Kealan Burke - Kin

Then the war had come, and he’d taken it home with him, only to find a worse one waiting.

He shuddered the smoke from his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then raised his head.

Mrs. Lambert didn’t look nearly so appealing now. Her face was wan and pale, her eyes liquid smudges peering out at a world she no longer took for granted, or trusted. Her long curly brown hair was in disarray, her clothes shabby and wrinkled from a long drive.

The year Finch graduated, Mrs. Lambert retired from Hayes High School after coming home one night to find her husband dead on the kitchen floor in a puddle of milk after his heart gave out while he was getting a drink. Surviving him had aged her considerably. Finch suspected what had happened to Claire would push her further to the grave than time alone could ever manage.

He watched Mrs. Lambert move to the side door of the SUV and, with visible effort, wrench it open. She looked like a scarecrow trying to throw wide a barn door. At the same time, the front passenger door slammed shut, and Kara emerged, looking like a younger but just as harried version of her mother. Finch felt something akin to excitement in his stomach, but it was immediately quelled by the memory of what had happened between them, how she had managed to move on with her life and he had gone to war to forget his, only to have bullets compound the fear that wherever he turned, he’d still be punished.

Unlike her mother’s, Kara’s hair had been cut short. Finch didn’t approve of the style, but figured that would hardly send her world careening out of orbit if she somehow got wind of it. Besides, when they’d been together, she’d had her hair long to suit him. The new cut was to suit someone else, or maybe just herself, as whenever he saw her around town she was alone, and not looking at all put out by it.

It made him ache to see her.

Now she joined her mother and reached in, pausing a moment to look around, probably to ensure no cameras were rolling. Finch guessed that the hospital might have leaked news of Claire’s discharge to the media, but the date would have been intentionally inaccurate, allowing the Lamberts to get Claire home a few days before the vultures descended. The reporters would figure it out, of course, but by then there’d be little they could do, assuming they’d care.

Kara’s gaze settled on his Buick, where he’d parked it facing out of a driveway two houses down on the opposite side of the road. He had to resist the urge to duck and felt his insides squirm the longer she watched him. She would recognize the car of course; he’d had it since their dating days, had driven her to Niagara Falls in it, made love to her in the back seat one drunken summer night then laughed about the immaturity of it, and the rearview mirror still held the memory of her standing at her front door six months later after she told him he scared her, that she couldn’t tolerate his moods or his temper any longer.

A pair of emaciated arms reached out from the darkness inside the SUV and Finch rolled his window down, just a little. The breeze snatched the smoke from the car, dragging it out into the rain.

Claire stepped out into the dim daylight and raised her face to the clouds, as if challenging God to throw his next unpleasant trial at her. She looked frail. Had Finch not known who she was, he might have thought her an elderly woman, some long-lost grandmother come to visit her relatives.

They raped her .

Slowly, one hand clamped on her mother’s arm, Kara’s hand on her back for support lest she should fall, they guided her toward the house and the shelter of the eave.

They cut out her eye .

Claire took the steps on her own, but paused at the top, as if the three stone steps had been enough to exhaust her.

They cut off her fingers .

Finch tossed his cigarette out the window. In the rearview, he was startled to see an old man in a check shirt and dungarees emerge from the house that belonged to the driveway and squint at the Buick as he started toward it. “Hey!”

Finch started the engine. He wasn’t going to think of this as a missed opportunity. After all, he’d had no intention of approaching the Lamberts. He’d only wanted to see Claire, to get as accurate a picture as he could of what they had done to her, so he could add it to the bloodstained collage he was developing in his own private darkroom.

They killed Danny .

He pulled out of the driveway and the old man slowed, then stopped as Finch turned out onto the road. He sped up, driving in the direction of the Lambert house but not stopping, the windshield wipers laboring to clear the glass of the strengthening rain. As he passed by, he looked and saw that Claire and her mother had already gone inside. Kara followed, but turned as she shut the door, and hesitated.

She saw him. There was no way she couldn’t have. But her expression remained the same.

Again, his stomach jumped.

Then she was gone.

Finch hit the gas.

Not today , he thought. Not now.

He would return, and when he did it would not be to offer his sympathy, or to torture himself by looking into the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.

It would be to see Claire.

Louise prayed he wasn’t home, but of course, considering the way the day had gone thus far, she wasn’t at all surprised when that prayer went unanswered. Upon entering the apartment, she found Wayne asleep on the sofa in front of the television, his bare feet propped up on the battered pine coffee table. A cigarette he’d set in the ashtray had burned itself out, a long worm of ash dipping down into a sea of its crumpled comrades. The apartment reeked of stale sweat and spoiled milk. Louise sighed and tossed her purse on the floor, inches from where Wayne dozed, his head to the side, a thin string of drool dangling from his jaw. He awoke at the sound, and yawned, then frowned and made as if to go back to sleep.

“Wayne.”

Sluggishly, he opened his eyes and straightened, squinting, struggling to make out who was standing before him.

“Hey,” he mumbled. A smile turned into another yawn and he stretched, sat up and reached for pack of cigarettes, but froze, his hand still in the air as he registered another presence in the room. “Who’s here?” He rose unsteadily, shaking himself alert. Louise thought she detected fear lurking in his eyes. What are you afraid of? she wondered, casting her mind back to all those nights when he’d jumped at sounds outside the apartment or on the street below, sounds she hadn’t even heard. His nocturnal walks did little to reassure her that he was not up to something. Lately, the caution she had initially interpreted from him as protectiveness had become something dangerously close to paranoia, and it worried her. She liked to assume he did nothing while she was at work. He had all day to himself but was always right there in his spot in front of the TV when she left and when she returned, so it was easy to pretend he hadn’t done much else. Now, she wondered.

But such concerns would have to wait.

She stepped aside, allowing Wayne to see the teenager who’d been standing between her and the door.

Wayne frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

Pete smiled and snatched off his wool cap, as if it might make recognition easier. The boy’s eyes were wide, desperate.

“Pete,” he answered. “Lowell.”

Still confused, Wayne looked to Louise.

“Jack Lowell’s boy,” she told him.

Recognition did not come. “Jack Lowell?”

“The man I was with before you. Back in Elkwood. The farmer. This is his boy.”

Wayne’s features softened. “Ah shit, right . I remember. Christ, you got tall .”