“How long?”
But then I realized why she’d asked if my parents were both still alive.
“About sixteen years?”
“Yes. Sometime in the seventies. It was in the local paper, but I can’t recall the details. It was mostly just people talking. Gossip.”
“Why did he kill himself?”
“All kinds of reasons, I imagine.” Marie looked at me sadly. “People’s lives can be very complicated, Paul. From what I understand, the man was in the army for a while and was affected by that.”
In the army for a while.
Another resonance. I remembered the description Charlie had given of Red Hands, and how that had become the way the rest of us pictured him too. Living off the land; as much a part of the woods as in them; a battered old fatigue coat, the shoulders worn away like feathers.
“What about the child he left behind?”
“It was a little more complicated than that.” Marie shook her head. “Are you sure you want to hear all this? Because think about it. Maybe there are reasons you’ve never heard this before now. Perhaps it’s better for everyone to forget.”
“I need to know,” I said.
“All right. I don’t know if any of this is true, but it’s what I heard back then. The man was married to someone in Gritten Wood—your town—at the time, and his wife was pregnant. But he was also involved with a second woman as well. From another part of Gritten—I don’t know where. And this other woman had ended up pregnant too.”
“So the man had two children?”
“Yes. The second woman—she knew he was married, of course, and she wanted him to leave his wife. But he didn’t do that. He chose his wife instead. But when he confessed to her, she rejected him—threw him out. And because of that, he went off into the woods and did what he did.”
Marie spread her hands, looking slightly helpless.
“But I don’t know any of this for a fact, Paul. It’s just rumors I heard at the time. Some of it second-, even thirdhand. I’m not sure if any of it’s true.”
I nodded to myself.
Marie might not have been certain, but I was. I thought about James. How his mother always seemed to resent him. How his biological father had disappeared before he was born. I’d always assumed James’s father had abandoned his family, and that James had been a constant reminder to Eileen of that hurt. But nobody had ever told me that was what had happened.
And then I thought about Charlie. How similar he and James sometimes looked. The way that when we’d first arrived at the school, Charlie had seemed to seek James out, keen to bend him to his will and bring him under his control. To isolate him from me. The way he always seemed to have some plan in mind, with the rest of us in the dark, trailing a few steps behind him.
When something awful happens, like Marie had just told me, people try to forget about it. Normal people, at least. But I thought about Jenny’s story now—about the little boy desperate to find his father; to talk to him; to be accepted by him—and I wondered if damaged people did something else instead.
If perhaps they went out searching.
THIRTY-ONE
You have to do something about Charlie.
On the morning of the final day, I remember waking just after dawn. The sun was streaming in through the thin curtains over the window by my desk, the room already warmed by it. But despite the heat, I was shivering. For the first time in months, I couldn’t remember the precise details of the dream I’d just woken from, only that it had involved Charlie. The dread from it was still there, seeping slowly across my thoughts like black ink spreading through tissue paper.
I lay still for a moment, calming myself down.
Trying to think of anything else.
My parents had both left for work early and the house was silent. Downstairs, I knew there would be the usual list of chores waiting for me to complete. They would occupy me for a few hours this morning. And then, this afternoon, Jenny was coming around.
It would be nice to have a bit more privacy, wouldn’t it?
My heart leaped for a different reason at that.
And yet the dream lingered. After a time, I went and sat down at my desk, drawing the curtains and looking out at the tangle of our backyard and the woods at the far end. The world was sunlit and rich with life: walled and carpeted in a thousand shades of yellow and green, dew still glinting on the grass. But I knew now that, sixteen years ago, a man had walked into those woods and slit his wrists, his life spilling out into the foliage.
On a different day, I would have taken out my dream diary and written in it. Today, I decided not to. All I really remembered from last night was Charlie, and I didn’t want to put his name in my book.
You have to do something about him.
That same thought arriving again, this time with more force and urgency to it. After what I’d learned yesterday, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something bad was going to happen—that Charlie was dangerous in some way. But at the same time, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Find an adult, I supposed, and talk to them. Tell them what I knew, and some of what I suspected. Start with the dreams, and then try to explain how everything had gradually become so dark. I could tell them about Goodbold’s dog, and about Red Hands, and how I no longer knew if Charlie was deluded and needed help, or if he was planning …
Something.
Nobody was going to listen to me.
But still. I had to try. So I would make a plan, I decided. I would work out exactly what story I needed to tell, and who I was going to tell it to. Marie was probably the best choice. Out of all the adults I could think of, she would be the most open to listening, and she already knew some of the background.
She could help me work out what to do.
Making that decision gave me the freedom to put it out of my head for a while. I showered and dressed, made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and then turned to the list of tasks that had been left for me on the kitchen table. There was tidying and cleaning to be done, and my mother had written a shopping list and left me some money. I did the house stuff first, and then finally, late morning, I set out to the shop.
* * *
The day was hot and bright, but I remember there was also an odd feel to the town. The streets were quiet, which wasn’t unusual for this time on a working day, but they seemed even more deserted than usual. On my way to the grocery store, I didn’t see another soul; it was as though everybody had been removed from the world and I had been left completely alone. There was a hush to the air and a strange sepia quality to the light. The roads, the houses, the trees—they all looked like they had been soaked in an amber liquid that had yet to fully drain from the air.
I was almost relieved when I reached the store and found actual people inside. Normality resumed. I collected together the items on my mother’s shopping list and the assistant bagged them carefully at the register. By the time I was outside again, back in that heavy silence, the plastic bag handles were already tight and digging into the creases of my fingers.
For some reason, I didn’t want to head home right away. There was still an hour or so before Jenny was due to come around, and I knew the only thing I’d do with that time was pace and worry. Although the atmosphere that day was unusual, it was also beautiful in its own strange way, so I decided to walk for a time, and I took a more circuitous route back to the house than normal, enjoying the warmth and the peace.