement people vowed to solve the murders, but no one ever did. News reports became fewer and further between, and the police and FBI presence in town dwindled. Interest waned, and I fell into line with everyone else, just another sleepwalker pretending all was well.
Of course the knowledge I had left me with tremendous guilt, and every time I’d see a family member of one of the murder victims in the newspaper, their faces so full of dread and anguish, I wanted desperately to tell them what I knew. But who would believe it? Even months later I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. Anything I might have done would only make things worse for them, would only complicate matters. Their loved ones were gone and they weren’t coming back whether I told them ghost stories or not. Bernard would never be found out, and even I had no proof that he had done anything other than kill himself. So I lived with the knowledge and stopped reading the articles, stopped looking at the pictures of mourning and confused family members hoping for explanations.
The leaves turned and the air became crisper—especially in the evenings. I tried my best to occupy my mind with things more pleasant. I even tried to write again, but every time I sat down with paper and pen, all I could see was Toni or Rick or Donald or Bernard, or those faces in the newspaper and all the sorrow and screams and blood that came with them.
The decision to leave town was surprisingly easy. Though Potter’s Cove was all I had ever known, it was time to go somewhere else and hopefully start again. Within a few days I’d be in Florida, and just as Toni had once wondered aloud, I couldn’t be sure anyone would even notice, much less care or try to stop me. In fact, in my mind, I had already left, and spent my time posturing like some strange hybrid creature suspended at a mysterious point between life and death, filled with perpetual uneasiness now rather than terror, forever destined to watch the windows for anything out of the ordinary, to feel that queasy and uncertain chill when strange headlights swept a darkened room, a telephone rang in the night, or a knock came on the door, forever bound to the knowledge that I was not alone and forced to survive on select memories and the reassurances I whispered to myself each sunset.