CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Edgar Borden sat in the dead man’s kitchen. He put his hands on the table, because she’d told him it helped.
And it did, or at least it used to. Find a surface and let your fingers do the thinking when your head won’t shut up.
Lindsey had said that to him during a Tuesday night lock-up round, leaning against the bars like she had all the time in the world, and he’d thought it was bullshit until he’d tried it at three in the morning with the walls closing in and discovered she was right. She was usually right.
Edgar’s free hand went to the object on the chain around his neck.
It wasn’t a cross or a symbol or any of the usual things men wore against their chests for comfort or superstition.
It was a figurine, and that figurine was all he had left of the man he used to be.
It was a unicorn, and the memories that surged back felt like they belonged to someone else, as they always did, but then he was suddenly able to smell the smoke and taste the ash one more time.
Edgar Borden. Husband, father. Blue collar through and through, and damn proud of it. A carpenter by trade and one of the best in the business.
He’d had it all. The picket fence and the two car garage. A little girl who looked at him like he’d personally hung the moon and a wife who still laughed at his stupid jokes after fifteen years. They hadn’t been rich but they’d been happy.
And then the day came.
It’d been a morning like any other. Edgar had woken up, kissed the wife, hugged his girl.
Then he'd decided to take his tool collection, expansive as it was, and give it a thorough cleansing, and thorough cleansings required the application of a generous amount of linseed oil.
Any carpenter in the world would tell you that if you combine linseed oil with elbow grease, then you have a miracle fluid on your hands.
A few hours later, his whole collection was gleaming again, and he threw the rags in the trash in his basement – his workshop – and headed out to a few jobs.
He’d returned home about six PM, and as he’d drawn closer to his house, the first twinges of dread began curling in his guts. There were people on the street – too many for a sleepy cul-de-sac on a winter’s evening. Then the cruisers had come into view. The ambulances. The strobing lights.
And at the center of it all: his house. His home. A blackened, smoldering husk where his castle had once stood.
In that moment, he swore his soul had been cut clean from his body.
The ground fell out from beneath him and suddenly, someone was screaming.
It took him a long dazed moment to realize it was him, howling his child’s name as he scrabbled at the pavement.
Trying to find purchase, to haul himself vertical and get to her but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.
Then there were hands on him, dragging him back from the edge. Forcing him to meet the gaze of a police officer.
‘Sir, I need you stay calm.’
Calm, they’d said, while he stared at the ruins of his life. But they didn’t need to say anymore, because he’d known. Christ, he’d known.
His girls. His beautiful, perfect girls.
‘I’m sorry, sir. But your wife and daughter were... unresponsive when we pulled them out.’
Unresponsive, the cop had said with that awful cop cadence – softening the blow of ‘charred to a crisp’ with bland syllables.
Edgar had just sat there on the curb and stared at the smoldering remains of his entire world.
When he’d finally come around, he’d asked one of the firemen if anything had survived.
Anything at all. As if a single unsinged scrap could erase the image seared into his retinas – the one of his baby girl laid out on a gurney, angelic in eternal slumber while the love of his life was zipped into a body bag ten feet away.
Myla and Marla. His reasons for every good thing he’d ever done.
But the cop had just reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny unicorn covered in black soot.
Myla’s figurine, and the thing she’d treasured more than gold.
The same figurine he’d kept around his neck ever since.
Later, when the shock receded enough for coherent thought, Edgar learned that the fire had begun in the basement.
His workshop, where he plied his trade. The insurance investigator had deemed it an ‘accident,’ an act of God.
No official cause had ever been given, just theories about a gas leak, a pilot light blowing out, a faulty wire in the lighting, an unserviced boiler.
But Edgar knew the truth, even if he never spoke it aloud. He’d wiped down those tools that morning and tossed the used rags in the bin without a second thought.
He hadn’t known. Not about the insidious nature of linseed.
Spontaneous combustion. That’s what they called it when the conditions were just right. When the chemicals from the oil oxidized and built up heat with nowhere to go. He’d seen freak headlines about it, but it was one of those things that people were too proud to think would ever happen to them.
But then it became his headline, at least in his own head.
Marla had been found by the basement door, half draped over the threshold like she’d tried to beat back the inferno. But the beast had been too ravenous and had swallowed her before she could even scream.
And his Myla, his perfect angel. She’d been napping upstairs, recovering from flu. The coroner said she likely hadn’t even woken up. He said she’d just breathed in the noxious smoke and slipped away.
After that, the details got hazy. Days blurred into weeks and months into years.
Life insurance was only in his name, and house insurance didn’t pay out for acts of God.
He had no motivation to work, and after he’d depleted his savings on mortgage payments for the husk of a house that remained, the bank repossessed it.
In less than a year, he’d lost everything.
Partner, child, house – and of course, his mind.
He took to sleeping rough after that, and waiting for the inevitable day when the bottle or exposure finally killed him.
That day had never come, but with nothing left to lose, he started breaking into houses, but not to steal.
He was more intent on destroying. He’d targeted people who worked at the bank.
Specific people. The woman who’d processed his foreclosure.
Her manager. The branch director who’d signed the final letter.
He’d gone into their homes at night and taken apart their kitchens and their living rooms with his bare hands and whatever tools he’d found in their garages.
He hadn’t touched the people. Hadn’t gone near the bedrooms. Just ruined their things, because their things were still intact and his weren’t, and the injustice of that was the only feeling still strong enough to get him off the floor in the morning.
The fourth house was the one where the police were waiting.
Four years at Louisiana State Penitentiary.
He’d processed in January and been assigned to a cellblock on the second tier and spent the first six weeks not speaking to anyone.
The prison counsellor had come twice. Both times Edgar had sat in the plastic chair and said nothing for the full fifty minutes and the counsellor had written something on a form and left.
Edgar remembered the day that Austin Creed was brought into the big house, and his presence had created quite the stir.
Edgar had never tried to get close to him, and only communicated with him directly once when their yard time overlapped.
To say Edgar had been interested in him would be generous, because Edgar merely saw him as just another inmate.
Lindsey Doyle, however, was a different story. She’d arrived on his seventh week inside.
She worked corrections and she ran the vocational programme on his unit, which meant she was in the prison workshop three days a week supervising inmates who were learning to sand shelves and assemble flat-pack furniture.
Edgar had been put on the programme because someone in admin had seen his background and decided he could help teach.
He hadn’t wanted to help teach. He hadn’t wanted to do anything. But they’d made him go, so he went.
She'd started talking to him during breaks and commented on how good his skills were.
She encouraged him to make little models they could sell in the prison gift shop.
Then she'd stop by his cell. She'd asked about the furniture.
About the oil finishes. About the figure around his neck – which the officials had kindly let him keep – which had then led to discussions about Marla and Myla, and once they went down that path, he couldn't stop.
Doyle soon found reasons to be wherever Edgar was.
They’d talked about philosophy and what happens after prison, and Doyle had been cautiously optimistic on that front.
She talked about the cruelty of surviving something that should have destroyed him, which he later learned was termed survivor’s guilt.
And Doyle had said that plenty of other people are in the same position Edgar was in, and the best thing that could happen to them is that they never experience the hardship in the first place.
‘If you could look at someone who was drowning the way you drowned and pull them out before it got worse, wouldn’t that be the most merciful thing a person could do?’
Doyle never said kill. She never had to.
The architecture of the idea was all hers, but she’d built it so that he was the one who walked through the door at the end, and by the time he did, it felt like his own conclusion.
That was her talent. She didn’t tell you what to think.
She merely rearranged the furniture until there was only one place left to sit.
He hadn’t wanted to leave prison. That was something he’d never told anyone except Doyle.
When his release date came around, he’d asked his parole officer to delay it.
The parole officer had stared at him, processed the paperwork, and told him to pack his things.
Nobody stayed voluntarily. It wasn’t how the system worked.
Doyle had been the one who’d convinced him to go.
Not just go, but actually do something. She’d set it up, got him the job at the donation centre.
Doyle had also pointed him towards a community group at the First Love Church, where he’d met twenty-plus like-minded people.
Eddie Foxall, Earl Parsons, and the mother of Rose Michaels.
All had shared their stories without hesitation.
Julia Michaels had her own problems, but during their coffee after-sessions, she’d told Edgar all about her daughter’s issues with her ex-husband and child.
All that pain. All that loss. All those people carrying it around like something they couldn’t put down because it was fused to them, part of them, and nobody was helping.
The skeleton of an idea formed, but it was too crazy to entertain.
However, that was when Amber Holloway walked into the door of his work.
She’d donated a big bag of stuff, and sitting on the top of it was a beautiful music box that brought back memories of his daughter’s.
Edgar hadn’t been able to resist asking questions, and that’s when he’d learned about Amber’s struggles.
It felt like a gift from above. It all fell into place. One figurine for each victim, to symbolize their rebirths.
Of course, there was only one music box to begin the sequence, so he took it home and kept it for when the mission began.
The other figurines he carved himself with his own two hands.
When he’d told Lindsey Doyle about his little project, she’d greatly encouraged him, and then asked for one small favor to put the icing on the cake.
She’d shown him a picture from Austin Creed’s farmhouse. He had a music box too. Then Doyle had said, ‘When you use this one, she’ll come.’
She. The FBI agent. Dark. The woman who’d put Austin Creed away and who was now in New Orleans, thirty miles from where Edgar was sitting, chasing his figurines around the city.
Doyle had told him about her, and she’d said the proximity to the Creed case would guarantee that Dark caught the spree investigation, and she’d been right. Doyle was always right.
And best of all, Edgar Borden was happy to go along with all of this, because if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t doing this to save people. That’s just what he was going to tell the cops.
He was doing this for himself because he wanted nothing more than to go back to prison.