Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

of the news cycle. The tone is different now than it was a few days ago. I sense it right away. More urgent. It is this urgency that catches my ear and it doesn’t take long to determine what the talking heads are all chirping about.

When last I’d tuned in, Atwater’s location was a big question mark. Extrapolations based on where he had last killed and the pattern from where he had killed before. Now there has been a sighting, not 100 percent confirmed but strongly suspected, at a beach community in the southern part of the county in which he normally lives.

The talking heads are happy now. Magpies on a fence. There is a lot of shiny stuff here to go over. Police have leads but also there is speculation that Atwater might not be alive. Dead by his own hand, and don’t let the pearly gates hit you on the way out.

“It is not clear how William Atwater, who has now killed at least sixteen children in and around the San Pasado area, has thus far managed to elude custody.” The county is roughly five thousand square miles, we are told. It incorporates miles of beaches, acre upon acre of rich and fertile farmland, a few lakes large enough to support boating and even fishing, a university town, some mountainous areas, and some densely forested regions.

The area under discussion is not huge, but it is varied enough to provide potential hiding places. And, after all, I remind myself, there is no reason I know of that will make him stay within the boundaries of the area in which he was born.

This brings to mind a picture of some feral creature, forced by nature to stay within a territorial area determined at his birth. Some pull of instinct. Something pure and primal.

Or maybe it’s just all he knows.

The images wash over me. The ones I see on the screen. The ones I recall from the previous week. And then a bunch from my own personal library, supplemented by memory. Children. All of them. I almost can’t bear it. Like the parents I see in the news, in that moment I feel as though I’d have trouble walking. Trouble standing erect.

I sip my wine. Outwardly calm, blinking away the feelings that surface.

The balance of the day of traveling and seething make things worse not better, and by the time I get home, I pad around the tiny rooms of my little cottage like a caged panther or some other cat too large to be constrained by the walls of a house. I’d expected coming home to soothe me, but it doesn’t, and the walls seemed to reverberate with voices that aren’t there. I feel awash in a sea of uselessness. Even the things that had previously given me some pleasure leave me feeling empty. It’s as though I no longer have a place or purpose. Or maybe more like, I haven’t had those things for such a long time, but something has now made it violently clear. I feel on the edge of something that is spiraling out of control.

I think of that pure column of happy I felt briefly in Vancouver. That tiny slice that felt like infinite possibility. Is it him that I miss? And what we’d shared in Vancouver? Or what had been possible—for a moment—for us? I found him, then I lost him. I want to howl at the moon.

If it were only that, it would be enough. But that is only a single facet of this diamond and each facet reflects on the others with a razor sharpness. Alone, one facet could cut. Together, they threaten to rip my insides to shreds. And each one is about loss. Loss of love. Loss of life. Loss of humanity. It feels like I could go on citing these facets, riding them down: a death spiral of loss leading to a sea of helplessness because, of course, there is nothing that can be done.

And then I realize that I’m wrong. Of course, there is something I can do. Something that both my profession and my background have combined to make me better equipped for than maybe anyone else on Earth. It is a ridiculous thought—I know that as soon as it hits. And beyond the rational, certainly. But even just the thought of it gives me purpose. And, with that, it gives me direction. I am in motion almost before I know what I’m doing. And rational hasn’t had a lot to do with me for a long time, in any case.

I begin to research. Before long, I am more of an expert on William Atwater than the world probably needs. Like most people in the West in the 21st century, Atwater has left an electronic trace as long as he’s been packing some sort of device, which has been his entire adult life. I come quickly to believe that somewhere, in all that electronic detritus, I will find a clue to where he is. And why do I need to find him? I’m not sure of that, but I know that I must and am equally certain that I will. Confident. I know he is somewhere. It is just a matter of narrowing down the where.

And so I settle in, at first searching for the electronic trail, then putting energy towards trying to read and understand it. There was a brief time when he had toyed with both Twitter and Instagram at the same time a lot of others had done so. Both feeds have long been neglected, but here one can see glimpses of forests and the occasional lunch. No real clues there, other than a location. For everything he’d tweeted or Instagrammed, perhaps five years before, he’d been in the north part of his county. This is a slim clue, hardly worth noting. I keep it anyway.

A plain old identity search on the major engines produces an equally thin stream. He played baseball in high