David Morrell - Long lost

The next morning, after a torturous sleep, I sent that message to the E-mail address of every church on my list. Staring at my computer screen, I silently asked God to help me. All I could do now was wait.

The need to urinate finally made me move. But once in motion, I remembered Payne's remark that as long as I stayed in motion, I was less likely to do something foolish to myself. I went for a five-mile run. I returned and checked to see if I had any E-mail. Nothing. I did an hour of exercises, then checked my E-mail again. Still nothing.

What did I expect? That someone at each church would faithfully read the church's E-mail every morning, that word of my message would spread instantly throughout each congregation, that people who remembered something like the events I'd described would immediately send an E-mail back to me? I have to be patient, I warned myself. Even in small towns, news doesn't get around as fast as I want it to. If there's a reply to be had, I probably won't receive it until evening.

So I showered, dressed, and tried to read. I went out and got a sandwich. I took a walk. I watched CNN. But mostly I kept checking to see if any E-mail had arrived. None did. By midnight, I gave up, shut off the lights, and tried to sleep.

But unconsciousness wouldn't come, and finally, betraying my resolve of the previous night, I went down the road to a bar and grill, where I wasn't likely to be recognized. If the man I'd beaten was looking for me, the logical place he'd do it was the restaurant across from the motel. This time, it took four beers and a shot of bourbon before I felt stupefied enough to go back to my room and try to sleep. I'm going to hell, I told myself.

I am in hell.

Around dawn, I woke, but there still wasn't any message. I faced another day of waiting. Time dragged on, until I admitted that I'd been a fool to have hoped. I hadn't been brave enough to identify with Lester Dant as closely as I'd needed to. I'd been wrong in my prediction of where he'd gone nineteen years previously and of what he'd done when he'd arrived there. Vowing that I couldn't persist in leading my life the way I was, wondering if I wanted to lead my life at all, I checked my E-mail and tensed at the discovery of four messages.

I was certain that they didn't exist, that I'd tricked myself into seeing things. With a sense of unreality, I stared at them. Unsteady, I printed them out. Each was from a different state: Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Initially, their sequence was alphabetic, based on the sender's name, but after I reread them several times, I arranged them so that they formed a geographical and chronological narrative.

Mr: Denning, the first began. Your message so disturbed me that it took me a long time to face up to answering it. My husband told me not to pain myself, but I can't bear the thought that other people have suffered. The writer identified herself as Mrs. Donald Cavendish, and the details of her message paralleled what Mrs. Garner had told me. If a rape had occurred, Mrs. Cavendish didn't mention it, but I had a disturbing sense of a deeper hurt than even the strong facts of her message accounted for. He hadn't called himself Lester, though. He hadn't used any name at all. The night that he'd disappeared, he'd burned down their house.

This had happened in November, a month after he'd brutalized Mrs. Garner. What had occurred in the interval? I checked my maps and found that the town in Kentucky was two hundred miles from Loganville, Ohio. After Lester spent the money that he'd stolen from Mrs. Garner, had he wandered, subsisting on the proceeds from house break-ins and liquor-store robberies until his aimless path took him to Kentucky?

The next message (as I arranged them) was from the neighboring state of West Virginia and described events one year later, when Lester (he used only his first name) had been welcomed by a churchgoing family whose teenage daughter he eventually victimized. It was the daughter who sent me the E-mail, revealing what she'd hidden from her parents until she was an adult. Lester had warned her that if she told anyone what he'd done, he'd come back one night and kill her. To prove his point, he'd strangled her cat in front of her. The next night, he'd robbed the house, stolen the family car, and disappeared. The police had found the fire-gutted car two hundred miles away, but although Lester was gone, it had taken the daughter a long time before she'd stopped having nightmares about him.

The third message (from Pennsylvania) described events a surprising eight years later. He'd shortened his first name to Les. His methods had changed. In his mid-twenties now, he no longer had the air of vulnerability that had made it so easy to portray himself a victim and win the compassion of a small-town congregation. Instead, he'd showed up at the church and offered to do odd jobs in exchange for meals. His amazing ability to quote any Bible passage from memory had endeared him to the congregation. This time, it was the church that he'd burned.

But it was the fourth message that disturbed me most. It was from a man who described events thirteen years after the fire in which Lester Dant's parents had been killed. It came from a town in central Ohio. This time when Lester had disappeared, he'd taken the man's wife. She'd never been found. But Lester hadn't used his first name or its abbreviation, Les. He'd used an entirely different first name. It turned me cold. Peter.

Shivering to the core of my soul, I stared at the maps and the placement of the towns. From Brockton southeast to Loganville in Ohio, then farther southeast to the town in Kentucky, then east to West Virginia, then northeast to Pennsylvania, then northwest to the town in Ohio, a hundred miles from where I was raised in the middle of that state. One month. One year. Eight years. Thirteen years.

He'd been to far-off places in the country during the intervals (his FBI crime report made that clear), but something kept making him return to this general area, and I couldn't help feeling that the placement of towns on the maps wasn't random, that it had a center, that he'd been skirting his ultimate destination, each time getting closer, drawn relentlessly back to where everything had begun.

It had been more than a quarter of a century since my mother and I had been forced to leave Woodford to live with her parents in Columbus. Payne had told me that the town was now a flourishing bedroom community for the encroaching city. But I hadn't fully realized what that meant. After I steered from the interstate, following a newly paved road into town, I tested my memory. I'd been barely fourteen when Mom and I had left. Even so, from all the times that she and Dad had taken Petey and me to visit her parents, I remembered that there'd been a lot of farmland on the way to the interstate. Much of that was gone now, replaced by subdivisions of large houses on small lots. The panoramic outdoor view that owners had initially been attracted to had been obliterated by further development. Expensive landscaping compensated.

On what had once been the edge of town, I passed the furniture factory where my dad had been a foreman. It was now a restaurant/movie theater/shopping mall complex. The industrial exterior had been retained, giving it a sense of local history. Downtown-a grid of six blocks of stores-looked better than it had in my youth. Its adjoining two-story brick structures had been freshly sandblasted, everything appearing new, even though the buildings came from the early 1900s. One street had been blocked off and converted into a pedestrian mall, trees and planters interspersed among outdoor cafes, a fountain, and a small bandstand.