Kin

“That’d be nice.”

“Yeah.”

Claire smiled, but wondered if Ted knew the distraction didn’t exist that was powerful enough to stop them from feeling what they’d lost. She guessed he did, that he was grasping at straws in an effort not to cave in on himself, and lose all he had left in the process. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying.

“How is Sally?”

He shrugged. “Holding up, best as she can I suppose. Worst thing is, she keeps coming to me to tell her everything’s going to be all right, or to make sense for her of what happened, and I can’t seem to find the words. Everything sounds…forced, as if I’m lying to her. But I’m not, you know? I just don’t know what to say.”

Claire did know. It was exactly what she was doing now with the father of her dead friend.

“There isn’t much you can say,” she said. “I still, even with everything that’s happened, have trouble believing it.”

Ted looked at her for so long she had to resist the urge to stand and busy herself with anything that would get her out from under his gaze. At length, he sighed. “I’m sorry for what they did to you.”

In that moment Claire knew how Sally Craddick had felt, seeking comfort from her father only to suspect his words were empty. There was no emotion in his voice, and she wondered just how much this man hated her for coming back alive when his son had died a horrible death.

His hand found hers and his skin was cold. “Tell me,” he said.

She looked at him, trying to read his will in the lines on his sallow face.

“Tell me how he died. Tell me what they did to my boy.”

Images passed through Claire’s mind, some of them taken from the photographs, others from the equally vivid vault of memory. She saw Stu standing on a jetty with Katy, him in black swim trunks, her in a cute peach- colored bikini, both of them wearing sunglasses as they posed, their skin beaded with water, hair wet from swimming. Then Stu drunk at the bar at the hotel in Sandestin, chatting up the barmaid, who looked completely uninterested, Katy sitting at a table with Claire and Daniel, all of them watching. Think I should tell her he has a tiny dick? Katy had said, and they’d laughed, but after several shots of tequila, she hadn’t been able to disguise the hurt in her voice. Thank Christ for college next year, she’d added, raising her glass. No more men with the maturity of a dragonfly. Daniel had frowned at her, puzzled by the analogy, then laughed so hard he’d almost choked on his beer. They all had, the sound of it enough to draw Stu back from the bar. What’s the joke? he’d asked, prepared to join in if he deemed it worthy. But then Katy’s smile had vanished as she’d looked away and told him, You are.

“He tried to protect us,” Claire told Stu’s father. “He tried to fight them off.”

This was a lie, but a necessary one. The truth would almost certainly destroy him.

“That’s my boy,” Ted said with pride, his eyes watering.

Claire smiled. He ran, she thought. He ran and left us there. Left Katy dead. Left Daniel and me to fight them on our own. He ran, and he might have made it if one of them hadn’t been waiting for him in the woods.

“Did he… was it quick?”

“I don’t know. They took us to different rooms, sheds, away from each other.” But I saw them dragging him in, and couldn’t see his face for all the blood.

Ted nodded gravely. “He was a brave boy, my son. I taught him to be a fighter. Told him he’d need to be, the way this world has gone.”

Claire squeezed his hand. “He did all he could for us.”

“Have you spoken to the other parents?”

“No. Not yet.” The thought of it turned her stomach, and after this encounter, she decided she might not.

“They’ll want to see you. They’ll want to know what you know about what happened.”

“Of course.” But she knew none of them would want to know that, not ever. Not if they wanted the truth. She could not give them the peace they sought unless she lied to them as she had lied to Ted, because the end, what she’d seen of it, had not been pretty, or dignified or heroic, and that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. The deaths of their children had been horrendous, violent, and messy.

“Did he say anything?” Ted asked.

“What?”

“Stu. Did he say anything before…?” He shook his head. A tear ran down his unshaven cheek.

“He was happy,” she said. “He was with Katy, and they were in love.”

This sounded utterly false, but Ted smiled slightly. “Good. That’s good. I liked Katy. She was a nice girl.”

“Yes she was.” Claire felt her throat constrict as the memories assailed her. How many times had Katy sat on this very bed with her, discussing their ambitions, their fears, laughing like idiots over something that might not have been that funny until Katy let loose her strange oddly manlike laugh, which would set Claire off every time she heard it? She recalled the night Katy had slept in the bed with her, wracked by sobs as she confessed that she had missed her period and was deathly afraid she was pregnant. If I am, she’d moaned, it wont be Stu’s. We haven’t slept together in over four months. Claire had held her, told her it would be all right, and it had been. Katy wasn’t pregnant. Six months later she would say those same words as she held her on the road to Elkwood, her friend’s blood pooling around her. Except it hadn’t been all right, not then, and now Katy was dead, her body cut up into pieces and scattered in poor Doctor Wellman’s basement.

“I think I need to move,” Ted said. “I think I need to get out of this town.”

Claire said nothing. Had Stu died at home, moving away from the scene and the awful memories they conjured up might not be such a bad idea. But Stu had been murdered miles away from there, in some place he’d never been before, a place Ted Craddick had never, and likely never would, see with his own eyes. The worst of the pain would be inside Ted’s own mind, and there was no moving away from that. The agony would follow him no matter where he went.

Abruptly he rose, releasing her hand. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said again. “And I’m sorry about what happened to you, and my boy, and your friends. It’s not right.” He lowered his gaze to the floor. “It’s not right what happened to you.” His winced as if the tears that were now flowing freely scalded him. Then his face relaxed and he tried to smile. “He never said anything but good things about you,” he told her and Claire guessed maybe that was Ted’s own untruth. She and Stu had had their share of run-ins, the unavoidable result of personalities too dissimilar to ever fully jibe. They’d both been stubborn, unwilling to back down, a stalemate seldom helped by Claire’s protectiveness toward Katy, who Stu had frequently hurt, whether he meant to or not.

“I loved him,” she told his father. “They were my life.”

She half-expected him to say, “A life you still have,” and spit on the floor as he stormed out, but instead he nodded, and put a hand on the door. He was almost in the hall before he turned, looking more troubled than she’d yet seen him. “Has Danny’s brother been to see you?”

“No.”

“He will,” Ted told her. “He’s calling on all the parents, and he mentioned wanting to see you too.”

“Why?”

A curious look passed over the man’s face. It was almost relief. “It’s better if he explains it to you himself.”

Any further questions she might have asked died in her mouth as he exited the room. She heard him talking to her mother as she escorted him downstairs, then he was gone, and once more the house was quiet.

* * *

In the photo album, beside a picture of Daniel in his football uniform, was a scrap of yellow notepaper riddled with creases. On it was written his cell phone number and beneath that, his barely legible scrawl tangled into the words “Call Me!”

Claire smiled and ran a finger over the clear plastic sheet holding it in place beside the photograph. In her old life, the happy, unthreatening one she’d known before the men had taken it from her, she’d been a packrat. There were no empty spaces in her room, and her closet was filled with old boxes, each of them containing memories and keepsakes from her years spent wandering through the minefield of teenage life. There were rolled