Blake Crouch: Locked doors

John David sighed and let go.

Beth stepped away from the edge and faced her son, thinking, You’ll be taller than me in two years.

Beads of water glistened on his hairless littleboy chest.

“Now I want to tell you something,” she said with convincing parental sternness. “You listening to me?”

“Yes ma’am.”

His voice was still high, at least a year from turning.

“I want to tell you…this!”

Beth shoved him off the pier and he screamed as he hit the water. She laughed, raised her hands in victory, and shouted, “Never underestimate the Mom!”

As John David bemoaned the injustice Jenna jerked him underwater by his ankles. The ripples made by the jet ski had begun to lap against the beams of the pier.

“I’m going in!” Beth yelled. “Don’t stay out long!”

“Come on, Mom, it’s Friday night!”

Walking back up the pier, she acknowledged this interval of peace-her children had touched her; what else mattered?

When she reached the cool grass she glanced back at her kids, then on across the lake at the quarter mile of shoreline where the monster used to live.

She’d received a letter from Andrew Thomas after Walter’s car turned up in Vermont.

As she walked into the house to fix herself a drink and look through her wedding album, the words of that thing echoed in her head:

Dear Beth,

Before I begin, please know that I did not murder my mother. And don’t believe what you read in the papers. I say this only to qualify what I have to tell you about your husband. Walter is dead, Beth, and it’s my fault, and I am so, so sorry. I want you to know that he died protecting you and Jenna and John David, and he did not suffer. Also know that because of his efforts, you and the children are safe. He’s buried in a secluded grove of pines in the Vermont countryside. I wish I could personally deliver this news to you but I have to disappear now. I hope you understand. I’m not an evil person, Beth. I tried to make the right choices. I’m going to keep on trying to make the right choices. But evil is alive and well in the world. And sometimes all we can do is not enough.

Andy

MY name is Andrew Thomas and I live in a world that believes I am a monster.

Once upon a time I was a suspense novelist. I had money. I lived in a beautiful house on a lake in North Carolina. I had friends. Lovers. I knew what respect and a mite of celebrity felt like.

Then someone came along and destroyed all of it.

His name was Orson Thomas and he was my fraternal twin.

Under threat of blackmail he took me to a remote cabin in the high desert of Wyoming.

He was a psychopath.

He showed me a side of myself I will spend the rest of my life annulling.

But the horror of what happened in that desert is another story.

In the end I escaped.

My brother was killed. His accomplice-a soulless individual named Luther Kite-I shot and left for dead, tied to a chair on the front porch of Orson’s cabin in the vast and snowswept desert.

That was November 1996 and I faced returning to a world that feared and hated me.

Bodies had been unearthed at my home on Lake Norman.

I was suspected in my mother’s death.

I was suspected in Walter Lancing’s disappearance.

I was the writer turned serial killer.

Orson and Luther had framed me in every way imaginable.

I couldn’t go home.

I was wanted.

And though I’d done questionable things in the name of self-preservation, I was by no means a murderer.

So I ran.

The village of Haines Junction, Yukon saved my life.

I’d been running two years when I found it-through desert villages in northern Mexico, the Baja Peninsula, the towns and cities of America.

I worked a summer in a lumber yard in Macon, Georgia.

I was a busboy for one week in Baltimore.

A ranch hand for a west Texas winter.

I slept in tents.

Homeless shelters.

Bunkhouses.

Fields beneath stars on cool clear nights.

I grew my hair out.

I didn’t shave.

I didn’t bathe.

I left places.

Arrived at new places.

I stopped reading.

Stopped writing.

I fulfilled my alcoholic tendencies.

I traveled by bus.

Hitchhiked.

Jumped a train once through South Dakota.

I never talked to anyone.

Because my name had become synonymous with murder and matricide I lived in constant fear, suspected everyone.

At a construction site in London, Kentucky, the foreman asked if I liked to read thrillers. Maybe he was just being friendly. I wasn’t there the next day to find out.

My face appeared on FBI posters.

I was the subject of television specials.

Books were written about me.

My novels sold like crazy.

People wanted to know how a serial murderer writes.

They said my stories were windows into an evil soul.

I became notorious.

A darkly comic figure of pop culture.

My name instilled fear.

My name was a punch line.

My name meant murder.

Having never been married, I was accustomed to living alone, but I’d not experienced this grade of utter abandonment.

I was homeless, hunted, and lonely.

It was no way to live.

In December, two nomadic years after my escape from the snowbound Wyoming desert, I took a bus to Vancouver, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Whitehorse, Yukon, a thousand miles north.

I rented a car and drove the Alaska Highway one hundred fifty kilometers west to the village of Haines Junction at the foot of the St. Elias Mountains. I’d researched the village for a book I never wrote. It seemed like a quiet isolated place to die.

I pulled off the highway outside of town, a vast coniferous forest extending in every direction, great white mountains looming in the west. The temperature held at minus thirty. The sky was gray, dusky, the subarctic sun a halfhearted presence over the distant peaks. The dashboard clock read 1:47 p.m. I would simply walk into the woods, sit down against a tree, and freeze to death. It seemed a peaceful way to go. Vaguely romantic. I thought of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” I looked forward to that warm euphoric stillness that would come near the end.

Wearing only a T-shirt, I opened the door and stepped out of the car into crusty snow. The cold was beyond comprehension. My eyes burned.

I walked a ways into the woods, chose a leafless aspen, and sat down with my back against the silver bark. I waited. I began to shiver. My stomach rumbled. I thought, Why die hungry? I got up, walked back to the car, and drove into the village, home to eight hundred residents though far fewer in these bleak winter months. I parked downtown in front of a diner called Bill’s, the street decorated for Christmas. I reached to open the car door but stopped.

I put my head on the steering wheel.

Wept.

But those dark times rarely haunted me. I’d lived in the woods outside of Haines Junction now for five years and it was sweet and essential to be this other man.

To the community my name was Vincent Carmichael and I’d become a full-fledged resident. The townsfolk might’ve described me as quiet but friendly. I was the American with long brown hair and an untamed beard. Everyone’s acquaintance. No one’s friend. But that was okay here. People came to this remote northwest corner of Canada to escape things. Haines Junction was a lodestone for damaged people.

During the tourist season, I worked as a chef in the kitchen of The Lantern, one of two fine-dining establishments in the village. There I earned enough money to live through the winter months, October to April, when there was no work and little to do but stay indoors near a fire.

I spent half my savings on a cabin. Six miles west of town in a valley called the Shakwak Trench, it stood in a grove of spruce, lost in the endless forest. From the window above my kitchen sink, a small meadow could be seen forty yards through the firs-a distant patch of green light when the sun was strong. Lying in its grass, you could see into the Kluane Reserve and the front wall of the ice-laden St. Elias Mountains that rose from this forest just a few miles to the west. There was even a pond a quarter mile south. I swam in it during the fleeting warmth of summer.