“You’re being used,” I said. “Your grief and anger are being exploited by others.”
“I been used before. It’s a matter of understanding that, and of receiving proper payment for it.”
“And what’s your payment here? Money?”
“Information.”
He let the barrel of the gun drop until it was pointed at the floor. A wave of tiredness seemed to wash over him, breaking against his face so that his features were altered, confused memories twisting and coiling in the aftermath. He dug his fingers deep into the corners of his eyes, then drew them across his face. For a moment, he looked old and frail.
“Information about your daughter,” I said. “What did the lawyer give you? Names?”
“Maybe. Nobody else offered me help. Nobody else gave a damn about her. You know what it was like for me, being trapped in that jail knowing that something had happened to my little girl, knowing that there was nothing I could do to find her, to help her? Social worker came to the jail, told me she’d gone missing. Bad as it was before, when I figured out what had been done to her, this was worse. She was gone, and I knew she was in trouble. Have you any idea what that will do to a man? I tell you, it near broke me, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I’d be no use to her that way, no sir, so I bided my time and waited for my opportunity. I kept it together for her, and I didn’t break.”
But he was broken. Something had fractured deep within him, and the flaw was progressing through his system. He was no longer as he once had been, but as Aimee Price had said, there was no way of knowing if he had been rendered more lethal, and more dangerous, as a result. They were two different things, though, and had I been pressed at that moment, as I lay incapacitated on my own bed, under my own gun, I would have said that he was more dangerous but less lethal. His edge had been taken from him, but what had replaced it had rendered him unpredictable. He was now a prisoner of his own anger and sadness, and that had made him vulnerable in ways he could not even suspect.
“My little girl didn’t just disappear into thin air,” he said. “She was taken from me, and I’ll find whoever was responsible for it. She may still be out there now, somewhere, waiting for me to come get her and take her home.”
“You know that’s not true. She’s gone.”
“You shut your mouth! You don’t know that.”
I didn’t care now. I was sick of Merrick, sick of them all.
“She was a young girl,” I said. “They took her. Something went wrong. She’s dead, Frank. That’s what I believe. She’s dead like Daniel Clay.”
“You don’t know that. How do you know that about my little girl?”
“Because they stopped,” I said. “After her, they stopped. They got scared.”
He shook his head forcefully. “No, I won’t believe it until I see her. Until they show me her body, then she’s alive to me. You say otherwise again, and I’ll kill you where you lie, I swear it. You mark me! Yes sir, you mark me well.”
He was standing above me now, the gun poised in his hand, ready to fire. It shook slightly, the rage at the heart of his being transferring its energy to the weapon in his hand.
“I met Andy Kellog,” I said.
The gun stopped shaking, but it did not move from me.
“You saw Andy. Well, I guess you was going to figure out where I’d been sooner or later. How is he?”
“Not good.”
“He shouldn’t ought to be in there. Those men tore something in him when they took him. They broke his heart. They’re not his fault, the things he does.”
He looked down at the floor again, once more unable to keep the memories at bay.
“Your daughter drew pictures like Andy’s, didn’t she?” I asked him. “Pictures of men with the heads of birds?”
Merrick nodded. “That’s right, just like Andy did. That was after she started seeing Clay. She sent the pictures to me at the jail. She was trying to tell me something about what was happening to her, but I didn’t understand, not until I met Andy. They were the same men. It’s not just about my little girl. That boy was like a son to me. They’ll pay for what they did to him as well. The lawyer Eldritch understood that. It wasn’t about just one child. He’s a good man. He wants those people found, just like I do.”
I heard someone laugh, and realized it was me.
“You think he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart? You ever wonder who is paying Eldritch, who employed him to secure your release, to feed you information? Did you take a look around that house in Welchville? Did you venture down into the cellar?”
Merrick’s mouth opened slightly, and his features became clouded with doubt. Perhaps the thought had never struck him that there was someone other than Eldritch involved.
“What are you talking about?”
“Eldritch has a client. The client is manipulating you through him. He owns that house you crashed in. He’s shadowing you, waiting to see who responds to your actions. When they emerge, he’ll take them, not you. He doesn’t care whether you find your daughter or not. All he wants is-”
I paused. I understood that to say what he wanted made no sense. To add to his collection? To dispense another form of justice in the face of the law’s inability to act against these men? Those were elements of what he desired, but they were not enough to explain his existence.
“You don’t know what he wants, if he even exists, and it don’t matter anyway,” said Merrick. “When the time comes, no man will take justice out of my hands. I want recompense. I told you that. I want the men who took my little girl to pay for what they did, to pay at my hand.”
“Recompense?” I tried to hide the disgust in my voice, but I could not. “You’re talking about your daughter, not some…used car that gave out on you a mile from the lot. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. You want to lash out at someone. She’s just your excuse.”
The anger flared again, and once more I was reminded of the similarities between Frank Merrick and Andy Kellog, of the rage always bubbling away beneath their exteriors. Merrick was right: he and Kellog were like father and son, in some strange way.
“You shut the fuck up!” said Merrick. “You got no idea what you’re saying.”
The gun shifted hands again, and his right fist was suddenly poised above me, the knuckles ready to smash down upon me. And then he seemed to become aware of something, for he paused and looked over his shoulder, and as he did so, I sensed it too.
The room had grown colder, and there was a noise from the hallway outside my door. It was soft, like the footsteps of a child.
“You alone here?” said Merrick.
“Yes,” I replied, and I couldn’t tell if I was lying.
He turned around and walked slowly to the open door, then stepped swiftly into the hallway, the gun held close to him in case someone tried to knock it from his grasp. He disappeared from view, and I could hear doors opening, and closets being searched. His shape passed by the doorway again, then he was downstairs, checking that all of the rooms were quiet and unoccupied. When he returned, he looked troubled, and the bedroom was colder still. He shivered.
“The hell is wrong with this place?”
But I was no longer listening to him, because I smelled her now. Blood and perfume. She was close. I thought Merrick might have smelled her too, because his nose wrinkled slightly. He spoke, but he sounded distant, almost distracted. There was an edge of madness to his voice, and I thought then that he was going to kill me for sure. I tried to move my lips to pray, but I could remember no words, and no prayers would come.
“I don’t want you meddling in my affairs no more, you understand?” he said. His spittle landed on my face. “I thought you was a man I could reason with, but I was wrong. You’ve caused me enough trouble already, and I need to make sure you don’t trouble me again.”
He returned to the satchel on the floor and withdrew a roll of duct tape. He laid the gun down, then used the tape to cover my mouth before binding my legs tightly together above the ankles. He took a burlap sack and draped it over my head, securing it with more tape wrapped around my neck. Using a blade, he ripped a hole in the sacking just beneath my nostrils, so that I could breathe more easily.