The Bleeding Season (18 page)

Bernard’s in his room, sugar.  Go on up and see him
.

All these years later, I had no doubt that she had.

*   *   *

I stared at the house, called on all the recollections and mysteries it held within its slowly dying walls, summoned them from its bowels to the light of day, to the sidewalk where I now stood.  And like the slow rise of blood from an exceptionally deep wound, they came.  Slow and seeping at first, and then, as I held the wound open wider still, it gushed, this blood of memories and secrets, leaking from the windows, dripping across the walls, bubbling from cracks in the foundation, frothing and swelling free like waves crashing shoreline, determined to knock me over and drag me under.

And down I went.

The house opened before me like a parting curtain, a yawning mouth vomiting forth the past like the repellent
thing
 that it was.

Knock once and enter.

Just beyond the front door, the staircase at the head of the small entranceway came into focus, the living room to the left, a small closet to the right, the smell of cigarettes, booze, and Linda’s perfume in the air as always.  Barely audible sounds of the television in the other room turned down low lingered in my ear even when the stairs began to creak as I climbed them, shifting with each hesitant step.

The door opening—no—
already open
 on the bedroom just to the right of the stairs.  Linda’s room, where the bed sat against the back wall, mismatched nightstands on either side of the headboard cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and empty liquor bottles, garments stuffed into plastic clothesbaskets and strewn about the room as if thrown or dropped there, an ironing board against one wall, a dressing table with mirror and closet against another.  Lipsticks and makeup, small bottles of polish and colognes and body sprays, tins of soap and powder rattling, clicking one against the other until it all faded to black.

*   *   *

The house watched me now, offering nothing.

While I glared back, the ghosts led my thoughts to the cemetery instead.  I hadn’t been there in quite some time, even in my mind.  Bernard’s mother and my parents had been buried in the same one, and while I often felt guilty for not tending more consistent attention to my mother’s so-called final resting place, I knew she would have understood.  “It’s only our bodies there anyway,” she’d once assured me, eyes blinking tranquilly, telling me everything, and nothing at all.  “I’ll be in Heaven with Daddy by then.”

She’d always referred to my father as “Daddy,” as if sweetening his moniker might make his absence more tolerable, the void somehow more human once assigned an innocent and childlike title.  But he remained a stranger to me, a character in other peoples’ stories, a smiling and gentle-looking man in faded photographs, a name chiseled into granite.   At least I’d had that much; Bernard knew virtually nothing about his father, though I’d never been quite sure which experience was preferable.  His mother had rarely spoken about the subject, and it wasn’t until I’d become an adult that her reasons began to make sense.  Although Bernard and I never discussed it and I had no way to know for sure, I believed Linda had never told him who his father was because she hadn’t been certain herself.

Visions of the cemetery scurried about, reached for me, revealed Linda sitting atop her headstone, laughing while Bernard crouched before her, digging furiously with fingers raw and bleeding, flinging soil across the flowers decorating her grave.

The demons were at play but the house fell silent.

For now, the ghosts had stopped talking.

CHAPTER 12

In a matter of weeks the public beach would be packed with tourists and locals alike, though for now, but for the steady toll of waves lapping the shore and the occasional cackle of a soaring gull, the area remained quiet.  I seldom went to the beach during the summer season, preferring instead to come in the quiet months when it was an entirely different experience.  Although I harbored a rather primitive fear of the ocean, I’d been coming to this beach since childhood, and it had figured into many seminal points during my life.  I remembered coming here the day Rick was released from prison, in fact, just one of numerous memories of this place, so despite my inherent uneasiness, I also found an ironic sense of comfort in the waves, in the majestic and familiar power of it all.

I drove carefully along the dirt lot, my old car throttled by purposely uneven terrain designed to prevent people from speeding, and parked near a row of stump-like wooden posts connected with heavy rope that separated the sand from the parking lot.  Mine was the only car in the lot, but further down the beach, near a stone jetty that stabbed quite a distance into the ocean, I noticed a young woman in a windbreaker playing with a black lab.  I wondered if she knew about the body that had been found.

On the seat next to me was a hardback composition notebook I’d picked up a few days earlier.  I had begun to transfer my thoughts, memories and dreams to paper in the hopes of perhaps better sorting through them, and decided to consult my notes one more time before making a definite move.  The nightmare still haunted me, but not as frequently, and thankfully, there had been no more hallucinations or visions—no more women, no more little boys—only a continued sense of dread and the persistent flicker of memories both recent and distant I found impossible to shake.

I flipped open the notebook, eyed my latest list of options and drew a line through the first,
Nightmares
, then the second,
Hauntings
.  My pen hesitated at the third,
Abandoned Factory
, then the fourth,
Photograph of Mystery Woman
.  I skipped over both, moved to the fifth,
Memories and Questions
.  Beneath that I’d written down the most disturbing or curious memories that had come to me of late and followed them with questions.

So many goddamn questions.

Of course the discovery of the young woman’s body changed everything.  I had no choice but to continue to force myself to remember the darkest corners of the past, but if I ever hoped to know who Bernard had really been, simple memory would not be enough.  To fill in the blank spaces, to know for sure what he had done, and what he hadn’t, I’d need to reconstruct a history of sorts.  Bernard’s history.

Somewhere in the distance the black lab barked.  I looked up, saw the woman throw a tennis ball.  The dog bolted after it along the sand, retrieved it then gleefully galloped back to her.  It suddenly occurred to me that had I been so inclined, it would have been ridiculously easy to step from my car, walk across the deserted beach and slaughter this woman.  Strobe-like flashes of her covered in blood blinked across my eyes, vanishing quickly.  Similar thoughts had almost certainly coursed through Bernard’s mind as well, but allowing even the faint beginnings of the evil he had called upon and held so close to seep into my own head was wildly unsettling.  I pushed it all away and focused on the woman instead.  She crouched down, took the lab’s head in her hands and kissed his nose.  The dog licked her face, his tail wagging.  We were so vulnerable, all of us so ripe for the picking without even realizing it, and there wasn’t a fucking thing we could do about it.  I closed the notebook, tossed it into the backseat.

The day had slipped away.  It was nearly four o’clock.

*   *   *

Brannigan’s was surprisingly busy for a late afternoon weekday.  One of the older establishments in town, over the years it had undergone a series of incarnations and varied themes but had essentially remained a sports pub with an attached dining area.  It had been a townie watering hole for years, a place to go and have some beers, shoot some pool or play pinball, order a pizza or a wide range of appetizers from the menu and eat them right at the bar or in the darkened booths that lined the back wall, and a place where for the most part, everyone knew one another.  But just like those who had come before us, and those who followed, the older we got the less we frequented the bar and opted for the dining area instead.  Although I still occasionally stopped in for a beer or two, the bar always had and always would pander to a predominantly younger crowd, and the farther I crept into my thirties the less tolerance I had for the language, music, fashion, and overall attitude of those ten years or so my junior.

I entered through the side door, which led directly to the dining room.  It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, as both the dining area and bar were always annoyingly darker than seemed necessary, but after scanning the room I could locate neither Donald nor Rick.

“Hi, Alan.”

I turned, saw a waitress fly by, a large tray of entrees balanced on her shoulder.  “Hey, how’s it going?” I muttered, unable to remember her name but recognizing her as a local I’d gone to high school with and who had worked there for years.  I wasn’t sure she even heard my response, as she’d already slipped between the tables and been absorbed into the noise, so I followed the wall to an archway with double swinging half-doors and moved into the bar.  It was packed.  All three of the pool tables were in use, and against one wall people were huddled around the pinball machines, the bells and electronic noises barely audible over the strains of a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune playing on the jukebox.  The televisions mounted above either corner of the bar normally featured sporting events, but both were tuned to newscasts, neither of which could be heard.

As I walked slowly through the crowd it became apparent that nearly everyone was discussing the discovery of the dead body.

At the far end of the room, I found Rick and Donald sitting in the last of a row of booths.  It was even darker there in the corner, a candle in the center of the table and encased in tinted glass providing minimal flickering light.

I slid in next to Donald, who was absently playing with a thin red straw floating in his drink.  He stopped long enough to acknowledge me with a slight nod.  Across from us, Rick sat clutching a bottle of cola with both hands, his expression darker than usual.  “Heard the latest?”

“I haven’t seen the news since this morning,” I told him.  “They found a body, it’s a woman, and she’s been dead for weeks.  That’s all I know.”

Donald spoke without looking at me.  “They’ve identified her.”

“Twenty-two years old, single mother from New Bedford,” Rick said.  “Been missing almost two months.”

I looked back across the room, hoping to locate a waitress.  The throng of patrons reminded me of the days in our early twenties when we’d come here, so full of life, young and strong and together, still so certain we were indestructible.  All the time in the world, we’d thought then.  Downing drinks, smoking cigarettes and eating whatever the hell we pleased without giving any of it another thought.  Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how much I missed feeling like that, so enthusiastically
alive
.

“Remember when we used to come here before I got married?” I asked.

Rick stared at me like I’d spoken Mandarin, but Donald allowed the slightest quiver of a smile and nodded.  “Can you believe we actually once found this place fun?”

I caught the attention of a waitress near the bar.  When she got to us I ordered a beer then turned back to the table.  “Those were good days,” I said.  “Weren’t they?”

“Are you asking?”  Donald gazed into what was left of his drink.  “Or only hopeful?”

“A little of both.”

“Missing your youth, Alan?”

“Almost.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not old yet,” he said softly.  “We’re just not young anymore.”

Rick leaned forward.  “I hate to interrupt you two and your stroll down memory-fucking-lane over here, but we got some important shit to talk about.”

“So talk,” I said.  “You’re the one who called the meeting.”

Rick’s eyes swept across me, sized me up.  He opened his mouth to say something but the waitress appeared with my beer and asked if he and Donald wanted anything else.  Donald ordered another vodka and tonic.  “All set, sweetie, thanks,” Rick said.

The waitress hesitated just long enough to give him a flirtatious smile then vanished.

“We need to decide what to do,” Donald said.

“Do?”  I looked at him, then at Rick.  “What’s there to do?”

Eventually Donald said, “Could Bernard have really done this?  Could he have
killed
 that girl?”

My immediate inclination was to tell him to keep his voice down, but the din in the bar was such that I could just barely hear him myself.  “We don’t know for sure that he did, but—”

“Yes we do,” Rick said.  “Don’t be an idiot.”

I sighed.  “Look, all I’m saying is—”

“I just can’t seem to get my mind around this,” Donald interrupted.

Rick cracked his knuckles and fired Donald a cross look.  “Donny thinks we should turn the tape over to the cops.”

“I said we should consider it.”

“All that’s going to do is drag us right into the middle of this,” I said.

Donald looked at me with glazed eyes.  “We’re already right in the middle of this.”  He threw back the remainder of his drink just as the waitress appeared with a refill.  Once she’d gone, he lit a cigarette and continued.  “Look, we’re in possession of potential evidence here.  We need to do the right thing, and the right thing, it seems to me, is to at least consider turning the tape over to the authorities.”

“No,” Rick snapped.  “Fuck that.”

I took a gulp of beer, ran the cold bottle across my forehead.  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to give it to the police.  Rick has a point, with all the news coverage this thing is getting, why draw attention to ourselves?”

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Donald said.  “What
is
 it with you two?  The entire area is in a panic.  People think a killer is on the loose in Potter’s Cove, and if what Bernard said was true, it won’t end here.  More bodies will be found.  We’re going to have something on our hands here the likes of which this town has never seen.”