Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY

Evil isn't merely a word.

It's a tangible, dimensional thing. It slithers through the air, shifting molecules and displacing energy as it considers various hunting grounds. Once it homes in on a target, its malevolent arc of electricity affixes to its prey.

It's easier to sense evil in the darkness. In the warmth of light, our rational minds try to mute our primal brain's desperate warning cry.

Some people appear to be more attuned to the menace linking itself to them than others. Such as the sorority girl in Florida who stepped out of her bedroom late one night to get a drink of water. She felt it, the thing lurking in the shadows. The bone-chilling certainty made her jump back and lock her door. That same night, Ted Bundy rampaged through the sorority house, stealing the lives of two young women and badly injuring two others.

Like Rose Barclay, Bundy was drawn to sharp objects as a child. Once, when his aunt took a nap, he gathered knives from the kitchen and arranged them around her sleeping form.

Did he also read about murderers? I wonder.

I've felt the presence of evil twice in my life. Possibly three times.

Most recently in the plastic house.

And in my early twenties, when my Honda wouldn't start in a nearly deserted shopping mall parking lot. The sun had dipped past the horizon; most of the stores in the mall were closed. As I popped my hood, a man materialized from behind a thick supporting column. He stepped toward me, so close I could see the dark mole between his eyebrows.

"Need a hand?" His voice was friendly. But the aura surrounding him ripped the breath from my lungs.

Time froze as my mind frantically whirled, instinctively calculating physics and risk. The distance to the mall was a hundred yards. My heels and skirt would make it impossible to outrun him. I was near the car hood, and he was by the trunk; if I tried to get inside and honk my horn, he'd be at the door before I could lock it. My purse was on the passenger's seat. It would take too long to grab my phone, which was tucked into an inner pocket.

He knew I was trapped. I could see it in his unblinking eyes.

I could dash around behind my little four-door car and try to keep it between us. But all he'd have to do was duck beneath the windows to conceal his movements while he approached me.

My last, desperate hope—that he really was a Good Samaritan—evaporated when he twisted his head to quickly glance toward the mall.

A roaring noise erupted in my head when I realized what he was doing.

He was checking to make sure no one else was coming.

He took a step closer. His smile widened.

He was savoring my fear. Feasting on it like a delicacy.

Then I heard the distant sound of laughter. Seconds later, three teenagers on skateboards whizzed into the lot, heading in my general direction.

"Wait!" I screamed.

One of them did something with his feet that caused his board to shoot up into the air. He caught it in one hand as his feet stuttered to a stop.

"What's up?" he asked me as his friends came toward us.

The man reached up and made a gesture like he was tipping an imaginary hat to me. Then he turned and evaporated into the night.

When the police arrived, they discovered my car battery had been deliberately disconnected. Then an officer told me something that seared me to my core. Two women who fit my general description had recently been murdered in the area.

Luck, good timing, divine intervention—whatever it was, it disrupted evil's force field that night.

I can't say for sure if I felt its presence a third time, on the night my mother died.

I was so young then, and terror and evil are inexorably linked. Perhaps my mind muddled the two.

This is what I remember: After she ushered me into the closet, my mother opened the front door willingly. I heard the rumble of a man's deep voice. A little later, I thought I heard her protest over the music: "No… please." Her voice was soft. She didn't scream or cry out for help. Was that because she didn't want me to burst out of the closet? Perhaps her last act was a breathtakingly loving one, to save my life and sacrifice hers by perpetuating the charade that she was alone.

But now I wonder: Did I truly hear her protest, or did my mind layer imaginary dialogue into my remembrance as a way of comforting me?

The final words I thought I heard her utter could have been a desperate trick by my psyche to convince me she loved me. That she wouldn't have willingly abandoned me.

Maybe the truth is that she eagerly succumbed to the seductive beckon of heroin again, never giving a second thought to her seven-year-old daughter curled up a few feet away.

You can be furious with your mother, Chelsea once told me. You can love her, and hate her, and desperately miss her too.

I do, I answer my old therapist in my mind now.

With my father, it's different. I carry a few faded mental snapshots—of him carrying the wiggling bundle that was Bingo into the living room on Christmas morning, and tucking his tongue into a corner of his mouth as he worked on one of his crossword puzzles. But I know there was nothing I—or anyone—could have done to save him. He swerved off a road at dusk and slammed into a tree. Then his beautiful, kind heart stopped beating before the ambulance arrived.

I hate not knowing how my mother died, and if someone killed her by forcing that flow of heroin into her veins.

Of all the ghosts I carry with me, my mother's haunts me most.

The void she left in my life is so deep that I fear if I peer over the edge, I'll tip in and never stop falling.