Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (40 page)

“Sir — this account hasn’t been paid in more than five years,” she said, as though he were personally accountable for its dereliction. “We cannot be held responsible for the contents of a safety deposit box that has not been paid for any length of time exceeding two years.”

“I understand that,” Dan said. “I just wondered if you could check to see what happened to the box’s contents.”

“I can tell you what would have happened.” Her face wore the look of a teacher speaking to a particularly dull three-year-old. “The bank would have sent out several letters requesting payment, and then, receiving no answer from you, we would have extended a courtesy time of two years’ wait. After that, the box would have been drilled open and the contents removed.” She stared him down, the better to make her point. “You understand, of course, that we do not keep spare copies of the keys. Once you have opened the account with us, no one can access the box but you.”

“Or in this case, my aged and infirm uncle.”

“Be that as it may,” another teacher-child look passed over her face, this one more wrathful in its proportions, “we cannot access the box without the key your uncle was given when he opened the account with us. Even if we needed to, we could not see what was inside the box without it.”

The reasoning went on like this for some time until the clerk seemed satisfied that Dan had been apprised of official banking procedures and was thoroughly taken to task over his shameful neglect-by-proxy on behalf of his uncle’s account.

“But if the box has already been drilled, might I not have access to the contents without the key?”

She peered at him closely, her face a reminder of the ignominy of all that was implicit about irresponsibility in regard to past due accounts. “I will speak with my manager.”

The manager, a thin-faced and surprisingly pleasant young man in an out-of-season linen suit, came forward and shook Dan’s hand. He looked over the letter and nodded. “We don’t get many requests going back that far,” he said. “Though oddly, someone was in here last week looking for something in another name from this same time period.”

Dan felt the chill crawl up his spine as he wondered about the coincidence of the timing. “Family looking for a long-lost will?” he asked casually.

“Not at all. Police business, actually. Though I had to turn them away empty-handed.”

“That’s a shame,” Dan said.

“In any case,” the man said, turning to his clerk. “I believe we can help Mr. Sharp, Karen.” He turned back to Dan. “We don’t actually dispose of the contents of safety deposit boxes ever. No matter how long the account has been derelict.” He smiled at this revelation of the bank’s good graces and nodded to the vault at the back. “We have a special place where we keep the contents in a sealed envelope, hoping that someone will show up one day — just as you have done — and that we will be able to return the items to their rightful owners.”

He gave Karen the nod and she went off to retrieve the contents, returning in less than a minute with a manila envelope and what Dan hoped was Craig Killingworth’s diary. She was all smiles as she asked him to sign a register acknowledging that he had picked up the box’s contents five years late. He paid the penalty fee and left, feeling like a neglectful library user who’d returned a book so long overdue it had gone out of print.

Outside in the parking lot, he slit the seal on the envelope and let its contents fall into his hands: a single cassette tape and a thick notebook puckered with the weight of Craig Killingworth’s entries. The creased pages held together for another instant then opened to reveal their long-unread secrets.

Dan was exhausted. He’d spent the past eight hours reading Craig Killingworth’s diary — a litany of fear, confusion, regret, and loss. It was the last testament of a man who had bound up all hope for the future in being reunited with his boys and who could never stop hoping for that day as long as he lived. He’d been tortured by his inability to change the one thing that defined him.

Dan read as Craig outlined his decision to reveal his secret torment to his wife, the one person he felt he could trust, setting in motion his betrayal at her hand. For more than a year, entry after entry detailed the torture he’d endured trying to be what she wanted him to be. This was followed by a hiatus of four months during which he added not a single entry. It resumed with the title “Crash,” as he described his recovery from the botched suicide attempt.

As Magnus suspected, that was when his wife’s plan had taken hold. She knew that nothing but death would stop Craig from exposing her lies and her efforts to separate him from what he loved most.
If I can’t have you, nobody will!
He’d inscribed these chilling words in the diary, the words Magnus claimed were Lucille’s, as she blackmailed him into being what she wanted him to be — lover, father, family man. Straight in every way. But ultimately he’d been unable to keep up the facade. And Lucille Killingworth had responded by separating him from his sons, knowing it would destroy him. Magnus was right. She was a monster, plain and simple.

The diary told Dan little he didn’t already know or suspect. Still, a man didn’t fill in a diary entry on the day of his death, walk over to the bank to deposit it safe and sound in a security bin before giving up the ghost. Craig Killingworth had made plans to secure the record of his ordeals long before whatever had happened to him. He’d even given Magnus the key to make sure it was followed up. Except Magnus hadn’t been able to do that for the last twenty years. Sometimes better never than late.

Clearly, Craig Killingworth had planned his death to the final detail. An orderly man, his writing showed that same attention to detail as his mind trod the many possible solutions to his problem and its likely outcome. Even while detailing his plans to leave with Magnus, and the brief blossoming of hope he saw in that, his diary entries vacillated daily between leaving and killing himself.
As much as I love Magnus,
he wrote,
without my sons, I have nothing. Most days I think it would be easier to end the struggle. To give her the thing she wants most — my death
.

Craig Killingworth had preferred death to a life without his sons. Lucille Killingworth had sensed that. She’d asked herself how she could drive him to suicide, and that was the answer she received. She’d systematically lied to the courts and taken away what mattered most to him. Dan imagined him standing on that lonely shore by the bay as he looked into the void his life had become and decided it was no longer worth it. A few hesitant steps onto the ice, a crack as it gave under his weight, and he would be gone. The trail would die out. The sun would come up the next day, and a man who’d touched hundreds of lives would no longer be there. They would think he’d left home on his bicycle, taken the ferry across the river, and vanished.

Love’s a terrible fever. It burns when it’s new and aches when it’s old. It tempts and taunts, beguiles and bewilders, before leaving you high and dry with the worst hangover you’ve ever experienced. It’s a whore and a thief, a liar and a sinner, though it goes by many names. Are there ever any survivors?

Sometimes,
Craig Killingworth wrote near the end of his account,
I think the only things that matter are the choices we make, for better or worse, for right or wrong
. But he’d struggled with his choices for too long. The last entry, made the day of the hearing right after the court stayed the order separating him from his sons, contained a simple sentence:
She’s won
. Craig Killingworth had known then what the story held for him. He’d already made his choice. He simply hadn’t wanted to tell Magnus that it left him without a future.

What Lucille had driven her husband to do was terrible, but in the end he had been the architect of his own demise. Whatever had finally befallen Craig Killingworth had clearly been perpetrated by his own hand. It was too late to save him now, to point twenty years down the road and say,
Here are your boys — live for them: the drug addict who needs you to love him so he won’t destroy himself, the arrogant one who needs to know that he doesn’t have to be insensitive to be a man
.

Dan turned to the beginning of the diary and reread Craig Killingworth’s determined first entry. In a strong script he had written:
Whatever happens I will never give up my fight
. But he had. In the end, he hadn’t found the determination to live.

Donny buzzed him in.

Dan brandished the diary as he came through the door. “You’ve got to read this. It even describes his sudden impulse just before he drove off the road rather than undergo any more torture at the hands of that woman and her barbaric therapist who promised to help him change his orientation.”

“Whoa!” Donny said, taken aback. “First ask how the boy is doing.”

“Sorry. How are things with Lester? How are you two getting along?”

“Fine. We’re getting along fine. Thank you.”

Dan glanced around. Nothing had changed in the condo. For having a teenage terror under his roof, Donny seemed to have maintained remarkable control of his premises. For a moment Dan wondered if “fine” meant more than it said. Should he ask for reassurance that Lester hadn’t come onto him, as he had with Dan, and that Donny hadn’t succumbed to the boy’s charms, such as they were? Then he remembered who he was talking to: Donny the wise, Donny the compassionate. The look of disdain that would greet the question stopped him dead. He already knew the answer. Better yet, he knew himself. He would never have entrusted Lester to Donny if he’d had any doubts. A father’s work was never done, it seemed.

“Great — I’m glad to hear. Where is he?”

“In bed. It’s past eleven o’clock, and those are the rules. He goes to bed by ten thirty.” Dan gave Donny a bemused look. Donny nodded. “Which also means you will have to contain yourself and keep your voice down.”

“Got it.”

He followed Donny into the kitchen and placed the diary on the table beside a yawning pile of unopened mail. Dan glanced at it. Neglect of self was one of the prime signs of depression. Was he seeing the outward clues of self-destruction? But no — Donny was past that. He had a cause now. Dan stood looking down at the book, as though waiting for it to speak.

“Go through it,” Dan said. “She drove him to suicide. Even after he and Magnus had planned their departure, he was still tormented by it. It’s sad, but he realized he couldn’t live without his kids, and the courts helped her take them from him.”

Donny nodded slowly. “I’ll read it — but I don’t like the look on your face.”

“What look?”

“The one that threatens to take on the world to save someone who died twenty years ago.” Donny shook his head. “Life’s always going to be harder than you expect. I don’t know why you want to make it worse.”

“Just call me Angela Davis.”

Donny shot him a glance. “You’re going to have to work on the ’fro.”

Dan pulled out the cassette and laid it beside the diary. “He even taped her phone conversations. He knew she was up to something. I had it transcribed and copied onto CD.”

Donny took the tape to the stereo and popped it in. It crackled to life, the years and cheap celluloid having left their mark. The voices were scratchy here, muffled there, but by straining an ear you could make out the words. A twenty-year-old conversation brought to life, the layers of time peeled back to reveal dust, but no tears. Not for Craig Killingworth. They listened to Lucille coolly discussing her husband’s fragile mental state with her friend, a woman named Bernice, whose smoke-tinged voice contributed to the conversation hesitantly, not convinced she wanted to be part of it, but reluctant to pull away.

Bernice suggested pressuring him to come back; Lucille declared she’d had enough of him and simply wanted him dead. The tape came to an end with the conclusion hanging in the air.

“I think if a judge hears this he’ll have to conclude that Lucille Killingworth contributed to her husband’s suicide. If we can’t get her up on murder charges, then this will at least do something.”

Donny gave Dan a sober look of appraisal. “Except that there’s still no body.”

“I know that.”

“No proof of death. On the other hand, if he really is dead, he might just as easily have been hit by a car while leaving town on his bike. Have you considered that? Or maybe he lives somewhere on Cape Breton Island raising goats. Who knows? Besides stirring up a great deal of trouble, what good do you really think this is going to do?”

It was past two a.m. when he left Donny’s place, the downtown core illuminated by bleached rectangles of light where over-zealous office workers toiled late into the night. He thought again of the missing part of the police file that hadn’t made it into his hands. He was convinced it told Craig Killingworth’s side of the story: his battle to regain custody of his children, his tortured efforts to change his sexuality despite the fact that he’d already attempted suicide, and Lucille Killingworth’s threats to keep him from his sons and expose him to the world, adding cruelty on top of cruelty. He was sure now that Commissioner Burgess, or possibly someone under him, had repressed the report.

He was sitting in a café in Bloomfield reading a blank menu. The front door opened. When he looked up, his mother stood next to him. She hadn’t changed a bit in all those years. He invited her to take a seat. She smiled and sat down, leaning in to speak in a low voice. “How are you doing with it?” she asked with a knowing look.

“Not drinking? It’s a bitch, but I can make it.”

She laughed — a raucous, throat-racking laugh. The kind of laugh you’d expect of the dead. So far, Dan told her, he’d had it relatively easy: no chills, no shakes, no scary bugs crawling over his skin at night. Only a slight hand wobble and a constant urge to do something — anything — to keep his mind off what he couldn’t have. Alcohol. The god-demon-lover-bitch.

“I never did get the hang of it myself.” She held a hand in front of him. “How many fingers do you see, Danny?”

Dan squinted. The fingers kept changing. “Four. No, five.”