The Shadows

It’s in the house, Paul.

“Charlie’s dream diary,” I said.

“You found it, then?”

“Yes. Why did my mother have it?”

There was a long silence then. I stared across the old playground, watching the bushes at the far side wavering ever so slightly in the breeze.

Waiting.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he said.

After everything that had happened, the anger flared.

“Do you know,” I said, “people keep asking me that. And for a long time, maybe the answer was no. I didn’t want to know about any of it. But I’m here now, despite everybody’s predictions about me. And so, yes. I would fucking well like to know.”

Carl looked up at the sky.

“I just wanted to keep everybody safe,” he said. “But now that Daphne’s gone, perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe nothing does. And, God, I’m so fucking tired. So I’ll tell you, if that’s what you want. Then you can carry it all too. And you can decide what to do about it.”

“Tell me how my mother got the diary.”

He continued staring at the sky for a moment, lost in memory, and then looked down and rubbed his hands together.

“First I need to tell you what happened that day.”

* * *

Carl and Eileen had both been home on the day Charlie and Billy murdered Jenny. Carl had been working upstairs, and, as always, he’d listened to James leaving the house with a heavy heart. There had been many days that year when he’d felt like that: watching Charlie lead us all down the backyard and into the woods, feeling powerless to intervene. He knew who Charlie was—the illegitimate son of Eileen’s former husband—and he didn’t trust his involvement in James’s life. But it had never felt like his place to say anything.

As he told me this, I recalled the last day I’d gone into the woods with them. The way I’d seen Carl reluctantly raise his hand to the glass when I’d waved at him.

“And, of course, by that point you weren’t with them,” Carl said. “But that day, you spoke to him here. You told him the truth. And instead of meeting Charlie and Billy, he came home.”

He had heard the argument begin, walking out of his makeshift office and standing quietly at the top of the stairs for a time, listening to the furious words being exchanged between James and his mother. The fallout from what I’d done had been ugly. Eileen had been sobbing and shouting. For his part, James had seemed resolute. Determined to discover the truth about his father.

“I always thought we should have told him sooner,” he said. “But Eileen was adamant. She didn’t want to think about what had happened; she just wanted to forget. At that point, I didn’t know how James had found out, but a part of me was glad he had. But it was a matter for them to sort out between them, so I went back to work.”

The argument downstairs continued for a time, and then settled into a kind of silence. Carl carried on working, imagining he’d be able to help with the situation later. That was his role in the house: to calm things down; to look after everybody and keep things working. He had always been the peacemaker.

He took a deep breath.

“But then I heard screaming.”

He could never be sure exactly what had happened, but it seemed that at some point Charlie had come in through the back door.

“That boy was crazy. You know that, right?”

I nodded, remembering. “Yeah. I know.”

“He really did believe in that dream world he’d made up. He thought he would find his father by doing what he did. But, of course, the whole thing was ridiculous. I think when he woke up in the woods, he was so upset and frustrated and angry that he came to our house to take it out on Eileen.”

Carl hadn’t seen it happen, but from what he could gather afterward, Charlie had begun screaming abuse at Eileen, and then attacked her, pushing her to the floor and starting to beat her. James had stood there for a moment, watching the boy he imagined had been his friend trying to kill his mother. Knowing that he had been betrayed. Understanding that the foundations of his existence had been undermined in a single afternoon.

And as Charlie continued his attack on Eileen, James picked up a knife.

* * *

When Carl had finished, I sat there in silence for a moment.

“James killed Charlie?”

Carl nodded.

“You could make an argument that he was acting in self-defense—or at least, protecting his mother. But it went way beyond that. He lost control of himself. I think that everything that had happened—everything he’d learned that day—it all came pouring out in that moment. He was still stabbing Charlie when I came downstairs. I had to wrestle the knife off him.”

He blinked the memory away.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” I said.

“I thought about it. But then … well. I made a decision. Standing there right then, I knew our lives had changed forever, and I wanted to limit the damage.” He looked at me suddenly. “I love James, you know.”

I nodded, remembering.

Like his own son.

“And I knew that he was going to be in real trouble. I had no idea what I was doing, but someone needed to take charge. James was sobbing; Eileen was hysterical. Someone needed to look after them both. So it came down to me. Like it always did.”

He shook his head and fell silent. I waited.

After a while, he took another deep breath.

“We wrapped Charlie’s body in plastic sheeting, packed up tightly, and stuck it up in the attic, surrounded by boxes and carpets. We cleaned up. And then we waited. We didn’t know what he’d done at that point, and by the time Billy was arrested that evening, it was too late to change anything. We’d hidden the body; we’d tidied the scene. We were all guilty. The police came to talk to us the next day, but they had no reason to suspect us of anything. They never searched the house or anything like that. I kept waiting for it all to go wrong, but it didn’t. What was left of Charlie was sealed away above us, but in the end it was easy to pretend it had all just … gone away.”

He spread his hands as though he couldn’t quite believe it. He was wrong, though. The three of them might have gotten away with the crime, but the repercussions of Charlie’s disappearance were still being felt even now. People were dying because of this secret. What happened that day had stretched its fingers out in the twenty-five years since, and it still had a grip on the world.

“James never really recovered,” Carl said. “He’s had a difficult life. The drinking. Drugs. Eileen and I came into some money, and we moved to be closer to him. He’s always needed someone to look after him.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I did my best to help. I tried to convince him that what happened had only ever been a bad dream.” Carl laughed flatly at the irony. “Over time, I think he’s come to accept that’s true. He believes that Charlie really did disappear that day. He talks about it all the time. Reinforcing it to himself. He needs that to be what happened so he doesn’t have to remember.”

I thought about what Amanda had told me.

“Does he talk about it online?”