“Blume?!”
I waved them off and pointed into the shed. “The house,” I gasped as best I could. “And there are…graves… bottom of the hill.”
They said something to me, but I didn’t catch it. All I heard was the pouring torrent as it dumped down on me. I lay in the mud and didn’t move for quite some time. I tried to stay awake for what seemed like hours. It might have been seconds.
Eventually I surrendered to the darkness and the steady rhythm of the rain.
ELEVEN
Breaking the habit.
An hour later, I found myself propped up on a stretcher in Billy Bennett’s living room, getting patched up by the medics. Several police were milling around, looking through his belongings, including, I noticed, the two detectives who had harangued me at my apartment. They simply passed by with a grudging nod.
I was drinking stale coffee with my left hand. My right hand was bandaged up. So was my chest. My ring finger and pinky had been broken and my palm had swollen to the size of an apple from warding off Billy’s board. At some point in the skirmish, I had also taken a blow to the side of my head, which had now been dressed by the ambulance crew.
After Billy had been taken into custody, the police had found three bodies in the poorly covered mounds that I had stumbled on. The corpses were too decomposed to identify them at the scene, but one thing was for sure: all three had been children. And with the discovery of Jack Ellington’s Who T-shirt, I was willing to bet he was one of them.
The police were also looking through the journals in the shed. Judging by the muted conversations I overheard, they were pretty sure there were at least two more bodies elsewhere on the property.
It’d been too late to save them, but there had been one saving grace of my fumbling heroics. Charlie Haines, the missing schoolboy, was alive, if not well. The kid had been whisked off to hospital. He had been bruised, catatonic with fear, and would probably require years of therapy, but the cops told me he was expected to make a full recovery in time.
“That was some timing,” I told the officer in charge of the investigation as he passed through.
“It was. It was a weird tip, too,” he said.
“How so?”
We got the call from a former Chief of Police. Bloke hasn’t even been on the force for five years. Then, 30 minutes later, I see him in the station in cuffs. It’s a damn shame.”
“Yeah, it is,” I said. Secretly thankful for Atkinson’s last minute act of bravery. He may have been a self-righteous asshole, but it seemed Henry Atkinson had finally had a crisis of conscience and turned himself at the last minute, saving my life, Charlie’s life, and probably many more. Whether it had been my confrontation with him that had caused Atkinson to do the right thing, or pure guilt, I would never know. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that Charlie Haines’ mother would get her son back tonight. She would never know the pain that Elizabeth Ellington had felt. The pain that I had felt.
Amir had been right. In my determination to solve my own family’s murder, I had accomplished nothing but a spiraling descent into boozy self-pity. When I had tried to help someone else though, someone who still had a shot at happiness, I had actually been able to make a difference. Considering how much pain I was in, that felt pretty good.
Though there were still holes in my theory, I had put most of it together after seeing the notebooks. Bennett was not Atkinson’s nephew as he had told me. Atkinson had been raised by a foster family, so at some point he and his wife had wanted to give back to the process. They had adopted a troubled kid, probably one with a history of abuse and mental issues; William Hudson. He was their adopted son.
At least for a few years. It wasn’t long before Billy left his foster home. Whether Billy had run away or had been kicked out due to his disturbing tendencies remained to be seen. However, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Atkinson had gotten rid of the troubled child, worried that custody of such a kid might taint his exemplary reputation.
Either way, Atkinson must have been shocked to see his son again years later. Had Billy blackmailed him into covering the whole thing up, or did Atkinson just feel guilty for his absent offspring? In the end, I figured it didn’t matter. Both were in cuffs, and the truth would soon be out.
A flicker of light caught my eye, and as I turned, I felt a flash of pain in my side. Outside the window, the rain was still coming, but a tiny break in the clouds pierced the drab sky. In the distance, sunlight broke through for the first time in days. I looked out of the glass towards the woods where I had found the mounds.
I thought of Sarah and Tommy, knowing that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to completely forget about their case. If anything, catching Bennett and finding Charlie Haines had only served to make me more confident in my skills as an investigator. I would find out who killed them, I resolved. I would find them and punish them.
TWELVE
Revelations.
Elizabeth had offered to pay me a handsome wage for the case, but I had declined. Another surprising appearance of the altruistic Thomas Blume. Was I going soft? Sure, I could use the money, but I’d figured she wasn’t a wealthy woman anymore and probably couldn’t afford it these days. Especially after paying for the second funeral of her dead son.
I was an asshole, but not that much of an asshole.
I paid my respects to Jack and the other kids from afar. Covered in bruises and stitches, I didn’t want to shock any of the already distraught parents at the cemetery. I’d stood on the other side of the churchyard, away from the crowd, silently hoping the kids found the peace in death that they’d had taken from them in life.
I noticed Elizabeth’s thin smile at the funeral—a kind of resigned sadness—and understood completely. Elizabeth Ellington would never know the joy of her son again, but she might find some peace for the first time in a decade, and that was something. In a world of uncertainty and pain, perhaps that was all we could ask for at this point.
I wondered if this would be my fate too. Digging into the death of my family was nothing but hurt and questions. Would I get the closure I needed, or would it end up poisoning me with suspicion and darkness like Amir warned?
Maybe it would. That’s why I had decided to renew the ad Amir had posted in the paper for me. The Ellington case had helped me get back in the saddle; it had helped me stay focused, and my voicemail was already brimming with enquiries.
Thomas Blume, Private Investigator.
It was official, at least according to my new business cards. I had a job and I would continue helping people, taking work where I could and where I was needed.
In the meantime, however, I would not forget the duty I had to my family. I would find their killer. And now I had somewhere to start; a huge lead had just presented itself at an unexpected time.
As I’d been rummaging through those sacks in Bennett’s farm, a thought had hit me. I had held little Jack Ellington’s shirt in my hand and had seen the strange collection of notebooks and kids’ toys scattered around. I had been reminded of the cloth found under the fingernails of my own son.
I’d never questioned it before. When the coroner had shown me the patch of burned skin and twisted flesh that used to be my family, I had gone numb. I couldn’t comprehend what I had seen.
But looking back, visualizing the crime scene photos I had burned into my mind, I realized something shocking.