“Well, yeah, I did, too. When I was six.”
“And I think your mom was a real jerk for telling you the truth.”
Angela shrugged. “I’m glad she was honest. And I give Dad props for sticking around.” Was that why her mother had made grieving her full-time job? She had gone to such lengths to haul Douglas to the altar, losing him was too much? Something to think about. “Also, I’m not sure I was bait. I think I was more like the canary in the coal shaft.”
“Angela, that’s awful!” Leah cried, but then couldn’t stop giggling. “You guys have the oddest way of looking at the world.”
“Look who’s talking,” Archer said fondly.
Angela had to admit it: She hadn’t thought they’d all be laughing as they drove through the gates of Illinois Correctional Campus. What did that say about her? And them?
That things will be different this time. Because I’m different, and Archer’s definitely different, and we have Leah Nazir, and a new detective, and we’re finally going to get it done.
Please God.
SIX
1640
OXFORD, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia.*
So it was coming for him again, the serious ailment, the settled humor. The timing was dark and sweet because with the beauty and simplicity of knowing when you are predicted to succumb, if one so chooses, you can make the astrologer a seer or a liar.
“So, a seer,” he said aloud. Friends would have been surprised to hear how low and hoarse he sounded. When it was on him, he went days without speaking. Or bathing, he remembered, glancing at his reflection in the mirror. Or shaving. Or eating. He couldn’t even muster the will to gasp in horror at his reflection. What little energy he had he needed for breathing. There was room for nothing else.
Ah, but euphoria might be on the way! He knew that as a dying brain fought and clawed for oxygen, chemicals flooded the system with joy and jubilation in a burst of biochemistry. That would be delightful, but it wasn’t a requirement. All he required was nothing. Forever.
He changed into a (reasonably) clean suit even as part of him knew it was idiotic: He’d shuffle off the mortal coil, but not before pissing and shitting himself. But the idea of ending it all in the same pajama pants he’d lived in for the last month was unpleasant.
He found the rope, ran it through his fingers for the tenth, sixtieth, hundredth time. Sturdy, strong. The knot would hold, and the beam, and the chair (until he had no use for the latter—or, he supposed, the ladder he needed to reach the noose).
No note, at least not in the traditional sense. Friends would say he had been writing his suicide note for the last three decades: The Anatomy of Melancholy.* Five printings in seventeen years, and every page dedicated to recognizing, treating, and enduring that wretched and serious ailment.
His friends would also point out his inconsistency on suicide. He had expressed conflicting points of view about the last act, stating at times that taking one’s own life was a natural consequence of the fiend Melancholia, as a tumor was of cancer, and other times seeing it as a moral choice. Readers had chided him for the disparate views, as they did not understand a fundamental truth of his condition: Sometimes he wished to be dead. And sometimes he did not.
It would never be done. The Anatomy of Melancholy could never be done, which was the work’s most dreadful and wonderful characteristic. And he was tired.
So then, what next? He positioned the chair, tossed the rope, tightened the knot, and wondered about what he would face as he left. Nothing? Or choirs of angels? Or another life?
What if I come back? What if Melancholia finds me again?
Don’t think of it. Don’t. He stepped off the chair and simultaneously gave it a savage kick, so there was no way to get his feet back under him, so his traitorous brain couldn’t rebel and force his legs to find purchase.
What if it finds me?
Don’t.
But what if it does?
Don’t.
Oh please, please d—
SEVEN
Prisons were like hospitals and gas stations: No matter where they were, or what size they were, or who ran them, or who was in them, they always smelled the same. Cleaning products and sweat, with a slight aftertaste of urine and ennui.
“Urine and ennui”? Get a grip, Chambers.
Detective Jason Chambers put his book (The Gashlycrumb Tinies: A Very Gorey Alphabet Book)* aside to focus on the Drake contingent, who were nearly finished jumping through the bureaucratic hoops necessary to visit an inmate in the state of Illinois.
He’d inherited the Drake file from his predecessor, a dour grouch who had never warmed up to Angela Drake and didn’t mind if she—or anyone within bitching distance—knew it.
“One of them Insighter freaks,” Detective Kline had confided. “Had the fucking balls to tell me I was Joey Vacher!”
“Who— Oh. You mean Joseph Vacher?”
“Yeah, if you can fuckin’ believe it.”
“This was upsetting news?” Chambers guessed, barely making an effort to appear interested.
“Yeah, no shit.” Kline had been packing his desk, an exhausting (judging by the moon-shaped sweat stains on his tan shirt) and smelly (going by . . . well . . . the smell) task he seemed glad to break off from. He slumped into his desk chair, which let out a wheeze as it took his weight. “Said it right to my face! ‘Hey, Kline, you used to be some dumbass frog serial killer.’”
Chambers, who had spent far too much time with Kline in the last month, had an idea what the problem was. “Which you took exception to. Not the part about you being a killer . . .”
“No way was I ever that loser.”
“Just not that killer.”
“Damn right!” Kline rubbed his sweaty forehead, turning drops of sweat into dark streaks. It was amazing how filthy you could get just pushing files around.
“Your standards,” Chambers guessed, “would have been too high in any life.”
“Hey, if I was ever gonna kill myself like a pussy, I would have done it right the first time. Stupid SOB managed to fuck that up twice. Cut his own throat—lived. Shot himself—lived. In the face! Twice! Lived! How the fuck can you fuck that up?”
“I’ll assume that’s rhetorical.” Chambers himself had taken a statement from someone who had jumped off a three-story building and lived (a quadriplegic to the end of her days, but alive) and met a teenager who had aimed for his own eye, but the bullet ended up plowing a path around the circumference of his skull, leaving him with a shocking scar and no loss of cognitive function. He hadn’t even lost the eye. In other words: Such things happen, as any doctor, cop, or Insighter could testify.
Kline ignored him and plowed ahead. “Even setting aside that bullshit, if I was gonna be some creeper frog psycho—”
“Isn’t your wife French?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t.”
“If I was gonna kill anyone, I woulda stuck to one sex. This guy was all over the place—a woman, teenage girls, teenage boys. And shepherds! He’s creeping around the countryside murdering friggin’ shepherds! What the fuck? No way was that me.”
“You would have eschewed shepherds,” Chambers guessed. “And killed a higher class of people.”
“Like hookers!”
“You think herding sheep is worse than prostitution?”
Kline ignored the question. “I wouldna been sloppy about it, either, I don’t care if we’re talking this month or fifty years ago.”
“Or a hundred twenty years ago, since that’s when Vacher was active.”
Kline made a waving away motion with both hands. “Snatched his last victim in earshot of her family. She kicked up a fuss and boom! Fucker’s caught. I wouldna got caught. And if I did get caught, I wouldna confessed. And if I did confess, I wouldna pussy out by trying for an NGI.* And if I did pussy out with an NGI, when it didn’t work I’d have taken my death sentence like a man. This guy, they had to drag his pussy ass to the chopper.”
“Guillotine.”