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

“Something.”

“I don’t know.”

I’m straining to hear now, truly.

“Was he cruel?” I ask it as gently as I can.

“I … I don’t think so.” I let it ride. And then, “Maybe. Sometimes to me. There was something … other about him. He had big thoughts, I think.” This last has been said with a kind of tragic hopefulness. Like you know what the outcome is, but you’re still wishing. I have been a mother. I don’t begrudge her the sentiment.

“How can I find him?” The words are there between us. They have no weight on their own. I can almost hear her ponder the question: decide how to answer.

“I don’t know for sure,” she says after a while. “I know he always loved Morning Bay. And the road there. Especially the golden road.”

“I don’t understand. The golden road—” But then I stop talking because I hear the click that means a landline has terminated connection.

The abrupt end of the call doesn’t sit well with me at first. I think about it and ascribe meaning to the act. Then I realize it is probably just some self-protection. How often must that phone ring right now? How many times every day. And what if you have no answers? And what if your heart breaks every time the phone rings? Or lifts in fear. After a while, you hang up. And before very long, you probably stop picking it up at all.

I ponder the words she gave me, then check things out. Morning Bay is a beach community at the southernmost end of the county. I can’t connect it to anything else I know about Atwater. It’s just another place. I file it away.

I try to find the half-siblings; but they have all flown. Certainly, if there were any landlines there, they’ve all gotten rid of them by now.

I speak with former teachers. All of the ones I manage to reach feel there had been something wrong at home. However, considering the tenor of the news for the last weeks, it is difficult to tell if at least some of what they feel hasn’t been tempered by seeing their former student’s face plastered all over CNN. One thing comes through though: the causes are difficult to pin down. He’d always been one of many in an overburdened system, plus some sort of genetic boat had sailed, and maybe he’d been left too far behind.

Everybody knows that a William Atwater doesn’t happen in isolation. I am shocked to find that, as I research, most of what I discover is cliché. It’s like I’m reading about a Movie of the Week. And not a very good one, at that.

Paint a picture of a serial killer. The most popular of those paintings looks like this: born into poverty and abuse, predestined—or so it seems—for the life he ends up living. One can fill in the blanks without trouble. Neglect, pain, lack of love: the perfect recipe; the perfect storm. And self-esteem never existed, having been snubbed out like a snail close to the time of his birth. Snubbed out with alacrity and intent.

One imagines a little flower, reaching up for the sun; the cloud of his reality blocking the light for year after year. I think of my own plants, now dead. Without the right care, they wither. Maybe eventually die. But not before they become twisted in their efforts to survive. I saw that, in my garden.

And so here we are.

It is in the course of these telephone interviews with teachers, friends, and even a few distant relatives that I come to have a sort of dark sympathy for William Atwater. I can feel the painful paths that have led to wherever he is now. The things that have created the monster we all now see night after night and hour after hour on television. The sympathy is tainted, of course. And imperfect. Empathy twisted. But beyond all the hype the media machine is pushing, and even beyond the atrocious acts he has committed, there is a human. He is flawed beyond the usual and even broken and misshapen, but he is more like me than I would have at first thought. We have more in common than we do not. This thought could shock me to self-evaluation, but fortunately, I’m on a mission so I don’t dwell on it.

On a practical level, the interviews help me to hone, not just Atwater’s personality, but the way he thinks and the way he processes information. As I research, I start sticking electronic pins into a map on my computer. For every location mentioned by a former friend or classmate or teacher, I pop in another pin. I add a few for the ones I find on social media. After a while, a couple of areas are as thick with pins as the back end of a hedgehog.

“He is out there.” This time the talking head is a forensic-psychologist-turned-mystery-novelist, and the expert du jour. He is over sixty, yet his face is weirdly unlined, and his thick dark hair is shorn close to his head. So close, you get the occasional flash of pink scalp. “He is hiding,” he adds, exposing perfect white teeth while spreading his hands wide. An eloquent gesture. “But he will be found.”

The statement is so fabulously obvious that the interviewer seems stunned. She has nothing to say to this. Then she recovers.

“Dr. Uxbridge, what can you tell us about the methods being used to locate William Atwater? Is there anything that, in your opinion, could be done that is not now being done? Are the powers that be really pulling all the stops?” The clichés emerge easily. They feel comfortable on the ear. They are effortless for her; for us.

“I don’t think being critical of law enforcement agencies is at all the correct path at this point.”

“That wasn’t my intent …”

“The local police in that area are a particularly overburdened agency. I have it from very good sources that they