The Burning Soul (6 page)
Authors: John Connolly
Tags: #Mystery, #Azizex666, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Thriller
‘And when she found out what we wanted she fought back, and we had to lie across her to keep her from getting up and running away. We kept touching her, and she said that she’d tell the police what we’d done, and her uncles – because she didn’t have a father, he was gone – and they and their friends would come for us and they’d cut our balls off. She started to scream, and Lonny covered her mouth with his hand. He pressed down real hard, so that her nostrils were blocked too. I told Lonny that we ought to let her go. I could see her eyes growing wide, and she was having trouble breathing, but Lonny wouldn’t take away his hand after I told him to. I tried to pull him off her but he was bigger and stronger than I was. Eventually Selina started bucking, and Lonny sat on her chest, and then she stopped moving at all, even though her eyes were still open and I could see my reflection in them.
‘I started crying, but Lonny told me to quit it, and I did. We covered her with rotten straw, and we left her there. It was an old barn on an abandoned farm. We figured it would be a while before she was found. We swore, Lonny and I, that we wouldn’t tell what we’d done, not ever, not even if the cops came for us and put us in separate rooms and interrogated us, like they did on the TV shows. If we both agreed not to speak, then they couldn’t do anything to us. We just had to stick to our story: We never saw Selina Day and we didn’t know anything about any old barn.’
All of this came out in a rush, like pus from an infected wound. It was spoken by an adult’s voice, but with the words and emphases of a child’s narration.
‘But somebody had seen us with her. He was a farmworker from out of state, an itinerant laborer. He heard that a black girl had gone missing, and he recalled the two boys he’d seen with a little black girl that day, a black girl in a red-and-black checked skirt, just like the description that the police had passed around. He went to the cops and told them what he’d seen. He had a good eye: He remembered what we looked like, what we were wearing, everything. Drake Creek wasn’t a big town, and they had us figured before he even stopped talking. They came for us, and they put us in separate rooms, just like on those shows, and a big detective told me that Lonny had put the blame on me, that it had all been my idea, that I’d tried to rape Selina Day and he’d wanted to stop me, and it was me who had suffocated her. He said that they’d have me tried as an adult, and they’d ask for the death penalty. He said I’d get the needle for what I’d done, and that I shouldn’t think it would be like going to sleep, because it wouldn’t be. I’d feel everything – the poison seeping into my veins, the pain as my organs shut down – and I wouldn’t be able to speak or cry out because the other drugs would have paralyzed me. And there would just be me in there, all alone, without my momma or my poppa. And he said that, sometimes, they deliberately screwed around with the drugs so it would hurt more, and maybe they’d do that to me to punish me for what I’d done, for trying to rape a little girl, and for killing her when she fought back.
‘But that wasn’t true. It had been Lonny’s idea all along, and he was the one who tried to take it too far, and he was the one who closed her nostrils and pressed his hand hard against her mouth so that she couldn’t breathe. I wanted to let her go, but he was scared of what she’d say, scared that he’d have his balls cut off.’
Haight had now regressed fully. His voice was higher, and he had slipped lower in his seat so that he appeared smaller. Even his suit looked too big for him. There were tears in his eyes, and he didn’t try to brush them away as they began to roll down his cheeks. He stared only inward, and I think that he had forgotten about our presence in the room, had forgotten even about the room itself and the reason he was there. Instead, he was fourteen years old, and back in a place that smelled of sweat and urine and vomit, and a big policeman with food stains on his tie was whispering to him of the pain that he was going to endure when they put the needle in.
‘I was so scared of dying, I forgot that North Dakota had abolished the death penalty in 1973.’ The ghost of a smile haunted his mouth, then fled back to the place where he kept all of his old specters. ‘So I told him what we’d done, but I wanted him to know that it wasn’t my idea. I’d gone along with it at first, but I was sorry now. I should never have done it, and I wished that Selina Day was still alive. I told him of how I’d tried to make Lonny stop. I even showed him how I’d grabbed hold of Lonny’s wrists in an effort to pull him off her. I remember that the detective patted me on the back when I was done, and brought me a soda. Then a lawyer came and asked if I’d been read my rights, and I couldn’t remember, and he and the detective got to talking, and the subject of my rights didn’t come up again after that. They let me see my momma and poppa, and my momma held me. My poppa could barely bring himself to look at me, not even when I told him that it wasn’t my fault, and that I hadn’t been the one who killed her. He was already sick then. He had to walk with a stick, and his skin had gone gray. He only lived for another three or four years, but I was always closer to my momma anyway.’
Haight drank the last of his water, and carefully put the cap back on. He held the empty bottle between his legs, his fingertips pressing down on the cap, as though it were a button that could cause the past to disappear, erasing all memories, all sins.
‘Lonny and I were tried as adults, and we spent eighteen years each in separate facilities, from juvenile to adult. The judge ordered that all records of the trial should be sealed, both so that we could get on with our lives upon our eventual release and for our own safety because it was said that Selina Day’s uncles were involved with the Black Liberation Army, although I don’t know how true that was. Looking back, I think it was just thrown into the mix, a way for the prosecutor to cover himself in case anything went wrong. Whatever the reasons, there was an agreement reached that we should be given new identities in the course of our incarceration, and those identities should be known only to a handful of people, but we only found that out later. I remember the judge telling us that we’d done a terrible thing, but he believed that everyone had the possibility of redemption within them, especially children. He told us we were to be given a chance to prove that, once we’d done our time.
‘After twelve years they moved us to out-of-state prisons to make the changes in identities run smoother. I was born William Lagenheimer, but I became Randall Haight between the state penitentiary in Bismarck and the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vermont. After a couple of years, they moved me to Berlin, New Hampshire, where I served out the last year of my sentence. They wouldn’t tell me Lonny’s new name, and I didn’t want to know anyway. I never wanted to see him again, after all the trouble he got us into. Eventually, I came to Maine.’
Haight pointed to the photograph of the weathered barn door.
‘This was the barn in which Selina Day died,’ he said. ‘They used that picture in some of the newspapers. These others I don’t know, but this one is, or was, in Drake Creek. I still see it in my dreams.’
He looked at his lawyer, seeking her response to this second telling of his story. She tried to smile encouragingly at him, but it was more like a grimace. He turned to me. His mouth opened, and he spread his hands as if to add something to the narrative – an apology, or an explanation for why this was all in the past, and how he was different now – but he seemed to realize that there was nothing more that could be said, so he closed his mouth, and folded his arms, and remained silent while he waited to hear what we had to say.
‘So someone has found out who you are?’ I said.
‘Yes. I don’t know who, or how, but yes, that’s it.’
‘It could be a prelude to blackmail,’ said Aimee.
‘Has there been a blackmail threat?’ I asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Aimee.
I shrugged. Beside me, the light of the setting sun reflected on the lenses of Haight’s spectacles, and I could no longer see his eyes.
‘For now, it seems that Mr. Haight here has two choices,’ I said. ‘He can stay where he is and deal with the consequences if this individual chooses to make public what he or she knows, or he can leave his home and go somewhere else. Maybe he can make contact with the authorities in North Dakota and see if they will provide him with another identity, although I guess he’d have to prove that he was in some form of danger as a consequence of his potential exposure, and even then new identities aren’t handed out so easily. Look, in the end, whatever the nature of his crime, he did his time. He was a child when Selina Day was killed, not an adult. Also, if one were to be cold-blooded about it, it’s a crime that was committed a long time ago, and in another state. If his identity is revealed, there may be people in Maine who’ll react badly, but he might also be surprised by how understanding folk can be.’
‘All that is true,’ said Aimee. ‘But there’s one detail that Mr. Haight hasn’t shared with you yet. It’s where he’s living. Why don’t you tell Mr. Parker where you’ve made your home?’
And I knew that this was the bait in the trap, the detail that she had deliberately held back from me, and as Haight began to speak I felt the jaws snap shut upon me, and I understood that I would not be able to turn away from this.
‘I live two miles from Anna Kore’s house,’ said Haight. ‘I live in Pastor’s Bay.’
5
R
andall Haight had resumed his seat in the reception area. The receptionist, shared by Aimee with the other businesses in the building, had gone home, so he was alone with his thoughts. He appeared dissatisfied as he left the room. It was there in the way that he held himself, in the pause before he closed the door behind him, the sense he gave that there was more to be said, or more that should have been said, and not by him. Our response – or possibly more correctly, my response – to his story had not satisfied him. I think that he might have been seeking some form of reassurance and consolation, not about the problem of the photographs, but about his own nature.
andall Haight had resumed his seat in the reception area. The receptionist, shared by Aimee with the other businesses in the building, had gone home, so he was alone with his thoughts. He appeared dissatisfied as he left the room. It was there in the way that he held himself, in the pause before he closed the door behind him, the sense he gave that there was more to be said, or more that should have been said, and not by him. Our response – or possibly more correctly, my response – to his story had not satisfied him. I think that he might have been seeking some form of reassurance and consolation, not about the problem of the photographs, but about his own nature.
It was now dusk outside, and the rain continued to fall. The lights of passing cars illuminated the parking lot, casting new shadows over the office in which Aimee and I sat. Dark patches remained in the branches of the tree. The ravens had not moved, and they made no sound. I felt the urge to take a handful of stones and force them from their perch.
Traitorous birds. Apostates.
‘Well?’ said Aimee.
We had not exchanged a word since Haight left the office at Aimee’s request so that we might discuss in private all that he had told us. The pictures of the barn doors remained on the desk. I moved them around with the index finger of my right hand, rearranging their order, as though the colors represented a code I could crack, and by doing so I would be allowed the revelation, the certainty, that I sought.
I was wondering where the lie was. It might be that I had grown more cynical as the years went by, or it might simply have been an atavistic instinct I had learned not to ignore, but a lie was hidden somewhere in Randall Haight’s testimony to us. It could have been a lie of deceit or a lie of omission, but it was there. I knew, because there is always a lie. Even a man like Haight, who, in his youth, was party to a terrible crime, and who had just confessed as much to two strangers, reducing himself in their eyes, would hold back at least one crucial detail. If nothing else, it was human nature. You didn’t give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left. There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified. The lie in Haight’s story was probably one that he had practiced, a rearrangement or omission of details that had now become crucial to his account of events, maybe to the extent that he no longer knew it as a lie at all. There had been a rehearsed element to his testimony, but I was not entirely certain that it had been solely for our benefit.
‘He’s lying,’ I said.
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know. I was watching him while he spoke, and there was something in the way he told his story. It was too
polished
, like he’d been preparing it for years in his head, waiting for the chance to perform it.’
polished
, like he’d been preparing it for years in his head, waiting for the chance to perform it.’
‘Maybe he has been. It was a turning point in his life – the worst thing that he’s ever done, or ever will do. It wouldn’t be surprising if he returned to it again and again, and constructed his own version of the crime and its aftermath. After all, he’s probably been trying to explain it to himself for years when he hasn’t been explaining it to cops or therapists.’
‘A version,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You described it as a “version.” That’s all it is. The only people who really know what went on in that barn are Randall Haight, Lonny Midas, and Selina Day, and the only one we’ve heard from is Randall Haight, who says that it wasn’t his fault, that he tried to stop the killing from happening, but Lonny Midas was too strong.’
‘Do we accept that that’s how we should think of him – as Randall Haight and not William Lagenheimer?’
‘That’s an interesting question. How does he see himself?’
‘I notice that you didn’t ask.’
‘I didn’t ask because I don’t think that it matters, for now. For your purposes, and in the eyes of his fellow citizens, he’s Randall Haight. For the most part, I imagine that’s how he thinks of himself. He’s had to accept the reality of his new identity, and whatever imagined history goes along with it, in order to survive.’
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