them all while they lie asleep in their beds. His mother, father and sister. Your father found them like that, in their beds. He found Joseph sitting outside the barn, the shotgun in his hands, just staring unblinking at the fire.
“Your father arrested the fourteen-year-old boy on the spot. He was convicted and because of his age, treated as a youth. A ‘crime of passion’ they called it; the desperate action of an abused youth. In the end he was incarcerated for ten years up in a mental institution just outside of Saranac. By the time he was released in 1973 he was twenty-four years old. He returned to that house that by now was surrounded by thick woods. Joseph kept to himself, but still we were acutely aware of his presence. It was as if the devil himself was in our midst.
“Then women started going missing. Young women, some of them girls. No one attributed their disappearance to him at first, but I think your father suspected. Finally, an Albany woman had the guts to come forward and identify Whalen in a lineup. He’d abducted and attempted to rape her, but somehow she’d managed to get away. After she came forward so did a few others who’d been lucky enough to escape him.
“They sent him away then for thirty years and what we thought would be for good. You girls were still young at the time so I can’t begin to describe the sigh of relief that was breathed by our entire community.”
I took in Caroline’s story. Each one of her words seemed to bear a great weight. I had no idea about my father, about what he’d seen, about what he’d been ordered to do by his state trooper superiors. In my mind I pictured him walking the upstairs of that horrible house only to witness the dead bodies. I knew then that the reason he forbade me and Molly to enter those woods had nothing to do with a stream that ran as deep and strong as a river or the cliff and waterfall beyond it.
It had everything to do with Whalen.
How he could have kept the horrible story of that house and the people who had been murdered there from Molly’s and my ears for so long a time was beyond me. But certainly not impossible. Not when it came to my dad. Not when it came to protecting his daughters. Molly and I knew about Whalen’s rape conviction; knew that he’d been sent to prison for a time that seemed forever. We felt secure because he wouldn’t be able to get to us from prison. He wouldn’t be able to hurt us or our parents. We knew about his arrest but we never knew about his murders. And I’m glad we didn’t.
Caroline stood.
“Joseph Whalen,” I said, my voice stuttering, stammering, eyes tearing. “When Molly and I were twelve…” She pressed her open hand against mine. “We… never… told anyone.”
She too began to cry.
“I know,” she said, patting my hand. “I didn’t always know. But now after what happened to you in the woods on Friday… after what the detective told me… now I know.”
We were silent from that point forward.
Until Franny came back.
Chapter 77
He had a smile on his round face.
I didn’t know whether to attribute the smile to the pie he’d just eaten inside the hospital cafeteria or to the painting he was about to give me.
The final painting.
As he picked it up and brought it to my bed, I felt my heart beat. In my head, flashes of images. Faces. Michael. Molly. Whalen.
Like the other four before it, this image took my breath away. Unlike the others, however, it did not frighten me. What this image represented was the end of something.
It was an almost exact representation of Molly and me. We were sitting by the stream in the woods, still dressed in our cut off jeans and t-shirts. Molly was washing me with the stream water, washing my hair, touching me with the cold, clean water and her gentle hand. It had been only moments since Whalen had attempted to do terrible things to us and failed. But now he was gone and Molly was being strong. Strong enough for the both of us. Molly was washing me in the stream. It was a baptismal ceremony; Molly making all things new again.
I laid my head back on the bed, into the soft pillow. I wanted to cry. For Molly, for Michael, for Franny, for everyone. But I felt that I couldn’t possibly cry another tear.
This painting was the end of something.
Somehow I was happy about that. Happy and sad at the same time.
“What’s its title Franny?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“’Touch’,” he said softly.
Maybe there were no more tears to shed, but I felt myself choking up. I felt my heart and my lungs and all my organs twist inside out.
“You were there, weren’t you?” I said. “All those years ago in the woods. You saw what happened to Molly and me. You must have seen it all through a basement window.”
He stood by the bed in his baggy jeans and yellow suspenders and he began to cry. He cried for the both of us. It was all too true. Franny had witnessed the attacks and couldn’t find a way to express what he’d seen. He couldn’t communicate it until now; this very week. Like me, like Molly, Franny had been carrying the burden for nearly his entire life.
He must have known that Whalen had been freed. He must have used his special extrasensory gifts to intuit Whalen’s intent-the intent to come after me. Franny sensed the danger and he tried to warn me through his art, his special language. In a word, he tried to save my life even before it required saving.
Chapter 78
The nurse came back in with my lunch, which she set down on the table beside me. I couldn’t bear the thought of eating. Attached to the nurse’s clipboard was a strip of paper. She pulled the piece of paper off the board and held it in her hand. Just a small strip of litmus paper about the size of a cigarette, its tail end painted with pink.
When the nurse glanced at Caroline, I could only assume that she took her for my mother, and Franny for my brother.
“I have some good news,” she announced. “You’re going to have a baby.”
For some reason I could not explain, the news didn’t throw me into the least bit of shock. The effect it had was good and kind. It made me feel warm inside; it made me feel healed.
Caroline came to me, hugged me without getting in the way of the wires.
“From out of the bad comes the good,” she whispered in my ear. “Where there is death, there is life.”
I believed her.
In my mind I’d thought about all the people I’d had relations with over the past twelve months.
Michael. He was the only one. I pictured him doing what he loved-working at his laptop, biting the nail. I saw him sitting at a small table sipping cappuccino outside a Paris cafe; I saw him working at a desk inside a New York City hotel room. I felt him lying beside me in bed, our bare feet touching.
Michael, don’t die.
Chapter 79
Michael was being kept alive inside a clear partitioned room in the ICU Caroline wheeled me into the dimly lit room, pushing me directly to the bed that held my husband’s comatose body. When Caroline left the room, I took Michael’s hand in mine. Already it felt cold and as frail as Molly’s had just before she died all those years ago.
