The next morning I woke to the doorbell.
Tired and stiff from rowing all the previous day I went to the landing at the top of the stairs and watched my dad as he opened the front door.
A man in jeans and a green t-shirt was standing there. He had a gun and a badge on his hip and he clearly knew my dad because they called each other by their first names. I guessed this was Detective Gene Travis, whom my dad had mentioned the night before. I’d asked him what happened to the shrimp boat and my dad had said that a detective named Gene Travis had arranged for it to be towed back to dry land so that it could be put on a truck and sent to the Harris County Crime Lab for testing.
“We got us a bit of a problem,” Gene Travis said.
“What kind of problem?” my dad answered.
“That guy down there, the one who reported the boat to you…”
“Yeah, Tom Moore.”
“Yeah. I went over there this morning to get his statement and, well, I’m sorry if he was a good friend of yours, but he’s dead. He and his wife both.”
“What?”
“They were all tore up, Wes. Same as those bodies you found on that shrimp boat. He and his wife, it looks like they’ve been eaten.”
My dad didn’t say anything to that.
“I think it’s pretty plain whoever did this is the same person who killed those men on the boat,” Detective Travis said. “He must have stayed in the area after the boat crashed.”
“I looked all over that scene,” my dad said. “I didn’t see anybody suspicious. Believe me, I looked.”
“We did too. We searched the area top to bottom. He must have gotten inside the house when Tom Moore was outside with you. Or maybe before you got there.”
“Must have been before I got there. Gene, I looked all over.”
“Okay, well, I’m sorry again.”
“Yeah. Yeah, thanks.”
Gene Travis left and my dad closed the door. A moment later he said, “Mark, you heard that?”
Oh crap, I thought. He knows I’m here. How did he know I was here?
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Come down.”
I did. I said, “Dad, how are they gonna figure out who did this?”
“They’ll start with the boat. It had to have come from somewhere. They’ll figure out where, then they’ll look into calls that came in just before the storm. They might get lucky and find a suspicious person call. Maybe somebody even made an arrest. That’d give them a name, or at least a description. If that doesn’t work, they’ll get into the forensics, see if they can find prints and stuff like that.”
“Oh,” I said. That seemed reasonable. Police work always sounded simple the way he described it.
“Do you know why I let you listen to that?”
“Um, no, not really. I didn’t think you knew I was there.”
“You’re congested and you were breathing through your nose. I could hear the breath whistling in your nose.”
“Oh.”
“Breathe through your mouth if you need to be quiet.” He crossed his arms over his chest and studied me. “It’s gonna take them a while to figure this out. Certainly a few days, maybe longer. I let you listen in on that because I wanted you to hear that this is serious. This isn’t a game. You listen to me, and you do as I say. You be careful when you’re out. You screwed up when you took my gun out, and I’m still pissed about that. Don’t be stupid like that again. You hear me?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I hear you.”
* * *
The floodwaters didn’t stick around long.
By midday nearly all the cars and trucks that had been parked in the street were visible, just the tires still below the surface. The crawdads were gone too. The phones and the electricity and the water were all still out, but the flood was going away. I think my little corner of the neighborhood was the last to stay flooded because we were right next to the greenbelt, but even down where we lived you could tell the water was going away. It left behind a sour, sewage smell.
I went out to the front yard and watched the commotion down at Mr. Moore’s house. There were two Harris County Sheriff’s cars down there, and a big 18-wheeler flatbed with a crane to get rid of the shrimp boat. The deputies had come by and asked my dad to help out and of course he’d gone down there. Jeff joined me and together we watched them load the boat onto the truck and drive it away.
“Is it true about Mr. Moore?” he asked.
I told him it was. “His wife too.”
“My mom is totally freaking out.”
“Mine too.”
“What does your dad think?”
“He said the guy must have been hiding inside Mr. Moore’s house. He was probably waiting for all the commotion to die down.”
“Yeah, but he ate them. What kind of lunatic does that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s pretty screwed up.”
“You know what Eric said?”
“No, what?”
“He said it was Dean Corll. He said the Candy Man’s back.”
“That’s ridiculous. Dean Corll’s dead.”
“I’m just telling you what he said. I told him the same thing, that Corll was dead, but you know him. He said the Houston Police Department faked his death to keep the public off their backs.”
Dean Corll was about as close to a boogeyman as we had. Ten years earlier he’d gone on a killing spree. With the help of two teenage helpers, who earned $200 a head for the boys they lured into Corll’s grasp, he’d kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered a total of twenty-seven teenage boys from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston’s 2nd Ward. People in his neighborhood called him the Candy Man because he was famous for passing out free candy to the kids. He was eventually murdered by one of his teenage helpers, which put his spree to an end, but did nothing to assuage the fear he left in his wake.
My dad had never really talked about Corll, not to me anyway, but I knew that the Houston Police Department took a real beating in the court of public opinion over what became known as the Houston Mass Murders. So many children had gone missing from the same neighborhood, but there’d been no concentrated effort to look into the disappearances. I guess conspiracy theories about the Candy Man coming back from the grave were inevitable.
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Corll’s dead,” I said. I meant to give it a note of finality, of authority, but for whatever reason that assured tone was missing.
* * *
Later, we went over to Alan’s house and played Monopoly.
It didn’t take Eric long to bring up Dean Corll. “You don’t think it’s possible the Houston Police Department faked his death?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because it was all over the news. They had a trial and everything. You don’t really think they’d have all of that if they faked his death, do you?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s possible.”
“It’s not.”
“Well what about those two guys who helped him? Maybe it’s one of them.”
Dean Corll had enlisted two teenage boys, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks, to help lure in his victims. The boys earned $200 a head for each victim and even helped in the tortures and murders and the disposal of the bodies. Both were serving life sentences for their part in the killings and I told Eric as much.
“Well, maybe they escaped.”
“Oh jeez,” I said. “I’m done. I’m not gonna debate conspiracy theories with you.”
“I’m just asking questions,” Eric said.
“You’re being stupid,” I said. I’d had enough. “Hey Alan, you mind if I get another Coke?”
“Sure,” he said. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.”
I went downstairs to his kitchen. His mom had put out a cooler filled with ice and cokes. I opened a can of Sprite and was throwing away the pop-top when Alan’s older sister Heather came in the back door.
Back when she was my babysitter she had been a little on the heavy side. Not fat, but definitely chunky. And, really, at the time, I hadn’t been old enough to think of her as a girl. She was just the person my parents hired to watch me when they wanted to go for dinner and a movie. I liked her. I liked her a lot. But I was too young to see her as a girl. You know, in a sexual way.
She was definitely more than that now. Her freshman year at the University of Texas had been good to her. She was slim and toned and with her hair teased up and her blouse hanging off her shoulder, she was, I’ll be honest here, kind of a fox.
I think she knew it, too.
Girls have to know it, when they look delicious.
I said, “Back from school, huh?” I tried to make it sound cool but my voice cracked.
I’m sure she noticed, but she didn’t let on. Despite the change in her appearance, she was still genuine. She was still kind.
“Yeah, my parents are bugging me to find a job.”
“Ah,” I said. I leaned up against the counter and took a swig of my Sprite. She really did look good. I was crazy about that off-the-shoulder look some of the girls wore, and she rocked it.
“How are your mom and dad?” she asked.
“They’re good. They’re working a lot.”
“I’m gonna have to drop your mom a line here pretty soon. I really appreciate her writing that letter of recommendation for me.”
“Yeah, come by,” I said. “I know they’d love to see you.”
She nodded, and it felt like we’d pretty much dried up our topics for conversation. Back when she was my babysitter we’d talk for hours. I used to love hanging out with her. But now, with her being in college and me still just a kid, it felt there was a real gulf between us, like we didn’t have anything in common anymore. It made me feel kind of depressed.
But then she said, “I heard about the rock fight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You really hit Billy in the face?”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
“I would have paid five dollars to see that. That guy is such a dick.”
I laughed again. “It was pretty cool.”
“I bet it was.” She smiled. But then she grew serious. “Listen, you need to be careful with him. He’s a first rate jerk, but he’s dangerous. I know girls that have gone out with him. He’s mean. He likes to hurt girls. Do you know what I mean when I say hurt?”
I waved that away like I wasn’t worried. “He doesn’t scare me.”
“Mark, I’m being serious. You need to be careful. You’ll do that, won’t you? You’ll be careful around him?”
“Yeah,” I said. I was a little surprised by how stern she suddenly seemed, like she was my babysitter all over again, but an adult this time. “Sure. I’ll be careful.”
“Good. Say hi to your mom for me.”
“Yeah, I will.”
She nodded and went up to her room.
* * *
That night, because I’d been spending so much time in canoes of late, I read Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” before drifting off to bed. When I woke the next morning the floodwater was gone from the street and the long process of cleaning up trash and busted tree limbs began. Mom had to get back to her practice, so Dad and I got busy with the yard. The pecan tree in our front yard hadn’t done very well in the storm, and several of its heaviest branches had broken away. Those we cut up with a chainsaw and loaded into the back of my dad’s pickup. It was hard work and we didn’t stop for a break until about one.
We were in the kitchen, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking warm Cokes when there was a knock at the door.
“I’ll get it,” I said.
It was Detective Gene Travis again. He looked grim. He was dressed in a suit, but his shoes were muddy. And he was carrying a thick accordion file stuffed with papers and pictures.
“My dad’s in the kitchen,” I said. “You can come in if you want.”
“No thanks. I got all this mud on my shoes. Could you ask your dad to come out here, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
I turned toward the kitchen. “Hey Dad!”
My dad came around the corner and he stiffened as soon as he saw Gene Travis. “What is it?” he asked.
Detective Travis looked at me and then at my father.
“Mark, go on,” my dad said. “I need to talk to this detective for a bit.”
I opened my mouth to object, but stopped myself before a single word came out. There wouldn’t have been any point.
Instead I sighed and shuffled back towards the kitchen. Maybe they didn’t know I was listening, but I was.
“There were two more last night,” Travis said.
“Oh no,” my dad said. “I saw the mud on your shoes. I figured something was up.”
“Yeah.”
“Who was it? Do you know?”
“Two college girls, a couple streets over.”
I was standing near the back door, but that froze me in place. Max was waiting on the other side, watching me through the glass, no doubt wondering why I was just standing there. He let out a bark, but I didn’t move.
And then Gene Travis said the name I’d been praying he wouldn’t say, and my blood went cold.
Heather Crawford was dead.
* * *
What I remember most of that moment, the moment after Gene Travis left and my dad stood there by the front door, was him walking into my mom’s office and picking up the phone–to call my mom, I guess–and finding the thing inoperative.
I remember him slamming the phone back down on the cradle and muttering something to himself and then sitting there, in her chair, with his face in his hands.
That was all.
Of my own pain, I have no memory.
* * *
Later, my mom made it home.
Dad hadn’t said a word to me. I’d been sitting on the stairs, waiting for something, anything, from him. But I’d gotten nothing.
When my mom got home, Dad wasted little time.
He pulled her aside and whispered what he’d learned from Detective Travis.
What I remember is my mom going into her office and dropping into her chair and then crying like I’d never seen her cry before.
I wanted to go to her. I wanted to say something that would mean something. But listening to her cry I knew I just wasn’t up for it. Whatever it was she needed to hear was a mystery to me.
Hell, my own feelings were a mystery to me.
The only thing I knew was that a great big crater had just been punched into the center of my world.
* * *
My dad worked the overnight shift, and usually by the time my mom came home from her practice, he was about to walk out the door.
“You’re going to work?” she asked, like she couldn’t believe it.
“I have to. Now that the roads are open I have to go in to work. I expect my guys to come in to work. I can’t very well skip out when I’m telling them they have to.”
“But now? Wes, I…I need you here.”
I was listening to this exchange from my perch at the top of the stairs, and this time, I was breathing in and out through my mouth, so as not to be overheard.
“I’m hurting too,” my dad said. I was surprised by the tenderness I heard there. He sounded vulnerable. He never sounded vulnerable.
“Oh Wes, why do you have to go?”
And then, strangely, his tone hardened. “Come on, Meredith. You married a cop. You knew what you were getting. I love you. But I have to go.”
“But you don’t need to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wes, I make enough you don’t have to do that anymore. You could retire today, if you wanted. I could finance that dog training school you’ve always wanted to start. This is the perfect neighborhood for it. We could do all of that today, if you wanted.”
“You want me to stop being a cop? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” she said. “Wes, I want you to be happy. I want us to be happy.”
“Aren’t we? Are you saying you’re not happy?”
“Wes, no. Please. Please don’t make this a battle.”
“A battle? What the hell, Meredith? I’m not fighting with you.”
“No, I know that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…I just…I just want you to hear me on this. I love you, Wes.”
“What else have I been doing? That’s all I’ve been doing is hearing you. I hear you say you want us to be happy. That means you’re not happy right now. Right? Am I right? I mean, what the hell? You know what kind of hours I work.”
“But Wes, I never see you. Our schedules are so messed up. All I want to do is spend time with you, like we used to do. Please, let’s be together on this.”
A pause. An awful pause.
“Ah Christ, get out of the way. I’m going to work.”
I saw my dad storm through the entryway at the foot of the stairs. I heard him yell, “Max, come!” and then the crash of muscle against metal as Max erupted from his crate and ran after my dad.
The door slammed.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then, filling that void, came my mother’s sobbing.