Sleep with the Lights On. Maggie Shayne
said Myrtle.
I got her into the bed, then climbed back in myself. She padded around until she found a spot she liked—as close to me as possible—and dropped. Myrtle didn’t lay down. Myrtle collapsed.
I sighed. “So what the hell was that about, do you think?” I asked her.
She opened her sightless eyes and looked back at me as if to say, You’re asking me? I’m just a dog.
I’d never had a nightmare like that in my life. It had been vivid. Real. And the feelings running through me in that dream had been majorly fucked up. Way out of line with anything I would ever have felt. I had never equated blood and sex. Not even in fantasy. Sadism was not my thing. I didn’t have a dominatrix bone in my body. So what the hell was up with the sensations of sexual pleasure and all that blood?
“All right, well, I’ve been through a lot this week. Hit by a car, got my eyesight back and Tommy’s still missing and—”
I flashed back to the man on the floor in my dream, the obvious question popping into my head. Could it have been my brother? Was I having some kind of psychic vision about what had happened to Tommy?
I sat up again, my eyes shifting rapidly side to side as I searched my brain for the memory, for any clue. What clothes was the guy wearing? What did he look like?
Blood and hamburger.
What the hell was wrong with me?
“Simple, stupid. Stress, a major physical change, every sense in my body undergoing a radical new state of being, and I’m still worried to hell and gone about Tommy. Maybe even feeling guilty that we were celebrating tonight while he was—”
Blood and hamburger.
“What do you say we leave the light on for the rest of the night, huh, Myrt?”
She closed her eyes and sighed.
But even then, I didn’t go back to sleep.
* * *
Mason stood between his two nephews at Glenwood Cemetery. Joshua had tugged and pulled at his necktie so much it was hanging loose and crooked, and kept shifting from one foot to the other, pausing in between to tug at the seat of his pants. He’d already taken off his jacket, and Mason thought if his mother hadn’t been standing there, he would have shucked the tie, the pants and the shoes, too, and gone running off in his shorts.
He intended to see to it the kid did just that once this part was over.
This part, frankly, sucked.
At least Josh seemed...normal. If there was a normal after a kid lost his dad. Mason had been twenty-nine when he’d lost his own, three years ago, and he still felt off his game.
That had been different, though. His dad had been sick for over a year. Pancreatic cancer was a bitch of a way to go. Had he known ahead of time, Mason would have stockpiled the morphine himself for his father. But no one had warned them how bad it would be. Those hospice nurses—they’d been so good in so many ways. Let Dad die at home where he wanted to be. But still, why don’t they tell the family to stockpile the morphine? To play the pain up before it got too bad and keep asking for more? They could have gotten it at that point. No one worries about addiction when you’re dying. It’s not like you’re going to have to get clean later on and suffer through withdrawal. All anyone wants is for you to be comfortable. Until it gets to the point where no amount of morphine can make you comfortable and instead it makes you crazy, with the nightmares and the hallucinations and the notion that the drugs are poison and everyone’s trying to get rid of you, maybe because that’s what they should be doing.
The thing was to stockpile the morphine before it got that bad. Then give it to them all at once when it gets too horrible to bear. It would have been merciful.
That had been, Mason realized, the first time he’d ever considered that doing something illegal might be justified. The day he’d watched his brother blow himself away had been the second—and that time he’d actually acted on the thought.
Jeremy sniffed. The sound jerked Mason out of his dark thoughts, and he looked over at his sixteen-year-old nephew. Built like a scarecrow. He’d grown a couple of inches over the summer, let his hair grow out. It was brown, curly. He attempted the comb-it-all-forward look currently the rage, but it curled at the ends in a flip that ruined the effect.
Jeremy was not doing well. He looked like a zombie.
Marie was a blond-haired blue-eyed rock, standing between her son Josh and mother-in-law, Angela. She had an arm around Josh, more to get him to stop fidgeting than to comfort him, but still. The other hand rested atop her baby bump. Her eyes were wet and a little puffy, but she’d done her hair and makeup, and she was holding it together in spades. For the boys, he figured. He and Marie had not always seen eye to eye, but he thought she was a hell of a mother. His nephews were lucky to have her.
His own mother, Angela, was standing there looking blank. She was medicated. He could tell. She had one of those doctors that only the wealthy or well-connected could afford, the kind who would pretty much prescribe whatever she asked for and look the other way when her usage seemed to be getting over the top.
As for himself, he was a wreck, too. And not just because he kept expecting the whole mess to blow up in his face at any second. Someone would find out what Eric had done—and what Mason had done to cover it up. It had to happen. That was hell to deal with on top of mourning the brother he’d thought he had, while trying to make sense out of the one he now knew had been real. The two images didn’t mesh. Yes, Eric had been fucked up for most of his life, but Mason had always seen him more as the victim of some screwy personality disorder—social anxiety or whatever—than as a criminal.
Murderer, he corrected.
Serial killer, he corrected again.
No matter how often he adjusted the label in his mind, he couldn’t seem to make it stick. His memory of his brother kept going straight back to “poor, mixed-up Eric, he’s so awkward with people, so painfully shy, so uncomfortable in his own body.”
Yeah, the family was a mess. Of them all, he figured Josh was doing the best.
The priest finished up, noting that there would be a gathering at Angela’s home afterward, and that they were all welcome to stop by and pay their respects.
Mason knew it was part of the whole ritual of parting, but he honestly didn’t know if he could get through it. People began to wander up to the five of them, offering hugs, handshakes, platitudes. And there would be more of the same into the evening, he knew, at his mother’s brick Georgian with its perfectly manicured lawn in Binghamton’s upscale suburb of Endwell. Uncomfortable people with empty words and filled casserole dishes.
Turning, he looked at the boys. “You guys wanna ride back with me instead of in the limo?”
Jeremy looked at his mother, then turned back and shook his head no, though Mason could tell he wanted to say yes. “We’d better stick with Mom.”
“Good man. I’ll be right behind you, then, okay?”
“I’d like to ride with you, Mason,” Angela said, and she closed a hand on his upper arm, digging in with her nails, though he didn’t think she meant to. “If you don’t mind.”
He was surprised how much his mother was leaning on him. She weighed next to nothing, and yet her hand on his arm seemed to be holding most of that weight up. It was alarming enough that he rearranged her, sliding his arm around her shoulders, and helped her down the grassy slope to the dirt track where several cars were lined up as their owners climbed back inside.
Marie and the boys slid into their limo, Marie having to turn her back to the open door and lower herself in carefully. She was going to have that little girl in a few months. Mason thought about that, about her and the boys having something joyful to take the place of the pain and grieving. And then he thought more. His brother was a serial killer. Was it genetic? Eric being adopted, his own forebears