Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

Did it matter?

After Olivia Fisher, he’d gone three years before doing it again. But then he’d pulled over Rosemary Gaynor for doing sixty in a forty. There was something about her, something in her eyes, something in the way her dark hair fell to her shoulders, that made him think of her.

If he’d known she already had a child, he might have given her a pass. But there was no baby seat in the back of her car, nothing that immediately gave away that she was a mother. It was only after he’d killed her that he learned there had been a baby boy asleep upstairs.

There was no point in killing them after they’d given birth. It was too late then. You had to get them before .

With Lorraine Plummer, it had been much easier to get it right. She was a student. No serious boyfriend, no imminent marriage. Motherhood might be years away.

Perhaps that was why the need struck him again so soon after Rosemary Gaynor. Because he’d gotten it wrong.

But she certainly looked the part. She looked so much like Leanna .

They’d been having regular chats lately. Somewhat one-sided, of course. That therapist he’d been seeing way back before he and Gale even moved to Promise Falls from Ohio suggested them. Give a voice to your feelings, he’d been told. Even if she can’t hear you, you get to hear yourself. Let the feelings out.

At times, it seemed to make a difference.

Sometimes, he’d talk to her, phone in hand, like he had a toll-free line to hell. Or he’d talk to her while driving, as though she were in the seat next to him. Other times, he would look at her picture on the mantel in the living room. Tell her what was on his mind. Give it to her straight.

Gale didn’t understand. She thought it was crazy. Asked him not to do it.

Move on, she said. It’s over. She can’t hurt you anymore.

Easy for her to say.

Let’s start a family of our own, Gale kept saying.

She just didn’t get it.

He was always very careful to make sure they took all the necessary precautions, and not just when it came to sex. He’d been careful to choose a girl who looked nothing like his mother. Different hairstyle, facial structure, body type. He wanted her to be as unlike his mother as possible.

After all, he’d hate to think that he might have to kill Gale.

Angus loved Gale.

They were, he believed, a perfect couple. He’d always been able to talk to her. He’d told her all about his childhood. How things got so much worse after his father left. How his mother had slowly descended into a kind of madness at times.

Angus hadn’t told Gale everything his mother had done. Some things he couldn’t bring himself to say aloud. Only his therapist heard the grisly details, and even in the privacy of the doctor’s office, there was one story Angus had always held back.

He’d told Gale of the lesser offenses. The relentless criticisms. That he was an accident. She’d never intended to have him. He was dumb like his father.

First came the insult. And then, when his lip would begin to quiver, she’d frown and say, “Oh, come, now. You have to learn to take these things. I’d be doing you no favor not to point out your shortcomings.”

And then she’d lean in, nose to nose, and say, “Give your mom a smile. A good boy always gives his mom a smile.”

A smile.

But being a good boy was an unattainable goal, as his mother constantly reminded him.

Good boys didn’t roughhouse or run through the living room. Good boys walked on the stairs, never jumped. Good boys didn’t get their clothes mussed up. Good boys didn’t make farting noises. Good boys didn’t get bad marks at school.

Good boys didn’t look at dirty magazines and do nasty things with themselves under the covers.

That was one of the stories he’d never been able to tell Gale. The night, when he was thirteen, when his mother burst into his room and caught him in the middle of doing that.

How she’d whipped the covers off the bed, exposed his nakedness, his withering hardness. He’d made a grab for the covers, but she held them firm.

“I thought you were a good boy,” she said.

“Please!” he whimpered, trying to get her to let go of the bed-covers. “Leave me alone!”

“If you think that’s such a smart thing to do, if you’re so proud of that kind of behavior, then go ahead and finish,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

He rolled onto his side, curling up into a ball, as though shielding himself from an imminent lashing. But her taunting had a much greater sting.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

He wrapped his arms around his knees, pulled them in closer to his chest, felt a tear run down his cheek to the pillow.

“Just as I thought,” his mother said. “Even those most basic tasks you can’t finish.”

And then she leaned in, kissed him on the forehead, and said, “All right now, let’s move on. Give your mom a smile.”

Pulling up the corners of his mouth felt like lifting a set of five-hundred-pound dumbbells.

After his mother died, he went to live with Aunt Belinda for two years. It just about killed him when she said to him one day, “I know my sister wasn’t the best of mothers, and it tore me apart watching how she treated you, but what could I do?”

She could have saved him, he thought. That’s what she could have done.

He thought, often, how much better it would have been if his mother had never had him. A life that never was would be preferable to what he’d endured.

That life seemed to turn around when he met Gale. Kind, loving, ego-boosting. After a stint in police college, he landed a job with the Cleveland force. Gale got work as a kindergarten teacher’s aide.

But a perfect life with the perfect woman was not enough to turn things around.

Charlene Quint was his first. (Well, not technically .) A Cleveland waitress. Twenty-seven. Engaged. Pulled her over for failing to signal a turn. When she turned her head just the right way, he could see Leanna in her. He had her address, made a house call a week later.

It had simultaneously felt like the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do. But it had also felt good .

When he accepted a job with the Promise Falls police, and he and Gale moved away from Cleveland, and he was no longer exposed to the geographic markers of his formative years, he thought the feelings would dissipate.

Several years passed before Olivia Fisher. He had pulled her over near the Promise Falls Mall. She was doing seventy in a forty. A serious offense, but he knocked the ticket back to fifty. Not before, however, engaging her in enough chitchat to find out she was graduating from Thackeray, that she was engaged, that she did not yet have any children.

Several days later, he staked out her address. She was still living with her parents, Elizabeth and Walden. He saw her leave by herself in the same car she’d been driving when he’d ticketed her. Followed her to downtown Promise Falls. She parked the car and wandered into the park, not far from the falls.

It was getting dark, and there were no other people nearby.

He walked right up to her. Smiled, said, “Ms. Fisher?”

She didn’t recognize him. Angus got that a lot. People meet you when you’re in uniform, then run into you another time when you’re in your street clothes, and they can’t place you. You’re out of context.

She said, “Uh, hello?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Happens all the time. I’m not in uniform. I was the mean old cop who gave you a speeding ticket the other day.”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled. “You’re right. I knew you looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen you.”