CHAPTER 12
Dr. Henry Stern isn’t lost, in hiding, or even trying to run away. He is at that moment sitting and watching Posner’s house from the same spot he’s used before. He uses a worn but serviceable pair of binoculars. He follows Posner as the man moves about on the second floor of his house. Posner seems nervous and anxious. Good. He will keep up whatever he’s doing as the man is losing it. At this thought Stern begins to laugh. At first it sounds more like a cackle in a barnyard, but later it comes out more like someone out-of-control, almost alien.
After he finds out the full truth about Heidi, he plans to kill Posner. He’s never taken a life before, although there are those who might believe otherwise. He was seventeen and an all-around everything in school. Sports were easy. Ditto school. The only problem he ever had was with girls. He was afraid to ask anyone out and even more fearful he’d be rejected. It all came together during the summer before his senior year. He’d been trying to work up the courage to ask out Rosalie Sanchez for months after she transferred in, but never had the guts to try. Then on a late August night a few weeks before school would restart he saw her at the drive-in, whose parking lot was where everyone in the town under the age of twenty joined up on warm summer nights.
She was hanging with some guys he didn’t know very well and holding a paper bag with a beer can she greedily sipped at. She was pretty and dark and very well built. He worked up enough nerve and offered to buy her a soda or a hot dog. At first she looked at him with level serious eyes, then just laughed and told him the only hot dog she wanted was the one between his legs. Before he could react she moved right up to him till they were eye to eye, zipped him open, and fished out his cock. He was anything but ready and she took hold of his stumpy limp dick in a soft hand with bright red polish on her nails and held it for barely a second before she dropped it.
“Too small,” she said. “Think I’ll throw it back.”
And with that everyone laughed. Not just she, but also the guys she was with, and then everyone else who either saw or heard what had happened. There were also many who were happy to laugh at him, either for the pure humor in it, or in many cases for the opportunity to take down the big little man on campus; the students he’d outscored on exams, and the athletes he’d bested in team tryouts were all there reveling in his tormented humiliation.
He stood and watched her slide alone into a used and much dented canary-yellow Chevy convertible with a broken muffler and a tailpipe that was tied to the undercarriage with wire, yet still managed to graze the ground with a shower of sparks when the car moved. He watched her drive away to the baffled thumps of hot air raging through the torn metal gaps beneath the car while she saluted him with a crimson-tipped middle finger while all he could do was shout.
“You bitch. I’ll kill you for this. You hear me? I’ll kill you.”
And then she was gone, and he fled moments afterward, oblivious to the night or the road, ostensively going home, but actually wandering to try and rid the foul reek of shame. He lost track of time until he moved across the Beaver Flats Bridge and saw the rear end of a yellow car tilted in a twenty degree angle to the nearly dry creek bed it had fallen into. He stopped the car and saw the tire marks where the Chevy couldn’t hold the approach curve and tore through the modest wooden railing before dropping forty feet into three feet of mud and water.
That’s where the police found him. It seemed like moments, but he later reckoned it had to be more than fifteen minutes. He told the police that he’d left his car off the road just before the entrance to the bridge and gone down and around to the creek bottom where the Chevy had hit and stuck at a strange angle. It was quiet except for the small splashes frogs make in chorus with the occasional night bird. He looked in the driver-side window and at first only saw one arm stretched out with the fingers turned upward. He didn’t try to look at her face, but he still remembers the red nails reaching upward in some kind of plea. He raced to the nearest phone to call for help, then returned to the bridge to wait.
The cause of death was a broken neck, but an autopsy showed she was legally drunk. At first there was all manner of speculation. The most prevalent idea was that the two of them had met up by accident and he killed her, and then tried to cover it all up by running her car off the road with her already dead. There was, of course, not a shred of proof for this theory, and the fact that he was the one who called in the accident and was still at the scene when the police found him worked more to his innocence. The final inquest reported an accidental death. There were still, however, many in the small community that believed then and probably still believe that he killed her. And now he was a suspect again, but he’d show them. He’d show them it was Posner.
He never returned to his local high school and his father’s business and political connections enabled him to pull in some favors on short notice to get his son into Deerfield Academy that fall. That was the time just before he began having hallucinations about Rosalie Sanchez. He had promised to kill her and she died. Simple as that, but it wasn’t going away. His father brought him to see a series of mental health professionals where he was diagnosed with a very incipient form of schizophrenia and put on a series of antipsychotic medications. There were side effects, of course, but over a period of time, the worst of these, the dry mouth, blurred vision, and drowsiness ebbed to the point of minor factors he could live with.
Then it was Yale premed and Downstate Medical in the city. He never lived in Hillsdale again and sold the house after his father died. He was smart and capable and his paths through college and medical school were relatively easy. At the time he met Heidi, he was in one of those intervals when he wasn’t taking Seroquel. He knew he could always self-prescribe when the bad feelings returned, which made him feel like he was sharing his body with another person. No one at the hospital knew of his condition. Such records were confidential and would remain that way unless he alone decided to unseal them.
Several months into their relationship, he began to feel those symptoms again and he went back on his meds. And that’s when he began to experience sexual failure. Some call it erectile dysfunction, but it was all the same to Heidi. Viagra didn’t help. He knew she wouldn’t keep him as her lover if he couldn’t fuck her as often as she wanted. After just a few such incidents he stopped his medications. That was his only hope. He was prepared to live with whatever twists and turns his mind would take as long as he had Heidi. But Posner took her away.
Yes. He wants to kill Posner. For several years his work involved saving lives, but this is different. All those people back upstate who might still think him guilty of murder would get their chance to be right. He was innocent then, but now he was prepared to confess his guilt as soon as he finished the job. He catches a movement at Posner’s front door and puts the glasses down. His prey is on the move again.
“Oh Lordy, Lordy, this is so fucking good,” he says to the empty seat and starts the engine.
As soon as he sees Posner’s car head east on the highway, he knows the man’s going back to the Montauk Overlook.
“She must be buried there. She must. I just missed the spot, that’s all. Now he’ll take me there. He will. I know it.”
Then he smiles and begins to hum as if to remind himself that he’s just out for a drive in the country.
Amos Posner’s on his way back to the overlook. He can’t help himself. He suspects that someone’s been watching him and wants to see that the grave is still undisturbed. He’s had the feeling for a few days now. Ever since he got the call from that cop Wisdom. It started with the small blue car in the Overlook parking lot. Just sitting there. Not doing anything. Just watching him. At first he thinks it must be the police, and then decides it’s just coincidence. But he’s seen that same blue car a few times in the last week. Once he even thought he saw it parked on the far corner down the block. Now he assumes once again it’s the police. Who else could it be? His hands are sweating as he grabs the wheel tighter than necessary.