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“My own sister-in-law knows? She knows what you did?”
“Yes, but—”
“And she has said nothing?”
“To protect her family name! They have an image! Jesus, Ken! You know that! She caught me burying Alisha—” He cuts off, swift and permanent as the gallows.
Burying. It destroys Ken. His little girl. I know he had expected to never have his baby again, but the finality, the reality, is never the release people think it is.
“I’m so sorry.” Blabbers. “I just—I just—I’ve had to sleep on the couch ever since she caught me and she broke all my things and she was screaming about forcing me into therapy or chemical castration and—”
“Shut up. You. Shut. Up. Now.” No longer his brother. It’s in his eyes. Their family name is the same but from two different levels in Hell now. He croaks out the words like they are sand and he is underwater. The cold distance, the irrevocability of this godless situation creeping in his voice.
The soulless countenance of Ken McDonald changes. His demeanor changes. Becomes alien. Gone cold now. Never fear a man more than when hi
s callousness emerges and you didn’t see it coming.
I squeeze the gun tighter against Francis. “Where?”
“Promise my forgiveness,” the pervert says, so low the dirt hears him better than we do.
After a breath as long as God’s, after he can retrieve his voice since hearing the word burying, Alisha’s father speaks. He does not look up.
“I forgive you for your sins against—” but he cannot finish.
“Thank you.” Such relief.
“Where?” I say. The only word I can insert into this gunpoint conversation.
“Under the new herb garden we planted. The marigolds mark her headstone.”
Ken starts to cry. But he bares his teeth as well.
So desperate now, rooting for mercy anywhere it may be dug up: “She loved marigolds, right? I thought they’d be a sweet gesture, a nice thing for Alisha—”
“You don’t speak her name. Ever,” Ken says through teeth that must be carnivorous now.
I don’t want to ask if they have cooked with those herbs. If they have trimmed the flowers and put them in a vase on their kitchen table.
A diseased man in Francis. A terrible accomplice wearing the mask of a soulmate in his wife. Their own niece, entombed unceremoniously in their yard. Hidden. Cast off.
How many other children? I make a note to look up his previous addresses.
“Let me go now,” the molester asks. “Let me go. I did my part here...”
Ken looks with a galvanized fury. It makes my heart warm.
“Alisha sends her best.” An arctic tone. “You are not my brother. I want you to hear that from my mouth. I will cut your name in two.
“I will cut your name in two.”
He turns around and begins to walk away from us, bathing in the shadows that line this neighborhood. “You’ll understand that when I said I forgave you, I lied.”
Alisha McDonald’s broken father strides away from us to go unearth his dead child to give her some dignity. I told Ken as soon as he hired me the answers would come, but not without a price.
Ken steps up and off the street, past the lights and into the gloom and darkness. But then he stops. Stands bolt still.
All that emerging callousness doing its work. Ken doesn’t fight it; just welcomes it. It’s armor. The best kind. Transforms his core just past the edge of shadow where the light cannot reach him.
