Sour Candy (4 page)

“
You guys been having
problems lately?”

“
What? No.”

“
No reason you can think of
why she wouldn’t answer the phone?”

“
None.”

Where the hell are you,
Lori?

Her absence from the house bothered
him a great deal, and not merely because she represented his sole
anchor in an otherwise unmoored day. When he’d left, it had been
with the expectation that they would lounge together in front of
the TV, enveloped in a chocolate coma and each other. They’d had
problems in the past, of course—what couple didn’t?—but nothing to
explain her just up and vanishing from the house without a call to
let him know where she was going. It just wasn’t like
her.

“
Well,” Cortez said, as he
turned onto Grady Avenue, a street lined with elms and ordinary
houses and ornate streetlights, a street unremarkable but for the
insidious implication of what might be awaiting him there. “I guess
we’ll see soon enough.”

They had to be wrong. He willed them
to be wrong. His life thus-far remained unpunctuated by drama
beyond the typical expected of a man his age. He had a decent job
at a respectable bank. He had more acquaintances than friends, but
that was hardly anything new. He was moderately attractive (on a
good day). Unremarkable. This new element simply did not fit and
thus his mind could not process it. He’d have had an easier time
believing that aliens had invaded the town.

Cortez pulled the car to a halt in the
driveway. Lori’s Volkswagen was gone, only the ghost of an old oil
stain to suggest it had ever been there at all, and of course his
Chevy was on the back of a tow truck en route to a garage
somewhere. Visible through the narrow window next to the front
door, Phil could see that only the light in the hall was on. The
rest of the house was in darkness, and while he’d seen it this way
countless times before, it unsettled him now.

The detectives exited the vehicle,
Cortez coming around to open the door for Phil, who, with great
difficulty, braced a hand on the doorframe and eased himself
out.

It was early Fall and a chill had
crept into the air, something Phil loved but found difficult to
fully appreciate now that his battered chest limited his air
intake.

“
You all right?” Marsh
asked, sounding as if she really didn’t care one way or
another.

“
Yeah.” He pushed away from
the car door and closed it behind him.

He looked up at the house. It looked
as it always had but he found himself dreading it.

“
You need to mow your lawn,
man,” Cortez said. Phil ignored him.

How could a day that started so
sweetly, so perfectly, so quickly turn to hell?

The answer to that was a simple one:
the woman. And now she was gone, out of the picture, free from
accountability, which left only the boy she had somehow and for
whatever reason, installed in his house.

“
Lead the way,” Cortez
said.

Phil did, his hands trembling as he
fished for his keys. He reached the front door and stood for a
moment on the welcome mat, head turned, listening for a sound from
within, but all was quiet.

“
You want us to go first?”
Marsh asked.

“
No, I got it.” He slid the
key into the lock, turned the knob and the door swung soundlessly
open, revealing everything right where he had left it. Dark
hardwood floor; lemon-yellow walls. To the left, beneath a silver
framed oval mirror stood the small mahogany table where he left his
keys and the mail after work. Beyond that, the door to the living
room and further along, the stairs. To the right, the door to the
office he shared with Lori. At the far end of the hall next to the
stairs, the entryway to the kitchen. Again he waited and again
there was no sound to indicate a presence in his house. And while
he would have preferred to have seen Lori rushing out to meet him,
he was content with silence for now because it meant nobody else
was here either.

He allowed himself a moment to relax a
little, though the tension was not so easily dismissed. He started
to turn to tell the detectives waiting on the threshold that they
could go now, and what a pleasure it would be to finally be rid of
them and their inexplicable hostility…

…
And then the kitchen light
came on, revealing the backlit silhouette of the child standing in
the doorway.

Phil froze, the keys clattering to the
floor.

“
What are you doing in my
house?” he blurted. And much to his surprise, one he’d forever wish
he’d never experienced, the child responded.

His voice was perfectly normal,
perfectly child-like, and worse, utterly convincing.

“
I live here,
Daddy.”

* * *

“I’ll look after the kid,”
Marsh told her partner, then nodded at Phil. “You might want to
take
him
outside
for a moment.”

Cortez turned and gestured toward the
open doorway. Phil gaped at him. “What in God’s name is going on
here?”

“
Step outside and we’ll
discuss it.”

“
I don’t want to discuss it.
I want to know what’s going on.”

“
I wasn’t
asking.”

Frustrated and afraid he was losing
his mind, Phil nevertheless complied, if only because he had
absolutely no idea what else he was supposed to do. He stepped out
into a light rain and raised his face to it, hoping it might wash
away some of the panic that was fluttering like a caged bird in his
chest.

Cortez followed him out, leaving the
door open behind them for light. He looked up at the sky as if
disappointed that it had decided to rain without telling
him.

Marsh called out to them from inside.
“What’s his name?” And, as if Phil had somehow missed it, Cortez
repeated the question.

Phil couldn’t help it. He laughed. Not
because there was anything even remotely funny about the situation
but because it was so incredibly absurd no other reaction seemed
appropriate. But then the mirth abated, replaced by frustration and
anger. He got right up in Cortez’s face. The big man didn’t
flinch.

“
I don’t fucking
know
the kid’s name. Why
can’t you people get that through your heads?
How
would I know it? Until today I’d
never seen him before in my
life
. I
told
you both that and yet here he is
and here we are with everyone treating me like I’m lying. This is
absolutely insane.”

“
Calm down.”

“
No. You know what? I
won’t
calm down. Would
you calm down if some batshit crazy person tried to kill you right
before she killed herself but before all that…
before
she did that, she stashed her
fucking
child
in
your house? And then, when you tell the cops what happened, they
decide not to believe you even though you’re telling them the
truth. Tell me, please, I’m dying to know: just how fucking calm
would
you
be in
that situation?”

Still Cortez looked the picture of
steely calm. He took a moment to wipe some of Phil’s spittle from
his face and then folded his arms, his eyes like two pieces of
flint.

“
You need to listen very
carefully to me.”

“
Do I?”

“
Don’t be a smartass, and
don’t talk. Despite what you think, we’re trying to help you
here.”

“
And how’s that exactly?
Because it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“
I said don’t
talk.”

“
Would you listen if I
did?”

A curious thing happened then. Cortez
took a deep breath and when he released it, some of the latent
hostility in him seemed to depart with it.

“
I’m a family man too,
Pendleton. Been married three times and have four kids. The two
kids from the first marriage hate the two from the second and
vice-versa like it’s some kind of competition. The eldest just
turned seventeen and thinks I’m the biggest asshole on the planet.
She hangs around with this emo kid who fancies himself a poet or
some shit. The alimony is sucking me dry, and my first ex-wife
should be classified as a stalker.”

“
Is there some reason you’re
telling me this?”

“
I’m telling you this
because I’m on my third marriage, easily the sanest and most normal
of the three and still,
still
there are days when I wake up and think about
walking out the door and just keep walking until I run out of road.
I love my wife and my kids, but sometimes I regret ever having
them, which is an awful thing to admit to another
person.”

“
So why admit it at
all?”

“
So you get that what you’re
going through is perfectly normal. Maybe not reasonable and
definitely not healthy, but normal all the same.”

“
And what is it you think
I’m going through?”

“
In a word:
denial.”

Phil clenched his fists.
“Denial of
what?
”

Cortez attempted to put a hand on
Phil’s shoulder. He shrugged it off, the motion sending lances of
fiery pain through his chest, and moved a step back.

The detective continued, unfazed.
“Look, I don’t know the full extent of what you’re going through
here, or what might have happened to you in the accident, but when
all is said and done, it’s not about you, it’s about protecting a
child.”

Phil scoffed. “You can start
protecting him by getting him back where he belongs.”

“
See, that’s just it. We
checked and according to the records, this
is
where he belongs.”

“
Then your records are
mistaken. I don’t have any children.” A thought occurred to him
through the panic. “So, wait: if you already know all there is to
know about the child, why did you ask me his name?”

Cortez shrugged. “Marsh’s idea. She
thought if we caught you off-guard maybe you’d answer before you
caught yourself. We know the kid’s name.”

Phil swallowed. “Well I don’t want to
know it.”

“
His name is Adam. Adam
Pendleton. His mother’s name was Hannah Ward.”

“
Hannah? I don’t know any
Hannah Ward either. How could I not know the mother of the child
you’re insisting is mine? Are you seriously trying to make me
believe I somehow just
forgot
all of this? That’s ridiculous.”

“
No argument there. But
Hannah Ward was the boy’s mother.”

“
Was?”

Cortez looked closely at him, studying
Phil’s eyes for some sign that he was pretending not to remember.
Both men now had something in common: the sheer implausibility that
Phil could have forgotten such major events. “Yes, was. She died
the day Adam was born. A fire in her room, thought to have been a
ruptured oxygen tank. Blew her to pieces. Luckily, Adam was in the
intensive care unit at the time.”

Phil turned and began to pace despite
the discomfort it caused him to do so. He put his hands in his hair
and looked at the houses around him. It all seemed so very normal,
and yet it wasn’t. Somewhere between encountering the woman in the
store and his arrival home, he’d entered The Twilight
Zone.

5. Alteration

“Do you need us to call someone to help
you?” Cortez asked, not unkindly.

Phil scoffed. “Help me? You’re the
ones who are supposed to be helping me.”

“
At this point, if you
really do believe what you’re claiming, I’d advise you to let us
hook you up with a psychiatric professional. Is there someone you
can call who can look after the child for a few days?”

“
I already told you, I don’t
know the child. Nobody else in my life does either.”

“
Your mother,
maybe?”

“
I haven’t spoken to her in
years.”

“
Let me ask you something:
if I called her right now, would she back up what you’re saying?
Would she claim she’s never heard of her own grandson?”

“
Yes.”

“
Okay.”

“
Wait…” Phil muttered,
raising a hand as if the solution to all of this had somehow
materialized in front of him. “Wait just a minute…” He turned back
to face Cortez. “A DNA test.”

Cortez closed his eyes for a moment,
clearly growing tired of Phil’s stubborn refusal to claim a child
that was obviously his own. “A DNA test.”

“
Yeah. That’ll
prove—”

“
Nothing.”

“
What?”

“
It’s not surprising you
don’t know Hannah Ward. You never met her.”

“
Okay, good, that’s a
start.”

“
The child was put into
foster care. Which is where you and your then wife Stacey Miller
found him.”