Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“He didn’t answer my last letter,” Sissy said.

“He’s been busy,” Conner said, and a grim smile came over his face.

When Jeremy Howell looked into his mother’s eyes it was with fear and respect, rather than love. Peggy had told her son over and over that he was special and that his specialness had to be fulfilled. If he was to be what he was born to be, to follow in his father’s bloody footprints, then he had to do more than seize the moment. He had to create it. He had to be wily, crafty, smart. He had to be ruthless. When Jeremy looked into his mother’s eyes it was with the kind of respect and fear that came with hate.

And yet he loved her. He knew her struggles. She’d told him repeatedly that loving Ted had been the hardest part of her hard-fought life.

“My own family disowned me,” she said one time when they sat in the car parked in front of his grandmother’s house. “And when they disowned me, they disowned you. I hate them. I know you don’t know them and you never will, but, honey, trust me.”

It was always about trust. Jeremy had never talked to his father, of course. By the time Peggy had told her son about his important father, Old Sparky had zapped Ted into oblivion.

“They killed him. No one would kill a lion for doing what he does naturally, exquisitely. No one thinks anything of a killer whale eating a seal, for God’s sake. It is what they do. Your father was like that. You’re like that.”

“Like that?” he asked.

His mother’s face tightened. “Don’t be stupid. What don’t you understand here?”

He thought a moment, wondering if he’d had the ability to say what he was really thinking.

“What if I don’t want to be like that?” he finally asked.

She looked at him, with those cold eyes. She took a moment, too. Conversations between mother and son were always like that. Long gaps between utterances, rather than quick exchanges fueled by any real connection.

Her eyes narrowed once more and she shrugged. He was a bug. A gnat. His questions were annoyances. “You will struggle for the rest of your life. You will die being a nothing. Nothing is worse than a promise or birthright unfulfilled.”

The words didn’t track and Peggy Howell could see that.

“Being your mother isn’t easy,” she said. “What I did for you just doesn’t seem to matter.”

She turned away and looked out at the house that she grew up in.

“I hate my parents and you’ll probably hate me, too.”

“I could never hate you, Mom,” he said, lying.

“I could hate you,” she said.

“You couldn’t.”

“Don’t mess with your birthright,” she said. “If you do, you’ll be alone forever.”

“I don’t want to be alone.”

She lit a cigarette and cracked the window.

“Except for Ted, I’ve been alone my entire life,” she said.

“What about my sister? My stepdad?”

“He’s dead and your sister Cecilia might as well be.” She pushed smoke out of her nostrils, reminding Jeremy of a dragon. “Are you going to let me down, too?”

“I guess not,” he said, still unsure of what she wanted.

“When Ted was only a little older than you he killed a girl.”

Jeremy felt his pulse quicken. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

Peggy turned away. “Then you’re nothing. You’re dead to me. And you know what? I’ll be kind of relieved. Nothing I loathe more than a loser. Especially a loser who’s been handed greatness on a silver platter. Be nothing. Fine with me.”

Jeremy remembered going to his bedroom after that encounter with his mother in the car, his sister playing in the room next door. He’d cried a little, but the tears were oddly forced. He went to Cecilia, who was playing with her Barbie, and he took his belt and slipped it around her neck. Cecilia started to scream and Peggy came in, yanked the belt from her daughter’s neck, and slapped Jeremy as hard as she could.

“Dogs don’t poop in their kennel,” she said.

He touched his face where the stinging pain came. “Huh?”

Peggy’s eyes bulged. “You heard me. Now get out of here!”

“But, Mom.”

“Don’t ‘but’ me, or I’ll beat the crap out of you.”

“I was doing what-”

Later that same night, Cecilia came into Jeremy’s bedroom, her neck still pink from the belt that had he’d twined around it. Her saucer eyes absorbed her brother.

“Jeremy, why did you hurt me?” she asked. Her tone was plaintive, but she didn’t cry.

“I don’t know,” he said, now barely looking at her.

She touched him, but he pulled back a little. “Please don’t hurt me ever again,” she said, looking at him as she tried to understand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His words came at her, hollow and empty.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

In that moment even Jeremy Howell’s kid sister could see that there was nothing to her brother’s apology. He had meant to hurt her. He wanted to hurt her.

Years later after Cecilia married and found fewer and fewer excuses to come home she told her husband about the time her brother tried to choke her with a belt.

“I don’t want that sick SOB around our kids,” Kirk Morris said.

“I don’t, either, but I don’t blame him. Not really. I think that the stuff my mom was doing to him was making him that way.”

“What was she doing to him?”

“Not that,” she said emphatically. “She was always whispering in his ear. Telling him things.”

“What was she saying?”

“Empowerment stuff. I watched her lean next to him and say, ‘You’re better than the rest. You are special.’ ”

“What’s so creepy about that?”

“It wasn’t in the words,” she said. “It was in how she said things and how he reacted. It was like something secret, maybe forbidden, dark. I don’t know.”

“Now you’re acting weird.”

“Maybe I am. I was a kid. Maybe I just didn’t get it. But on more than one occasion I remember my mother telling him that being the best was a lonely endeavor, one that few could understand. She said, ‘Your work will only be known if you get caught.’ ”

“Get caught?”

“Something like that. I don’t know for sure. It was a long time ago. Really, when I look back, my brother never really had a chance.”

“I don’t feel sorry for him and I don’t want him around our kids.”

“I do feel sorry for him, but I agree. I don’t want him around the children, either.”

Although the Morrises lived only across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Gig Harbor, they never saw much of Uncle Jeremy. Their mother said he was too busy. A recluse. He had a demanding job. She never told her children that their grandmother actually lived with their uncle. Oddly, they never asked about her. They assumed that she, along with their grandfather, was dead. After all, why wouldn’t their grandma come to see them if she was alive?

The crack. The way out. The source of the air. Emma Rose woke up, her mind still zeroing in on what she needed to do above all other possibilities. Her head throbbed and she wanted to throw up. But more than that, she wanted out of the apartment. She wanted to go home. She pulled herself up from the mattress and found her way to back to the wall with the crack. At least, that’s where she was certain it had been the day before. On her knees, she ran her hands over the wall, but she couldn’t find the opening. Had she gone the wrong direction? The room was not that large. How was it that she couldn’t find the source of the airflow? It was dark as always, but she’d found it before by feeling the air pass through the opening. How was it that she couldn’t find it now?

God, help me. Where is it? Where did it go?