Mary looked at Sonya’s pretty-but-not-too-pretty face across from her. Sonya was probably Mary’s age, hair highlighted with blonde and cut at a sharp angle to make her look sharp – a real go-getter. Her vacant eyes dampened on cue, her face well conditioned in front of a dressing room mirror to look deeply concerned but skeptical, caring but not without reservation. Mary couldn’t help but wonder where this woman would go and what she would do after the interview. This was just another workday for her. For Mary it was the culmination of the end of her life.
“You told the police that you had seen someone – a man – in the woods behind your house? That Jacob had told you he’d seen a man back there at night, watching the house?”
How do you describe something like that? She saw something back there. It looked like a man…but the eyes – they were larger than the world. She had lost herself in them, in their crazed look, and all her memory seemed erased. She didn’t know how to describe him. She didn’t know how to explain the way his eyes seemed like swirling pools of yellow, and his open mouth like a cavern. She tried to rationalize it to herself, tell herself she was upset and making a monster out of a man, but she could never quite convince herself. Man or monster – what was the difference? Weren’t we all just awful, godforsaken creatures anyway? She looked at her audience of cameramen and audio technicians and Sonya. Perhaps the halos and bright lights hid something darker. Demons were just fallen angels.
Of course, when Jacob told her of a man out at the edge of the woods walking back and forth like a zombie, she had dismissed it. How do you tell the world that sometimes, as a parent, you don’t have the time or energy to entertain every thought or story a child blurts at you throughout the day?
“I thought it was a dream. Just imagination,” Mary said. “I didn’t think he was real.”
“Do you mean when Jacob told you about him, or when you saw him yourself?”
Mary paused for a moment. “Maybe both.”
“Do you think Jacob’s disappearance is in any way connected with what happened to your husband on that hunting trip? With the disappearance of his friends, Michael and Conner Braddick?”
Mary shook her head slowly. “I don’t see how Jonathan could have anything to do with it. He was gone. I don’t know what happened up there, but he didn’t take Jacob.”
“What about the suspicious site found near the Aspetuck River Valley just this week? Police dogs traced your son to that location – what looks like a ritualistic site. A place your husband told them they would find. The body of his recently deceased friend was dug up just days before your husband’s hunting trip and your son’s disappearance. Doesn’t all that seem a bit strange or suspicious to you?”
“I don’t see how…”
“Is it possible your husband had something to do with the disappearance of Jacob?”
That fake little bitch was pushing hard now. Her questions came fast and with a twinge of anger. Or perhaps it was condescension. What did this reporter want her to say, anyway? That her husband had gone insane? That he was somehow responsible? Mary didn’t know what happened in those mountains other than Jonathan’s ravings. Perhaps that was what the audience wanted. They wanted her to fuel these strange conspiracy theories, the internet stories that talked about some strange cult and ritual human sacrifice, bloggers who posited Jonathan was a murderer of children. That Jonathan, Gene, Michael and Conner were all part of some satanic pact, that they had arranged it so that Jacob would be taken by others while they were in Coombs’ Gulch, thereby removing all suspicion, that something had gone wrong between them and Jonathan had killed them both. The world thought he was mentally ill at best or a monster at worst.
But none of that was true. She knew that. She knew Jonathan. He had his faults, and things had been bad between them at the end. His drinking had grown out of hand. He was like a shadow that somehow crowded the house. He was angry over something. He seemed to harbor some kind of deep, dark sadness, which he never revealed – but she knew him. He was incapable of the things the world suggested. He could never hurt a child, much less his own. He loved Jacob as much as any decent father, maybe more. And he had loved her, too. She remembered their times together – dating, the wedding, their honeymoon, Jacob’s birth. They were once happy and very much in love.
The image of the last time she saw Jonathan flashed through her mind: head down, woozy with drugs, dressed in a hospital gown and escorted by orderlies the size of linebackers. Something happened in those mountains. Perhaps she didn’t know him anymore, and, in these last weeks as she faced the cold, lonely terror alone, she wondered if, perhaps, she had ever truly known him at all.
But that was not yet an admission she was willing to make.
Mary refused to sacrifice her history, everything she knew, by admitting on national television that she had no idea who her husband was, that he could very well be a killer and a monster. She would not let that pound of flesh be taken – not right now, and not by Sonya Martinez.
“No. There’s no way. Jonathan was…” – Mary paused for a moment, her throat suddenly tightening –
