Time Release (25 page)

Sonny was moving down the stairs slowly, like he was walking underwater. If he heard, he didn't answer. Christensen creaked halfway down and squinted into the cellar room, his head numbed by the coarse smell of mildew. It wasn't pitch black, as he'd imagined, but dimly lit by daylight filtering into a basement window-well and through a grimy pane just above the laundry sink.

The center of the room was a tangle of garden tools, hoses, clotheslines, overturned bikes. In the far corner, a table saw and lathe, someone's small wood shop. A Ping-Pong table, folded for storage, leaned against the back wall. Christensen listened hard for the skittering rush of rodent feet, but heard only Sonny's labored breathing.

Sonny was at the sink now, running his ruined hand along the empty countertop that stretched five feet in both directions from the basin. The hand cut an irregular trail through the collected dust, which swirled up into the shaft of light like an apparition.

“Why are we here, Sonny?”

Sonny's hand continued its methodic passage across the countertop. “To be closer to God.” His voice flattened into recitation: “I am baptizing you in water, but there is one to come who is mightier than I. His winnowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.”

“Who told you that?”

“Rachel.”

Rachel again. “Wait. She brought you down here to be closer to God?”

“To wash our sin away. Make us pure. We were con­ceived in sin.”

“Who's we? David, too?”

“You. Me. We have the stain.”

“Who else has the stain? Our mother?”

Sonny nodded. A knowing smile. “He used her as his vessel. Rachel says she'll be forgiven.”

“Who, Sonny? Who used her? Dad?”

“Papa Richard, too. Rachel told me. Mom was their vessel. The dark angel's vessel.” He paused. “Wasn't her fault.”

Papa Richard. Sonny's grandfather, Sandra Corbett's father. Like Rachel, he was little more than a caricature in Christensen's mind: The stern and possibly abusive minis­ter. Died in the late 1970s. Christensen tried to fit Sonny's words into a puzzle that now seemed even more compli­cated than the day he first sifted the Corbett family history from the juvenile court file. Incest might explain why Sandra's mind unraveled, her submissiveness to years of abuse from her husband, but there was so much else he didn't understand.

“Rachel was Mom's sister, right? Older or younger?”

“She knew everything.”

“So Papa Richard used Rachel, too?”

Sonny shook his head, his eyes never straying from the sink. His broken hand seemed twice its normal size. “Papa never touched her. Dad couldn't touch her, either. Rachel's smart, David, not like Mom. She knows who they are. She couldn't save Mom, but she wants to save us. She told me. Down here.”

Sonny reached for the cold-water faucet, turned it on full. The pipes moaned again. “She'll take me to God while you're gone to the store, then take you when you get back.”

Water. Baptism. Salvation. Had Rachel tried to drown the boys in this sink? Christensen wished he could dismiss the whole thing as a typical repressed-memory aberration. But this was different. Sonny's recall of specifics—the Bible verse, the relationships between the characters, his grasp of chronology—gave his words gruesome plausibility.

“Tell me how she's going to save us.”

Sonny turned suddenly. He was smiling, a peaceful smile, uncomfortably close, conspiratorial. Christensen stepped back. “The water,” Sonny whispered.

Would a woman be physically capable of drowning a struggling adolescent boy? Not unless she coaxed him into a vulnerable position. Christensen looked at the sink, the counter, remembered Sonny's memory of being helpless underwater, on his back but not swimming, struggling toward a rectangular light above. He looked up at the window. Maybe he'd submitted, convinced that baptism would take him to a better place.

“She stopped Papa Richard from hurting Mom, you know,” Sonny said. “She told me.”

Christensen shivered, not knowing why. “Rachel? I don't understand.”

“She said nobody ever knew. He was old. They thought he choked on something and died.”

The weakness in his legs forced Christensen to the counter. He held on tight. Steady, he told himself.
Holy shit.
“Sonny, you're saying Rachel killed your grandfather?”

“Nobody ever knew. Served it to him herself in a bowl of bean soup. She had a plan for Dad, too. A different plan. A better plan. Show the world what he was. Show the world the evil.”

“Tell me.”

“The potion.”

The words hung in the musty air, a twist Christensen could not have imagined. Could Downing have worked all these years on the Primenyl case, and still have been this wrong?

“The potion,” Christensen repeated. “I don't remember the potion.”

“Don't lie.”

“I don't remember, Sonny. I don't.”

“The potion that made the world see. The potion that made Dad go away because everybody thought he was the one that put it in the stores. She made you keep it in your hidey-hole, and nobody ever found it. You remember, David. Don't lie.”

Christensen couldn't argue about what Sonny's older brother did or didn't do ten years ago, and pleading ignorance was pissing Sonny off. He tried a new tack.

“Show me the hidey-hole,” he said.

Sonny's eyes went straight to the floor. “She made us swear. On the Bible, remember?”

“It's my hidey-hole, so I already know, don't I? I just forgot where it is. Show me, Sonny.”

Christensen could hear his own heartbeat as they stood still and quiet, face-to-face, only feet apart. He wanted to run from this place. Downing should be here facing down the beast, not him. This was a cop's work.

Sonny moved across the room, picking his way through the clutter, and into a shadow at the far end of the basement. Christensen squinted at first, reluctant to follow. But curi­osity overtook him. He crossed the room, following Sonny's path, until he stood beside him at the irregular stone wall that was the house's original foundation. It rose maybe six feet from the floor, and the thick floor joists above ran in parallel lines across the basement ceiling, each one an­chored to the top of the stone wall. The third joist from the left was supported by a mine jack, a quick fix for a subsidence problem.

Sonny studied the joists, his body swaying slightly but otherwise still. “Gimme a boost,” he said.

Christensen swallowed hard. “I'd almost forgotten.”

“They looked everywhere but. Boost me.”

Christensen cupped his hands and Sonny stepped in. Above him he saw Sonny reach into the space between the joist and the mine jack, all the way up to his shoulder. How willing would a cop be to blindly reach that deep into a place already showing signs of collapse? Downing wouldn't have hesitated if he'd noticed the space, but he also could have overlooked such a small, dark void.

A rustle of pages. Christensen looked up as Sonny pulled a handful of something from the hole. He was using his left hand now, probably because the swelling limited movement of his right fingers. “You had
Playboys!
” Sonny said, and dropped them to the floor. They whistled past Christensen's ear and landed with a solid thump.

What would an older brother say? “You were too young.”

“Down.”

Sonny stepped back onto the basement floor holding a tear-shaped bundle, a soft white blob that seemed to glow in the darkness. It looked like a small pouch, about the size of a softball, made from cheesecloth and knotted at the top. Christensen felt as if he'd swallowed bees. Downing should be here. He took the bundle when Sonny held it out to him, cupping his hands beneath it for support. Something inside the pouch pricked the base of his left thumb.

Christensen threaded his way back across the room toward the sink, where the light was better. He laid the bundle on the counter in the square patch of sunlight beneath the window-well. Should he open it, or wait and call Downing? He studied it for a long time.

“The potion?” Christensen asked.

Sonny stayed in the shadows, saying nothing.

The knot was loose. Christensen picked at it, and it loosened even more. He pulled its ends apart and laid the filmy corners away from what was inside. What he found seemed too familiar to be scary. Two of the three items he recognized: a tube of instant glue and a thin, dull-metal X-Acto knife, its triangular blade exposed and thrust through the cheesecloth. The third item was a small brown glass bottle with a black screw cap. He'd watched enough crime shows to know he should keep his fingerprints off potential evidence, so he lifted the corners of the cheesecloth and rolled the bottle from side to side. No label. He bent down, wishing he could pick it up, wondering if he could see its contents by raising the bottle to the window. His head suddenly filled with a familiar odor. What was it? He closed his eyes, but didn't need to inhale again.

Bitter almonds.

Anyone who lived in Pittsburgh in 1986 knew what that meant. Christensen backed away, not realizing he was doing so until he bumped into a support beam. “Sonny, we need to go.” Struggling to control the tremor in his voice. “Now.”

Still no answer. He looked into the shadow where he'd last seen Sonny, squinted until a human form emerged from the darkness. Sonny was on his knees. He was holding the frame of an ancient bicycle, its tires flat but otherwise intact. What little light there was played off the spokes and the accumulated cobwebs. “Your bike?” Christensen asked, moving toward him.

Sonny looked up. “No, yours,” he said.

“Mine?”

“Rachel said we could help, remember?”

“Tell me.”

“Deliveries,” Sonny said. “She asked us to take it back to Dad's store.”

“Take what, Sonny?”

“Just take the box in and put it on the shelf with the other headache pills, she said. Don't worry about the receipt. Don't let him see you. Don't talk to anybody. Come straight back.”

“Did you want to help her, Sonny?”

“No. Did you?”

“No.”

Sonny stood up, dropping the bike. It fell onto its side with a crash.

“Paper, scissors, rock,” Sonny said. “Remember?” He put both hands behind his back, starting a game Christensen had taught Annie only a few weeks ago. “Come on. That's fair. One, two, three.”

Sonny pulled his left hand from behind his back. Scissors. “Come on,” he said. “Do it.”

Christensen put his hands behind his back. Another hunch. If Sonny was scissors, he'd be paper. Scissors cut paper.

“One, two, three,” Sonny said. Scissors again. He stared at Christensen's upturned palm, and suddenly all expression left his face.

“You win,” Christensen said. “I lose.” He played out the scene in his mind. Sonny the victor, relieved of his aunt's strange and incomprehensible chore, gloating as his brother pedaled off with a box of Primenyl. They couldn't have known then what was inside. When did they realize?

“You lose,” Sonny said, bringing both hands up to within a foot of his face. He tried to flex the left, but it seemed suddenly lifeless. He appraised the bloated right, as if seeing the damage for the first time.

“What happens next, Sonny?”

“My hands. I can't feel them.”

“Should I take the pills to the store?”

“You did. You took them back because you lost. I had scissors, you had paper.”

“I lost. How do you feel about that?”

Sonny trembled. His face seemed to collapse. Tears. Hands held out like dead birds. “I'm sorry, David. I was scissors, but I'd have gone. I would have.”

Something clicked. Paper, scissors, rock. The numbness in Sonny's hands. “Guilty? You felt guilty because David had to take the pills back?” Christensen realized too late that he'd spoken out loud.

“Then we saw on the news about all those people—”

“You realized something was wrong with the pills, didn't you, Sonny? Something Rachel did.”

“—and the police started coming around—”

“David figured it out, too.”

“—and the city canceled Halloween and we saw Dad on TV and you went upstairs. David, you didn't know! I didn't. She tricked us!”

Christensen's head swam with questions. Had awareness crept up on the two boys, then ages twelve and fifteen, or had it struck them like a thunderbolt? How long after that did David commit suicide? When did Ron Corbett realize Rachel had set him up? Christensen recalled the chronology from Sonny's file. Corbett abandoned his family two weeks after the last Primenyl death. David shot himself a week after that. Two weeks later, their mother was involuntarily committed to Borman and Sonny entered foster care. The family exploded, scattering damaged souls like ghastly debris. And at ground zero stood some cipher named Rachel, a lit match in her hand.

He groped for words. “You didn't know, Sonny. It wasn't David's fault. Or yours.”

“Oh God!” Sonny's face changed. His eyes, which had seemed to see nothing until now, shifted to his hands. Pain shot across his face as he took a closer look at the obviously broken right. He looked around the basement, apparently disoriented, like someone stepping from a long tunnel into bright daylight. A full half-minute of silence.

“I know this place,” he said finally.

“You're safe, Sonny. No one can hurt you.”

Sonny cradled the broken hand. “We're alone?”

Christensen nodded. “Let's go upstairs.”

“Wait.”

Christensen tensed. He wasn't sure how conscious Sonny was of the memories he'd just relived. No two reconciliations were the same. Sonny's eyes had settled on the laundry sink. He moved slowly out of the deep shadows and into the sepia light beneath the basement window, stopping in front of the basin but staring now at a small shelf above it. Laundry supplies. A measuring cup, a dusty box of Tide, a wad of dryer lint. Sonny picked up something from the shelf that looked like a pencil. He laid it carefully in the patch of sunlight beside the sink. Christensen saw it now, an ornate, black-lacquered chopstick.