Blood Runs Cold

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ said Jason, raising the gun, lowering it, running the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘Shut up!’

‘No,’ said Ren. ‘No. Let him go, Jason. Let Salem leave. Let him get out.’

‘He’ll call the Sheriff –’

‘Think about it, Jason,’ said Ren calmly. ‘How can Salem do that? Salem has no way of doing that.’

‘She’s right,’ shouted Salem. ‘I don’t. I really don’t.’

‘Stop talking,’ said Jason, taking a step toward him.

Salem flinched, throwing his arms up, covering his head. ‘No,’ he said, over and over.

‘Stop,’ said Jason. ‘Stop.’

Ren started again, singing the rest of the song, her voice steady, but low: ‘… people just grow lonesome. Waiting for someone to say … hello in there … hello.’

Ren stopped as Jason raised the gun again toward Salem. Salem was swaying gently, his eyes closed, his hand across his stomach. Ren wanted to shout at Jason, to tell him Salem was quiet now, to tell him he wasn’t a threat, that she would be quiet too. But she knew she would startle Salem and she didn’t want him to have to open his eyes to this scene, unless she knew he was going to make it out alive. But in the new silence, Salem opened his eyes and locked on to hers again. Ren smiled at him.

Jason pulled the trigger.

61

Salem was blasted backward, shattering the mirror behind him, a huge hole blown into his sunken chest. Ren had closed her eyes only when she knew Salem could no longer see her. She looked down now on his small, broken frame, slumped against his rocking chair, a plaid blanket half-fallen across his body.

‘You fucking bastard,’ she roared at Jason. ‘You fucking bastard.’

She stepped sideways and took a step forward. She pointed a finger at him. ‘Do not say a fucking word, you fucking animal.’

‘Do not move,’ said Jason, pointing the gun at her.

‘I’m not coming near you, you son of a bitch.’ She walked with her hands in the air toward Salem, bent down and pulled the rest of the blanket over him. ‘I’m trying to give a man some dignity. So, you? You stay the fuck away from me.’

She had her back to Jason Wardwell as she covered Salem with his coat. With her right hand she reached around to the back of the cooler box, pulled off the gun she had taped there and slipped it into her ankle holster.

She stood back up and turned to face Malcolm Wardwell.

‘Jean Transom tracked you down, didn’t she? You would remember her as Jennifer Mayer. She came to confront the monster who abducted and abused her and her eleven-year-old friend, Ruth Sleight. She came up to the most remote place she knew she could find you. Somewhere she could talk to you in private. And if anything bad happened, you could be far away from town.’

Ren thought of the image that Ruth Sleight had drawn – the mosaic pattern from the floor of Wardwell’s store – the store he had the keys for, the one that had been vacant for years; down the stairs into the darkness, the windows boarded up. The beautiful patterned floor was the only thing Jennifer Mayer could see under the blindfold. And Ruth Sleight was able to back her up. And the smell that came through the vents was from the brewery next door. Jean Transom never drank beer. And never really knew why.

Malcolm’s face was gray.

There is something not right here.

Ren thought about the store. She thought of the whole line of stores down Main Street. She thought of the risk of discovery. The argument between Malcolm and Jason Wardwell about Mountain Sports, their bitter words flashing back: spoilt, ungrateful, terrible, terrible child; stay out of my business, Dad; pact with the devil; sackcloth and ashes. All because he was going to Mountain Sports. Ren remembered, standing on the balcony, looking out at the beautiful view over the Blue River. And closer still, the day-care center next door.

Oh my God. ‘There she was,’ said Ren. ‘Poor Jean. So close, so close. And she picked the wrong guy.’

Malcolm Wardwell looked at Ren, confused. But he had years of practice in saying nothing. Salem’s voice rang in Ren’s ears. You take the hits. You take the hits.

‘When the police came knocking at your door thirty years ago and raided your house,’ said Ren, ‘and you watched them take away those magazines and videos … you were more surprised than they were,’ said Ren.

Silence.

‘You took the hit, Malcolm, didn’t you? You took the hit for your son. In a split second, you made a call. You were forty years old. Jason was sixteen. And maybe … maybe Jason was just going through a phase, right? Maybe for him it wasn’t a teenage crush on a teacher like everyone else. Maybe if you caught it early enough, his “problem” could be treated and it would all go away. I’m guessing he wasn’t on his last vacation before college that summer. My guess is you packed him off to a treatment facility … that clearly didn’t work.’

Malcolm bowed his head. But still didn’t speak.

‘And this is how it worked out for you,’ said Ren. ‘You end up on a freezing mountainside on a January night and you realized that your only son, who you’d laid down your life for, within eight months of him getting out of treatment had abducted two eleven-year-old girls, held them for three weeks in the building you had great plans for, abused them and impregnated one of them … And Jean Transom thought it was you. There she was – a strong, bright FBI agent who rarely put a foot wrong, but got tangled in a case so close to her broken heart that she thought it was you.’

‘Shut up, shut up.’ Jason squeezed his eyes shut briefly, then they were wild and traveling the room, searching for escape.

‘There is no exit for you,’ said Ren.

‘I didn’t …’ said Jason. ‘Those girls … they wanted a ride …’

Sweet Jesus. ‘And you just gave them a ride.’ She nodded.

‘Exactly.’ Hope sparked in his eyes.

‘For three weeks, y’all just drove around in your car,’ said Ren, still nodding.

His eyes flashed with anger. ‘It’s not as if they were behaving like eleven-year-olds anyway …’

Ren guessed this was just the beginning of Jason Wardwell’s blame plan. DARVO – the sex offender’s instant response to accusation – Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

Ren fell silent. The stench of poor, dead Salem hung in the air with the smell of whatever food had turned black at the bottom of the hot pan. Jason Wardwell’s forehead was slick.

Paul Louderback, where are you?

‘I had no idea,’ said Malcolm, turning to Jason. ‘I watched those girls’ parents just like every other person in the country. And the screwed-up thing was, I thought I was like them. I thought about how I nearly lost you. I could understand their pain because I thought I nearly lost you. I hoped they were as lucky as I would be, that their little girls would get to come back, that they would get a second chance. I looked at you,’ he stabbed a finger at Jason, ‘and I thought it was all a success story.’ He shook his head. ‘And you were the one. You were responsible for this agony I was tuning into every day, hoping that, on one of those days, it would be gone, their daughters would be back. And then one day, they did. And we were all told that they were unharmed. And I cried and cried for them and for you, and I thought God is good, God has answered all our prayers.’

‘What a fool you were,’ said Jason, his tone a rotten collision of rejection and disgust.

‘You are a vile, thankless man,’ said Ren.

Jason Wardwell’s relationship with his father had stalled, aged sixteen, on the day his father made the decision to cover his son’s child porn habit. Jason Wardwell lived in a Peter Pan town where people got to play in the snow, say ‘dude’ and ‘super’ for as long as they wanted to, because it made them feel good and why shouldn’t