“They said there will be someone to greet you,” the pilot says through the headphones. “Someone waiting.”
“Who?” I ask. “Who’s waiting?”
I see the pilot shrug. He doesn’t turn around. Again I have the thought that he doesn’t want to see my face, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want me to see his. As it is, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.
“I don’t know,” he says, his tone flat and not inviting further questions.
When the engines are off, I thank him, exit the plane, and step into a humid Florida night. The tree frogs are singing and the mosquitoes start biting as soon as I strip off my coat, which I won’t need here. I can already feel beads of sweat make their debut on my forehead.
In the distance I see the dark, lean form of a man standing beside a vehicle. Its headlights are the only thing illuminating the blackness except for the light coming from the small control tower above us. I don’t see anyone up there.
I approach the vehicle for lack of any alternatives, and I realize that it’s the Angry Man.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks as I draw near.
I shake my head. The situation takes on a surreal quality. “I remember you,” I say. “But I don’t know your name.”
“My name’s Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet.”
The words hit as though he’s thrown stones at me. I feel that the knowledge should illuminate what’s happening to me, but it doesn’t.
“Once upon a time,” he goes on, “my wife and I believed that Frank Geary murdered our daughter.”
He is dressed in dark pants and a heavy flannel shirt, with a jacket over that. It is far too hot for all those clothes, but he doesn’t appear uncomfortable. Instead he seems to hunch himself in as if bracing against the cold. And is he shivering just slightly? He seems out of place in this moment of my life, as though he has no business being there.
“Our rage was the driving force in our lives for years. It consumed us.” He releases a throaty cough, then pulls a pack of Marlboro reds from his pocket, lights one with a Zippo, and takes a long, deep drag. He has the look of a lifelong smoker, gray and drawn.
“You know, the thing was, I was a terrible father. Absent a lot, distant when I was around. I never so much as held my daughter or told her I loved her in all the years she was alive. I provided for her, sure, roof over her head, nice things, college. That’s what I knew how to do. That’s all I thought a father
I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not sure why he’s telling me this or what we’re doing here. But I listen because I don’t have any choice, and I figure as long as he’s talking, my daughter is safe. My whole body tingles with the desire to be moving, to be anywhere else but here.
“Of course,” he says, “it was all much harder on Janet. The mother-daughter thing, man, you can’t get inside that. I was filled with rage, with the desire for revenge. It was like rocket fuel in my veins. But when Melissa died, Janet died, too. Simple as that. She was still walking around, but she never lived another day of her life. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she did what she did. But I never saw it coming; I wouldn’t have thought her capable.”
He is racked suddenly by a fit of coughing so intense, it’s embarrassing to watch. He takes a wad of tissues from his pants and covers his mouth until the coughing subsides. When he pulls it back from his mouth, I can see that the tissues are dark with blood. My mind is filled now with the memories of the night Janet Parker killed Frank and then herself. I can hear the gunshots and smell the smoke. I never asked myself who started that fire, but I imagine it was Marlowe. I think he intended for my mother to die that night, too. He didn’t expect me to run back in and drag her outside. I am thinking about this as Alan Parker recovers himself and starts to talk again.
“Even as I mourned Janet, I was happy for her in a way. I knew how good it must have felt to pull that trigger. I know she died at peace.” He has a sad smile on his face that reminds me of how Janet Parker looked that night, as though she’d laid down a great burden. I don’t tell him this. I don’t know if he realizes I watched her die, and I’m not sure what good it will do to tell him.
“But Frank Geary didn’t kill Melissa,” I say, really just guessing.
He shook his head. “He may not have, no. I had Melissa’s body exhumed when we won the first round of evidence retesting. And the DNA samples found were similar to Frank Geary’s without being identical. So the conclusion was that Marlowe Geary played some role in her torture and death.”
There’s flash lightning in the clouds above us and the deep rumble of distant thunder, but it’s not raining. Every few minutes the sky illuminates and then goes dark again, as if someone is turning it on and off with a switch.
“To be honest,” he says, “I’d suspected this early on. In my life I’ve been around enough killers-in Vietnam-to know one when I saw one. At the trial, Marlowe seemed as dead inside as his father. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
I realize something then. The lights start to come on inside, illuminating places within me that have been dark for so long. “Briggs worked for you.
He nods. “I wasn’t sure what Marlowe had to do with Melissa’s death. But I knew he’d used Janet to kill his father. And when I realized he was killing other women, taking other people’s daughters away, I wanted to stop him. I was filled with a sick rage-it was something living inside me. But I didn’t want him arrested and in prison. I didn’t want that kind of justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer and die the way his victims did. And I knew plenty of people to help with that-the military is good at turning out merciless killers.”
“Why didn’t you come yourself?”
“After Janet died, I started coughing up blood. The sickness of fear and anger, you can’t carry it forever. It starts to kill you. In my case, cancer.”
More of that horrible coughing. I hate, am repulsed by him, and pity him in equal measure.
“After you and Marlowe were ‘killed’ in your car accident, I had an epiphany. I realized that my and Janet’s rage and desire for revenge had cost us everything. We might have had some years together, we might have touched happiness again, if only we had faced down our fears, our regrets, our hatred for Frank Geary. But instead we let the rip he’d opened in the fabric of our life suck us in like a black hole. We let him destroy all three of us.”
He looks at me as though trying to decide if I’m listening to him. Whatever he sees on my face makes the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.
“I decided I’d fight my cancer and live for Janet and Melissa rather than die for them. As I fought that war, I realized that the rage I’d directed at Frank and Marlowe Geary was really directed at myself, for all the ways I’d failed as father and husband. If I’d been present for them while they lived, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many regrets when they died.”
I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.
“When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”
I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”
He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Ophelia March.”
I stare at his pale face and think how ill he looks. There is a distance to his stare. He is already on his way somewhere else.
“Naturally, I started to wonder. If Ophelia survived, what about Marlowe Geary? And, if so, where is he?”
“But you’d given up your quest for revenge,” I say, putting my hand on the hood of his car. I am feeling weak now, wobbly. The frenetic energy I had is abandoning me.
He offers a thin smile. “I’ve always remembered you, Ophelia. You were the saddest-looking child I’d ever seen. I remember you coming and going from that farm, the circles under your eyes, the way you hunched your shoulders and hung your head. You were living in a pit of snakes; I was never sure which of them would be first to squeeze
