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
