Jan Burke - Sweet Dreams, Irene

“Well, I for one am damn glad you were curious,” Frank said. “I don’t know how much longer it would have taken if both of you hadn’t been there at the same time.” He looked at me. “As far as I could tell, there were only four things that had gone on at the shelter that could have made you a target for someone: you had talked to Sammy, you had talked to Sarah, you had taken Sammy’s journal, and you had asked around about members of the coven, particularly this ‘Goat.’

“So I started asking Jacob if he knew the names of the people whose initials had been in the journal. I left out the ones for Romeo and Juliet.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up at this, but he didn’t get anything for the effort.

“When I got to the initials DM and RA, Jacob said, ‘Devon Morris and Raney Adams.’ And suddenly Jack looked like someone had slapped him.”

“I asked Jacob to repeat the names,” Jack said. “They were Paul’s cousins. Remember I told you he had lived with Cindy’s sister for a while? Well, Devon and Raney were two of her five kids.”

“Devon told me he and Raney were half-brothers,” I said quietly.

“They’re all half-brothers. I just didn’t know Paul still had anything to do with them. I didn’t know they were hanging out at the shelter. I doubt they were ever around at the same time my mother was there. She couldn’t abide any of that bunch.”

“You’re right – at least, on the day I was there with your mother, Devon and Raney weren’t around.”

Frank went on. “Things started to look a little different once we knew they were related to Paul. You had seen Paul order them around; Sammy’s journal mentions a connection between them and the Goat. Pete tracked Sarah down; she had gone to stay with an aunt in the San Diego area. She said she left because Paul had threatened her about the journal. She told Paul it wasn’t in the shelter any longer and that he’d never find it. He grabbed on to her and she thought he was going to hit her, when Mrs. Riley walked in. He walked off and she packed up and left.

“We asked Mrs. Riley about it and she said Paul had kicked Devon and Raney out the day before the funeral. But she also said she was convinced that Paul had received a phone call from Raney very early Wednesday morning – she answered the phone, thought she recognized the voice – and Paul had taken off not long after he got the call. He hadn’t returned until late that afternoon.

“So we put a tail on Paul, hoping he’d lead us to wherever Devon and Raney were. I figured he had to be the Goat. He was connected to the shelter, to Sammy, to Devon and Raney, and to Mrs. Fremont. And he knew about Jack’s leukemia. So he stood to inherit. He probably picked the goat and Satanism because of Jack’s tattoo. Paul was hoping Jack would be suspected of murdering Mrs. Fremont. I guess Sammy found out what they were up to. She probably threatened him by telling him she had a journal.”

“She knew Paul was the Goat. She saw the scars on his arms,” I said. “I saw them when – I saw them,” I finished weakly, trying to not feel the memory in my shoulder and thumb.

Frank waited, probably wondering if I was going to burst into tears again, and went on when I didn’t.

“I checked vehicle registrations for Devon and Raney. Devon had a registration for a Blazer. So now it was a matter of waiting and praying to God that Paul got back in touch with them before – well, before it was too late. Jack knew them by sight and I didn’t; I only had a DMV photo. So he came with me to watch Paul and on Friday it paid off. We followed Paul to a place where he met Raney. Then we followed them up into the mountains. By then, we knew where they were headed.

“Sure enough, they took the Pine Summit turnoff. I didn’t know what the situation would be, and Jack and I weren’t really official-”

“You mean Carlson didn’t want you working on this,” I said.

“Well, actually, he let me work on it. I don’t know if he felt sorry for me or what. He told me I seemed to be personally connected to every murder in Las Piernas, so I could work on a missing persons case. He knew I’d look for you anyway. But he didn’t like the idea of Jack getting involved, and so we were sort of an unofficial back-up tail, you might say. Good thing, because Paul shook the official one.

“Anyway, like I said, I didn’t know exactly what the situation would be, but I knew there were at least three of them, and Paul had other cousins. So I stopped off at the sheriff’s station and told them what was going on. By the time we convinced the sheriff and his deputy to get up off their behinds and follow us up there, Raney had apparently started back down. We came across his truck – what was left of it. I was afraid… well, we stayed just long enough to determine there was only one body. The sheriff fooled around calling another unit but I couldn’t wait. Jack and I took off for the cabins. You know the rest.”

I know we all had our own mental pictures of what happened from there, and the silence that followed was an uneasy one.

“I don’t know how I could have been so wrong about Paul,” Jack said, just above a whisper. “I can understand why he hated me. I just never thought he was so bitter toward his grandmother.”

No one said anything for a long time. I felt myself wearing down and told them I was going to call it a night.

Jack stood up, gently putting Cody on the floor. “I’ll say good night, then. I’m glad we talked.”

“Stay if you want to,” I said. “I just don’t have any stamina. I wish-” I didn’t finish it.

“That you could go back to being your old self?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

“Give up on that one, Irene. Just about everything changes.” And with that, he said good night again and left.

OVER THE NEXT WEEK or so, I tried to come to grips with the implications of just about everything changing. The first disappointment came with the unsettling realization that I was not going to heal overnight. I didn’t like being so dependent on others, but that was the simple fact of the matter. There was very little that I could do for myself, even when I started to be able to hobble around a little.

There was also the fact that I was still feeling scared. Afraid that if I was alone I would be kidnapped. What were the odds? A million to one still made me break out in a cold sweat.

Looking back on it, that week I did more feeling than thinking. It was as if everything I had tried to repress during my captivity came boiling up and over me. The terror of it demanded to be acknowledged.

Frank’s support was unwavering, but I doubt that we could have made it through that time alone. Fortunately, we didn’t have to try. Lydia, Guy, Rachel, and Pete came by and spent hours with me, talked to me, watched me sleep, woke me from nightmares. Took care of and cared about me.

When I protested to Rachel that she should find something more enjoyable to do with her vacation, she said, “What, I don’t look like I can make a decision? When I’m doing something I don’t want to be doing, you can put the story in that newspaper of yours. Basta.”

Okay, enough. I didn’t mention it again.

Two new friends were over fairly often: Jacob and Jack. Like my other friends, the first time Jacob came over, he was shaken by my appearance. But, like them, he recovered quickly. He was full of youthful energy and loaded with questions about working for newspapers. His father, I learned, had won the election. Julie’s parents had put her on restriction, so he hadn’t seen much of her. I imagined I would see less of him once she was paroled.

Jack seemed to need to be around us, and he came by several times each day. He brought groceries, helped Lydia and Rachel cook, talked hockey with Guy and Pete. He did errands that would have taken up Frank’s time, allowing Frank to spend it with me instead.