Chapter Thirty

The lights flashed on bright, making Mary’s eyes water. A small microphone nestled in her lapel. The Channel 8 news reporter – Sonya Martinez – sat across from her in a chair, pleasantly pretty and covered in makeup.

“What would you like to say to whoever took your son?” Sonya said.

Despite the rehearsals, the words she had memorized and the coaching from detectives and experts, Mary could only bring herself to say, “Please, bring him home.”

And even that was choked and dead on arrival.

It had been three weeks since Jacob disappeared and her husband, Jonathan, had returned home, crazed and alone, talking nonstop about something in the woods, some kind of ritual, demons and children lost in space. The police immediately hauled him away. He put up a fight in the middle of the police station and tried to escape, injuring a couple of officers with strength she did not know he possessed. They placed him in a locked psychiatric hospital and charged him with assault.

The New York State Police began their search of the mountains where Jonathan and Michael and Conner Braddick had taken their last hunting trip. They found no trace of Conner and only found Michael’s backpack and gear high on a mountaintop – a place where few people would tread on their own – but no other trace of either man. They had disappeared as well.

Jonathan would ramble nonstop when she was allowed to visit him, his eyes wide, desperate and insistent as he tried to convince her of something incomprehensible. It was all gibberish. Something had happened, of that she was sure, and his already fragile mind had snapped. Mary still had that horrible sense of alienation from him – of seeing him completely lost and yet standing right in front of her. He looked like a madman, his hair matted to his scalp, his pale face gaunt and soured with desperation, sweat and grime. His eyes, once blue, now looked nearly white. She had needed him so badly in that moment, needed him to hold her so they could find a moment of strength together and gird themselves against the horror of what had happened to their son. But he was untouchable. It was like watching a dead and broken branch finally fall to the ground.

The police questioned him extensively. They suspected him of murdering his two friends. They tried to connect him with Jacob’s disappearance. It was all too strange – too coincidental to just be coincidence, and the detectives looked for any connection between Jacob’s disappearance and the disappearance of Michael and Conner.

The newspapers and television had a field day. It was on the evening news; even some national publications picked it up. The multiple disappearances fueled all sorts of insane theories spread over the internet, television and newspapers, which twisted in her head and caused her to feel dizzy. Everyone had ‘facts’, and yet there were zero facts at all. Those ‘facts’ were woven into a tapestry – multiple tapestries – and hung like a veil before the stage of the world. She was so desperate sometimes she almost felt herself succumb to Jonathan’s story; it made as much sense as anything else at this point. He kept telling police to search the forests surrounding their town, to find a place with markings on trees and a ritualistic design in the ground. A place where trapped and possessed men offered gifts of children to a demon-god. They laughed and shook their heads. Mary kept her arms across her stomach, trying to keep her insides from spilling out.

Then they found it. Three miles up Route 4 – a long scenic road that rose and fell with the hills – and deep in the woods off old hiking trails no one used anymore, police dogs picked up Jacob’s scent and followed it to a strange clearing in the woods with a ring of stones laid in the ground and a pattern of intersecting lines. Symbols were carved in the surrounding trees, just as Jonathan had said there would be. The cops came down on him ten times harder. Now he wasn’t just some unlucky sap with bad timing – now he was an honest-to-god suspect.

So far they hadn’t been able to fit the pieces together, though. The timelines didn’t work. They triangulated his cell phone to a remote meadow in the Adirondacks that bordered Coombs’ Gulch – exactly where Jonathan said he had been the entire time. The detectives had to drop it after a while, but still, she could see it in their eyes – they were constantly thinking about it – how he did it and managed to baffle them all. They would never let it go.

“What do you think happened to your son?” Sonya Martinez said with a built-in sympathetic voice Mary recognized from every other female reporter who interviewed the family of a missing child, a voice sweet enough to convince you she cared, easily digestible for the masses, but with a slight edge of skepticism to let the viewer know she was on the case, determined to solve the mystery.

The camera lights left a halo over everything and everyone in her range of vision, as if angels had descended from heaven to question her and dredge the pain. Maybe if she told them the right things, the angels would find her son.

“He was only a boy. A little boy,” Mary said. The tears were coming now. She couldn’t help it. She cried automatically these days. Anything set her off. The lights and the questions were overwhelming; the loss and the fear ran rampant inside her. “I don’t know. I just don’t know, and that’s the worst part.”

She lied to the angels. She had heard it said that not knowing what happened to a missing child was the worst part. Maybe that was true after years of searching and heartache. Right now what she feared more than anything was the phone call that a body had been discovered, that detectives and forensic technicians were descending on some lonesome wooded area to piece together some horrid and lurid story of what a monster had done to her only child. Waiting to hear confirmation of what she, deep down, knew was the worst part. She felt the dead emptiness of true loss, like she had been killed and gutted like one of Jonathan’s dead deer.

Maybe that was all she was now – a doe strung up, hollowed out, with everyone taking their pound of flesh. The media questioned her parenting: Where was she when Jacob got off the bus? What was Jonathan doing in the mountains? How was their marriage? Remember JonBenét Ramsey? They painted the portrait that fit their notions, stripped the meat from her bones and dined on the six o’clock news.

And yet here she was offering herself up as further sacrifice. It was what the detectives and the experts told her to do, so she did it. Her life was not her own anymore – it too had been taken. Now she only did what she was told to by her handlers, her puppeteers, and she walked to and fro in a daze. When she spoke, there was nothing but breath behind the words. She had lost her son and her husband. At this point, it was a miracle she could get out of bed in the morning.

Mary looked at Sonya’s pretty-but-not-too-pretty face across from her. Sonya was probably Mary’s age, hair highlighted with blonde and cut at a sharp angle to make her look sharp – a real go-getter. Her vacant eyes dampened on cue, her face well conditioned in front of a dressing room mirror to look deeply concerned but skeptical, caring but not without reservation. Mary couldn’t help but wonder where this woman would go and what she would do after the interview. This was just another workday for her. For Mary it was the culmination of the end of her life.

“You told the police that you had seen someone – a man – in the woods behind your house? That Jacob had told you he’d seen a man back there at night, watching the house?”

How do you describe something like that? She saw something back there. It looked like a man…but the eyes – they were larger than the world. She had lost herself in them, in their crazed look, and all her memory seemed erased. She didn’t know how to describe him. She didn’t know how to explain the way his eyes seemed like swirling pools of yellow, and his open mouth like a cavern. She tried to rationalize it to herself, tell herself she was upset and making a monster out of a man, but she could never quite convince herself. Man or monster – what was the difference? Weren’t we all just awful, godforsaken creatures anyway? She looked at her audience of cameramen and audio technicians and Sonya. Perhaps the halos and bright lights hid something darker. Demons were just fallen angels.

Of course, when Jacob told her of a man out at the edge of the woods walking back and forth like a zombie, she had dismissed it. How do you tell the world that sometimes, as a parent, you don’t have the time or energy to entertain every thought or story a child blurts at you throughout the day?

“I thought it was a dream. Just imagination,” Mary said. “I didn’t think he was real.”

“Do you mean when Jacob told you about him, or when you saw him yourself?”

Mary paused for a moment. “Maybe both.”

“Do you think Jacob’s disappearance is in any way connected with what happened to your husband on that hunting trip? With the disappearance of his friends, Michael and Conner Braddick?”

Mary shook her head slowly. “I don’t see how Jonathan could have anything to do with it. He was gone. I don’t know what happened up there, but he didn’t take Jacob.”

“What about the suspicious site found near the Aspetuck River Valley just this week? Police dogs traced your son to that location – what looks like a ritualistic site. A place your husband told them they would find. The body of his recently deceased friend was dug up just days before your husband’s hunting trip and your son’s disappearance. Doesn’t all that seem a bit strange or suspicious to you?”

“I don’t see how…”

“Is it possible your husband had something to do with the disappearance of Jacob?”

That fake little bitch was pushing hard now. Her questions came fast and with a twinge of anger. Or perhaps it was condescension. What did this reporter want her to say, anyway? That her husband had gone insane? That he was somehow responsible? Mary didn’t know what happened in those mountains other than Jonathan’s ravings. Perhaps that was what the audience wanted. They wanted her to fuel these strange conspiracy theories, the internet stories that talked about some strange cult and ritual human sacrifice, bloggers who posited Jonathan was a murderer of children. That Jonathan, Gene, Michael and Conner were all part of some satanic pact, that they had arranged it so that Jacob would be taken by others while they were in Coombs’ Gulch, thereby removing all suspicion, that something had gone wrong between them and Jonathan had killed them both. The world thought he was mentally ill at best or a monster at worst.

But none of that was true. She knew that. She knew Jonathan. He had his faults, and things had been bad between them at the end. His drinking had grown out of hand. He was like a shadow that somehow crowded the house. He was angry over something. He seemed to harbor some kind of deep, dark sadness, which he never revealed – but she knew him. He was incapable of the things the world suggested. He could never hurt a child, much less his own. He loved Jacob as much as any decent father, maybe more. And he had loved her, too. She remembered their times together – dating, the wedding, their honeymoon, Jacob’s birth. They were once happy and very much in love.

The image of the last time she saw Jonathan flashed through her mind: head down, woozy with drugs, dressed in a hospital gown and escorted by orderlies the size of linebackers. Something happened in those mountains. Perhaps she didn’t know him anymore, and, in these last weeks as she faced the cold, lonely terror alone, she wondered if, perhaps, she had ever truly known him at all.

But that was not yet an admission she was willing to make.

Mary refused to sacrifice her history, everything she knew, by admitting on national television that she had no idea who her husband was, that he could very well be a killer and a monster. She would not let that pound of flesh be taken – not right now, and not by Sonya Martinez.

“No. There’s no way. Jonathan was…” – Mary paused for a moment, her throat suddenly tightening – “…is…a good man.”

* * *

The lights went off. The halos were gone. The angels disappeared and were replaced by mere mortal men and women. The crew started moving their gear, and the world went back to its dull colors, the facade of life. The pretty-but-not-too-pretty Sonya hugged her, but Mary could barely bring her arms around for an embrace before the reporter said a few hollow words and walked off into the darkness of the studio. Crewmen stripped Mary of the recording gear and led her out to the front offices and the glass doors that opened to the parking lot in front of the network branch office.

Detective Rick Gerrano met her at the doors and walked her to her car.

“How did it go?”

“Hard.”

“I know,” he said. “It’ll air tonight, and we’ll see what kind of response we get. This kind of publicity can bring people out of the woodwork. Get people talking. We just need to find a thread to follow.”

“Like finding your way out of a labyrinth,” she said.

“Kind of like that, yeah.”

But the labyrinth was a trap; it was stalked by a monster.

Detective Gerrano shook her hand. His hands were cold from standing outside, and his grip was viselike, practiced with condemning the guilty. “We’ll see what comes of it, and I’ll be in touch,” he said and then left.

Mary was alone again. She could hear the sound of the highway droning in the distance, beneath the gray, wintering sky, and in that moment she felt she was stuck in some kind of eternity, condemned to this lifelessness forever.

It was a forty-five-minute drive back to her house. She didn’t want to go there. She dreaded it, in fact. But for now there was nowhere else to be, and she was told she should stay there on the off chance that Jacob returned or a phone call was placed by a witness or the person who took him.

The silence of being alone was awful, and she played the radio as she drove, occasional news reports buffering songs of love, life and loss that musicians tend to capture with two-line rhymes.

She stopped at the intersection where the bus had let Jacob off. She could see her house and driveway just through the small copse of trees, which were bare and gray in the cold. She wondered if this was all just some kind of dream from which she would wake, that it was an alternate reality to which she’d been transported in that moment when she stared into the woods behind her home and saw into the eyes of a stranger. If one thing – just one second – had been different that day, her life would be different; Jacob would be home. It wasn’t fair that such horrid weight should hinge on one split second, one coincidence, one decision. That was an unfair burden of life, and it made her think that life was not what it seemed, that it was, in fact, some kind of false light, a holograph meant to tease, test and eventually destroy. But for what purpose, she did not know. This can’t be it. This can’t be reality. She wanted to tear through it as if it were a movie screen, but that was impossible. Everything was just too real – empty, hollow and real.

She was trapped here in this world, in this ungodly version of reality, this tragedy played out on a stage she could not leave.

She opened the door to the house, the culmination of her and Jonathan’s life together, a place they had worked and saved for to raise a family and live a quiet life tucked into an average neighborhood. The scratches were still on the door, the five-finger grooves that sliced across the barrier between the outside world and what they had created inside. She stared at them for a minute. Something had tried to get inside, to get at her and Jacob. What was it? No one had an answer.

The silence overwhelmed her. Mary went inside, put her bag down and looked around the empty living room, the kitchen, the stairway to Jacob’s bedroom. The afternoon seemed to stretch out long and terrible before her, and she realized she had nothing to do – nothing she could do – but sit in the awful silence.

The guilt and rage and regret built up inside – a ball in her gut that seemed to expand with every moment, with every second, in which her child was gone and her husband locked up and her life no longer her own. She didn’t know what to do, and perhaps that was the worst thing of all.

Mary walked to the kitchen sink and peered out through the small window that looked on the sloping backyard and the trees beyond, the place where she had seen that stranger on the day Jacob disappeared.

She stared into those dead trees with their branches intersecting at angles, forming fractal patterns, one on top of the other, mesmerizing her as they reached farther and farther into the depths, beyond what she could see with her eyes. What was out there? Beyond what anyone could see? What hid just out of sight, behind the trees and in all the unknown dark spaces?

The woods seemed to rush up to her. The yard disappeared beneath it, until it swallowed the whole house. The neighborhood disappeared. The world grew dark, and she found herself alone in a cabin in the woods at night – the trees innumerable, the possibilities endless, the horror overwhelming. It was a dreamscape, as if she had suddenly plunged into a dream within a dream, or, perhaps, a nightmare. She wondered if in that moment she understood what Jonathan had seen on that trip, if the madness she saw out there had found its way inside, into their lives. She wondered if that was where Jacob was hidden, in that dark maze of forest and frozen ground and silence.

She thought she could see, at the edge of her vision, a small figure standing among the trees. She strained her eyes to see if it was him. She heard a whisper follow through the branches, carried on the wind, like the voice of a frightened child standing over his mother’s bed in the night, whispering about monsters.

She reached out into the abyss, and something awful reached back.