Michael Prescott - Blind Pursuit

Her father.

Erin lifted her head, struck by a new thought.

You’ll bur n, Albert Reilly had promised, and the next night he’d set out to fulfill his prophesy.

Oliver, despite his denials, was almost certainly fixated on his mother. And his mother’s sister had died in a gasoline fire. A fire set by a man who once had loved her.

The logic of the subconscious was the logic of a dream. Identities melded; one sister blended with another; the death of an aunt could become the death of the loved and hated mother.

In the confusion of a subconscious association, had Oliver conflated Maureen with Lydia? Was that why he’d chosen burning as the method of death for the three symbolic Lydias he’d killed?

That had to be it. But why would he want Lydia dead, symbolically or literally? Why had he run away in the first place… and why had he killed Lincoln?

Lydia might have known the answers to some or all of those questions, but only rarely had she spoken of her past. The subject had been tacitly understood to be taboo in her household while Erin and Annie were growing up.

The two girls had been curious, though. Thumbing through old photo albums, they’d come upon more than pictures of the ranch. There had been photos of Oliver as well.

Erin closed her eyes and tried to summon up a memory of the face captured in those faded Kodachromes. A vague recollection swam into partial focus. It was a snapshot of Oliver, roughly seventeen, posed with his father at a lakeside dock.

Lincoln had been smiling, a tall, wiry man with a baseball cap tipped forward on his forehead, the bill throwing his eyes into shadow.

Oliver had worn neither a cap nor a smile. He, too, was tall, as tall as his father, but broad-shouldered and thick-limbed. His hair was blondish and long, pulled back by a tie-dyed headband; a stubble of beard salted his face.

Erin and Annie had studied that photo for a long time, staring into their foster brother’s blue eyes, trying to glimpse his soul. But there was no soul to see. His gaze was blank, his features smoothed into an expressionless mask-and what made it worse was the peculiar certainty that it was no mask, that nothing lay underneath to conceal.

In that assumption, however, they’d been wrong, or partly wrong. At times, no doubt, Oliver had been as dead inside as his outward appearance would suggest. But at other moments anger must have risen in him, the blind, furious, seething anger that had driven him finally to lash out and kill. To kill the man standing beside him with his arm thrown casually over his son’s shoulder, the man in the baseball cap, laughing at the day.

Anger at what-and for what? If Lydia had ever known or suspected the dark whirlpool swirling below her son’s placid surface, she hadn’t spoken of it.

Yet possibly she had known more than she let on. Too much, perhaps, for her peace of mind. Certainly she behaved like a woman carrying a heavy burden of anxiety.

More than anxiety. Fear.

Erin nodded. Yes. Fear, along with the unconditional love she had shown toward her two young nieces, had been the dominant motif of Lydia’s personality.

She was always edgy and restless and afraid. Addicted to sleeping pills and tranquilizers, forever obtaining new prescriptions from new doctors. The variety of her nervous habits was almost amusing-her tuneless humming, her obsessive need to check and double-check every lock, the fretful attentiveness that made her look in on the girls every night, sometimes waking them inadvertently.

At the time the twins had attributed her eccentricities to the double tragedy that had scarred her life. She had lost a husband and son in the worst imaginable way; had lost a sister also, in another act of insane violence.

All that was left to her were her two nieces, and so maybe it was unsurprising how she doted on them, fanatically overprotective, touchingly proud. I can’t believe how simply wonderful you girls are, she would often say. How perfect you turned out, how smart and beautiful and strong. You two mean more to me than you’ll ever know.

She loved them, and cared for them, and worriedly monitored their safety. But possibly her concern was prompted by more than a generalized fear of suffering a final, irrevocable loss.

She might have known that Oliver was still alive. Might have known that he killed Lincoln, and that he could return one day for her-and her young charges.

Erin hugged herself as a chill shivered through her.

Us, she thought. That’s what kept her awake at night. Not fear for her own safety. She was afraid for us. Afraid of what Oliver might do.

They had taken his place, after all. She and Annie had been raised, in effect, as Lydia’s children. And Oliver, his memory expunged, had never been mentioned or acknowledged around the house.

In the van, while she lay blindfolded, feigning unconsciousness, Oliver had stroked her hair, her face, and breathed one word: Filth.

He hated her. Must hate Annie also. Because they had replaced him in Lydia’s heart.

Yes, Erin thought slowly. He must have hated us for years.

If Lydia had known her son was alive, then she’d been right to be afraid. He could have come after them at any time.

And now, at last, he had.

Two miles from the turnoff to the ranch, Gund became aware of being followed.

Though the sun had set, enough light remained to reflect off the windshield of a vehicle well to his rear, maintaining a constant distance from his van.

Of course, the driver might be only a commuter heading home to one of the rare, remote subdivisions along this road. But then why keep the headlights off, despite the dusk? Why, unless to avoid being seen, while holding the van just within view?

Testing his hypothesis, Gund accelerated. The other vehicle disappeared briefly, dropping below the horizon, then promptly reemerged.

Gund relaxed his pressure on the gas pedal; the speedometer needle dipped. His pursuer edged slightly closer before falling back to a safe distance.

No question now. None at all.

Someone was after him.

Pursuit implied suspicion; suspicion suggested the prospect of arrest. Of punishment.

Fear ballooned in Gund’s chest and was transmuted instantly into furious anger.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathed, in reference to no one and nothing. “Son of a bitch.”

He had known punishment before. Now in a disorienting flashback he felt the awful, crippling pain again, and with it the ugly shame of his forced submission.

Random scraps of memory whirled in his mind-hiss of running water, blood running down his leg like a menstrual flow, wadded tissue paper stuffed inside him to stop the bleeding, Lydia knocking tentatively at the locked bathroom door: “Oliver…? Oliver? ” The quaver in his adolescent voice as he made some reply. The sight of his face in the mirror over the blood-dappled sink, his eyes briefly haunted, then going safely blank.

A shudder slithered through him now, breath catching in his throat.

Oh, yes, he’d had his share of punishment, of discipline, of authority’s brutal lessons.

The police were only another brand of authority, offering a different form of abuse.

Yet not so very different, after all. He’d heard what went on in prisons.

If he was caught… sentenced…

Then he would not be Harold Gund any longer. He would be Oliver once more, Oliver Ryan Connor, poor helpless boy, pitiable victim.

No. He would not endure it again. He’d made that vow nearly three decades ago, in a forest clearing, and he would keep it as the sacred promise that it was.

No more punishment. Not ever.

Squinting in the sideview mirror, he strained to distinguish some details of the mystery vehicle’s appearance-shape, color, markings. White T.P.D. cruiser? Gold sheriff’s department car?