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

possibility. And the world is not necessarily a better place with William Atwater out of circulation and some of his secrets spilled, but at least it is safer. There is some satisfaction for me in knowing I’ve been instrumental in making that happen.

Beyond that, home is soft corners, dull edges. Home reminds me, again, of other homes at different times. Other lives. It makes me think for a time about Vancouver, too. About what had and hadn’t happened there. About desert islands and peeled grapes and different outcomes. And for a single morning, I am choked with a regret so detailed it is like a spider living in my heart.

I ramble the forest. I wander scant trails probably made by deer. Wander also country roads. It passes the time. More than that, it gives me a point from which to begin to process many things. To place them in context. The walking begins to have a meditative quality, letting me see the continuity of life and how the more things are stretched in different directions, the more some aspects of them come to be the same.

I go out to the garage and unearth the television I’d packed away. I dust it off and settle in to watch the twenty-four-hour cycle of news about William Atwater. For once, I have an interest in the outcome. I want to know what the police did with the tidbits they’d been given, and I wonder if they will be able to extract everything from him that they need.

Watching the news is as distressing now as it was before. Talking head after talking head, expert after expert opining in onerous, knowing tones, dredging up endless details, as though they believe that the smallest thing will be relevant to the larger story. It seems to me a form of brainwashing, and yet for what are our brains being washed? What outcome is being shared in which we need to believe?

On the television, psychiatrists opine on Atwater’s mental condition, even though they have not been anywhere near him. On the screen, a well-known news personality talks with Atwater’s aunt about what he was like as a child. The presenter is a celebrity, as well known—or better—than the notorious subject under discussion. It’s hard not to be diverted by his familiar and beautiful profile; the helmet-like smoothness of his hair. We cut to a different news personality; less well known. She talks with the arresting officer. Both are giving us their opinion on Atwater’s state of mind. From what I hear and from what I know, neither are particularly close.

My ears perk up when the officer says Atwater had been found and apprehended in an RV parked in a state park on California’s Central Coast. There is no mention of a phantom woman vigilante who had captured Atwater, then tipped the police off. And I am relieved about that, of course. But a part of me is also disappointed in ways I don’t truly understand. It’s not that I want acknowledgement. Not really. It is potentially disastrous for any sort of finger to be pointed at me. But I would have thought some aspect of the true story would come out. The fact that it has been totally suppressed makes me think there is a reason for that. And I wonder at the nature of that. And I wonder what it means.

After a while there is a press conference. Here the police mention Hoyo Lago. Camera crews are dispatched and the tone of the story changes again.

Finally, action—though now it is of the most horrific kind. The bodies of children, some of them ten years dead, are brought back to the light. Tents are set up over excavations. I can see this from a distance on television, the familiar locale rendered unfamiliar again by all of this activity. It looks like an archaeological dig. I stop myself. Realize. That is, of course, what it is.

Forensics goes in, as well as more traditional branches of the detective arts. After a while, news trickles back to us, the waiting public. Bits and pieces over time and all of it is reported in breathless tones and accompanying still photos.

And so many horrid details. Too many. They had discovered that the decomposed corpse found at the furthest edge of the space wore the outfit little Sally Lund had been wearing when she disappeared. Or still more exacting forensic and detective work: the little boy found near the base of a huge and twisty oak had his femur broken in just the same place as had little Riley Rajagopal, gone missing some eight years before. Dental work. Jewelry. Recovered toys. DNA. Pieces of a gruesome puzzle come together piece by painful piece. It is impossible to watch. Difficult, also, to look away.

The garden theme has been adhered to beyond metaphor. It is horrible to see the story unravel; watch the pieces being put together. A twisted jigsaw that makes my heart weep. Every moment.

A carefully lettered “headstone” was buried just beneath the earth that covered each child. This discovery produces an almost physical reaction. It is beyond horrible. It is unthinkable. And yet it provides the information needed to know how all of these pieces fit and who all of these children were. And with their identities, we also learn Atwater’s impressions of each victim.

We learn, for instance, that little Contessa MacDonald had been a “clinging vine.” So she had needed to be planted in shade and near others of her kind. Exhumation has disclosed wounds less severe than on some of the others, as though Atwater had felt the need to be more gentle with this little vine than some of the others. On the other hand, little Daniel Croft had been “willful and in need of discipline,” and not all of the results of those words are shared with the public. And yet we know.

And all of it is horrifying. All of it is beyond thought. The idea of a garden.