Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“Bunny,” Mary cooed. “Here, bunny.”

She followed it up the trail. She looked down at her feet, not at the trees or the river, and not at the highway, which soon disappeared from view behind her. She didn’t notice it was getting dark. The bunny led her away, a hop at a time, and when it finally shot north on the trail and disappeared, Mary ran, trying to catch it. She called out for the bunny in a murmur and hunted in the brush. It was gone, but when she jumped into a patch of wildflowers, she flushed another butterfly, which floated just out of her reach. She forgot about the rabbit and followed the butterfly instead.

She forgot about Charlie, too. And Mama. She didn’t think about being alone, because the butterfly was with her. It wasn’t until the butterfly soared off into the treetops that Mary stopped and looked around her and realized that no one was close to her anymore. It was nearly dark inside the trees. She could see the river down the bank below her, but the dancing dots of sunlight were gone, and the water looked black. Mary stood in the middle of the trail, not knowing what to do. She bit her lip and blinked. Tears dripped down her cheeks.

“Mama?”

She didn’t dare speak loudly. She didn’t know who would hear her. She wished the bunny would come back. Somewhere below her, awfully far away, she thought she heard Mama’s voice. Mary didn’t know how to find her, and she was afraid that Mama would be angry at her for running away. She had done that before, and Mama always got upset, although she hugged her hard.

Mary wanted a hug right now.

She heard noises in the woods. Her eyes grew wide. She hoped it would be Mama, or Charlie, or Daddy, and that they had come to get her and take her home. She took a step backward and laced her fingers together over her stomach. It was hard to see anything at all now, just shadows that were like the night outside her bedroom window. She looked up, wanting to see the sky, but the branches drooped like arms over her head, and she didn’t like it at all. The noises got louder. She cried harder and whimpered.

“I’m sorry.”

The trees moved. They were alive. Mary saw a man climb out of the trees, not even ten feet away from her. He reached out his hands toward her the way a monster would, but it wasn’t Charlie, or Daddy; he was a stranger, and she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t scream, because she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Not at all. Not ever.

She didn’t want to look at him. She thought if she closed her eyes, he would go away, like a bad dream. But when she did, and she opened them to slits, he was still there, and he was coming closer. When he was close enough that she could see his face, her mouth fell open in a terrible O, because this man was worse than a stranger.

He was the man outside her window.

The man who scared her.

“Him him him him him him him!”

He said something to her. He moved toward her, his grasping arms outstretched.

“No no no no no!”

Mary ran, falling as she did, then getting up and crying. She didn’t look behind her. She never wanted to see the man again, never wanted to see his face, never wanted to feel him watching her, never wanted to find him outside her window. She wanted Mama and Daddy to make him go away. She wanted to wake up and be in her bed.

She couldn’t see anything in front of her as she ran. She didn’t know where she was. She knew only that the world was going down, that the branches and brush grabbed at her like the hands of monsters, that she heard animals breathing and snorting.

The ground under her feet became a dark pool of quicksand.

Water.

She was in water. She was in the river.

Then there was no ground under her feet at all, and she was sinking.

Stride slid open a small cubbyhole inside the cabinet of his desk. The drawer was empty except for a photograph, which Stride removed and held at the corner between his thumb and forefinger. The picture was more than ten years old. It showed two men, dressed in suits, standing in front of a brick fireplace at the Kitch, which was the private club where the movers and shakers of Duluth sipped martinis, ate red meat, and decided the city’s future. Stride was the man on the left. Next to him was Ray Wallace, with an arm around Stride’s shoulder and a smile as big as the lake. It was the night Stride had been named to lead the city’s Detective Bureau. Ray was the police chief.

He could see paternal pride in Ray’s eyes. There was nothing fake about that glow. Ray had guided every step of his career from his earliest days on the police force. That night at the Kitch, Ray told him that the only thing that would ever make him happier was the day he could hand the keys to the chief’s office to Stride as he retired.

Two years later, Ray drilled a bullet through Stride’s shoulder.

He used the same long-barreled revolver he had kept in pristine condition since his own days as a detective, the same gun he had used to hunt Dada. While Stride watched, bleeding, from the floor of Ray’s cabin, Ray took that revolver, put the barrel in his mouth under his droopy red mustache, and blew out most of his brain through the back of his skull.

Looking back, Stride knew he should have seen the signs. He could see them in the photograph as he stared at it. Ray was heavy. His cheeks were florid from the four scotches he drank at dinner. Age wore on him. He had trappings of wealth he never should have had, like the watch on his hand, the bottle of champagne at dinner, the spring vacation to Aruba, and the pearls around his young wife’s neck. Back then, Stride had never wanted to see the signs. He had refused to allow them into his mind, until a whistle-blower from Stanhope Industries laid out all the papers for him at a Twin Cities hotel, and Stride could see twenty years of bribery and corruption with only one name to explain it all away. Ray.

Stride hired a forensic accountant who followed the paper trail to Ray and to a handful of senior executives at Stanhope. The mayor and county attorney would have been content to let Ray resign and slip away quietly, but the media got their teeth in the story, and Ray was staring not only at disgrace and bankruptcy but at jail time, too. When Ray’s wife called Stride from their cabin near Ely, Ray was threatening to kill all of them. His wife. Their two kids. Stride went up there alone, wanting to talk Ray out of it, man to man, detective to chief. He thought he had a chance of making it all end peacefully when Ray let his wife and kids walk safely out the door. He only realized later that this was between himself and Ray, that Stride’s betrayal was like a son taking down a father. Ray wanted Stride to be there when he killed himself.

“You don’t still blame yourself, do you?”

Stride saw Maggie in the doorway of his office. The rest of the Detective Bureau was dark behind her; it was after midnight. She strolled inside and sat down sideways in the upholstered chair he kept in the corner. Her short legs dangled off the ground. She had a can of Diet Coke in one hand.

“I’ve been down that road too many times,” Stride said. “There’s nothing I would have done differently.”

Maggie and Cindy had been the two people in his life who helped him climb out of a well of depression after Ray died. Without Maggie, he doubted that he would have gone back on the job after his shoulder healed. He had been ready to quit, but Maggie had nagged him about open cases until he realized that he still loved being a cop, with or without Ray.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Stride said.

“What’s that?”

“I still wonder why Ray never tried to corrupt me. He was on the take all those years, but he never once asked me to cut a corner for him. He never asked for my help.”