Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

She blushed. It was the first time that I’d caught Donna Mason in a dishonesty, or at least the first I knew of.

“The red light’s still going,” I said. “You knew it was on.”

“Well... yes, I did.”

Donna was still red faced and flustered. She said nothing, but she looked down at the camera and turned it off. I heard the traffic out on the freeway. I smelled my own fear.

“Now what?” I asked.

She looked very tired, suddenly, and she spoke quietly, with a trace of the south in her voice. “Go back to the studio and edit. After that, I got a late flight out to Dallas. My bags are packed and waiting in the car.”

“Mary Lou Kidder?”

“Yeah. It’s our Texas connection to The Horridus. Nobody has that angle but me. Thanks to you.”

Donna: ambition, guts, energy.

“I’m trusting you,” I said.

“You should. Thanks for the trust. Thanks for the exclusive, too.”

She nodded at me and lugged her camera out of the room. I heard the front door open, then slam shut.

I spent the evening drinking and thinking. I checked the user-group bulletin board where I’d left my messages, but I. R. Shroud had left nothing for me. I composed another note to reiterate my interest in obtaining pictures of a young girl engaged in sexual activity. I now had a young girl in mind, one I somehow remembered but couldn’t say from when or where — and I wondered if this Shroud could help me find her image, and then her. Of course, I couched my request in the kind of bright, vague language that wouldn’t be decipherable to the layperson.

Asking for such a thing, even for a man who is hoping to do some good with it, brings a stain to the soul that no tequila can bleach out.

The next morning I crept back into Laguna with all the dignity of a lab rat. The girl who had served me coffee and a donut five times a week for nearly a year looked at me with frank disbelief. The teller at my bank adopted a stiff formality, asked for two forms of ID and double-snapped the new twenties toward me without looking me in the eye. The gas station attendant smiled mercifully as he took one of the new bills, then huddled with a co-worker at the register and they burst out laughing as I walked toward my car. My favorite checker at the market said nothing as she rang up my newspaper and orange juice.

I sat in my car and spread the paper open against the wheel: there I was, above the fold, a Sheriff Department personnel shot that, like a lot of personnel shots, made me look exactly like the criminal I was assumed to be.

A sheriff deputy accused of sixteen counts of sex with children was suffering stress over the death of his son.

Deputy Terry Naughton, 40, of Laguna Beach, was apparently despondent over the drowning of his five-year-old son two years ago. The incident that claimed the life of Matthew Naughton led the distraught deputy to alcohol abuse and depression, according to sources within the sheriff’s office.

Files obtained by the Journal state that Deputy Naughton was “profoundly shaken” by the death of his son, Matthew, in a swimming accident off of Shaw’s Cove in Laguna Beach.

The files also suggested that the deputy may have used alcohol to cope with his son’s death. Sources within the Sheriff Department who wished not to be named said...

I scanned through the rest of the article for information about the cause of Matthew’s death. There was no mention of medical particulars. Or lack of them. Yet.

My fury was whole. Sources within. Sources within. Files obtained. Jordan Ishmael? At that moment I could have successfully strangled him, hand-to-hand combat skills or not. Frances? Wade himself? What did it really matter?

Didn’t anyone even care that a monster called The Horridus was out there, watching all of us while I sat in jail? How could they splash my picture all over the paper, but not publish the composite that Amanda had based on Brittany Elder’s eyewitness account? I noted the time for Donna’s interview — 7 P.M. — and hurled the paper into the backseat, spilling orange juice over my lap. I stopped by the hardware store to get batteries for my flashlights, and the pretty young clerk, who had always cheerfully talked with me, gave me nothing but a malignant stare, then sighed as she waited for me to get the plastic bag off her counter. She glanced at my wet pants and thought God knows what.

I drove slowly down to Ardith’s place.

She was waiting for me, as she said she would be. When she opened the door I looked away from her, unwilling to absorb whatever feelings she was having toward me. I had already done more than my share in life to make hers miserable. I knew it; she knew it. I studied her entryway tiles like they were treasures from King Tut’s tomb.

“I’d like to look at the pictures,” I said.

She reached out and brought up my chin so I’d have to look her in the eye.

“All right.”

Haunted is the man who sets foot in a house that used to be his, to face a woman who no longer is. Same furniture — the big things, anyway. Same defined spaces. Same invisible rhythms, same small atmospheres room by room, same ambient sound. And because of that sameness, you feel as if you’ve changed in a million ways you never intended to. You have.

She led me upstairs. There was a small room at the top, with a pillowed bench for reading set below dormer windows that gathered up the mild May sun. Down the short hall to our left was the room that used to be our “office,” although neither of us did much work in it. To the right was Matt’s room.

“Mind if I—”

“—It hasn’t changed.”

I pushed open the door and felt the musty onrush of my son’s habitat. I stepped to the center of the room. There was the smell of plastic and rubber — all those toys and balls. And the smell of clean sheets. There was the sweet, pillowy smell of stuffed animals, and the greenish smell of a bundle of dried twigs and flowers he’d collected with his mother. Then there was the smell of Matthew himself, a low-lying human scent of boy so faint I doubted anyone in the world except me, and certainly Ardith, could even detect it. Lion King poster. Batman poster. Pictures of baseball players cut from sports pages and stuck to the wall with tape slowly whitening in the wake of the years. Pictures, a piggy bank, a peanut butter jar filled with lucky feathers he’d found.

“I can’t do it,” I said, turning.

“Neither can I.”

In the office, Ardith pulled open a sliding closet door and stood before a wall of boxes. Typical of Ardith’s passion for order, the boxes were identical in size and labeled on the tops and on two adjacent corners, so their contents would be discernible from almost any likely angle.

“Which ones, Terry?”

“Matt and me. Say... age four.”

Ardith uncrossed her arms and stepped toward the pasteboard wall. I looked at her. My wife. Once. My one and only. The mother of my vanquished son. I wished all memory would just go away. Every bit of it. Why not a past that is cleaned and polished to a clinical shine? Like an aluminum table in a doctor’s office, a new .45 cartridge, a spaceship?

She spotted the appropriate box and looked back at me. It was shoulder high, so I stepped in and lifted the one above it while she worried it out. She moved back past me and swung it onto the desk.

“It’s been almost six months since I looked at any of this,” she said.

“I’ll go through it alone, if you want.”

“I’d like to be here, if it’s all right with you.”