Kealan Burke - Kin

You’re dreamin’ .

Eventually, she turned.

The man—the boy —had pulled down his scarf to reveal an uncertain, yet hopeful grin, and with him came a tsunami of emotion that crashed down on Louise, sucking the air from her lungs.

“Oh God.”

Her past approached her in small careful steps, wreathed in the smells of dust and leaves and forgotten warmth, but it was only a memory, as she feared was the boy standing before her.

It had to be a memory. Or a ghost.

His eyes were wide, and alive, as he came to her. “Mom… it’s me.”

Finch was there when they brought her home, though he tried not to let himself be seen.

The Lambert House was modest but attractive. A white-tract home with brown decorative shutters and dormer windows, it was set just far enough apart from its neighbors to avoid looking like part of a subdivision, which is exactly what it was—just one of thirty-nine buildings of similar design. The house was relatively new, had not yet conceded defeat to Ohio’s scorching summers or freezing winters. The roof looked pristine, the windows polished, the lines straight, the angles sharp. The lawn was neatly tended. But Finch knew that if there were any validity to the claim that houses absorbed the emotions of their owners, the Lambert home would soon begin to sag. The windows would darken even in sunlight, spots of dirt would speckle the siding, the bones beneath the skin of the house would weaken, and cracks would appear. There would be too much hurt and misery for the house to remain standing proud.

He watched as a gray SUV slowed and turned into the driveway. The windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see the passengers, only a darker version of a sky pregnant with rain, but he knew the car, had seen it many times before. It had spent its fair share of time in his own driveway over the years.

There were no reporters at the house. They had kept vigil there like hippies at a folk festival since the day the news broke about the murders, but as soon as the murderer was named and his death announced, they started to lose interest. Killers were always popular in the news, particularly one this savage, but dead ones weren’t worth the hassle, not when the space could be filled by the latest atrocity in the Middle East. Even at the height of the frenzy, coverage of the Alabama murders had paled in comparison to that of beheaded engineers and assassinated politicians in Iraq. Now, the farther away from the epicenter of the massacre you went, the further into the paper you had to look to find mention of what had happened in Elkwood. It was a different world these days, Finch realized. Since 9/11, society’s gaze had shifted outward in search of blame, to places unseen and seldom heard of except in grainy pictures on the news. Everyone was looking for the boogeyman. The worries of a nation were with their soldiers, no longer on their own stoops. And every day there was more cause for grief as word was sent home of another casualty. The internal corruption and strife of America went unnoticed, its troubles measured only by the amount of bodies and flag-draped coffins.

Finch sighed, shifted in the car seat and lit a cigarette. The smoke filled the Buick and he waved a hand through it.

He had been there, at the core of the unrest in Iraq, and had seen Hell firsthand. It had infiltrated him, possessed him, destroyed him, and they’d sent him home, promising he would be fine. But he hadn’t. He’d taken Hell home with him. The army, the government, some faceless son of a bitch in an expensive suit chomping on a cigar a thousand miles away from the conflict, had put him there and hadn’t been able to exorcise it from him when he’d returned. Despite the pride and strength he’d always claimed were his biggest assets, his turmoil was so great he’d sought assistance, but a series of stops at the VA center and hospital in Columbus yielded little help. He was put on a six-month waiting list and told to sit tight. And in that time, he read the papers and watched the news, and saw his fellow marines die of neglect, turned away by the very administration that had made so many promises. Die over there, or die at home , seemed to be the consensus, and in that respect, they held true to their word. Finch turned to alcohol, and briefly to drugs, but they only fed the horror inside him, fortified it, allowing his demons a legitimate stage from which to torment him. More marines had died. He quit watching the news, quit listening to the world.

Until it took his brother from him.

Danny .

The last he’d seen his face had been on the main evening news, his gangly arm thrown over the shoulders of his girlfriend Claire. Now he was dead, hacked to pieces by an insane doctor.

But of course, that wasn’t true. Not if Claire was to be believed, and why shouldn’t she be? Who else alive could tell the world the truth about what had happened down there in that dirty little town? Except, they refused to believe what she’d told them because they had already celebrated the end of their grisly case weeks before Claire was even conscious, buried it in the same pit with the remains of the old doctor, who they knew without a shadow of a doubt had, despite having no previous history of violence, gone berserk and hacked up a load of kids. Backs had been slapped, folders had been tossed into filing cabinets, and sudsy beers had been tossed back while they grinned at each other, dug into steaks and thick fries smothered in ketchup, before going home to their wives and girlfriends, maybe to sleep after a hard day’s work, maybe to make love to put the proper end to a case they hoped someday to tell their grandchildren about.

The Sheriff who’d seen to Claire in Birmingham, a man by the name of Marshall Todd, had called Finch’s mother to offer his condolences for the umpteenth time, to let them know Claire’s release was imminent, and that they might do well to prepare for all kinds of questions from left-field. The girl’s story, he informed them, ran contrary to what they knew to be true. He suspected she was out of it from the painkillers, was misremembering things as people do in the aftermath of such a terrible trauma. All it would take to inspire a story like that, he said, would be repressed memories and a shifting of the wrong ones. She could be remembering the scenes but superimposing things over them that hadn’t been there at all. He could understood completely how a woman forced to endure such an awful ordeal, crazy with pain, disorientated from the abuse she’d taken, would see phantoms where there had been none. Even so , he’d conceded, if it turns out Wellman had an accomplice, we’ll look into it, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the main figure at the center of this atrocity is dead, and I hope that brings you some little peace of mind.

Finch shook his head as rain beaded the glass and the SUV squeaked slightly to a stop close to the front door of the house.

It hadn’t brought them peace of mind, and, standing in the kitchen, trembling, his mother had yelled at the Sheriff, questioning his foolishness in thinking it might when her son was dead.

The driver side door of the SUV opened and Claire’s mother got out. A high school teacher at least two decades his senior, he nevertheless recalled fantasizing about her during those halcyon days back when everybody lived forever, and happiness was daydreaming about taking your teacher over the desk during detention, or asking a girl out and having her look at you like she thought you’d never ask. It was a basketball victory, a smoke behind the bleachers, a Friday night cruising with your friends, sipping beer outside Wal-Mart until the cops came, the smell of the air, electric with possibility.