Chapter Twenty-Four
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 who used 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 the LOVE and HATE that 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.
Given the message on Emily Roswell’s hands, should they be considering that their killer might have distinctive tattoos, too?
“You’re at number twenty-eight.”
She spins around in surprise. Christopher Appleton, from number forty-four, bends to retrieve some of the cans on the floor.
Images of emaciated plants and a sun-crisp lawn suddenly flash into her mind.
She sees placards, closed curtains, hears the blare of the television, feels her skin growing hot.
“Yes,” she says quickly, flustered. She’s learned by now that gut instinct can be a powerful thing, and hers is screaming. “Yes,” she says again as she blinks. “Beverley Edwards. And this is Benjamin, and Audrey.”
“As in Hepburn?” he asks, then shakes his head oddly.
“I guess so,” she replies, and shifts her feet as an awkward silence follows. “Are you settling in okay?” She forces the words out. “It’s a friendly neighborhood once you give it a chance,” she lies.
“Well enough, thank you. I don’t really get out a lot to meet people.”
She remembers the rally, seeing him there—she was so sure it was him.
Thoughts of the pig carcass fill her head again, the old-meat smell of it.
She’d had to wrap it in a tarpaulin, lift it into the trunk of her car and drive a couple of miles out of town to dispose of it after dark.
She’d felt absurd, embarrassed to be sneaking around, guilty at leaving the kids asleep at home.
It was only when she’d dragged the body out and stashed it in the foliage at the side of the road that she’d stopped to wonder if her husband had ever found himself in the same position while concealing his morbid crimes.
Christopher Appleton’s eyes, which dart, struggling to meet hers, are small behind thick glasses.
He wears a turtleneck with a sweater-vest pulled over the top, even in this heat.
He is of average height and slight build, but his hands, Beverley notices, are half-clenched and the fingers are slightly crooked.
This man couldn’t really be the person who left the dead body of a pig on her front lawn, could he?
She thinks of those twitching curtains, the times she’s seen him watching her.
Has he seen Roger leaving her house late at night?
Her gaze cuts to the contents of his cart, and in just a fraction of a second she feels as if the air has been snatched from her lungs.
Lined up neatly, as if she has placed them in there herself, are six boxes of cereal.
Their red cardboard is as distinctive as the gaudy illustrations, the cartoonish yellow lettering, the leprechaun cartoon.
Lucky Charms. Elsie told her about the note that the killer had written on the back of a cereal box, a box of Lucky Charms, and stashed it behind windshield wipers, waited for it to be found.
He clocks her looking, winces. “I’m not so good at taking care of myself anymore,” he begins to explain, but Beverley is already backing away, terror a siren in her head.
She mutters an apology. She must get back home.
No time to stay and talk. She doesn’t even pay for her groceries, just abandons her cart at the store’s entrance, grabs her children by their hands and flees.