The Unquiet

“I found some plastic sheeting in the garage and I wrapped him in it. There used to be a greenhouse in the back garden. It had a dirt floor. It was dark by then, and I dragged him out there. That was the hardest part: getting him up from the basement. He didn’t look like he weighed a lot, but it was all muscle and bone. I dug a hole and put him in, then covered him up again. I suppose I was already pla

“When it was all done, I went home. The next night, I waited until dark then drove my father’s car up to Jackman and left it there. I reported him missing once the car was taken care of. The police came. Some detectives looked at the basement floor, like I knew they would, but my father had only just started tearing it up, and it was clear that there was nothing underneath it. They knew all about my father, and when they found the car up in Jackman, they figured he’d fled.

“After a couple of days, I came back and moved the body. I’d been lucky. It had been wicked cold that month. I guess it kept him, well, you know, from rotting too much, so there wasn’t a smell, not really. I started to dig in the basement. It took me most of the night, but he had taught me what to do. He always said that a girl should know how to take care of a house, how to fix things and keep them in order. I cleared a space of rubble and dug down until there was a hole big enough to take him. I covered him up, then I went upstairs and fell asleep in my old room. You wouldn’t think that someone could just fall asleep after doing something like that, but I slept straight through until midday. I slept so peacefully, better than I could ever remember doing before. Then I went back down and kept working. Everything that I needed was down there, even a little mixer for the cement. Getting the rubble up took some time, and my back ached for weeks after, but once that was done, it was all pretty easy. It took me a day or two over the weekend, all told. Je

“And then you moved into this house.”

“I couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t mine to sell, and anyway I would have been afraid to do that even if it had been, just in case someone decided to renovate the basement and found what was there. It seemed better to move in. Then we just stayed here. You know what the strange thing is, though? You see those cracks in the floor? They’re new. They only started appearing in the last couple of weeks, ever since Frank Merrick came around causing trouble. It’s like he awakened something down there, as if my father heard him asking questions and tried to find a way back into the world. I’ve started to have nightmares. I dream that I hear noises from the basement, and when I open the door, my father is climbing the steps, hauling himself up from the dirt to make me pay for what I’ve done, because he loved me, and I’d hurt him. In my dream, he ignores me and starts crawling toward Je

Her toe had begun to explore one of the cracks in the floor. She withdrew it quickly when she became aware of what she was doing, the description of her nightmares reminding her of what lay below.

“Who helped you with all of this?” I asked.

“Nobody,” she said. “I did it alone.”

“You drove your father’s car up to Jackman. How did you get back down after you’d abandoned it?”

“I hitched a ride.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

But I knew that she was lying. After all that she had done, she wouldn’t have taken a chance like that. Someone followed her up to Jackman, then drove her back east again. I thought it might have been the woman, April. I remembered the way they had looked at each other that night after Merrick had broken the window. Something had passed between them, a gesture of complicity, an acknowledgment of a shared understanding. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered.

“Who was the other man, Rebecca, the one who took the photograph?”

“I don’t know. It was late. I heard someone drinking with my father, then they came to my room. They both smelled pretty bad. I can still recall it. It’s why I’ve never been able to drink whiskey. They turned on the bedside light. The man had a mask on, an old Halloween mask of a ghost that my father used to wear to frighten the trick-or-treaters. My father told me that the man was a friend of his, and that I should do the same things that I did for him. I didn’t want to, but…” She stopped for a moment. “I was seven years old,” she whispered. “That’s all. I was seven. They took pictures. It was like it was a game, a big joke. It was the only time it ever happened. The next day, my father cried and told me he was sorry. He told me again that he loved me, and that he never wanted to share me with anyone else. And he never did.”

“And you’ve no idea who it might have been?”

She shook her head, but she would not look at me.

“There were more pictures of that night in Raymon Lang’s trailer. Your father’s drinking buddy was in them, but his head wasn’t visible. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm. Do you remember it?”

“No. It was dark. If I did see it, I’ve forgotten it over the years.”

“One of the other children who was abused mentioned the same tattoo. Someone suggested to me that it might be a military tattoo. Do you know if any of your father’s friends served in the army?”

“Elwin Stark, he did,” she said. “I think Eddie Haver might have been in the army too. They’re the only ones, but I don’t think either of them had a tattoo like that on his arm. They came on vacation with us sometimes. I saw them on the beach. I would have noticed.”

I let it go. I didn’t see what else I could do.

“Your father betrayed those children, didn’t he?” I asked.

She nodded. “I think so. They had those pictures of him with me. I guess that’s how they made him do what he did.”

“How did they get them?”

“I suppose the other man from that night passed them on to them. But, you know, my father really did care about the kids he treated. He tried to look out for them. Those men made him choose the ones that he gave to them, made him pick children to be abused, but he seemed to work twice as hard for the rest because of it. I know it makes no sense at all, but it was almost like there were two Daniel Clays, the bad one and the good one. There was the one who abused his daughter and betrayed children to save his reputation, and the one who fought tooth and nail to save other kids from abuse. Maybe that was the only way he could survive without going insane: by separating the two parts, and by taking all of the bad stuff and calling it ‘love.’”

“And Jerry Legere? You suspected him after you found him with Je

“I saw something of what I had seen in my father in him,” she said, “but I didn’t know he was involved, not until the police came and told me how he had died. I think I hate him more than anyone. I mean, he must have known about me. He knew what my father had done and, somehow, it made me more attractive to him.” She shuddered. “It was like, when he was fucking me, he was fucking the child I was as well.”

She sank down on the floor and laid her forehead on her arms. I could barely hear her when she spoke again.

“What happens now?” she asked. “Will they take Je

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing happens.”

She lifted her head. “You’re not going to tell the police?”

“No.”

There was no more to say. I left her in the basement, sitting at the foot of the grave she had dug for her father. I got in my car and I drove away to the susurration of the sea, like an infinite number of voices offering quiet consolation. It was the last time I would ever hear the sea in that place, for I never returned there again.