Dead Silence Page 4

  She makes a face. “Yeah. They gave me antibiotics. I was so sick, and I was out of work for over a week, and I lost my job.”

  “You lost your job! Because you were sick? That’s not—that’s—What do you do?”

  “Oh . . . I . . .” She shifts her weight. “I’m a teacher. I was a teacher. Then.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for you to be fired from—”

  “No, no, I don’t mean I lost my job because I was sick. But, um, you know how you look back on some stupid random thing that happened, and it seems like it’s the thing that made a lot of other bad stuff happen, even though it didn’t?”

  Boy, do I ever.

  “So now you’re unemployed?”

  “Yeah. So, anyway . . .” She inhales, exhales, on a shrug. “I had the time to start thinking about my past. And that’s how I found you. And I guess if you find my real parents, then that strep throat wasn’t a bad thing at all, you know?”

  “I do, but . . . I should mention, Lily, going into this search, that what I turn up may not be what you’re expecting or hoping to find. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. And there’s always a chance that I’ll hit dead ends no matter where I look.”

  Lily nods slowly, thoughtfully.

  “The other thing is that if I do find living relatives, they might not be receptive to making a connection. Okay? So just keep that in mind. It’s a lot, I know.”

  “Got it.”

  Before Lily leaves, they make an appointment for the following Thursday. Amelia closes the door after her and leans against it, exhaling at last.

  Chapter Three

  Interstate 81 bisects New York State, running south from the rolling hills on the Saint Lawrence River to Watertown, along Lake Ontario’s eastern shore, then down through Syracuse, where it intersects with the thruway. Traffic picks up there, in the shadow of its industrial cityscape. Rain begins to fall, and the world swims in around him. Strangers’ eyes seem to probe him as they whiz past—truckers, commuters, university students. They can’t possibly know, he reminds himself, adjusting the windshield wipers as the downpour ebbs to a drizzle.

  The kid, slumped in the backseat beneath the quilt, looks like any other sleeping toddler, though he isn’t sucking his thumb. That’s what he does, what he’s done since he was born—always when he’s sleeping, and in his waking hours as well.

  He’s dead. He must be. He’d barely had a pulse when the Angler checked him at a gas station stop nearly an hour ago. He’s such a frail thing, it’s not surprising that the medication could have been lethal this time.

  The Angler remembers how the boy whimpered when he saw the spoon and plastic cup, its foil seal already peeled back. There had been a time when he’d have gobbled the treat, but now he knew that it was no ordinary chocolate pudding, knew that the Angler would command Monique to force-feed it to him. The first time, she’d refused, so the Angler held down the struggling child and jammed the substance down his throat as he choked and gagged. Now she was the one who lifted the spoon with one trembling hand and pried the boy’s mouth open with the other, crooning to him in French as tears streamed down both their faces.

  He thinks of his wife, Cecile, administering pediatric cough syrup droplet by droplet from a measured oral syringe the last time their son had been sick.

  “Don’t be so stingy with it,” he’d said. “Give him a little extra so he’ll stop hacking and sleep.”

  “You mean, so that you can sleep,” she’d said with a glare and turned her back, cradling the boy and rocking him like an infant. Pascal is a robust four years old and their daughter, Renee, almost seven. She has her mother’s black hair and fair skin, but her towheaded brother looks like the Angler had at that age. So very much like the child in the backseat.

  Convenient, with the borrowed passport and all.

  Cecile will never notice that he’d snuck it out of the house. She won’t need it until next June, when she and the children depart to spend the summer with her parents in Paris.

  He clenches the wheel, spotting a green mileage sign ahead. He’s reached Cortland, and Binghamton is just forty miles down the road. Both, like Syracuse, are college towns. He needs to get away from them, from all these people, from the highway. He’s unsure of the speed limit in kilometers, and the car behind him is tailgating. Because he’s going too slowly? Because the driver is onto him? Can it be an unmarked police vehicle?

  He veers off the next exit without signaling, and exhales when the other car fails to follow. His nerves are frayed, and exhaustion has caught up with him. The sooner he’s rid of the body, the better.

  The two-lane road veers southwest past fast-food restaurants, chain hotels, discount stores, and a turnoff toward campus. A little farther on, it’s lined with houses. He brakes for several small-town stoplights, noting that a few roofs are tarped, and there are broken branches stacked along the curbs. Must have been a hell of a storm here recently. A flagman waves the traffic to a single lane. He twitches, feeling trapped as he crawls past a bucket truck crew working on damaged trees overhead. He clears that, only to become stuck behind a yellow school bus making every stop to dispatch middle schoolers.

  He watches two long-haired girls stroll toward a gas station mini-mart, carrying backpacks that stoop them forward so that their short skirts ride up their thighs.

  The bus moves on, and the road opens up at last. Here, it’s comfortably rural, winding toward the Finger Lakes and yet another well-populated college town. A signpost warns him that Ithaca is a scant twenty miles from here. He has to get rid of the kid before he gets much closer.

  At the moment, he’s the only car on the highway. He can’t just pull over and dump a corpse, though. Maybe he can find a nice little pond out here, a rowboat he can borrow . . .

  Maybe, but not likely. Not in the middle of the day, by any means.

  Coming around a bend, he spots a cop car parked on the shoulder. He hits the brakes, curses under his breath, and looks at the speedometer. He’d been going more than seventy kilometers an hour—what’s the damned limit here? He holds his breath as he crawls past, feeling the cop’s stare. But the dome lights don’t glow and spin, and the sedan is still parked there when he finally rounds a curve and loses it in the rearview mirror.

  Close call.

  He makes the next turn, off the main road onto one dotted with fields and the occasional farmhouse. Too much wide-open space. He needs privacy.

  He turns down another, narrower road, a tree-lined, winding country lane littered with fallen leaves. Ah, this is more like it. He slows, spotting a weathered wooden orchard stand off the shoulder ahead. That’s the spot.

  He pulls over, turns off the engine, and opens the car door. The rain has stopped, and the world is dripping, thick with humming insects and chirping songbirds. Branches bend in a damp breeze, laden with glistening foliage and coppery apples. The dilapidated fruit stand appears forsaken, with no sign of tire tracks in the muddy parking area littered with downed branches. One appears to have taken out a chunk of the stand’s slatted roof.

  He goes around to the passenger’s side and opens his tackle box. Had that customs official decided to look inside, he’d have found the filet knife right on top. Would he have realized that its ten-inch blade is smeared with human blood?

  Heart racing, the Angler removes the knife and snaps the lid closed. He needs to get rid of it—not here with the body, but somewhere along the way. And then, when he’s safely back home, he won’t be so quick to find a new girl. He’ll take some time away from all that. Time for normal.

  He shoves the knife into his coat pocket and pauses to listen for cars approaching on the road, hearing nothing. He only needs a minute here, perhaps mere seconds, and he’ll be on his way.

  He opens the door and leans into the backseat. The kid is still and deathly pale. There will likely be no need to finish him off. He would if necessary, but it wouldn’t be easy with a child. Especially one who so closely resembles Pascal.
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  He scoops up the boy. The small, dangling feet scrape along the edge of the car door as he maneuvers to close it, but the child doesn’t flinch. He carries the lifeless body toward the trees behind the wooden structure. There, far more gently than is necessary, he sets him on the ground amid rotting fallen fruit. If he’s not dead, he’s about to be. He’s frightfully pale. One bare, filthy foot is now smeared with fresh blood.

  Something stirs as the Angler stares down at that pathetic face, now half-obscured by weeds.

  Not just because he looks like Monique, or like my son.

  Because he looks like me, as I was then.

  Vulnerable. Motherless. Alone. Injured. Broken.

  Blamed for something over which he had no control.

  He doesn’t like to look back on his grim childhood. When he does, he prefers to remember just the summer he’d spent in the Laurentians, fishing for northern pike with the only man he’d ever known who hadn’t abused or assaulted him.

  Hugo had always known just where to sink the bait for that sleek, silvery prey gliding in the reeds below the murky surface; just how to move the line to lure the fish and blindside it with a barbed hook.

  “Faites confiance à vos sens,” he’d said as if it were that easy.

  Just trust your senses.

  The Angler would watch in awe as his uncle tossed catch after wriggling catch into a bucket, and he’d salivate at the thought of savoring that tender flesh.

  His own job had been to clean the fish. Sometimes, he’d close his eyes, blade in hand, hands slick with guts and blood, and he’d imagine . . .

  La bête noire.

  The black beast—his father—had died a satisfyingly violent death. Car accident, as opposed to any of the grisly scenarios the Angler had conjured in his darkest hours. The funeral mass had fallen on his own thirtieth birthday, a most welcome gift.

  Uncle Hugo had traveled from Quebec to pay his respects. Nearly unrecognizable, having traded worn denim for a dark suit, he’d extended condolences in French and sat apart from the smattering of coworkers and neighbors obligated to mourn a man who hadn’t a friend in the world, and didn’t deserve one. The elderly priest, who’d inflicted his own brand of cruel tyranny during the Angler’s school days, had delivered a perfunctory homily and no eulogy.

  After the yawning earth had swallowed his father’s coffin, the Angler had followed his uncle all the way back to the Laurentians, keeping a careful distance behind the pickup truck’s taillights. He’d felt no affection for the old man after all these years, and no need to reestablish a connection. He only wanted to see the farm again, perched near a rural lake surrounded by forests and mountains.

  He’d expected that it, like every other place in the world, would have changed over the years. But the old homestead had appeared just as it had been that summer. He’d prowled the property and crept into the house after his uncle had turned in for the night.

  There, too, time had stood still.

  In a spartan room at the end of the upstairs hallway, he’d surveyed familiar furniture. The bookcase was still filled with boyhood novels he’d read that summer. On top, he saw the tower of elongated wooden blocks he and Hugo had made to duplicate Jenga, a game the kids were playing back home. The object was to stack the blocks and then take turns removing them one at a time with painstaking care. If the tower falls, you lose.

  Standing there years later, he remembered playing the game with his elderly uncle on nights when they weren’t out fishing.

  His father had refused to let him take the game home to Ottawa with him, just as he’d refused him the boxed toy store set that had been all he’d wanted the Christmas before.

  You lose . . . you lose . . .

  He’d stared at the worn patchwork quilt he’d needed every night but one that chilly summer, longing to crawl under it and go to sleep—here, on the farm. Longed to stay forever, never go back to his father.

  And then he’d realized that his father was dead. And that he was no longer an incorrigible child who’d been kicked out of three schools. He was a man with a full-time factory job and a newly inherited house from which he could finally banish his father’s presence.

  Another decade has passed since that tentative nocturnal visit. Now the orchards are overgrown, the livestock reduced to a small flock of chickens and roosters, the empty barn stalls surrounded by fallow fields. Uncle Hugo sleeps long and often. His meals are delivered by volunteers from the local church. If he ever happened to spot the Angler prowling about the property, he likely wouldn’t remember him, or might—God forbid—mistake him for his dead father. Or his dead father’s ghost.

  His head echoes with the crack of a belt, angry cursing, slamming doors, breaking glass, terrified whimpers . . .

  And then, too late, he hears something else.

  Out on the road, some distance away. Not a car, but . . .

  The unmistakable clopping of a horse’s hooves.

  He looks wildly for a place to hide, then remembers the car parked right there in the open. He runs for it, reassured to find the parking area still deserted and the road empty. But someone is coming. He jumps behind the wheel and pulls out onto the road heading in the opposite direction, back from where he came, watching the rearview mirror until the orchard stand disappears around a bend.

  Safe. If he didn’t see the horseback rider, then the rider didn’t see him or the car or the Ontario plates. Only animals are likely to find the boy’s body anytime soon, and by the time they’re finished with him . . .

  He’ll no longer bear any resemblance to Pascal, much less to me.

  It’s over.

  For a good long time, anyway. Maybe forever. If he’d been caught back there . . .

  Had someone come along in a car, he wouldn’t have had time to escape. The driver might have noticed a vehicle parked in the middle of nowhere. Might have stopped to investigate, even, and then . . .

  But you weren’t caught. You’re never caught. You do the catching.

  He retraces his route to the highway. The cop is still there, but the Angler notes the speed limit this time and holds the speedometer to it. There are no more school buses.

  He spies two familiar long-haired girls outside the mini-mart. Their backpacks are on the ground now, their skirts hiked even higher than before as they straddle a bike rack in a most unladylike fashion, talking while tapping away on their cell phones and slurping tall blue drinks through straws. They look about thirteen, maybe fourteen—Monique’s age when he’d first got her.

  She’d been glorious then, her skin luminescent; her body taut and supple. He’d marveled that it had sprung back so quickly after pregnancy. Cecile had struggled to reclaim her figure, and to this day bears unsightly traces of childbirth, concealed beneath a well-chosen wardrobe.

  Lately, though, he’d noticed that his precious Monique, too, was ripening—not like a pretty pink apple on the bough, but like one that had fallen and begun to stink and rot. Her breasts sagged, her hips had widened; there was an unappealing ridge of fat below her navel. Her face, too, was aging—hardened, sunken, gaunt. Her skin was sallow. Her mouth smelled of decay; her molars were turning black and crumbling. In pain, she’d said she needed a dentist. He’d laughed. As if.

  He’d known that their journey together would soon come to an end, though he hadn’t expected it to happen so abruptly. He’d assumed there would be time to figure out how best to get rid of her and the boy, even bring in a replacement so that she could teach the newcomer how it goes here.

  That’s all right. When he finds one, she’ll learn on her own, just as Monique had.

  He takes one last wistful glance in his rearview mirror at the schoolgirls, and then they vanish.

  He’ll take a break for a while. Maybe even until next summer, with Cecile and the children safely overseas and cool, languid nights that belong only to him. Nights that are perfect for fishing.

  Amelia hadn’t intended to walk all the way from her office to Sutton
Place. But when she’d stepped outside into soft evening air, she couldn’t bring herself to descend to the subway. She’d started uptown on foot, needing time alone to digest what had happened this morning, and to discuss it with the one person in her world who would not only grasp its significance, but who knows what it’s like to be in her shoes.

  Her shoes . . .

  Oh, ouch, her shoes. Leather pumps weren’t made for three-mile urban hikes.

  As she walks, she scrutinizes likely strangers and eavesdrops on their conversations, hoping to trigger some innate recognition of her birth mother buried deeply in her subconscious mind. Old habit, though she’s well aware of infantile amnesia, the phenomenon that precludes people from remembering their earliest years of life.

  Back when Silas Moss informed her that a child can’t retain autobiographical memory until at least three or four years of age, Amelia had protested. After all, if the human brain is developed enough for a baby to learn how to talk and a toddler how to walk, shouldn’t it be capable of storing a birth mother’s face or voice?

  Si had gently told her that it is not. “Talking and walking are procedural memories, my dear, as opposed to episodic memories. Science has yet to fully explain why they differ so drastically, particularly at the very beginning of life, or toward the end.”

  A bittersweet truth, especially now that Silas is nearing the end of his, wheelchair bound in a rest home, his memories and brilliant mind corroded by Alzheimer’s disease.

  As Amelia waits for the light to change at Second Avenue and East Twenty-Third Street, Jessie returns her call.

  “Mimi? I got your message. What’s up?”

  “I found my ring!”

  “What? How? Where?”

  Jessie doesn’t ask “which ring,” though Amelia had lost it long before they’d even met.

  Someone bumps her from behind as pedestrians brush past her into the crosswalk. The light has changed. She crosses the street and hobbles on, telling Jessie about Lily Tucker.

  “What did she say when you told her it was your ring?”