“Giving up,” Ralph said.
There was a noise down the hall. Ike Tressler was coming with another boy. They could hear him dragging him, the boy begging not to do holding time, and Ike cursing him. Just like the use of the isolation cells, all the goodness Martha had promised had slipped away, and what was left was worse than before.
“I’ll come back,” Ralph said. “I’m not giving up.”
It was very late, once more, and Martha was in the therapy room.
All Martha remembered of her childhood was her father’s belt. He took it off after work and hung it over a chair at the dining room table, where her mother, worn to a nub by her father, would silently dish out the food, and he would bless it. Martha and her mother—and the ghosts of her mother’s expectations—would wait for her father to try the soup, or the casserole, or the baked ham. That first taste was always a moment of held breath. Would he like it? What would he say?
If it was a good day, her father would grunt, and in that grunt, Martha would see her mother’s shoulders collapse, and everything about the night would be okay—provided her father didn’t lay into the beer too much. Eventually she would go to her twin bed in her room down the hall, crawl under the flowered bedspread, and try to fall asleep before she heard the creak of her father lying on top of her mother in the dark.
It was funny that it was the belt Martha thought of now. It had a holster for his service pistol, and the holes were worn where her fatherhad gained weight over the years. The buckle was brass but long since tarnished. She didn’t remember the shape of the buckle. All she remembered was the sound of his hands, rough as sandpaper, on the belt. Undoing it.
Later, during those heat-shot weeks when Sunday came too soon and lasted too long—an endless tunnel of time—Sheriff King, on his day off, would decide to take his daughter into the desert. Mother never disagreed. Mother never disagreed with anything Father had to say. She stayed back in her kitchen, endlessly puzzling over what to cook her husband that he would finally like.
Martha thought of that now, too, with another dead boy in her arms. It kept happening, and she didn’t know why. It had kept happening in Axis, and she had thought coming here—leaving the sleeping giants behind—would stop it. But instead, it was getting worse. She left the boys in the therapy room. She went on a break or to her office, and somehow a curtain fell over her and she dream-walked through the rest of the day or evening without even thinking of them. Then all of a sudden, it would come over her, and she’d come rushing back.
To find this.
Maybe you want to do this, she thought, cradling the boy’s body. Maybe there is something inside you that wants—
She pushed the thought away. It was an accident. Holding time was risky therapy. Everyone knew that. In Colorado, a girl named Candace Newmaker had died after being wrapped in a flannel sheet. She suffocated after vomiting and defecating on herself. There had been other children in other centers, too, ones who never got publicity. The only reason people knew about Candace, Martha reflected, was because her therapists had called an ambulance. They had not been smart, like she and others were. In some instances, therapists had been able to claim that such deaths were therapeutic accidents.
But there were only so many times you could have a therapeutic accident. Once, maybe twice. Not as many times as Martha King. She had been forced to hide them.
This was just a mistake, she told herself. Just like the others, buried in their desert graves in Arizona, the sound of the shovel wielded by her father strangely similar to the sound of his hands rasping on the belt. Those first years he had come willingly. Too willingly.
She looked down at the boy’s face. It was very still. She was aware she had taped the rug very tightly around him. Why had she done that?
The last one here had been named Steven. This one was... Joey. The boy in her arms was named Joey.
She stroked the tape around the rug. She kept thinking of her father’s belt hanging over the chair. She thought of the sound of her father’s hands on the belt and wanted to think no more.
Soon she would make her call. She would wave for help like a sleeping giant on the desert floor, and no matter who answered, the man on the other end would always be the same—the one who put her there.
Late that night, a figure crept from the center.
He carried the second boy deep into the forest. This time he kept an eye out for Brett Jarvis. He dug quickly, turning the boy into the hole. He had thought of throwing the bodies over the cliff into the sea, but there was always a chance they would wash up, either whole or in pieces, torn apart by sharks. This was safer and cleaner. There could be a thousand corpses buried in the Oregon woods. There probably were.
He stopped, wiping sweat from his eyes with the stained bandanna he kept in his pocket. He put the bandanna back and refilled the hole. He covered the grave with mossy limbs and broken branches. That would keep animals from digging up the remains.
He sat down on a log for a breather. It was very late, and the air hada crystalline quality. It was the salt from the sea. The sky above him was pure darkness, roiling away in clouds he could not see.
Picking up the shovel, he returned to the center. Martha was gone by the time he got back, which annoyed him. He knew she wanted to be able to pin it on him, if she was ever caught. But he had his own secret.
27
Amanda was up early the next morning, waiting in the Sleeping Giant hotel lobby for Larry, her backpack at her feet. She was holding a report.
Larry entered the lobby, walking slowly due to his sore knees.
“Whatcha got there?” he asked, looking around for the coffee urn. He poured himself a cup. From the other room came sounds of breakfast, but they needed to hit the road. He would grab a bagel, he decided.
“A child protective services report,” she said.
“How did you get that?”
“Last night I met some people, at a pub. One put me in touch with a local social worker. We met at a diner up the road. She gets up early too.”
