blocking out the sounds, making them seem not so real, but this night, the sounds broke through and found their way into the closet with him. There was a different kind of urgency to these sounds. They turned into gasps and threats, and he heard sounds that he shouldn’t have heard. Smacking sounds. Ripping sounds and wet sounds. And then, a slicing, tearing sound that he hoped he would never hear again. He tried humming to block them out, but it didn’t work.
And he didn’t move. He dared not move until his mama came for him.
He waited, even after he heard the bedroom door open and close, then the outside door slam shut. Even after the soft gasping sounds in the room beyond the closet door went away and everything descended into silence. Still he waited. Playing chess. Winning. Losing. It was all the same in the end. He waited and played and waited and played. He waited until he couldn’t wait any longer. “Mama?” he whispered at last. His voice was hoarse, and it didn’t even sound like it was coming from his throat. “Are you there?”
No answer. No sound. Maybe she was sleeping? He wouldn’t want to wake her. He was afraid of what she might say.
But it was strange for her to fall asleep right then. Usually she came and unlocked the closet as soon as she could, sometimes even before she was done counting her money.
“Mama?”
He heard his voice echo in the closet, but no reply came from his mother, no sound came from the bedroom except the air conditioner sputtering and, with a harsh, grating gasp, dying its final death in the windowsill.
As the hours slipped by, his calls became shouts and then screams and then wails, and then everything just deteriorated into sobbing. He yelled and begged for his mother to come, but she didn’t. He banged on the door until his hands were raw, but she didn’t answer. Why didn’t she come? Didn’t she love him?
After a while the tears stopped.
He tried to play chess again, tried to picture the board and the pieces, but in his mind the board had been tipped over. All the pieces were scattered across the floor of his imagination. He couldn’t seem to get them set upright again. No matter how hard he tried, they kept tipping over, spilling onto the floor. Scattered. The game was over.
“Mama!”
He flung himself against the closet door, over and over again, screaming with his tired, ragged voice. But his mama didn’t reply, and she didn’t come to let him out. He tried turning the locked doorknob again and again even though he knew it wouldn’t move.
By morning he was no longer screaming. He was no longer pounding. He was just sitting in the corner, smelling the strange and slightly ripe odor coming from beyond the closet door.
He spent that entire day in the closet.
Oh how he wished the air conditioner was working.
It was late that afternoon when he began to notice the flies.
A few crawled beneath the door and joined him in the hot closet. He tried to shoo them away, but they buzzed around him like an angry, dark cloud.
There were a lot of flies.
On the third day, only after he took the umbrella that he found in the corner of the closet and stabbed its tip into the wood and splintered a hole that he was able to kick larger and larger until he could slide his hand through to unlock himself, only then did he emerge into the room.
Only then.
Dim twilight gave everything an odd reddish glow.
“Mama?”
Only then did he see the bed.
“Are you there, Mama?”
Only then.
A form lay beneath the covers, but the sheets were tangled and draped over the still bulge in a twisted, awkward way. Dark pools and splotches stained the sheets and the wall and the headboard of the bed. Flies crawled on his mother’s forehead, and he couldn’t figure out why she didn’t brush them away.
“What’s that smell, Mama?”
Beside her bed lay the yellow scarf. Her favorite one. The one she liked to wear on special occasions.
“Let me tuck you in, Mama.”
And he did. He even took the yellow scarf from the bedside and tied it gently in her stiff, matted red hair.
Only then.
“There, Mama. That’s better. Now everything will be OK.” And he lay down beside her and he held her as the flies crawled across his arms.
Only then did he stop playing chess in his mind forever.
The pieces had fallen so far out of reach that no one would ever find them again.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid remembered hearing this story, remembered meeting Sevren at the group home, remembered seeing what he had done to the cat using only a pocketknife.
He remembered these things when he was in North Carolina last summer researching Q875, because that’s when he heard about the chess pieces and the stab wounds and the dead girls with the yellow ribbons tied in their hair.
And when he heard, he knew.
It had to be Sevren. It had to be.
The timing had been perfect, really.
Because when the young women in the southeast began showing up dead, he realized almost at once how to solve the problem that had come up concerning two of the family members.
The solution seemed quite clear. It would allow him to take care of Bethanie and Alexis without drawing undue attention to his family or the plans they’d so carefully laid.
He didn’t have to worry that the police would never find out that someone else had murdered two of the girls. He just needed to buy a little time. Until October 27th, and after that it wouldn’t matter anymore.
Because in the next three weeks there would be so many other bodies to sort through that the world wouldn’t even remember those two dead women.
Some scars are meant to be caressed forever.
Oh yes, Father would be very proud.
46
We couldn’t find Joseph Grolin.
Sheriff Wallace’s team checked the MountainQuest offices. He grunted as he recounted the visit to Ralph and me: Yes, Grolin had shown up for work that morning, but no, they didn’t know where he’d gone. Yes, they knew what he was writing: an article about North Carolina raft guides who spend their winters working on the slopes of Vail, Colorado, as ski instructors, but no, they didn’t have any idea where he might be. Yes, they would call if they heard anything about his whereabouts. Yes, yes, yes, and now could you please leave the office since you’re disrupting the production schedule?
Meanwhile a team of crime scene technicians was combing the remains of Grolin’s house for any evidence that he’d taken Jolene there. Anything at all. Last I’d heard, they found a video camera in the woods with a remote cellular feed. I’d told them to look for it. After all, I figured that somewhere out there, he’d been watching.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to recover anything substantial from the bomb’s timer or ignition mechanism. That was a big disappointment because it might have led us to a munitions manufacturer or distributor.
Brent did some checking and found that four of the bodies had been dumped in popular climbing locations featured in Mountain-Quest magazine.
Still no sign of the remaining half of Jolene’s body.
