AFTER NIGHTFALL, RYAN MET EMMA AT THE TOWNSENDS’ BROWNSTONE
in Pawtucket.
It had been Ryan’s idea to tell Emma everything that Chelsea’s parents knew about the night of the accident. He met her for coffee that afternoon and laid it all out for her exactly as Paul and Rachel had for him—from the fact that Babes had been a passenger in Chelsea’s car to his frantic run home without calling 911. Paul wasn’t keen on divulging so much information to the attorney general’s office, at least not with a warrant still out for Babes’s arrest, but Ryan convinced him that being straight with Emma was the best course.
Selling Rachel on a face-to-face meeting with Emma was another hurdle entirely.
“I can come back later,” said Emma, “if she’s not up to this.” She and Ryan were alone in the Townsends’ living room, Ryan seated on the couch and Emma in the armchair. Paul was in the master bedroom with his wife, trying to convince her that this was the right thing to do.
“Let’s give her a little more time,” said Ryan.
Silence returned, broken only by the steady tick of the clock on the wall—a reminder that time was not on their side.
“This must be so hard for Rachel,” Emma said. “Not to minimize what you and Paul have gone through, but it’s so hard when a mother loses a child.”
Ryan thought of all the joy—virtually his only joy—that Ainsley had brought him over the past three years.
“How is she doing, really?” said Emma. “I know a lot has been going on, but are you keeping your hand on her pulse at all?”
“We all try.”
Emma noticed the Bible on the coffee table. “Is this Rachel’s?”
“Yeah,” said Ryan. “She’s not overly religious, but she seems to turn to the Bible in times of stress. It was the same way when Chelsea died.”
Emma picked it up. It was a leather-bound version with silk ribbon markers. She turned to a marked page, read to herself for a moment, and stopped abruptly.
“What is it?” said Ryan.
“Do you know what your mother-in-law is reading?” said Emma.
“Not exactly, no.”
“This passage is marked in ink. It’s from Jeremiah 31:15,” she said, and then read aloud: ‘ “A voice heard in Ramah/mourning and great weeping/Rachel weeping for her children/and refusing to be comforted/because her children are no more.’”
Ryan recalled what Rachel had said earlier about the night of Chelsea’s accident—her fear that Babes would hurt himself out of shame if the police interrogated him, her fear of losing a son on top of a daughter.
Emma closed the book and laid it on the table.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Rachel, as she entered the room. Paul was at her side.
Ryan took a good look at her, and he saw a woman trying hard to be strong, but more than anything else, he saw a mother suffering as he’d never seen suffering before. And at that moment he came to a realization. Yes, she loved Chelsea, her beautiful and brilliant daughter who’d had it all—a rewarding job as a teacher, an exciting career plan, an amazing young child, and a man who would love her till the end of time. But for all his flaws and idiosyncrasies—maybe even
because
of them—Rachel loved Babes every bit as much. If not more.
Ryan greeted her with a kiss, and Emma shook her hand. Rachel took a seat next to Ryan on the couch, opposite Emma. Paul sat beside his wife.
Emma said, “I want to thank both of you for letting Ryan share these latest details about Babes.”
“Of course,” said Paul.
“Ryan seemed to think it was the right thing to do,” Rachel said cautiously.
“It was,” said Emma. “But now that you have been completely open and honest with me, I am going to do the same with you. Maybe you can help me.”
“I’ll sure try,” said Rachel.
Emma laid her briefcase on the coffee table and opened it.
Before she could begin, Ryan interjected. “Emma and I went over this earlier. Some of it’s pretty surprising. Shocking, even. Don’t take anything you see here as fact. Think of it more as clues. If you get upset and need a break, just let her know.”
Rachel nodded, though far from putting her at ease, Ryan’s words seemed to have made her more anxious. Her husband took her hand, but Ryan noticed that Paul’s hand was shaking a little, too.
Emma removed a copy of the first anonymous tip she’d received, the three-year-old newspaper with the coded sentence.
“This was tip number one,” said Emma. “Ryan and I initially agreed not to show it to you, knowing how hard it would be for you to see the newspaper report of Chelsea’s death again.”
“Okay,” said Rachel. “And you’re showing me this now because…”
“I want your honest opinion,” said Emma. She laid the newspaper in front of the Townsends.
Rachel looked away, then back.
“I’m sorry,” said Emma. “But if you just focus on the article and read the five underlined words in the numbered sequence, it forms a sentence: ‘I know who did it.’”
Rachel looked at it. “What is it you want to know?”
“Could this have come from Babes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does it look like his work?”
Paul and his wife exchanged glances. Paul said, “You would know better than I would, sweetheart.”
Rachel took a closer look. Then she glanced at Ryan, who gave her a look of encouragement, telling her it was okay to be honest.
“I would say yes,” said Rachel.
“Why?” said Emma.
“Babes has very poor penmanship. His numerals are even bad. Those handwritten numbers that accompany the underlined words—one through five—look like his handwriting to me.”
“Anything else that makes you think it’s from Babes?”
“The whole concept—numbering words and rearranging them into a sentence. That’s something Babes would do. And it’s logical that the three-year anniversary of Chelsea’s death would prompt Babes to implicate himself.”
Ryan said, “What do you mean implicate himself?”
“That’s what I think he means when he says ‘I know who did it.’ Babes is saying that he did it.”
“It’s interesting you say that,” said Emma, as she pulled the next document from her briefcase. “This was the second tip I received. For obvious reasons, we kept this highly confidential. I’m sharing this with you now because I don’t see any other way to sort out what’s happening with your son. And Ryan assured me that this information will not leave this room.”
“Of course,” said Paul.
Emma showed it to them, and surprise immediately registered on Rachel’s face upon seeing the photograph and the coded two-word sentence: “It’s him.”
“Brandon Lomax?” she said, her shock now tinged with anger.
“We don’t know if it was him,” said Emma. “This tip could be a crank. Could be a mistake.”
Paul said, “I can’t believe—”
“Rachel, Paul—please,” said Ryan. “Don’t be judge, jury, and executioner on this. Let’s go one step at a time. All Emma wants to know is: Does this second tip look like it’s from Babes?”
Rachel studied it, her face straining with thought. “Honestly, I can’t tell. The only handwritten marks on the page are the lines underneath the words and the numbers one and two in the margin. The underlining and the number one are just straight lines. That really only leaves the number two.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” said Emma. “I’ve prosecuted enough forgery cases to know that no respectable handwriting expert would render an unqualified opinion based upon a vertical line, two horizontal lines, and the number two. That’s part of the reason I haven’t pushed for a professional handwriting analysis.”
Ryan said, “Emma just wants your impression. Does it look the way Babes writes the number two?”
“That’s really hard to say,” said Rachel. “It’s difficult for Babes to write characters the same way on a consistent basis. This could be his handwriting, but that doesn’t jibe with his confession on the radio. As Babes sees it,
Babes
did it.”
“True,” said Ryan. “But the sentence ‘It’s him’ could mean that Lomax was the drunk driver who ran Chelsea off the road, even though Babes considers himself ultimately responsible for Chelsea’s death.”
“That’s a possible reading,” said Emma. “And it leads me to the third tip.”
She removed a copy of the e-mail message and let Rachel read it from top to bottom—including the reference to Lomax walking up to Chelsea’s car, seeing her grievous injuries, and vomiting at the scene.
Rachel needed time to collect herself upon reading it, and Paul put his arm around her.
“I’m sorry to hit you with this,” said Emma.
“It’s all right,” said Rachel.
Emma gave her a few moments longer, then asked, “Do you think Babes—”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m sorry,” said Emma. “I was going to ask if you thought Babes wrote this.”
“No, no,” she said firmly, then added again: “No.”
Paul said, “You seem incredibly sure about that.”
“I am.”
Emma said, “I’m sure Babes is good with the computer.”
“Yes, he works from home for his friend Tom Bales at MIT.”
“So he would know how to create a free e-mail account under a fictitious name and send a message from a public computer, which would make it impossible to trace the e-mail back to the real sender.”
“Or Tom could have helped him with that,” said Ryan. “That’s something I’ve been trying to talk to Tom about, but he won’t return my calls.”
Rachel shook her head. “Tom is a good kid. My opinion has nothing to do with Babes’s or Tom’s computer skills anyway. I can simply read this and tell it’s not him. The word choice, the sentence structure, the speech pattern: it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever read from Babes.”
“That’s important,” said Emma.
“And I would never have let this happen,” said Paul.
“What do you mean?”
“If Babes had been able to identify the drunk who ran Chelsea off the road, I would have forced him to go to the police. That night he ran home from the accident, he swore to me that he never saw anything or anybody.”
Rachel said, “That’s the only reason Paul and I were able to protect him in good conscience and, for his own good, not let the police interrogate him.”
Ryan could see that Emma’s line of questioning was beginning to take a toll on the couple, particularly Rachel. “I think that may be enough for one night,” he said.
Rachel breathed a sigh of relief. “I hope that was helpful.”
“Very,” said Emma.
Paul and Rachel rose and said good night. Ryan and Emma held their discussion until they heard the bedroom door close at the end of the hall.
“What do you think?” said Ryan.
“Two possibilities,” said Emma. “One, Babes did see someone that night, and he lied to his father when he swore that he hadn’t. Or—”
“Two,” said Ryan, finishing the thought for her: “Someone else did.”
“Someone else?”
“There’s a rocket scientist I still need to talk to,” said Ryan.
YAZ WAS GOING TO KILL HIMSELF.
All day long, baseball. Into the evening, more baseball. Didn’t this Babes ever get tired of talking about the same damn thing, hour after hour? No doubt about it: if there’d been a pistol to suck on, Yaz’s brains would have been all over the wall.
Yaz found a comfortable gravestone and sat down in the moonlight. His food run into town had taken only half an hour. It was amazing what ended up in the Dumpster behind a subway shop. He took one more bite of an only slightly spoiled turkey loaf, put it back in his coat pocket, and started back to the crypt.
Babes would be there waiting for him. Yaz had tested him all afternoon to make sure he wouldn’t run. Yaz told him to shut up or he’d cut off his ear. Babes shut up. Yaz ordered him to stand on one foot for five minutes or he’d slit his throat. Babes stood on one foot. And before leaving the crypt, he told Babes to sit in the corner until he got back, or he’d kill his entire family. That one had made him cry, but Babes went straight to the corner.
This is too easy.
The crypt was one of the most impressive memorials in the old North Burial Ground. A full moon and the shadows of sprawling oaks created the eerie, horror-film feeling that Yaz loved. He turned the broken latch, and the iron gate creaked open. It was pitch-dark inside the crypt, so he struck a match before entering. Sure enough, Babes was huddled in the corner, exactly where Yaz had left him.
“Good boy, Babes,” said Yaz.
Babes didn’t move.
“You hungry?”
Babes refused to look at him—the guy never seemed to make eye contact—but he nodded. Yaz tossed him the half-eaten turkey loaf. Babes fumbled it, and the hunk of processed meat fell to the floor.
“Five-second rule,” said Yaz, invoking the childhood joke. But Babes seemed to take it more as a command, waiting a few seconds before picking up the loaf.
This guy is so literal.
Babes picked up the turkey, sniffed it, and took a tiny bite.
“Good, huh?” said Yaz.
Babes made a face and took an even smaller bite.
Yaz struck another match and lit the candle on the bench in the center of the crypt. Then he took a seat and watched Babes eat. “You’ll do anything I say, won’t you?” said Yaz. Babes chewed in silence. “Yes, sir,” said Yaz. “I bet you’d even kill for me, wouldn’t you?” Babes stared at the floor.
Yaz rose and walked over to the vacant niche, the makeshift storage closet that had held everything from Babes’s baseball cards to Yaz’s vanilla wafers. He removed the cover, took an old blanket from his collection of stuff, and spread it out across the floor.
“You’re like a child. An innocent, gullible little child.” Yaz chuckled, then turned serious. “Come here, Babes.”
Babes shrank even farther into the corner.
“Come on, little boy,” said Yaz, his eyes narrowing in the flicker of candlelight. “Come lay down on my blankie.
Now.
”