“My Charlie was turned differently,” Lydia Rutherford said. “I knew that from the beginning. At first my husband was afraid of Charlie. He wouldn’t hold him. Perhaps he saw himself mirrored in the boy. Perhaps he knew what was bound to happen.”
Alex stared at the woman and the man beside her. The cartoon soundtrack rippled down the hallway and into the tiny room. “What happened?” she managed.
“Don’t you see?” the woman said, for the first time managing a smile. “Can’t you figure it out, college girl? My husband was a ghostwriter.”
Alex stared at the woman, at the axe she wielded. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”
“He had been writing about women for so long, about how to destroy them,” Lydia continued. “When he fell into the Mood, I left, you see. I took the baby with me and I got out of Hamlet. And when I returned, something had changed. Charles had brightened. I thought it was the encyclopedias, thought his sales numbers had been good. But I was wrong. I found out that he had taken a girl. Murdered her in the woods, dropped books around the body—but not on the face. That came later.”
The woman stopped. The wind blew and tickled a wind chime hanging from the eaves of the porch. Now, Alex thought. Now comes the end of the story.
“Charles needed to be found,” she said. “He needed to be found and cured, just as every person with a sickness does. Do you understand? He wanted the investigators to know what he’d done, what he planned to do with other girls. So he tried to tell people, to warn them, to show them who he was with his novels.”
“How?” Alex asked, her voice quavering.
“Charles’s mind was strange. His sickness was real. And the scholars thought he was a genius; those students who came to my house thought Paul Fallows was a god, a deity.” The woman stopped, laughing. “Fallows was a name. Nothing more than a name. A ghost, someone my husband made up to hide himself. Those two novels he wrote, especially The Golden Silence—it was a map to him. To find him. To punish him.”
“But The Golden Silence—there’s a reference to Dr. Morrow in that book. Your husband didn’t know about Morrow. He couldn’t have. Charles was already dead when the doctor . . . sent Charlie home.” Alex was careful not to say “cured.” Not after what Dr. Bern had told them. “What happened to Charles, Lydia?”
The woman frowned. “Apparently you’re not as smart as I thought you were. We sent Charlie to Shining City, where he met the good doctor. It was our decision.” At this Lydia bristled. “It was Charles’s bad luck to die before any progress was made. It was a clot in his brain that dislodged and then exploded. A mind bomb. And I did what Charles told me to do: I sent The Golden Silence off and had it published. But by that time Charlie was . . .” She looked back at the door, at the man. She shrugged: What could I do? “Like his daddy.”
“No,” Alex said.
“The two girls from Dumant discovered the truth,” Lydia went on. “They came here together because that Aldiss told them to, but only one of them came back a second time. The smart one. She found this room, just like you did. And I think Charlie told her things about his daddy. He told her because she was”—her voice soft, ashamed—“a whore. I think she touched him. She would have done anything to get what she wanted. And Charlie talked. He told on his daddy. He told about all the girls, about the bodies and the encyclopedias. But this girl and her friend left Iowa before I could do anything. It was only a few days before we worked up the courage to go to Dumant. It had to be done. Dr. Morrow had not really worked miracles, you see; no one could change the Mood. No one.”
Alex began to see the picture forming in her mind. Shawna and Abigail had been here, but, like her, Shawna had wanted to come back. Alone. To dig deeper. To win. Had she even told Abigail what she’d found?
“I regret my haste, of course,” Lydia went on. “I didn’t realize until we’d returned home that Shawna had stolen something from us. Something private. For years I’ve waited for that book to come to light. For someone like you . . . well, it’s no matter now.”
Another step, the woman drawing closer in the tiny, packed room. Alex thought, Move now. She tried to push herself back, away from Lydia. Tried to move, but she was up against a box. She felt the sharp edge cutting into her leg.
Lydia looked down. She frowned as if Alex had ruined things, as if Alex had stepped into the plot and discovered exactly where it was going. As if the end had come upon her too fast and too soon.
“Charlie,” she said, her voice clipped and mean. “Come here, please. It’s time.”