At all costs

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Despite the sprawling opulence of the mansion-in-the-meadow-Jake had it pegged at about ten thousand square feet-they remained clustered in the tiny parlor. Never much of a brandy connoisseur, Jake had developed a taste for Armagnac in the hour since he returned from the Radford, made even more discerning by Thorne’s observation that the stuff sold for four hundred dollars a bottle.

Nick had crashed shortly after they’d returned, claiming the love seat as his own and leaving the two chairs for Jake and Thorne. Harry Sinclair’s right-hand man looked exhausted, yet he remained awake and attentive while Jake recounted all that went on in Irene’s hotel room. He seemed particularly intrigued by the part about finding the “FBI lady” naked. Under different circumstances, Jake might even have considered this little chat a bonding session, but he never doubted that Thorne’s single purpose was to report everything Jake said back to his boss.

“I think Rivers is pretty sharp,” Jake concluded. “I’m sure she’ll do the legwork we need to get done.” Did I just say that? He wondered if he wasn’t trying to convince himself. The fact was, the odds were even that she’d take his information straight to Frankel, at which point Jake was screwed. No, correction-they were all screwed. Possibly even the mighty Harry Sinclair, given Irene’s question about his involvement in all this-the one detail he’d omitted from his report to Thorne.

As the big man started to doze, Jake was seized by melancholy, and the image of Travis fixed itself in his thoughts. Was there at least a safety net for his son-a level below which he wouldn’t fall? Jake wanted to believe that even if the fight to prove his and Carolyn’s innocence dragged on, the boy would be cut loose and-

What?

It worried Jake that even if he saw his most fervent wish fulfilled and Travis staged a full recovery, the likelihood was that his son would become a ward of the state.

A thought materialized out of nowhere. It was a wild one-one that was formed more from exhaustion than logic-yet in the space of seconds it grew from merely a seedling notion to a fine compromise to a question in need of speedy resolution. He turned urgently to Thorne and tapped the man’s knee, startling him from a fragile sleep.

“I’ve got a question for you.”

Thorne raised an eyebrow.

“What do you think Harry would say if I asked him to take charge of Travis while all of this business plays itself out?”

“He’d say no,” Thorne replied grumpily. He’d been enjoying his shut-eye.

“Why?” Suddenly, Jake was wide awake. He sat up straight. “I mean, he’s family, right? The courts would surely be inclined to grant temporary custody to family. Christ, Carolyn thinks the sun rises and sets with the old bastard.”

Thorne shook his head. “It’s a question Mr. Sinclair anticipated. The answer is no.”

“It’d be better than shuttling the poor kid from stranger to stranger,” Jake countered. “At least Harry could give some stability.”

“Your boy isn’t Mr. Sinclair’s problem,” Thorne said simply. “I mean, as kids go, yours ain’t so bad, but a kid’s a kid. You know of any kids Mr. Sinclair ever had? I don’t. He doesn’t like them.”

Jake wasn’t about to let it go. “But what about Carolyn? His Sunshine? I mean, she’s-”

“She’s different,” Thorne interrupted. He thought about saying something else but then stopped himself. “She’s different.”

In that instant, Jake saw a look in Thorne’s face that came as close to tenderness as a man like him could ever generate. “Tell me about her childhood,” he said softly.

Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want to know? She was a kid. Mr. Sinclair liked her.”

“But she has nightmares. Horrible ones. She wakes up screaming, yet she won’t talk about them. I know nothing of her parents. When I try to probe, she just pulls away.”

Thorne looked away, uncomfortable with the topic. “Then she doesn’t want you to know,” he said. “You should just let it go.”

“So why does she adore Harry the way she does?” Jake pressed. “What is it about that ornery old man that makes her melt at the mention of his name?”

Thorne just shook his head. These questions were not even worth answering.

“Did Harry abuse Carolyn?” Jake asked out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Did Harry abuse my wife when she was a little girl?” Jake said it again firmly, without hesitation. “There are signs, sometimes, that she was molested as a kid. She pulls away occasionally, she frequently doesn’t sleep. And the nightmares. I just thought that maybe…” His voice trailed off. He’d never verbalized his concerns to anyone before, and he was shocked by the emotions that welled up within him.

Thorne’s eyes hardened. “So you think Mr. Sinclair raped his niece? And that afterward she decided to adore him?” He leaned heavily on Jake’s word.

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s so much weird psychological bullshit you read about. I thought maybe…”

“You really got it bad for Sunshine, don’t you?” Thorne seemed surprised.

Jake looked away, embarrassed. “More than you could know,” he said.

Thorne inhaled deeply through his nose and let it go through puffed cheeks. “Mr. Sinclair’s little sister, Rebecca-she wasn’t very tough… very confident about herself,” he said softly. “She was sick a lot as a kid, and as she got older, she started into that whiny teenage shit, where she thought she was ugly and no guys would ever like her. I never knew her back then, you know, but Mr. Sinclair was very bothered by her attitude. Said she was a pretty thing, but how do you make a kid sister listen?”

He shifted again. “So when she’s eighteen, along comes a twenty-five-year-old dickhead named Mike Skepanski. Him I knew, and you could tell just from looking at him what a useless pile of shit he was. Mr. Sinclair hated him. Hell, everybody hated him. Everybody but Rebecca, of course, who fell in love with the guy and married him. Just weeks out of high school, knows nothing about anything, and she’s attached to this jerk for the rest of her life.”

As he spoke, Thorne’s story took on a momentum of its own, seeming to propel him more than he was propelling it. “Well, he does a stint as a construction worker for a while, but then the poor baby cuts his hand and doesn’t want to do that anymore. So he sits around the house for a few months until some idiot offers him a job as a security guard. He takes it, because he’s allowed to carry a gun and the gun makes him feel like a big man.

“That doesn’t work out either, of course, because he’s a worthless loser. Seems to me, he got caught sleeping on the job, or some such thing, and he got fired. It’s like this his whole life. He can’t hold a job, Rebecca’s miserable, and in the middle of it all, Carolyn is born.” Thorne allowed himself a smile as he looked back to Jake. “Now, I gotta tell you, I’m not much into kids, but Carolyn was a cutie. Big eyes, always smiling. And for the first time, Rebecca begins to think good thoughts about herself, you know?” The smile went away. “Until the Polack starts knocking her around just for the hell of it. Rebecca never said a word to anybody. Instead, she got heavy into drugs and booze and shit.”

He fell quiet for a moment, clearly girding himself for the rest of the story. “So I get a phone call one day that scares me. Rebecca’s not right, you know? And she wants to talk to her brother. I think that’s the first time I got clued in to the drinking. Well, Mr. Sinclair talks on the phone and comes out breathing fire. He grabs me, and we go driving all the way up to Milwaukee. He wouldn’t say why we were going up there, but I couldn’t drive fast enough to suit him.

“We pull up to their crappy little house about six at night, and as we get outa the car, we hear these screams. Not like angry screams, you know? Like terrified screams. Little-girl screams. We go inside and run upstairs, and there they are, all three of them in little Carolyn’s bedroom. She’s maybe nine, ten years old now.”

His voice trailed off. Another deep breath, and he recrossed his legs. “The Polack is drunk off his ass, beating the living shit out of both of them. Little Carolyn was screaming for him to stop, crying and crying while he just beat her with his fists.”

“Oh, my God,” Jake moaned. He felt ill.

“Rebecca was out of it,” Thorne went on, his voice growing thicker. “She’d already been pounded numb. Maybe it was the drugs, but she was never the same.” He paused. “Mr. Sinclair took the girls to the hospital, and I took care of the Polack.”

The tone and the body language told Jake that Thorne was done, but he couldn’t let it end there. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Thorne said, shrugging. “But Mr. Sinclair made sure that Rebecca and Sunshine had everything they needed.” He locked his gaze on Jake and scowled.

“What did you do with her father?”

Thorne’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set. His position sort of uncoiled as he leaned back and placed his palms on the arms of the chair. “You ask a lot of questions, Jake. Are you sure you want to know the answers?”

Jake paused just long enough to convey his uneasiness. “Yes,” he said at length, “I want to know. I think I ought to know.”

“Okay,” Thorne said, leaning his elbows on his knees. “This is just between you and me, right? Mikey and I went for a little drive in the country. We talked for a little while, and then I blew his fucking head off.” He smiled, still pleased with himself after all these years. “He’s fertilizer now, and as far as I know, no one even reported the bastard missing.”

The words hung in the air like a bad odor, churning Jake’s stomach. At the same time, they left him feeling oddly fulfilled. “You murdered him?”

Thorne responded silently, with one of his humorless smiles.

“Does Harry know? I mean, did he tell you to kill him?”

“Of course not,” Thorne scoffed quickly, unequivocally; like it was the most ridiculous question in the world. “Mr. Sinclair doesn’t operate that way. He thinks I put the Polack on a plane to anyplace two thousand miles away, with instructions never to be seen again. He assumed I did what he told me, and I never bothered to correct him.”

Jake didn’t buy it. “Come on, Thorne! Do you expect me to believe-”

Thorne cut him off with a raised hand. “You still don’t get it, do you? My job is to make problems go away. Ninety percent of the time, Mr. Sinclair has no idea what I do. In fact, he pays me a lot of money not to keep him informed.”

“But if he knew-”

“He’d be upset-oh, yeah,” Thorne said. “But like I said, Carolyn-she was a cutie. And myself, I’ve always been partial to permanent solutions.”

Travis had been in this tunnel once before, and like last time, he wasn’t alone. Those same faceless voices floated all around him in the dark, saying things he couldn’t quite make out.

The snake was still down his throat, but it seemed to have settled down. It wasn’t biting him anymore. Jesus, though, his mouth was dry. He tried to swallow, but the snake wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t hissing at him anymore, either-at least, not unless he wanted it to. The snake had given him back control of his breathing. That was nice of him.

Something was dragging him toward a light, and as he got closer, he gradually realized that he wasn’t in a tunnel at all. He was asleep. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t get himself all the way awake. The voices kept getting louder and louder. If he wasn’t mistaken, someone was saying his name.

What nightmares he’d had! Chases and chemicals and screaming and fighting. Whatever he’d had to eat before bed last night, he hoped he’d never make that mistake again.

What was last night, anyway? The light grew brighter still.

But he wasn’t floating anymore. In fact, he felt anchored down, as if glued to the floor. He tried to move, but his chest hurt like hell. Like he’d been beaten with something. Was that what this was all about? Maybe he was still in the dirt recovering from his fight with Terry Lampier, and the rest had all been a wild dream.

The light rushed toward him now, with frightening speed. The voices grew louder and clearer, and sure enough, someone was saying his name.

Travis opened his eyes, yet he still didn’t know where he was. He tried to talk, but something in his mouth wouldn’t let him. His old friend the snake.

A face appeared above him, a lady he didn’t know, with a smile that trimmed the edges off his fear. “Hi there, Travis,” she said. “Welcome back. You had us worried for a while.”

Hours had passed, she was sure, but there was no way for her to know what time it was. Clocks weren’t the only human niceties denied to residents of the isolation wing. So was any view of the outdoors. The only reality residents were allowed was the one provided by their jailers. How easy it was, she’d thought at one point during the night, to manipulate people’s thoughts and fears. Her light had stayed on all night, but she supposed it would have been just as easy to keep it off. Days and days without a restful sleep, followed by days and days of darkness, were pretty much guaranteed to alter a body’s sense of reality. And to what end? Any end they chose, she assumed.

She hadn’t moved in a very long time. She just sat there on her concrete cot, fingering the rope that Wiggins had left behind and trying to make peace with God. Was there a God? Despite everything that had happened to her over the years, she couldn’t help but feel that there was another place, better than this one, and a presence-a force — that wanted her and Jake and her little boy to be together. If not here, then there.

What was she to do? What options did she have? She could kill herself or kill her son. That part was clear, but what then? What guarantees were there that Wiggins wouldn’t kill her little boy, anyway? Maybe this was all bluff to begin with…

No, she told herself quickly. He was dead serious. He’ll kill my baby.

For a long while, she debated the option of reporting all of this to the matron, but ultimately, she rejected it as unworkable. They’d never believe her, and in the questioning that followed, she’d miss her deadline to die.

Roll call. She didn’t even know when that was. It had to be in the morning, she figured, but what time? Judging by the rhythms of the place, the critical hour was approaching. Late, late that night, the noise had died down to just a few rude conversations as inmates dropped off to sleep. Now the noise was picking up again; nothing like it was before, but it wouldn’t be long.

The slipknot was the first thing she tied. Nothing fancy-nothing like the looped nooses that Travis liked to tie in every piece of rope he ever got his hands on. Just a simple slipknot, tied the same way she’d learned years ago, in Brownies.

Memories of her childhood-the most horrible ones-tried to sneak their way into her consciousness, but she ran them off. For the last time, she realized with some measure of relief. Perhaps that was the silver lining within this darkest of clouds. She’d never have to face the nightmares again.

It was time to think about Jake. And about Travis. About the good times.

Snagging the light fixture with the running end of the rope turned out to be quite the challenge. She fashioned a lasso of sorts in the middle of the clothesline and tried to rope the fixture, much like a cowboy would rope a horse. With the fixture well out of reach overhead, there could be no screwups, no second chances; no way to loosen a fouled knot.

It helped if she stood on the cot. After four or five flubs, she finally got it and in so doing, felt inexplicably elated. The next challenge would be to lean out far enough to actually extend her neck into the dangling loop of rope.

A bell rang somewhere, startling the hell out of her. “Roll call!” someone yelled. “All right, ladies, rise and shine!”

Carolyn’s heart raced now as she heard footsteps approaching down the hall.

“Front and center, Mrs. Donovan!”

Standing on tiptoes and straining like a kid trying to see over the fence at a ballpark, she just barely hooked the noose with the point of her chin and opened her jaw wide to drag her head in further. She filled her brain with images of Jake and Travis. The images she wanted to take with her. She whispered that she loved them.

“It’s a new day…”

That’s when she lost her balance. The noose came tight-impossibly tight-as she swung away from the cot in a wide arc, her toes straining instinctively to touch the floor, which remained just an inch out of reach. For an instant, she wondered if the thin clothesline might actually pop her head right off her body, and she clawed at the spot where the rope dug into her flesh.

Then her vision flashed red, and there was nothing more.