Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“Oh?”

“God, no. They broke up very badly. Laura came to me in tears.”

“Did she say what happened?”

“She told me they had a fight.”

“What was the fight about?”

Rikke steepled her fingers together. She spoke slowly. “It was about a boy. Tish was insanely jealous. She demanded that Laura stop seeing him.”

“Who was it?”

“Laura didn’t tell me his name, but I always assumed it was the boy from that rich family in Duluth. The Stanhopes. I read in the papers after her death that Laura and Peter were seeing each other.”

Stride didn’t like where this was going. It made him wonder again about Tish’s motives in pursuing Peter Stanhope.

“Did Finn talk to you about Laura’s murder after it happened? Did he ever say he knew something about it?”

“Of course not. Like I told you, he wasn’t there.”

“I do need to talk to Finn,” Stride said, getting to his feet. “How do I reach him?”

Rikke waved her hand dismissively. “He comes and goes when he pleases. I’m not my brother’s keeper. Call the delivery company, and maybe they can help you find him somewhere on his route.”

Stride nodded. “I appreciate your time.”

Rikke didn’t reply.

“You know, I do remember something from your geometry class,” Stride added.

“Oh?”

“I think it was called the parallel postulate.”

Rikke shrugged. “If two lines cross a third and form less than two right angles, then eventually the two lines will meet if extended far enough. Why on earth do you find that so interesting?”

“It’s something I find in most of my investigations,” Stride told her. “Sooner or later, the lines always intersect.”

After Stride left, Rikke Mathisen stood at the living room window that looked out on the street. Holding aside the lace curtain, she watched Stride retreat into the dusky gloom and climb into his truck. His headlights burst on like two staring eyes, and then gravel scraped as he sped down the dirt road back to the highway, jolting across the railroad tracks. She watched until the red taillights disappeared and kept watching as night fell outside like a black cloud enveloping the house. Her orange tabby cat rubbed against her legs and mewed, but Rikke didn’t move. In the distance, coming from the northeast, a train screamed. Even at this distance, she felt its vibration under her feet. It didn’t matter how long she had lived here. She heard every train.

Rikke turned away. Hung on the foyer wall by a steel wire was a mirror, framed in heavy brass, laden with dust. She caught a glimpse of her dark reflection, and her breath clutched in her chest, because it was her mother’s face staring back at her like a mean-eyed ghost brought up from the earth. Fate was cruel. Thirty years had passed, and she had become the person that she and Finn had hated for so long. You can run and run, and when you think you’ve escaped, you realize that all along you’ve been running in a circle.

She switched off the downstairs light and felt her way with her hands, like a blind person, toward the mahogany steps that led upstairs. At the top of the stairs, she stared at the closed door in front of her. Finn’s room. She jiggled the metal knob, but it was locked. He always kept it locked. He didn’t realize that Rikke kept a key. She let herself inside and turned on the light, not caring if Finn saw the glow from his bedroom window when he drove home. The room was messy. Soiled clothes were strewn across the bed and draped over the closet door. Crushed cans of Budweiser littered the floor like silver hockey pucks. She smelled urine from his sheets. He still wet the bed.

The top drawer of his black lacquer nightstand was open. She yanked it out and overturned the drawer onto the floor, where the contents rolled and clattered. She did the same with the bottom drawer. She got down on all fours and pushed through the pile of junk with her hands. Finn saved everything. Old cell phones and computer cables. Half-completed tax forms. Dried-up pens and pencils snapped in half. Thumbed porno magazines, bottles of lubricant, and rubber strokers crusted over with discharge.

An old photograph.

Rikke held it up and stared at it. The picture was four inches square, with a narrow white border, its colors faded and unnatural. She recognized Finn in the backyard of their house, sitting next to Laura at a picnic bench, with his arm around her shoulder. They were young and smiling. Laura wore a tank top. Finn was bare-chested, his blond hair curly and big. Rikke remembered taking the photograph. She held it, her hands trembling, then tore it in half, and tore it in half again, and again, until the pieces were too small to rip. She scattered them like pinches of coarse salt over the mess on the floor.

Back then, Finn had given up his room for Laura on those nights when she stayed over. She had slept here in his twin bed, while he slept on the sofa downstairs. Except when he would creep upstairs and watch. Rikke knew all about it. She had seen him hovering in the blackness of the doorway to his room, staring at his bed, where the stars glowed faintly and illuminated bare flesh. They never talked about it. Some things were just understood.

She went to his desk next, pulled out all the drawers, and poured them out like jugs of water. She sifted through the debris without seeing what she wanted, but she knew she would find what she was looking for eventually. She knew Finn. With her face sober and emotionless, she pulled all of his clothes off the hangers in the closet, pulled the board games down off the dusty shelf, and felt along the grainy surface of the wood with outstretched fingers. When she found nothing, she dragged the mattress off Finn’s bed and then flipped the box spring off the frame.

Nothing.

She toppled the black nightstand to the floor with one hand. The lamp came with it, crashing and breaking. She bent over and peered at the underside of the nightstand and nodded grimly to herself.

There it was.

A bulging manila envelope was taped to the unfinished wood with duct tape that was losing its stickiness, because it had been pulled off and resealed countless times. Rikke grabbed the envelope. Slabs of tape came with it. She ripped the flap and extracted the dog-eared sheaf of papers inside. She went through each one carefully, studying every picture. They were grainy color photographs, printed on the inkjet on Finn’s desk. Blurry images, taken at night. It didn’t matter. She could see clearly enough what they were.

Teenage girls.

When she had seen them all, she shoved them back into the envelope. On the opposite wall, beside Finn’s desk, was a metal trash can. She emptied it of garbage and then put the envelope inside. She hunted for a box of matches amid the chaos she had created on the floor, then lit a match and dropped it inside the trash can, where the wispy fire smoldered on the paper and grew into a widening torch of flame. Smoke and orange lightning belched from the can. The envelope and all the photographs curled into flakes of black ash that floated in the room like coal-colored snow. In the hallway, the smoke alarm honked in protest. Rikke ignored it.

When it was over, the metal inside was scorched. She took a ruler, got down on her knees, and hacked at the warm ashes, turning them into dust. Her skin was streaked with soot. She got up and wiped her hands on her shorts, leaving black fingerprints.

The computer was next. And the camera. They would all go in the river sometime during the middle-night hours. You couldn’t erase things like that. Someone who knew what they were doing could always find them again.

Rikke heard a noise in the hall and looked up.

Finn was in the doorway.