Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

Danny hit “end” on the cell phone, punched in 411, and asked for the number of Martha Durham.

Then he asked for the address.

Danny kept the blinds closed regardless of the time of day. Marshall had gone to great pains to make the old sash windows functional, as he did with every building he restored, but he needn’t have bothered with Danny’s unit. His brother believed the out-of-doors should be kept out of doors.

For reasons he was unsure of-except that darkness covered more sins-he switched the lights off before he sat on Danny’s bed. He no longer wanted to see the relics of the lives in his hand but held them tightly; they gave him courage. For the first time in his life he tried, consciously and wholeheartedly, to remember the night of the killings. The night he became Butcher Boy and, along with his family, his childhood was slaughtered.

Mack the Giant had ripped him from sleep-or the dead sleep of unconsciousness. He’d been groggy from the concussion and the medicine his mom had given him. His head felt as if would break open and spill his brains out if he moved. The cop had jerked him hard. Marshall remembered the pain and the fear. He’d thought they were all going to be murdered.

The guy, the huge cop, had dragged him down the hall and forced him to look at Lena. Then he knew they were all going to be killed, that the carnage had already started. He remembered fighting hard as he could, to get away from the man in the policeman’s costume. Dylan thought it was a costume. Real police didn’t come and kill people for no reason.

Marshall tried to go beyond what he could remember, to see the time before the police had come: himself alone, crazy, a boy, pulling the gold chain from around his baby sister’s neck.

There wouldn’t have been any pulling. Her neck was severed lengthwise, a blow that had split her nearly in two from her crown to below her tiny bird-boned shoulders. The chain would have been cut. He tried to picture himself, that boy, Dylan, setting the axe down and fishing the gold cross out of the gore.

The only boy he could see was the terrified child fighting to get away from the man he thought had killed his sister. He couldn’t remember being Butcher Boy.

“Psycho fuck.” Mack had called him that.

Traumatic amnesia. Psychotic break.

When he’d seen little Lena, Marshall remembered Mack’s hand closing harder on the back of his neck. In the darkness of Danny’s room, he felt it happening again. The cop stepped over Lena, jerking him along behind. Terrified his feet would touch his sister’s blood, he’d grabbed the cop’s leg. Mack backhanded him.

Later, at the trial, the cop said he thought Dylan was going for his gun.

His mother had fallen in the doorway of the master bedroom. She was face down, her long brown hair thrown forward. The amount of blood and its bright, comic book color shocked him.

To get the cross from around her neck he would have had to fumble though the sopping mess, dig out the chain, and yank until it broke.

Trying to picture Dylan-himself-doing that, all he saw were the butterflies, how beautiful they’d been above Kowalski’s office, how they’d died.

The kiss, the last good memory.

Dylan hadn’t seen his father. At least not that Marshall remembered. So much of his life had been haunted by that phrase, “not that he remembered.” He’d come to accept that the origins of Butcher Boy were the only thing worth remembering and worth forgetting. The rest of the memories of his young life had been locked behind that paradox.

Once the monster had been laid over that little kid, Dylan, nobody ever thought about him again. Marshall hadn’t thought of him again. Butcher Boy in Drummond had not thought of him. In every way that mattered, Dylan had been murdered that night as surely as his mom, dad, and Lena were.

“God, I miss you.” Marshall heard himself cry the words. “I loved you.” Saying the words felt strange. He didn’t know if what he tasted in the back of his throat was the foulest form of hypocrisy or freedom. Before Drummond, maybe as early as the trial, he had forbidden himself to feel love for his family, to feel anything. The jewelry had brought it all back.

“I loved you,” he said again. Forty years of accumulated emotion hit him, and he began to dissolve, ice breaking away, glacial silences turning to liquid and pouring through the barren scoured places.

“Momma and Daddy, I loved you. Your boy Dylan loved you.”

Dylan, the real, live boy, the boy before that night, came back to life, and Marshall saw him, was him. Freckled in summer, hair blond from the sun.

Laughing.

It surprised him to remember how much he had laughed when he was a kid. How much fun it had been being a kid in Minnesota in the sixties. Maybe the last gasp of the Norman Rockwell times before drugs and twenty-four-hour news and school shootings changed small-town America.

He had friends; there’d been a gang of kids, their lives centered on sports: Little League in summer, hockey in winter. Between seasons, there were forts made from haystacks and riding the elevators when they could sneak into the downtown buildings and get away with it.

Riding bikes.

Marshall laughed aloud.

They had ridden thousands of miles. They rode all summer to each others’ houses, and the river, and the lake. They rode in the winter when the ice pulled the wheels out from under them. Boys on bikes were free.

Ricky, and David, and Charlie, and Al-God but they’d had fun.

Little boys who loved their moms and dads, their friends, their bicycles, John Wayne, and the Green Lantern, little boys like that surely didn’t turn psycho overnight.

Rich, though he wasn’t much older, wouldn’t have much to do with them except to give them a bad time.

A rotten time.

Rich had reinvented himself after Dylan’s trial. Marshall had forgotten that too. Dylan had been so glad somebody still loved him he’d have been willing to overlook just about anything. Rich had been his lifeline in Drummond.

That brother-the Drummond brother-had not always existed, Marshall realized. As Butcher Boy had hidden Dylan, Richard-the new improved Drummond Richard-had hidden Rich.

“A rotten time” was an understatement.

Rich had tortured the hell out of them. He was so good at it he almost never got caught. Half the time, Ricky, Charlie-none of them-knew he was doing it until it was too late, and they were screwed.

Rich had a hole where there should have been snips and snails and puppy dog tails. He didn’t care about things the way other kids did. He didn’t cry when he was hurt. When someone else got hurt, he’d laugh or, more commonly, study them like a scientist with a rat. If there was an accident, he’d call for help a little late or not at all. He’d know the cat was locked in the garage, or that the gate was open and Lena could wander out into the street, and he wouldn’t tell anyone.

Charlie’s mom didn’t like him playing with Rich, and Ricky’s wouldn’t let him stay for sleepovers if Rich was going to be there. They didn’t even want their kids in the same house with him.

How could he have forgotten that? How could he have forgotten eleven years of his life?

Because Rich became the big brother Dylan needed. Rich became the best part of Dylan’s confused, insane world. He came to see him, went to bat for him at Drummond. Dylan- Marshall -had forgotten his brother had ever been any other way. Maybe the loss of his family changed Rich on some fundamental level.

Three murders and Rich is a nice guy?

A damned thin silver lining.

Marshall remembered that Rich-the pre-Drummond Rich-could be funny, even fun, but when the littler kids hung out with him, things had a way of going sour.