Sleep Tight

Chapter 29

Mason hummed to himself as he packed his lunch to take with him to the commercial greenhouse where he worked. He hadn't felt this good since… since, well, since his sister had been home. But his life was turning around. Jo was coming to visit soon, and he had a girl, just like she'd always wanted. A girl who read Proust.

"I worry about you," Jo had told him once. "I'd feel better leaving here if you had somebody. What about that nice Lauren who works at Dr. DeLong's office?"

"She isn't my type," he'd said, closing the book he'd been reading. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.

"What kind of girl is your type?"

"I don't know." He'd looked at her light hair, her blue eyes, her sweet face. "Maybe somebody kinda like you."

She'd laughed. "Oh, Mason. You're so sweet, but you don't want a girlfriend like me."

"Why not?"

"You shouldn't limit yourself in that way. There are so many different kinds of people in the world."

In the dark of the kitchen, he replaced the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put the container back in the refrigerator. A minute ago, he'd been blissfully happy. Now a deep, unreasoning sorrow pressed down on him, coming out of nowhere. A moment ago, the world had seemed a promising place. Now bleakness stretched out before him as far as he could see.

The girl, he thought despairingly, exhaustion washing over him. Did he have enough energy to deal with her today? Earlier, he'd been so happy knowing she was in the house. Now taking care of her seemed more than he could cope with. Before, everything had been sharp and well defined. Now his thoughts were fuzzy, with sloppy, disturbing edges that couldn't be repaired.

This life is an illusion, he thought, mentally quoting Graham Morris. The words often gave him comfort in times like these.

The girl. He had to deal with the girl. He had to do something with her while he went to work. Normally, spending the day among acres of roses brought him comfort. How could it today if he spent all the time worrying about her?

Last night he'd left her tied to the bed, her mouth covered with tape in case she woke up and decided to start screaming. He could leave her there. Not even look in the room. He could leave for work and forget about her for eight hours.

It all seemed so hard. It all suddenly seemed stupid. That was perhaps his biggest fault-allowing an idea to carry him away so that he jumped into new situations without giving them enough thought.

Wearily, he made his way to the bedroom.

She was awake. Her eyes were open, and she was watching him. Even though she was wearing his sister's clothes, she was just a girl.

There was nothing special about her.

She reads Proust. How many people do you know who read Proust?

None.

True, but that didn't mean she understood it. Lots of people read books and listened to music they didn't understand or care to understand. It didn't mean she could spend hours discussing Proust.

You haven't given her a chance.

She'd disappointed him, just like the others.

What was he going to do with her?

When he was little, he'd read a book about a dog, and suddenly he wanted one. His sister took him to a kennel, where they bought a mutt. He'd wanted a real dog like a collie or Labrador retriever, but Jo insisted on getting one from the pound. "To save him from being put to sleep," she'd explained. She'd spent her life caring for strays of all kinds, so he couldn't speak against the very thing that defined who she was.

The dog was an ugly, pathetic thing, with big brown eyes and soft hair, and the most irritatingly timid nature. If Masbn as much as frowned, it would tuck its tail between its legs and piddle all over the floor.

Mason knew nothing about dogs except what he'd learned from television, books, and movies. It turned out that those dogs-the kind with leading roles on screen-were lies. He'd expected the mutt to be smarter, to be able to communicate with him and understand everything he said. At the very least, it should have been able to entertain itself.

The dog was an annoyance. A horrible, time-consuming annoyance. It had to be taken outside when it wasn't convenient, and it chewed up the furniture. Worse, it chewed on Mason's books.

It constantly wanted to play. It constantly wanted attention, and didn't like to be left alone even for ten minutes. It was a pathetic, useless creature that took and took and took, and never gave anything back except for ruined books and stained carpet.

Jo adored the pathetic creature, the way she seemed to adore all pathetic creatures. "We're all made by God," she'd say, smiling. She would toss sticks to it and pet it, talking to it in her soft, quiet voice. When she did so, the dog would actually calm down and mind, at least a little.

"Isn't he wonderful?" she'd sometimes say. "Isn't he adorable?"

The more Jo liked it, the more Mason hated it. Stupid dog. Stupid, worthless dog. Eating and shitting, eating and shitting.

Mason tried to lose it. He took it miles from home. Then, when it wasn't looking, Mason ran away. But the dog-Seymour was its name-found its way home. Which meant it wasn't as stupid as Mason thought. But that was just instinct, Mason had argued with himself when the dog had arrived panting and happy on the doorstep. Turtles had instinct. Salmon had instinct. Worms had instinct.

The girl on the bed was making Mason feel the way he'd felt toward Seymour. She was an irritant that was creeping under his skin. Someone who'd lured him with promises of being more than she was. She'd tricked him into thinking she was the prize, that once he found her, his life would be complete and the happiness that had eluded him for so long would be within his grasp.

But nothing had changed. Right now he was sad. It was an old, familiar sadness that was like a smothering blanket.

He would feed her and put her away for the day. And later he would think about what to do.

When he got so sick of the dog that he couldn't stand it anymore, Mason-in order to save his sanity and his place in the household-was forced to take drastic measures he hadn't wanted to take. But it had been Seymour's fault. If Seymour had lived up to his expectations, nothing would have happened.

One day Seymour disappeared. "Up and disappeared," the locals would have said. But he and Jo weren't locals; they'd moved in when an uncle left Jo the house in his will, plus enough money to live on for several years. Mason and Jo had moved there from Louisiana, driving all the way in an old station wagon packed with their belongings. "A new beginning," Jo had called it.

But the people in the nearby town had never really let them in. Mason hadn't cared. "They can all go to hell," he'd told Jo. She'd been hurt by their rejection. Fifteen years later she gave up and decided it was time to go. When she left, only a handful of neighbors stopped to tell her good-bye.

Mason had stayed. He had his roses, and his roses were a part of him. He couldn't leave.

When Seymour vanished, he and Jo searched the area surrounding the sprawling farmhouse. They checked the outbuildings and the barn. They looked along the pond and stream that ran through the property. Then they got in the car and drove, going door to door, asking if anyone had seen a cute little brown dog.

No one had.

"He's gone," Mason told Jo after a week had passed.

"Where did he go?" she asked, sobbing in her handkerchief. "Why did he want to leave us?"

"Maybe he followed some other dogs," Mason suggested. "Or maybe he followed a car down the road. You know how he was, always chasing anything that moved."

Mason and Jo had clung together that evening, crying in the darkness. "Don't feel too sad about him," Mason had said. "He was faithless. He was a faithless mongrel."

With the dog gone, a heavy burden lifted from Mason.

He never forgot the lesson he'd learned from Seymour. Life was full of disappointments, and nothing was what it looked like from the outside.

He let the girl named Gillian go to the bathroom; then he made her walk downstairs. He shoved her along in front of him, down the aged wooden steps into the stone basement with its dirt floor. The smell of dampness and earth hit him, and again he thought of Seymour.

The bare lightbulbs that lit the way from room to room were dim.

They wound along to finally come to the door with the chipped green paint. He reached around the girl, opened it, and then gave her a push.

Gillian stumbled forward, her heart hammering. The room was no wider than six feet across, each side lined with wooden shelves. On one of the shelves was a thin gray mattress and pillow. Attached to the shelf supports were handcuffs. In the back of the room, lying horizontally on the ground like a coffin, was a mustard-colored refrigerator. Dangling above her head, covered with cobwebs, was a bare, low-watt lightbulb.

He spun her around and yanked the tape from her mouth.

She didn't respond to the pain. "Mason, please, let's talk. I want to talk to you-" When she talked to him, he changed.

"I'm going to work," he said.

He pulled a wrapped sandwich out of his sweatshirt pocket and put it on the mattress. Out of his other pocket came a jar of water. He put that next to the sandwich. "If you scream, nobody will hear you. But I don't want you to scream. If I come home and hear you screaming, I'll have to discipline you. I'll have to hurt you. If you're bad, you'll be punished. If you're good, you'll be rewarded."

"Mason, please-"

He turned and left, shutting the door behind him. She heard the jingle of metal as he locked the lock, then muffled footsteps as he walked away. A minute later the light above her head went out, plunging her into darkness.

Trying to keep her fear tamped down, she felt her way to the door and ran her hands across the rough wood. There was no handle on the inside. She pushed, then threw her weight against it. Solid, with no movement. She threw herself at it again and again until her shoulder ached.

She expected her eyes to adjust to the dark, expected the room to eventually lighten, but that didn't happen. It remained as dark as it had been when Mason turned bff the light.

She thought about prisoners who'd been secluded in dark holes for months, sometimes years. If they hadn't been crazy to begin with, they were when they got out.

He was coming back, she told herself. He'd just put her down there while he was at work. Yet she couldn't keep from wondering, What if he never returns?-either intentionally or unintentionally. He could be in a car wreck. He could be killed. Nobody would know where she was.

Every instinct told her to scream as loudly as she could.

What if he hasn't really left?

What if he's upstairs, listening, waiting to see if you've disobeyed?

What if he's standing right on the other side of the door?

She rapped lightly on the door. "Mason?" she whispered. "Are you out there?" She paused, listening for an answer.

Silence.

Left alone in the dark with just her thoughts, she felt fear begin to grow.

He was different this morning.

He didn't like me this morning.

Even though he was a kidnapper and a killer, he seemed to be in awe of women in his own weird, twisted way. But this morning he'd been all business, hardly looking at her. She'd sensed disappointment in him. What had she done wrong? What had set him off?

Was he riding the downside of a manic episode? Now that the thrill of the capture was over, had the high evaporated, leaving him deflated and depressed?

She crossed her arms at her waist and pressed them to her empty stomach. It hurt. Her stomach hurt. She remembered the sandwich he'd dropped on the bed, along with the jar of water.

She couldn't inspect it with her eyes, couldn't examine it for bugs or anything else he may have decided to put inside. Even if she could see, she wouldn't be able to tell if he'd laced it with anything from rat poison to some kind of drug that would knock her out for the rest of the day.

Maybe that would be a good idea.

No, she decided, thinking of lying down on the filthy mattress, virtually unconscious for hours while roaches nibbled away at her. No, she couldn't make herself eat the sandwich or drink the water.

How much time had passed? Two hours? Five minutes? Impossible to tell.

She had to focus her mind on something solid. Think about getting out. Think about what she would say to Mason when he returned to convince him never to put her here again. Think about not doing anything wrong. Think about being good.

But thoughts of Mason's return increased her anxiety and made her more aware of the slow passing of time. She had to dwell on something else, had to think of something nice.

A picnic in the park.

Fried chicken.

No, can't think about food.

Still standing, she leaned her back against the door and closed her eyes. "Swimming," she whispered to herself. She'd always loved to swim. When she was in high school, she used to force the air from her lungs. Airless, her body lost all buoyancy and she would let herself sink to the bottom of the deep end. She would lie there, looking up at the surface from her skewed perspective. When her lungs could wait no longer for air, she'd fold herself, then push against the pool bottom, shooting up to the surface, flying into the sparkling light, feeling exhilarated because she'd flirted with death.

"What are you doing?" Mary would shout in a frantic voice from the edge of the pool.

"Pretending to be dead."

"Don't scare me like that! I was ready to dive in and pull you out!"

Mary rescued people. It was what she did.

Gillian used to be brave. She used to be tough. She used to be scared of nothing. But that was all a facade. A teenage facade.

Fear is a terrible thing. An awful, horrible thing.

Maybe the most terrible, awful, horrible thing. It made you rearrange yourself, made you willing to compromise all principles. Made you desperately want to please a sick man.

Mary pulled up in front of Gavin Hitchcock's house, turned off the ignition, and got out of the car. After Gillian's abduction and Holly's statement, Gavin's confession had been tossed out and he'd been released on bail, the rape charge still standing. Now Mary was after reassurance and information. Sometimes killers worked in pairs, and she needed to be absolutely certain Gavin wasn't in some way connected to the recent murders-and possibly to her sister's abduction.

He answered the door dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, his hair clipped close to his head, his face clean-shaved, his eyes dark-rimmed and hostile. Evidence of his overdose clung to him. He was pale and thin, and he looked as if he'd dropped thirty pounds since the day Mary had seen him at the auto repair shop.

"What do you want?" He chose a pose of intimidation, chest out, one bent arm high on the doorframe, fingers dangling.

"May I come in?"

He stared at her a moment, then dropped his arm and backed up to let her pass. "Have you heard anything about Gillian?" he asked, his tone warring between resentment of Mary and desire for news of her sister.

Mary sat down on the couch. His house was clean and tidy, very different from the last time she'd been there.

He remained standing. "What do you want?"

"You love Gillian, don't you?" she asked, trying to establish a foundation for the questions that would follow.

"That's no big secret."

"And you'd like us to find her, wouldn't you?"

"Of course I would." He became animated, angry at the implication that he might not want Gillian to be found. "I'm going crazy here. If I find out who did this to her, I'll kill him." He began to pace. "I don't care if I go to prison for the rest of my life." He jabbed a finger in her direction. "I want that son of a bitch dead. If I find out he did anything to hurt Gillian-" He stopped, and his voice cracked. Emotions and energy spent, he collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. When he looked up, his eyes were red. "She has to be okay," he said hoarsely. "She has to be okay."

Mary had never before seen a lack of sympathy as a handicap, but she wasn't sure anymore. "If you can't feel what they feel, how can you begin to understand them and what they might do next?" Anthony had once argued when she'd accused him of giving criminals too much soul.

"Gavin-I have to know if you had anything to do with the recent murders."

He frowned in concentration, and she could see the confusion on his face. "I have epilepsy, you know," he told her. "Sometimes I have fits and pass out, and when I wake up I can't remember what happened."

"Do you have any memory of any of the girls? Of ever seeing them? Talking to them?"

He thought about it, then slowly shook his head. "No. Nothing."

"But you said you murdered them." Her voice was low, conversational, inquisitive. "You confessed. Why would you confess to something you have no memory of?"

"There was that Cammie chick, who said I raped her. And I remember having a knife in my hand. I remember thinkin' about killing her."

"Thinking and doing are two different things."

"I know, I know." He picked up a plastic red lighter from the table and began nervously fiddling with it. Flicking it on and off, staring at the flame. "But then there was Gillian."

"Gillian?"

"Looking at me the way she was. Like I made her sick. Like I was some kind of monster. So I thought I must have killed them."

"Now what do you think?"

"I don't know." He tossed down the lighter. "My head is a mess. I can't even remember raping that college girl, but I must have done that too. I mean, I tied her up."

"Did she ask to be tied to the bed?"

"Oh, Christ." He looked at the ceiling, then rubbed his face again, clearly uncomfortable. "I think maybe she was passed out when I did it."

Mary was convinced he was in no way connected to the murders and Gillian's abduction. She didn't know about the rape. That would be for the court to decide. But now his innocence in the recent homicides brought up the other question, the main question, the question that had informed part of her life. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Gavin, I have to know if you killed Fiona Portman." Her voice took on a softer, pleading quality. "You can tell the truth," she reasoned. "You've already served your time."

"You'd like for me to say yes, wouldn't you? Because then it would be over. You could quit thinking about it. But the truth is, it will never be over. Not for you. Not for me. Because I don't know if I killed her." Gavin rarely made eye contact, but he regarded her steadily as he said, "You maybe didn't know this, but Fiona used to meet me in the woods behind her house for sex."

A few weeks ago, Mary wouldn't have believed what he was saying. She sat up a little straighter, bracing herself. "No, I didn't know that."

"She didn't want you to. She wanted you to think of her as the sweet neighbor kid."

Fiona was electric and charismatic. She drew people to her, and in a way, she cast spells on them.

"She told me not to tell anybody about us," Gavin said. "She didn't want anybody to know that she was hangin' around with me. If I saw her in the hallway at school, I was supposed to act like I hardly knew her. I could say hi-something like that, because if I acted like she wasn't there that would have seemed weird."

"Didn't that bother you?"

He shrugged and pursed his lips. "I didn't think about it too much. I was just glad she wanted something to do with me at all. And the sex." He spread his arms. "How could a guy turn down sex?"

"How did you plan your meetings?" she asked.

"I didn't have a phone, so sometimes I'd call her from a pay phone, and if her mom answered, I'd pretend I had the wrong number. But usually she'd write me notes and hand them to me, saying they were from somebody else so nobody would know she was writing to me. The notes were always the same, telling me to meet her in the tree house in the woods behind her house."

Mary remembered the strange feeling of deja vu she'd had at the high school in Canary Falls. In it, Fiona had been passing a note to Gavin. Now it made sense.

"Here I was, fucking the smartest, hottest, most popular girl in school, and nobody knew about it. I kind of got off on it being a secret. It made it seem dangerous in a cool way. Something nobody else in the world knew about." He frowned. "Until her mother caught us."

"Abigail Portman caught you with Fiona?"

"Yeah," he said vaguely, as if struggling to remember. "We were in the tree house goin' at it, and her mother just pops in."

"Then what happened?"

"I pulled up my pants and got the hell out of there."

"Gavin, do you remember if that was the night Fiona died?"

He concentrated, trying to pull up the memory, then shook his head. "Everything's a jumble. Whenever I have fits, things get mixed up. Time gets weird. It's hard to separate my thoughts from reality."

Had Gavin Hitchcock killed Fiona, or had he been a convenient scapegoat? A victim of circumstance? Had Gillian been right about him all along? "Try to remember. Did you have a fit the night Abigail Portman caught you with Fiona?"

"Was it the same day?" he asked himself, perplexed. He finally had to give up and let it go. He couldn't remember. "All I know is that the day she died, I woke up in the woods a few feet from her. At first I thought she was asleep. Then I saw all the blood and knew she was dead. So I ran. I ran like hell. People saw me, saw the blood, and called the police. When they showed up to arrest me, I wasn't surprised. I still had Fiona's blood on me, and I thought maybe I did do it. I used to get weird ideas. I used to imagine killing people, and cutting them up. I fantasized about it, and drew sick pictures of guys with their arms cut off. Explosions with body parts flying through the air. Stuff like that. So I figured I probably did kill her.

But Gillian never thought so, and finally I began to wonder too. And now I don't know. Sometimes I think I didn't do it. But if I didn't do it, who did?"

Who did? His question echoed in her mind. And if Gavin was innocent, that meant someone had gone free while he served time for a crime he didn't commit…

"I have to go," she said, getting to her feet. "Thanks for talking to me."

He stood, nervously rubbing his palms against his jeans. "Will you call me?" He swallowed, fear in his eyes. "When you find her?" No matter how you find her? were the unspoken words neither of them wanted to hear.

"Yes." Mary held out her hand.

He stared, puzzled and suspicious before finally shaking with a surprisingly firm grip. "Don't forget to call."

"I won't."

Outside, Mary was sliding into the car when her phone rang. It was Anthony. "Research just got back to us with a lst of rose propagators," he told her.

"I'll be right there."