Margot wants to sprint over, yank it open, but Clarke still has her by the wrist.
He says nothing, waiting for the visitor to retreat, but the knocking comes again, more urgently.
“Mason!” a voice calls frantically from the other side of the door.
Clarke drops Margot’s wrist, turns angrily. “I’m busy in here,” he growls.
“It’s the fucking crocodile,” the voice strains. “It’s got someone.”
Two weeks missing
I once heard someonesay that women’s greatest fears in life are sexual assault and death. Men? The thing that keeps them up at night is the idea of being rejected and humiliated by a romantic prospect.
How pathetic is that?
How free you must feel out there, living life as normal. How incredibly light, your existence, to wander anywhere you like without fear, knowing that you are untouchable, that the worst thing that could happen to you is that cute girl you like saying no.
I’ve begun to wonder about the newspapers that must land on your doorstep. What stories do they contain? Am I in there? Which picture did they use?
If not me, there will be tales of other women, certainly, of women taken, women harmed. Again and again. And so it goes.
No doubt the details of these women’s lives will be scant. There might be a cursory acknowledgment of her father’s vocation, a few words on her appearance if she’s beautiful.
The next day, there’ll be a different story. A different girl. Another victim, soon forgotten, a smiling picture to be folded in half, tossed in the trash with the bread crusts from breakfast.
But you don’t have to think about that, do you? Becoming a victim doesn’t ever have to trouble your thoughts.
I’ll make you see, though, that there are more things in life to fear than not getting what you want.
Twenty-Four
Benjamin is screaming.
His face is puce, tears flowing so readily that they drip from his chin. The sound causes a bulb of panic to rise in Beverley’s throat.
She doesn’t know how to calm him when he gets like this—his rage so acute, erupting from nowhere, so wild and untethered. She’s tried everything: hugging him tightly, whispering reassuring words in his ear, stepping back to let it all play out, like a bucking horse, until his energy depletes. But every time he explodes, Beverley feels more alarmed and more certain, with a horrified sense of impending catastrophe, that he is turning into his father.
Benjamin cries out again, then, with a roar of frustration, knocks a whole row of cans from the grocery store shelf. They clatter to the floor, where some lie dented, others rolling under the wheels of passing carts.
Shoppers click their tongues or raise silent eyebrows at Beverley. She glares back, straightens her jacket.You try and do this,she wants to challenge them.You try and deal with this after everything that’s happened.
A psychopath is prone to impulsive outbursts of aggression.
She read the line in a book, just that morning, and the words tap insistently on her shoulder now. She’d picked up the book by chance at the public library. She’d spent the morning researching satanism while the kids ran amok in the aisles. She’d been considering Emily Roswell’s tattooed knuckles and what they might say about the man who killed her, but when she’d come across a section on the criminal mind, she couldn’t help but reach for one of the titles, quietly tuck it under her arm. As the kids tormented the librarian, she’d taken a seat on a nearby chair and flipped through the pages.
“He reacts to frustration with hostility and fury.” Her fingers had traced the words, her eyes closing in guilt.
Could she really be thinking this about her own child? Could her once sweet, gentle baby, now a boy of seven, really be dangerous? She knew she was failing as a mother by even considering this, but Benjamin—once placid and thoughtful—had turned into someone whose outbursts, although it killed her to admit it, had started to scare her.
She’d continued reading, noting what the book said about upbringing. Psychopaths, it said, can be the products of difficult childhoods. Foster homes. Absent fathers. Abuse. Lack of nurture and care.Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.She recalled Elsie saying something along those lines when they were discussing the killer’s behavior, the words of some famous English poet or something—Beverley couldn’t remember who. But that was exactly why she tried so hard to give the kids everything they needed—a loving home, plenty of affection, a safe environment to grow up in. She wanted them to know that they would always be loved and protected. It was hard for Benjamin, who had idolized Henry, to have his father discussed on the school playground as some sort of monster. For Benjamin, Henry was his father, the center of his universe, the man whoused to tuck him in at night and lift him onto his shoulders in the yard, spinning round and round and round. But he was a “bad man”—that’s what the other children said. He was a bad man who got what he deserved. How can Beverley compete with that?
The thought that some behaviors and traits could simply be genetic had troubled Beverley. Could it be, despite everything she’d tried to do, that Benjamin had inherited the very same rotten core that lay in Henry?
She’d tried to put that thought in the back of her mind as she closed the book and added it to her pile. Not wanting anyone to see the cover, she’d quickly taken another book, a title on new satanism, and placed it on top. Then she crossed to the counter.
The occult was not something Beverley—housewife, mother—ever thought she’d be investigating. But theLOVEandHATEthat had been carved into Emily’s hands—it was hard not to read into that. She’d considered the Richard Speck case. Every woman her age has heard of Richard Speck, will be forever haunted by what he did. The papers teemed with stories when it all happened last month. Speck had broken into a dormitory on the south side of Chicago and murdered eight student nurses, rounding them up at gunpoint before strangling, torturing and stabbing them to death. Women everywhere had been rocked by the horror of it, the violation of his acts, the white-hot fear they induced.
He’d had a tattoo on his arm, Beverley recalled.Born to raise hell.It’s how he’d got caught. One of the surviving nurses told the cops that she’d seen the tattoo on his forearm during the attack. The press ran with that detail. A few days later, Speck slashed his own wrists, winding up in the hospital. There, a doctor caught a glimpse of the tattoo on his arm. He was toast.
