Page 48 of The Chain House

“Fuck you,” he said aloud, but in a whisper, because the last one had been the voice of Justice Minks. “Don’t ever touch me. Don’t ever touch me again,” he told the voice.

And Lizzie Hall reached for the towel that had come off during the scuffle with her husband—her dead husband—like she was no longer comfortable being naked in front of her neighbor. And the way she was looking at him now crushed his soul, eyeing him like she was full of fear of him, like he was the monster and not the dead sack of bones on the floor. She should be thanking him. That was crazy talk, he knew, but didn’t it hold a bit of truth?

Quit looking at me like that, he wanted to tell her, but instead said nothing because there was blood running from Jake Hall’s head, staining the carpet in a shape that looked a little like Texas; he’d split it good and wide just over the left temple.

His arms were shaking like he could still feel the impact in them through the bat.

There’s no way he’d swung hard enough to kill the man. But then again, hadn’t that been his intent all along? Maybe not all along, but in that exact moment—Jake Hall had been a bully beating on a defenseless woman, and in that instant, he’d wanted the man off this earth.

He needed to be taught a lesson.

He didn’t deserve to play the game of life because he didn’t follow the rules.

“Trevor …”

He wasn’t civilized.

“Trevor …”

He was a total asshole.

“Trevor!”

He turned and screamed, “What?”

And she cowered against the wall again, crying even harder now, and he felt like he’d really done it now. Severed any hope of remedying this situation. Maybe deep down he’d planned this out, killing Jake Hall and the two of them running off into fairytale land, but screaming at the one person now he wanted so badly to hug wasn’t the way to go.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Lizzie. When she didn’t respond, he said it again, but with more desperation, because he just realized he’d protected her from violence by using violence.

By going one step further.

By turning his bat into a weapon. A murder weapon.

What she didn’t know, and he couldn’t take the time to rationalize now, was that it hadn’t been just Jake he’d hit, but all of them, every one of the bullies who’d beat on him and ridiculed him and tortured him for being Tiny Tommy.

What’s done was done. After the brief thought of checking Jake’s pulse and deciding what was the point, he backed away from the scene, slowly at first—like maybe if he walked in reverse he could pretend none of it had happened—before turning from Lizzie and her dead husband and running out the door.

The cops would probably come soon. Maybe an ambulance.

He could either stay at home and wait and take whatever punishment was coming, or he could run. He’d run before, and he could run again.

And as he entered his house, all he could think of was Sam.

Everything he’d ever done in his life, for better or worse, had been for Sam.

And as he opened his dresser drawers and threw in clothes and underwear and socks, he said, “I’m sorry, Sam.” He grabbed a toothbrush and deodorant and his cholesterol meds and shoved them into the bag. The television was on in the living room. He’d left in such a hurry earlier he’d forgotten to turn it off, but truthfully, he didn’t even remember turning it on. The entire morning had been a hangover-induced blur. Below the TV was a row of shelving that held their photo albums. Sam often kidded them that nobody did photo albums anymore, and he’d tried to explain to his son that photo albums weren’t something someone did. But maybe he wasn’t totally wrong, because every one of the photo albums was full of pictures of things they’d done. Memories they’d made. As a family. And yeah, maybe he hadn’t added to the photo album collection since Annie died, maybe he’d gotten lazy, but the truth was it had hurt Trevor too hard to open them ever again. They were dusty even now, just like the baseboards in the dining room.

Trevor removed one album from the shelf and turned the pages, looking for one picture in particular. It wasn’t in that album, or the next, but halfway through the third one he found it, a picture of himself and Annie and Sam from twenty years ago, one they’d gotten a stranger to take of them in front of the chalet they’d rented in Gatlinburg. It was his favorite picture because he felt it was a trip, as far as pure happiness went, that could never be duplicated, and maybe it never was. But in it, Annie was beaming, her smile broad and honest and full of relief, and Sam stood between them, each of them with a hand on his shoulders, his smile equally as large and full of pure joy, because they were fresh off eating ice cream cones and they’d promised him an hour in the pool and then pulled pork, his favorite, for dinner.

Trevor was crying as he removed the picture from the clear plastic sleeve of the photo album, the surrounding pictures all from the same trip but not as special to him as that one. He stood from the floor, slid the picture into his shirt pocket, and faced the TV just as whatever program was on was interrupted by breaking news about Bethany Hawthorne. The news anchor’s voice-over said something about authorities now believing they knew who may be behind yesterday’s abduction of Beth Hawthorne and the murder of her security guard, about history coming back to haunt the Hawthorne family yet again in the name of Justice Minks, and they now had a sketched rendering of what the man may have looked like twenty years ago behind the infamous mask …

But it was mostly bee buzz to Trevor, because he couldn’t take his eyes off the TV screen and the sketch of a man Trevor knew all too well. Very few people, if any, had seen Justice Minks without his mask, and Trevor was one of them. He’d seen the face up close and personal, too close, so close, in fact, that Trevor could still see the raised ridge of the jagged scar across his face, could still recall the smell of his breath on his skin and the brownish-yellow hue of his coffee-stained teeth, when he’d grabbed Trevor by the collar and hissed, You forget me, Tommy. You got that. You forget I exist. I was never here. Or I’ll find you. I’ll find you and whatever life you manage to make after this, and I’ll ruin it. I will hunt you down and end you and everyone you love. The only question will be how many pieces I cut you into. And I won’t give a fuck who your brother is anymore.

CHAPTER21

WITH THE SKETCH of Justice Minks now out across the news outlets, Jennifer’s hope that the man would be recognized by someone was dampened by the sudden fear of her vulnerability.

The fear Minks would see the sketch, know she’d drawn it, and then come to hunt her down. If he could get to Bethany Hawthorne, he could get to her.