Chapter Eight

By late morning the storm was already hitting southeastern Massachusetts fairly heavily, but in nearby Rhode Island the tiny flakes had begun less than an hour before. As Carlo crossed the state line he looked to the sky. He still had time to check out the Josephine Covington angle then get back home and hunker down before things got too out of control. “I hope,” he sighed.

He grabbed his cell phone and dialed Katherine’s number, but changed his mind and hung up before it connected. There was a good chance she might be upset with him for taking it upon himself to do this. The wiser choice, it seemed, was to wait and see what the meeting with the old woman yielded. If he was able to garner some important or useful information he’d phone Katherine right away.

Within half an hour he’d located the town of Littlebrook and the street address Reggie had given him as Josephine Covington’s last known residence. The area was very rural and seemed sparsely populated even by Rhode Island standards, and was one of those quiet little towns that looked like it had been frozen in time since the late 1950s.

Carlo turned onto a side road bookended by two enormous but empty fields, and followed it for a few hundred yards until the silhouette of a house came into view.

The home Josephine Covington had apparently moved into not long after the death of her husband was surprisingly old and rundown. Clearly neglected, it sat like a giant forgotten monument to another era. The two-story, unimaginatively designed box-like structure was in desperate need of a paintjob, the old clapboard flaked and decomposing, the yard dead and mostly clumps of brown grass. Alone at the end of a desolate dirt road and set back on a large lot, the area looked unfinished, like the neighborhood that should have sprouted up around it years before had never materialized, leaving a lonely old house and the lonely old woman who occupied it.

Not far from the front steps, Carlo parked, and through the light snow, saw something moving. He squinted, watched the slowly gliding figure. As the windshield wipers made another pass, he realized he was looking at an old woman sitting on a porch swing, swaying back and forth in the breeze and seemingly oblivious to the snow.

“You have got to be shitting me,” he mumbled, stepping from the car.

Had it not been for her presence, he might have assumed the house abandoned long ago. Now the entire scene looked like something out of some surreal Bergman film.

The porch swing rocked slowly, the rusty chains squeaking and squealing with each pass. The woman appeared to be looking directly at him but gave no indication that she’d actually seen him. She was astonishingly elderly, her face so severely wrinkled it resembled splintered and cracked clay. Her white hair was thin and too long for a woman of her years, and hung about either side of her gaunt face like worn curtains. In a light housedress and slippers, she should’ve been freezing, but instead appeared impossibly fragile and unaware, a skeleton with an ashen complexion dressed and posed there as if without her knowledge.

Carlo approached the woman slowly, unsure of what her reaction might be. She bowed her head, and he could not be sure if the woman had perhaps fallen asleep or simply hadn’t yet seen him. As he crossed what remained of the front yard and cautiously climbed the steps to the porch, the woman again slowly raised her head.

Never before had he seen the ravages of age so evident in a person’s face. Her mouth seemed frozen in a perpetual frown, and her eyes were covered in thick white cataracts. In her bony, arthritically mangled hands were a set of wooden rosary beads, a gold crucifix dangling from the last length of beads swaying in time with the temperate motion of the porch swing.

“Mrs. Covington?”

The woman stared at him with eyes that saw nothing.

“Ma’am, are you Josephine Covington?”

She nodded slowly and with great effort, milky eyes looking right through him.

“Mrs. Covington, you—you don’t know me, my name’s Carlo Damone. I’m a close friend of Katherine’s.”

The woman offered no reply.

“James’s wife, Katherine,” he said, this time more emphatically. “I was hoping to talk with you about James, ma’am. Your son, James, Mrs. Covington, he’s missing. A little over a year ago he disappeared without a trace. Were you aware this?”

Her lips moved soundlessly in prayer, the wooden beads slowly sliding between her gnarled fingers.

“Mrs. Covington, do you understand? I’ve driven quite a distance to see you, this is very important. Have you seen James? Have you heard from him? He’s gone missing. Your son, James, Mrs. Covington, he’s missing.”

This time the word son seemed to register, and her head moved sluggishly to the side, as if she had heard something farther in the distance and was straining to make it out. “My son,” she said in a weak and raspy voice.

“Yes, your son.” Carlo looked around. Could this woman possibly still live here unattended? She seemed just barely coherent and physically incapable of caring for herself. “Are you alone here, Mrs. Covington? Does someone look after you? Would you like to go inside, it’s awfully cold out and it’s snowing, you really need to be inside, don’t you—”

“My son died,” she said softly.

“No, we—we don’t know that James has died, he’s missing, he—”

“Parker,” the woman said suddenly, and with more strength than she appeared to have.

“Pardon?”

“Parker. My son.”

Katherine hadn’t mentioned James having a foster brother, but it was certainly possible that he had. “I don’t understand, Mrs. Covington, was Parker another foster child of yours?”

“Why would you ask for him now, after all this time? He was just a little boy, my—my poor, precious, beautiful little boy. He was my child.”

Carlo could only surmise that Josephine and her husband had had another child, a son named Parker who had evidently died years before. Perhaps this explained why they decided to bring a foster child like James into their lives, and he suspected it also more than likely explained why they had struck Katherine as so emotionally cold and detached. “Mrs. Covington, do you remember Katherine?”

The old woman nodded wearily. “Katherine.”

“Yes. Katherine. Your son James married her, do you remember? I’m a friend of—”

“James wasn’t our son.”

“Foster son,” he corrected himself.

“Parker was our son.”

“Have you heard from James? He’s missing, Mrs. Covington, do you understand?”

The steady squeak of the porch swing was the only response. Frustrated, Carlo nodded, even though he was relatively certain the woman was completely blind. He slowly backed away down the porch steps. Josephine Covington was clearly suffering from senility, among other afflictions, and the sky was turning an odd gray. The snow was getting worse, and he had a long drive home. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Are you sure you’re all right here all alone? I could call someone or…”

Discouraged by the silence that answered, Carlo turned and started for his car.

“He drowned, you know.”

Carlo froze.

“Our son Parker, he drowned. Everyone thought it was an accident, even my damn fool husband. Until the day he died he believed Parker’s death was an accident. He wanted to believe that, needed to. He believed it because James wanted him to. But you can’t fool a mother. A mother knows certain things when it comes to her children. Gods should never take a child from their mother once it’s given him or her to you. And if a god does, for no reason other than sport or vengeance, then it tells you just what kind of god he is, doesn’t it? Ours is a merciful god, but not always a compassionate one. But then, our god isn’t the only god, is he? There’s a greater god even than him. This is what I’ve heard. I don’t know if it’s true…do you know if it’s true?”

Carlo forced himself to look back over his shoulder. She stared back with blank eyes.

“I hope it is,” she said. “When it happened again, the drowning of that little Japanese boy up at their lake, I—I told my husband, ‘Do you see, Darren? Do you see?’ He still didn’t believe. But I know James. I know his secrets.”

“What secrets, Mrs. Covington?” Carlo turned and took a few steps back toward the house, heart racing. “Can you tell those secrets to me?”

“I know his secrets because he told them to me.”

“Please tell me what you know, ma’am.”

“I had a terrible time with his delivery…almost died. He was special, our Parker, our special, precious boy. I couldn’t have another, but we thought he needed an older brother, our little Parker.”

James had not come after Parker then. He’d been there at the same time. They’d all been together, a family, until—

“I know what he did,” Josephine Covington said. “I know what James did.”

“What did James do, Mrs. Covington?”

“I’ve always known. I’ve always known what he did because he told me. Sometimes God tells you things too, things we think we want to know. But there are some things we should never know, things we’re not meant to know. Not ever.” The milky eyes glistened. Perhaps she saw and remembered far more than Carlo had initially suspected. “I know what James is, I’ve known for some time now.”

“Where is he?”

“The water,” she said, slurring her words like someone who had suffered a stroke. “Water teems with life. It—it’s alive, did you know that? It heals and cleanses, but also kills. Did you know a great deal of the human body consists of water?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You don’t see it, but it’s there. Moving, flowing, alive within us and yet all we see is the exterior, a shell. It’s not real, what we see, what he’ll show you, what James will show you there—none of it’s real. Just like the lake itself, there is the surface, and there is what lies beneath.”

“They dragged the lake,” he told her. “His body wasn’t there.”

“The lake,” she said again. “James and the lake are the same.”

“Has he gone back, is that it? Mrs. Covington, has James gone back to the lake?”

“He never left. He never will. Neither will Katherine.” Her mouth drooped into a deeper frown, the heavy lines in her face growing worse. “And neither will you.”