John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

“It was only a game,” she said, searching for something that might mollify her brother. “We were just playing a game! We were children—”

“It wasn’t a game,” he said, his eyes bleak and his voice harsh. “It was sex, Claire. It was sex and torture! You tortured a little boy, Claire. A little boy who was your own brother!”

Once again Claire’s eyes darted around the room, this time searching for a means of escape. But there was no escape, not without getting past Patrick, and he was too big, and too strong.

Far bigger and stronger than he’d been back then, all those years ago, in the playhouse.

And now he was furious, too.

Turn it back, she told herself. Make him think it was his fault. “You wanted to do it,” she hissed. “You liked it, Patrick. You loved it! And you were lucky Father never found out — if I’d told him you raped me, he’d have killed you!”

Ignoring her words, he moved closer.

Claire turned, scrambled across the bed, and fumbled with the nightstand drawer. “Get away from me, Patrick,” she said, trying to keep her terror out of her voice. “I’m warning you—”

But it was already too late. Lunging at the bed, he threw himself on top of her, then twisted her around so she was lying on her back, his legs straddling her, his weight pinning her to the mattress. She kicked and struggled as she kept reaching for the drawer in the nightstand, but it was useless.

As she struggled even harder, Patrick saw the desperation in her face, and it somewhat eased his pain to see that now she would feel what all the others had felt, all the others who had suffered because of what she’d done to him. He could feel the blood pumping through her arteries under his hands now, feel her heart pounding and her chest heaving. His hands moved to her neck and his fingers closed around her throat. She was still thrashing beneath him, her face turning red, her eyes bulging. Then her lungs began to spasm as she struggled for air, and he could feel her larynx and esophagus collapsing under the pressure of his fingers.

No more was he the little boy molested by his big sister and her laughing friend.

No more was he stripped naked, bound to a table, and forced to submit his body to his sister’s desire.

“No more!” he screamed, releasing the last of the pent-up fury and outrage that had split him in two so many years ago.

Claire’s face had turned from red to purple, and her struggles had lessened, yet still he squeezed. And then, finally, she stopped struggling.

Her arteries no longer throbbed, her chest no longer heaved.

And still he squeezed.

He squeezed until his hands ached as much as his heart, until his own lungs began to heave with sobs.

He squeezed until tears fell from his eyes into the dead, wide-open orbs of his sister's.

They trickled into her mouth and onto her cheeks and through her hair.

His tears.

The tears he’d held back, just as he’d held the memories at bay.

Finally, his tears as spent as his rage, Patrick rolled off Claire’s still body. For a few minutes he lay on the bed next to his sister, then wiped away the last of his tears.

It was time to finish it, finally and forever.

Opening the drawer he hadn’t let Claire reach, he took out the small pistol she’d bought after Phillip Sollinger had left her ten years ago.

He gazed at the gun for almost a full minute.

Oh God, I’m so sorry, he said silently to himself as he put the gun to his temple.

As his finger began to squeeze the trigger, one last memory rose in his mind.

The journal.

The journal written by that other person, the secret person who had hidden inside him all those long years while he himself was hiding from the past.

The journal that was locked in the bottom drawer of the desk in the library.

The journal that, perhaps, would explain it all.

His finger tightening once more, Patrick Shields pulled the trigger.

Andrew Grant was only vaguely aware of the brightening dawn outside the window of the small apartment he’d called home since his wife had thrown him out five years ago — not because of another woman in his life or another man in hers, but because of the kind of behavior he was indulging in right now. Not only was the small dining room table covered with copies of every report, note, and photograph that might be even peripherally relevant to the open house cases, but so also was the couch, the coffee table, and every other flat surface. All night, he had been sifting through them, moving relentlessly from one report to another, prowling through the mass of interviews, observations, and speculations like a hungry tiger sniffing for prey it knows is there but can’t quite pin down. But he was close, though it was his gut telling him he was almost there rather than his brain.

An invisible person.

That was what it boiled down to. Someone who could blend into even a small crowd so perfectly that even people who remembered he was there couldn’t quite recall what he looked like. That let out all the real-estate agents he’d talked to, and all the clients they’d brought with them. And all the couples who had gone through the houses, too. And all the singles who’d signed in — whoever he was looking for wouldn’t have signed the agents’ books at all. But at all three of the open houses he was now investigating, at least one person — and at the Marshalls’, three people — had remembered someone being in the house at the same time they were, though they couldn’t recall anything about him. “One of those guys you just don’t notice, you know?” someone had said. “Like a waiter when you’re at a restaurant. You know he’s there, but you don’t even look at him.”

A waiter…

What the hell did that mean?

His gut told him it meant something, but what ?

As he reached for the mug of cold coffee he’d left on the windowsill, the police scanner in the kitchen, which had been droning intermittently all night with reports of domestic violence and drunken driving, suddenly came to life with a report of a fire. But it wasn’t the fire itself that caught Grant’s attention — it was the location: 35 Flinders Beach Road.

The coffee mug instantly forgotten, Grant went to the dining room table and picked up one of the twenty-odd reports he himself had made on this case over the last two weeks, this one in reference to the reward that had been offered for information about Lindsay Marshall. He stared at the name and address of the donor: Patrick Shields, 35 Flinders Beach Road.

Now Grant’s mind was racing. This wasn’t the first fire Patrick Shields had been involved in. Just last Christmas the man’s skiing cabin in Vermont had burned, killing his wife and both his daughters.

That fire had been deemed accidental, but now, as the address of tonight’s fire was repeated on the scanner, Grant’s skin crawled. One fire might be accidental. But not two.

He picked up his jacket from the chair by the door, and in less than a minute was driving out of the building’s garage, his mind racing.

Two girls and a woman had died in the fire in Vermont, and now two girls and a woman were missing.

And Patrick Shields’s house was once more burning.

But Patrick Shields? It made no sense — almost everything about Shields was memorable: he was good-looking, and always expensively dressed in the kind of clothes whose quality even he could spot instantly. And not just spot, either — actually notice, and wish he could afford.

But it wasn’t just that. At least until his wife and children died, Shields had always possessed the kind of self-confidence that only old money brings, which again always commanded attention.