Billy's Bones (16 page)

“We can come tomorrow—”

“Tom!” Kevin’s voice was so sharp that Tom staggered back from it, as if he expected the man to hit him. Apparently, Kevin noticed because when he spoke again, he was calmer, but his voice still had an edge to it. “Tom, you have no idea how much I had to psyche myself up to come here. You’re the one who wanted to see this place. So fine! Let’s see it! We’ll tell Dr. Cross all about it later. But I am not coming here again. This is it.”

With that, he strode across the lawn, ignoring the walkway, and unlocked the front door. Tom had little choice but to follow him.

He caught up with Kevin standing in the empty front hall, eerily still, as if listening for something. But there wasn’t a sound. The bare walls had ghostly rectangular shadows in places, where decades of sunlight had faded the paint around picture frames, now absent, and the carpeting exuded a smell of cleaning chemicals.

When Shadow nosed his hand, Kevin rubbed the top of the dog’s head absently and said, “This is the first time I’ve seen it since everything was taken out.”

“Where did all the furnishings go?” Tom asked. “Your mother couldn’t have brought them to Riverview with her.”

Kevin shook his head. “No, we put whatever she wanted to keep into storage. God knows why. I’ll never touch any of it. When she’s gone, I’ll have to either sell it or trash it.”

Tom found that incredibly sad, but he said nothing. He and Shadow simply trailed behind Kevin as he drifted from room to room. Not all the furnishings were gone. Some things Mrs. Derocher hadn’t wanted were still in the rooms, covered with protective sheets, in case a new owner might want them, but they merely enhanced the barren atmosphere of the house.

The downstairs had a large living room with a fireplace and window seats Tom coveted, a dining room, a half bath, and a beautiful kitchen with a stainless steel gas stove and refrigerator, granite countertops, and tiled walls with a country motif of apples and pears on them. Everything about the house screamed “affluence” to Tom, even devoid of most of its original furnishings.

“What did your parents do for work?” Tom asked.

“My father was a lawyer,” Kevin replied, still seeming lost in thought as he brushed his fingers along the natural wood top of the kitchen island. “My mother was a receptionist at his firm, but she quit working when she married him. I think being forced to go back to work, after he killed himself, upset her more than losing her husband.”

“I thought you said this place was falling apart.”

“I lied,” Kevin said curtly. “I just didn’t want to come out here.”

That was irritating, but Tom didn’t see much point in making a big deal about it. “You said your mother wanted you to move in so you could keep up with repairs.”

“That part was true,” Kevin said. “The roof needs some repair, and there were other things my mother needed done around the place—electrical work, some plumbing—so she wanted me to move in and take care of things. At least, that was her excuse. Really, she just wanted me to come home. As if I ever would.”

He turned and strode out of the kitchen back to the hall, calling over his shoulder, “Nothing more exciting than dinner and Saturday morning cartoons ever happened down here. The real excitement in the Derocher family was upstairs!”

Tom had to carry Shadow up the broad staircase, so it took a minute for them to catch up to him at the far end of the hall. Kevin had stopped in one of the upper hall doorways. He flipped the light on, and Tom looked past him to see a bathroom, tiled in blue and white, in a geometric pattern that seemed vaguely Roman. The room was large enough to accommodate both a shower and a square tub not much smaller than Tom’s hot tub, in addition to the toilet and sink.

“Here’s where the real family drama took place,” Kevin said, sounding like a tour guide. “He did it in the tub.”

“Your father? His suicide, you mean?”

Kevin walked up to the tub and waited until Tom was standing beside him, peering down into the basin, before continuing. “Most men might have been happy to just slash their wrists open but not my father. He never did anything by halves.”

He raised his right hand and spread his index and ring fingers apart into a V. “After I burned down the gardening shed, my mother went out and bought all new tools for her garden. She had a kick-ass garden back then. So Dad filled up the tub with hot water one night when Mom was asleep. Then he sat down and took her brand new pruning shears—” Kevin slid his open fingers down along his front until they were framing where his penis would have been sticking out if he hadn’t been wearing jeans. “—and clipped it off.” He snapped his fingers shut.

Tom’s stomach churned at the thought. “That’s… revolting.”

“Then he just sat there until he bled out. Mom found him sitting in a tub full of bloody water in the morning.”

“Nice.” Clearly, Kevin’s father had had some issues himself. “I’m beginning to sense a theme here.”

Kevin looked at him uncertainly for a moment. Then he gave Tom a sad smile. “Yeah, well… I may have shown it to everyone on Northside Road, but I didn’t cut it off.”

“That’s good. I’m rather fond of your penis.”

“Even if you can’t touch it?”

“I can admire it from afar,” Tom replied and then immediately regretted the semiflirtatious tone it lent to the conversation. It hardly seemed appropriate, given the context.

What would possess a man to mutilate himself that way? But Tom thought he might already know the answer to that: guilt. In particular, guilt over inappropriate sexual behavior with his son. Tom had no proof of that yet, but he strongly suspected it.

“Where were you when this happened?” Tom asked.

“I was still at Hampstead.” Kevin took a deep breath and walked out of the room, scratching Shadow behind the ear on his way out. “I’ll show you the bedrooms, not that there’s anything there.”

He was right about that. The room Kevin’s parents had shared contained a bed and a couple of dressers, but of course all the personal effects had been taken away. Kevin’s bedroom was the same.

Kevin pulled the sheet off the twin bed in his room to expose the bare mattress. “I had the same bed from the time I was about three until I left home at eighteen.” He stretched out on the mattress, and he had to bend his knees to keep his feet from hanging over the bottom. “By the time I was seventeen, I was too tall for this damned thing. Mom wanted to buy me a new one, but I wasn’t planning on sticking around much longer, so I kept telling her it was fine.”

“How does it feel to lie there again?” Tom asked. He had hoped being in his old room might trigger something in Kevin’s memory.

But Kevin just shrugged. “It’s not a very comfortable mattress. I’m glad I don’t have to sleep on this thing anymore.”

He got up to look out one of the two double-hung windows. Tom went to stand beside him. The window looked out upon a fair-sized backyard with a rust-colored picnic table and small patio coming off the kitchen. Across the yard was a small stand of birch trees, and beyond that, more of the ubiquitous pine and birch forest that blanketed this part of the state.

“Where was the shed?” Tom asked.

Kevin nodded in the direction of a small patch of overgrown grass in one corner of the yard. “My mother wanted to replace it, but after my father killed himself, she never got around to it.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

But Kevin shook his head. There was an odd look in his eyes—a troubled look. But he wasn’t staring at the grass where the shed had been. He was looking at the forest, as he often did when they were hanging out on Tom’s deck. For the first time, Tom found himself wondering if there was something significant behind that look. He always just assumed Kevin was lost in thought, and where he was looking was irrelevant. But perhaps he was wrong. Was there something about the forest itself that drew Kevin’s attention?

“I’d like to stay up here a minute,” Kevin said quietly. “You go ahead. I think Shadow needs to go out again anyway.”

That was probably true. The pup had gotten better at letting Tom and Kevin know when he needed to relieve himself by pacing back and forth in a frantic manner, and now he was doing so by the door of the bedroom, straining against his leash. They’d learned the hard way not to ignore this behavior. So Tom left Kevin alone with his thoughts, hoping it would be good for him. He had to carry the pooch downstairs, but fortunately he managed to get him outside without Shadow having an accident.

After Shadow had finished his business, Tom led him around to the back of the house. Along the way, they passed what had once been a flower bed, now overgrown with weeds, and Tom found himself smiling as he remembered Kevin talking about kicking down the urinating boy lawn ornament.

He took Shadow across the empty yard, past the patio and the picnic table, until they came to the overgrown patch Kevin had pointed out from the window. To Tom’s surprise, there were still blackened, burnt boards underneath the vegetation. Someone had cleaned the area up a bit and stacked the few intact boards off to one side, where they had lain untouched for twenty-five years, as grass and weeds grew around and through them, almost obscuring them. But not quite. There was something eerie and unsettling about it. But the question in Tom’s mind was whether there was anything
significant
about it. Had it just been a random act of rebellion—something relatively harmless, yet still dramatic and destructive? Or had there been some reason Kevin wanted to destroy the shed?

Shadow was nosing curiously through the weeds and the wreckage, but Tom pulled him back, fearful of old nails that might still be in the boards. He glanced up at the forest no more than thirty feet away and wondered again if anything lay out there that might provide another piece of this puzzle.

As he and Shadow walked back to the house, Tom looked up to see if Kevin was still watching from his bedroom, but the window was empty.
It’s probably time to leave
, he thought. They’d been through the place, he’d learned a bit more about Kevin’s family, and he’d seen the infamous gardening shed. But there was probably nothing more to be learned here.

“Kevin!” Tom called when he stepped into the front hall once more. “I’m ready to go if you are.”

There was no answer. Tom listened, but the house was disturbingly silent, apart from Shadow’s heavy panting. “Kevin?”

Still no answer.

Tom left Shadow to wander around by himself downstairs while he walked slowly up the stairs. He was unable to shake the feeling he was stepping into a Hitchcock film, and Mr. Derocher’s mummified corpse was about to fall out of a broom closet, clutching its withered, severed penis in one hand.

“Kevin?” Still no answer. Growing fearful, Tom quickly searched the rooms until he came to the large upstairs bathroom.

That’s where he found him.

Kevin lay in the tub, despite the fact that there wasn’t any water, curled up in a fetal position with his arms holding his knees close to his chest. From what Tom could see, he was naked. Kevin’s face was resting against the rim of the tub, and he was staring blankly into space, so motionless that Tom felt a chill prick up the hair on his scalp.

“Kevin?” he asked quietly, afraid to draw near—afraid he might find Kevin sitting in a pool of blood.

But Kevin wasn’t dead. His eyes remained glassy and seemingly sightless as he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “The water’s cold….”

“There isn’t any water, Kevin.”

Kevin didn’t seem to be listening. He was silent for a long time before he said, “I don’t wanna take a bath. I had one this morning.” His voice sounded odd, as though he were talking in his sleep, and there was a childlike quality to it. “Okay….” He laughed faintly. “Daddy…,” he said, his voice scolding, “I’m big now… I can do it myself….” His expression grew uncertain, and his voice more docile. “Okay… no, I won’t tell… yeah, I promise….”

But after a long silence, during which his face wore an expression halfway between bewilderment and anxiety, Kevin suddenly screwed his face up in disgust. “No, don’t—that’s gross. I don’t wanna….” Then his anxiety appeared to ease a bit. “Okay… yeah, that feels okay….”

This unsettling monologue went on for quite some time. Tom had heard of PTSD sufferers having flashbacks, but he had little experience with it.
Damn you for barreling in here without Sue, Kevin!

Tom sat down on the floor near Kevin and let him ramble on in this vague way. He was tempted to call Sue, but she had her own mess to deal with right now, and Tom didn’t want to do anything that might disrupt what Kevin was going through. Whatever Kevin was experiencing, Tom felt reasonably certain he needed to let it happen. At least he hoped that was the right way to handle this.

At some point, tears began to leak out of Kevin’s eyes and trickle down around his nose and lips, but his expression wasn’t that of someone crying. He still looked vaguely anxious, but not really frightened or upset. And the fragments of dialog Tom overheard seemed mostly confused. The boy Kevin had been had trusted his father and not felt threatened by him. It was apparent some of the experience had even been pleasant, a sort of bonding between a boy and his father, but the whole thing seemed to have left him uneasy and baffled by this new way of looking at the man. His father had suddenly become a different person—one who liked to do things Kevin found gross and embarrassing, one who forced a closeness Kevin wasn’t comfortable with, and one who had effectively cut Kevin from his mother by a solemn oath never to reveal their “secret.”

Tom wasn’t certain when he himself began to cry. He simply became aware that his face was wet as he watched this replay of parental betrayal. He was sickened and enraged. If Kevin’s father had still been alive, Tom wasn’t sure he’d be able to restrain himself from seeking the man out and punching him in the face—just before calling the police on the bastard.

Downstairs, Shadow had begun to grow distraught at being left alone. He began to bark and whine piteously, and that finally brought Kevin back to the present. His face an emotionless mask, as if all feeling had been drained from his body, Kevin’s eyes focused on Tom’s anxious face.