Authors: Alex Dolan
The Euthanist (38 page)
I still had a few forks, and now Veda had his own quiver. The three of us formed a triangle. Helena looked at me and then back to Veda, questioning why he had weapons in his hands. “Baby?”
Veda didn’t respond.
She kept us at bay with the knife, but the dynamic had changed. She no longer had the momentum. Instead of lashing out at us, she held the knife to protect herself from us.
Veda struck next, swift as a scorpion. While she aimed the knife at me, he plunged two forks so that they rooted in her middle back and right ass cheek. He howled at her, his voice not as untamed as Helena’s, nor as afflicted as Leland’s. He sounded lustful for violence.
Helena slashed through the air behind her and nicked his forearm, right atop his self-inflicted scars. He plunged another fork between her shoulders. Another fork found her kidney. She squawked as if something had caught in her windpipe, and then her arms spasmed. I plunged two forks into her chest. I operated without thinking, but looking back, I suppose that was the moment when it started to feel wrong.
Helena’s arm dropped, and her fingers uncoiled. The knife fell silently on the carpet. I kicked it toward the staircase. I wanted to stop then. Since Leland first cuffed me, all I wanted to do was walk away. The more I involved myself, the more my actions and their consequences tied to those of the Moon family. I wanted all of this to finish. With Helena Mumm disarmed, I might finally leave them.
I dropped my forks on the carpet.
Veda kept his. He wasn’t finished.
He planted his remaining forks into the woman. Now unarmed, her entire body was a target; he drove the prongs until they hit bone. The spilled blood inebriated him in a sadistic frenzy, until his last fork entered her stomach, where she had stabbed his father. When he stepped back, he panted and stared at the blood on his hands.
Helena’s legs quavered. She dropped to her knees, her weight quaking the floor. She stretched her arms toward the ceiling, possibly longing for whatever god would have her. A dozen steel rods protruded from her, glinting in the cascade of sunlight from the front window. Helena Mumm had turned into an effigy of Saint Sebastian.
I attended to the Moons. Tesmer held her bloody calf, but the gash in her leg didn’t seem major. I was worried for Leland. He could have passed for dead but for a fluttering gasp, as a rivulet of blood drooled from his lips. His eyes couldn’t focus, and he was possibly delirious from blood loss. While I dialed 911, I saw Veda from across the room.
Veda had retrieved the chef’s knife from the floor. My cell phone was ringing at my ear. He walked back over to Helena, who was sobbing from both the pain and the understanding that she had lost. The emergency operator picked up, but I was too transfixed by the youngest Moon to speak.
With both hands, Veda thrust the knife into Helena’s neck until the blade disappeared. Blood sprayed on his arms and stomach. Veda cherished the moment. I saw the relief in his face. His hands stayed on the handle so he could savor the woman’s every tremor, and he rotated the blade so she would feel it more. She convulsed as she expired, her eyes frozen on him.
Sometime later, I would realize that I hadn’t issued a word of protest.
Chapter 18
Mortality may be universal, but people experience death in any number of ways. I can’t pretend to understand what that experience is, since I have never gone through it (
yet
, I suppose). When it happens to me, I don’t know whether it will come as a relief, even deliverance, or whether it will seem like nagging regret over a life unfulfilled, or even the bleak misery of knowing I’ll be orphaned again once I sever my connection to the world of the living. Some clients have expressed a mournful resignation of leaving life incomplete, while others have seemed petulantly exuberant that they were exiting the world on their own terms. Walter Gretsch ended his life in confusion, haunted by his victims, and as I like to imagine, possibly tortured by the thought that he might pass into an eternal torment for the things he’d done. When Helena Mumm died, I sensed that she felt cheated by her life, denied a child and a family, and in denial about the pain she had inflicted on others.
Those who witness the transformation of the living into the dead respond to the phenomenon with vastly different reactions as well. Families of my clients have wept from the possible selfish desolation that comes from understanding that you will never see that person again. After unearthing the offspring buried within that redwood cathedral, the wreckage of those families reminded me how mortality might harrow the best of us. Conversely, Veda Moon took gluttonous satisfaction in watching Helena pass on, and possibly drew the strength he needed to move on from his own trauma.
Since death can be experienced in infinite variations, I cannot place a universal value on it. This also means that I cannot place a universal value on what it means to bring death to another person. Let’s just say I can’t approach my work with the same certainty as before. So I’m taking a break and considering other ways I might help ease suffering.
Shortly after Helena Mumm died, I visited Gordon Ostrowski at San Sebastián. I didn’t say anything to him. Not that I was afraid to talk to him. I simply sat on the other side of the glass and observed him. At first Gordon leered at me, as though no time had passed, and I was the same teen who cowered under his pregnant volcano. But eventually he recognized my contempt, the way I studied him as nothing more than a curiosity, an iguana in a terrarium. He called the guard to take him away, and that’s the last I’ve seen him. I don’t believe Gordon possesses the capacity to grieve, but I hope he will buckle under the frustration that he was lost any control he once held over other people.
Almost a year has passed. It is August in Boston, and I’m starting medical school in two days. The MCATs were a bitch, but I have a good head for numbers, and I perform well under pressure. The summer in this city is hotter than what I was used to in California. Muggy too, and the mosquitoes love my pale skin. Everything’s brick out here; and the squirrels on campus are smaller and gray. At last, I feel disconnected from where I grew up.
Out here I’m Ella. Pamela to school administrators who don’t know better. Pam to some. Never Kali. I feel younger than a year ago. My hair grew longer, and maybe it makes me look more feminine. The university sweatshirt definitely makes me feel girlish. I’ve started to meet my classmates at some wine mixers. Turns out, med school students can be just as buffoonish as firemen when it comes to drinking. I hope this makes it easier for me to adjust.
Jeffrey Holt visited me when he was speaking in town. The Holt family is back living up at the cottage in Shallot. He’s gotten over being angry with me, and we had drinks and watchfdiaed a Sox game at a bar. He pitched me on coming back to the network. I told him I wouldn’t take on clients now, not while I’m in school. He teased out the idea of me helping with some of his policy work, and I said I’d think about it.
At the site, they found eighteen girls; more than they thought were taken. The FBI let Leland reopen the case. His stomach is mostly healed. He can’t run much, but it was a close call when he got to the hospital, and he seems grateful that he survived at all. Leland and I trade e-mails, and that’s how I found out that Veda moved in with Cindy Coates. They’re coming out to Boston next spring to run the marathon, and I’ll give them a couch to sleep on. Leland tells me that for all of Veda’s crankiness, Cindy softens him up a bit.
Today I’m shopping for books and wandering the stores in Cambridge. Emmanuel skips on a slack leash by my ankles. In one of the bookstores I find Jeffrey Holt’s book.
One of the few things here that reminds me of home is the abundance of vintage clothing stores. Second-hand clothes, whatever you want to call them. Strolling down the lumpy brick sidewalk, I’m drawn to one particular shop because of the wigs displayed in the windows.
Inside, I try on a bright pink bob with bangs. Maybe I linger longer than I should. Looking in the mirror, you can barely tell it’s me.
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