The Menace: A Thriller

Chapter 3

Roy Ryan shut the door behind Chief Cutter and turned, looking across the big open room divided by the curving stairway, a space welcoming if a bit shabby, past the cozy areas and occasional windows letting in moonlight. His son was off to the right watching a cheesy live-action super-hero on TV; on the couch his estranged wife sat facing the dancing orange and blue of the fireplace flames. She fit in here, a warm woman despite her cold upbringing, a beautiful specimen of the female sex whose features had delicacy but also strength, her blonde hair glowing in the firelight.

He couldn’t help himself — he still loved her. But she had let him down — putting her controlling old man before the needs of their little family, and the son who embarrassed that other, larger family, one of Atlanta’s most powerful and socially prominent.

Helen’s father, Alexander Parsons, was the second-generation head of Georgia National, the USA’s leading manufacturer and marketer of tissue, pulp, packaging and building products. They made everything from toilet paper to paper cups, from office supplies to drywall. Also, a lot of money — her father’s favorite paper product, one of the few he did not himself directly manufacture.

Among the family’s supposedly public-spirited (and tax write-off) enterprises was a clinic in Atlanta where Roy had been set up with a practice whose patients were only the “right” kind of people. When Roy tried to expand to include a free clinic for, well, the “wrong” kind of people (in Helen’s father’s eyes) that had caused a nasty breach.

But it still hadn’t been enough to make Roy break away. That took the Parsons family’s increasingly short-sighted attitude about Richie, who they bounced from one expert to another and had privately tutored, denying the boy any access to other kids his age.

The back-breaking straw had been their decision to have the child institutionalized, which Helen had gone along with. Roy considered his wife’s compliance a betrayal of both himself and their son, leading to their separation, and in turn to the custody battle. Fortunately, a judge — unimpressed with the Parsons political power and outraged by a child diagnosed only marginally as “special needs” being institutionalized — gave Roy custody to the child with only limited visitation rights to Helen.

He crossed the room and joined her on the couch, maintaining that unpassable border of a center cushion. Her chin bobbed up almost imperceptibly, the blue eyes not leaving the flickering flames, a mild acknowledgment of his presence beside her. Almost beside her.

“I love my son,” she said quietly.

“I know you do.”

“I just wanted... want... what’s best for him.” Now she looked at him. “You left him to me. To my care. But he didn’t need a mother.”

“Of course he did.”

Her full lips turned into two tight lines. “That’s not what I mean. He needed you, a father, and you were too busy trying to get that stupid free clinic up and running for... for whoever... and didn’t give Richard the attention he needs.”

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was soft. “You’re not wrong. I’m trying to make up for it now.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Better late than never?”

His voice came back, not soft: “Would it have been so hard for you to set up your precious art studio at home? And be with him? A boy like that needed us, not a nanny, not shrinks and ‘developmental’ experts. He’s not a genius, okay, but so what? I see him as a normal boy.”

She lowered her head and her eyes bore into him like a bull considering a matador. “And your idea of ‘normal’ is to put him in public school, with their ‘special education’ classes... our son, taking the ‘short bus’!” She shuddered, hugged her arms to herself, as if the fire wasn’t enough. “It’s just your lazy way of keeping him off your hands while you see your precious patients.”

“That’s how you look at me, is it? Tonight, for example. You really thought I was capable of staging, of faking, some threat to Richie just to buy some time in your father’s next legal assault on my son and me?”

She shook her head, sighing. “Why not? You’re capable of anything, Roy. You talk a good game, but really? The only thing you’ve ever thought of is yourself.”

“Just because I busted my ass working—”

Her eyes and nostrils flared. “Working to help who? Not us. You had to be some bleeding heart. Free clinic! You just did that to stick a finger in Daddy’s eye!”

Roy leaned across the cushion divide. “Wasn’t it bad enough that I lowered myself to taking a handout from your father—”

“Handout!” Her eyes showed white all round. “Running a damn clinic was a handout?”

“Putting me in charge, right out of medical school? Damn well told! So the least I could do was give something back—”

Her eyes narrowed now. “You didn’t have anything to give back that my family didn’t give you in the first place.”

She returned her eyes to the fire, arms still folded.

In every discussion like this, between a husband and wife, one of two things must happen: somebody walks out of the room; or somebody changes the subject. Roy decided to change the subject.

“If you’re going to stay here for a while,” he said, “you’ll need to have some things sent up from Atlanta. Till then, the bathroom near the south guest room has enough toiletries for you to get by.”

She shook her head, the blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders just a little. “Not necessary. I have an overnight bag in the car.”

He eyed her warily. “You were already figuring for an overnight stay?”

A shrug. “I didn’t know how long this... negotiation was going to take.”

He frowned, genuinely confused. “What negotiation?”

Another shrug. “Getting you to come to your senses and share custody.”

He huffed a laugh. “What did you have in mind, a seduction job?”

Her chin crinkled, but then irritation turned into amusement, despite herself.

“You wish.” She shifted on her couch cushion. “I think we’ve explored this thoroughly enough for now. I have a motel reservation to cancel. And we have a lot of talking to do, starting tomorrow. This isn’t over — it’s just beginning.”

“Hell,” he said, lifting a shoulder and setting it back down. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want.”

A voice between them, high-pitched but male, said, “Are you really staying, Mom?”

Peeking over the center of the couch from in back of them was the bright-eyed face of ten year-old Richard Ryan. That he looked so much like Helen’s father was a bitter irony they’d both long since gotten past.

“I’m staying,” she confirmed. “Have you been listening long, honey?”

“No. What’s a suh-duck-shun job?”

His parents looked at each other.

“If Spider-man’s over,” Roy said, ignoring the question, “you should get up to your room, and get yourself in bed.”

“Who’s gonna tuck me in? Maybe Mom?”

“Sure,” she said. “Go on up and brush your teeth and climb under the covers. I’ll be right up.”

Richie did neither of those things, instead scrambling around to plant himself between them on the couch. The boy looked at his mother like Christmas was coming, and soon. “If you’re staying? Can we go on the rides at the park? Maybe go on the pond in a boat? Can I row?”

“Well...” she started.

“Maybe the park in a few days,” Roy finished for her. “For now we have to stay inside.”

The boy frowned. “Because you’re sick?”

“What makes you think I’m sick, son?”

“You have the flu, don’t you?”

How long had the boy been listening?

“Well, I am sick...” Roy began.

“I’ll say,” Helen muttered.

“...but it’s not serious. We’re just going to stay in, here at the house, till we’re sure you and Mom haven’t caught this bug.”

“Like a quarantine,” the boy said.

His parents exchanged looks again — this kid, so under-estimated, came up with the damnedest words sometimes.

“Like that,” Roy said.

Richie frowned, curious. “Is that why those policemen are out walking around?”

“Uh, yeah. That’s right.”

The boy’s head tilted to one side. “Is that for keeping somebody from getting in? Or for us getting out?”

“They’re just protecting us.”

He winced in thought. “What about school?”

“I’ll let your principal know. You’ll do homework here.”

Richie jerked a thumb toward his mother. “Is Mom staying to be your nurse?”

She mouthed You wish at Roy, who said, “If we need her to. But mostly she’ll just be Mom. You two can catch up — you haven’t spent much time together lately.”

“I know!” Richie turned to her. “Can we play games?”

“Sure,” Helen said.

“Like Operation? I think it’s funny when the tweezers make it buzz.”

“Me, too,” Roy said. “But real operations aren’t so funny.”

“I know! You’re a real doctor. This is just pretend.”

“Right.”

“I’m going to be a doctor someday. I still have what you gave me! That old stethoscope.”

Another mouthful the kid managed, and remembered.

The boy was saying, “I’m gonna get it out and be your doctor, Dad!”

He ruffled the boy’s hair. “Why not? But for now, doctor’s orders are Richard Thomas Ryan needs to get himself to bed. Mom will be up soon.”

“And you, too?”

“Sure.”

The boy scrambled away and went up the stairs — slow and careful, as he’d been taught, then scrambling again when he reached the top.

“Why do you encourage him?” Helen asked. Suddenly she seemed on the verge of tears.

“What are you talking about?”

“Telling a boy like Richard he can be a doctor someday. What is wrong with you?”

“What’s the harm? So he has a vivid imagination — so what? I think it’s a good sign — even your developmental jerks say so. Right now he wants to be a doctor — last week it was Batman, next week it’ll be one of these cops walking the grounds.”

She was shaking her head. “I don’t agree that his imagination is a good thing. You let him watch too much unsupervised TV. Do you want him to jump off the roof in his Superman pajamas? And it’s cruel of you.”

“What is?”

“Putting it in his head he could be grow up to be a doctor.”

Roy rolled his eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Suppose he does develop an actual interest in medicine — he’s so much brighter than your ‘experts’ indicate. Can’t you see how he’s blossoming?”

“He’s more like a six-year-old than almost eleven.”

“But a normal six-year-old. And even if he’s not a genius, he could be a male nurse or maybe an orderly. I mean, his vocabulary — ‘quarantine’? How about stethoscope’? How many kids his age with their high IQs know that one?”

She sighed. “It’s just dangerous, getting his hopes up. You’re his hero, Roy. He sees you and wants to be a doctor. It’s cruel.”

Glass shattered and an object came flying through the picture window to the left of the fireplace, knocking a lamp off a table, sailing in like a terrible bird that had caught fire. Helen gasped and Roy, momentarily stunned, realized what he was looking at, as it spun on the wood floor like a deadly top spitting flames — a bottle of fluid, its cloth wick already lit.

“Get away and down!” he yelled at his wife, and bolted to the bottle and grabbed it and thrust it back out through the jagged-toothed aperture in the window. The burning bottle hit the lawn and exploded in a burst of flame that illuminated something scurrying away, something...

...human?

A broad-shouldered creature in black on no discernible legs, its long simian-like arms outstretched, was moving quickly, though the motion was more side to side than forward, and yet in a few eyeblinks he was at the fieldstone wall, climbing it as quickly as a squirrel up the side of a brick building and...

Gone.

Roy yanked off his sports coat and smothered the flames the burning bottle had deposited on the wooden floor. Outside, the fire was ebbing but still vivid in the night and three cops were rushing to where the Molotov cocktail had landed after Roy lobbed it, the trio apparently not having seen the fleeing... man?... who had obviously hurled the makeshift bomb in the first place. A fourth cop joined them, having availed himself of a fire extinguisher and got to work putting out the flames.

Roy went back to Helen and said to her, “It’s all right. Check on Richie,” and got a long-stemmed flashlight from a drawer before going out to join the four officers.

Leon Jackson, a big trimly bearded African-American officer who the chief had left in charge, approached as Roy exited the house and ran down the steps off the porch.

“Did you see it?” Roy asked, almost yelling, though the only sounds were the steamy noise of the fire extinguisher and the snap of the dying flames. “Did any of your men see it?”

“It?”

Roy nodded several times, fast. “If it was a man, it was the damnedest man I ever saw. I think he was in a black sweater, maybe a cap — he went over the wall... there.”

Roy pointed.

Jackson trotted over and sent two of his men out to check the other side of the wall, where a strip of grass bordered trees, then returned to the doctor.

“It was more like... half a man,” Roy said. “But he had legs... or anyway feet, or...”

Jackson put a hand on Roy’s shoulder. “It’s okay, doctor. Just tell me what you saw.”

Roy did, but could add nothing to what he’d already shared, other than, “He scrambled up that wall like a damn monkey. So fast. So goddamn fast...”

Gently, hand still on Roy’s shoulder, Jackson said, “Now, come on, doctor. You can do better than that. What did he look like?”

“I only got a glimpse.”

“Try. You’re a medical man, now. Amputee? Dwarf? Try.”

Roy shook his head. “You’d need Dr. Frankenstein for the right medical opinion on this one. Get Chief Cutter out here, would you?”

“You bet.”

“Sergeant Jackson!”

The cry came from one of the other cops stepping just inside the gate, which they’d opened to check out the perimeter. Jackson jogged over to the officer and Roy followed.

The cop, a skinny guy in his forties who wore an alarmed expression, had a flashlight, too. “You need to see this, Sergeant.”

Roy followed Jackson taking the other officer’s lead, flashlight beams cutting the night. Another cop with a flashlight was already illuminating footprints in soft ground — it had rained a few days ago — trailing into the nearby trees.

The footprints were those of a large man — a barefoot man.

“What the hell,” Jackson said to nobody in particular, “are we looking at?”

“He doesn’t have much of a stride,” the skinny officer said.

Roy said, “Why would he? He’s only about three feet tall.”

All the cops looked at him like he was crazy. Which was exactly how Roy felt.

Before long Roy was back inside, where the fire on the floor was out, the charred sports coat cast aside, an officer taking Polaroid pictures of the blackened, glass-scattered area. Helen was over on the couch sitting next to Richie, who was snuggled against her in his pjs. A lot of lights had been turned on. The boy straightened and smiled as his father approached, then the child’s expression tightened like a fist.

“What the hell was that, Dad?”

“Language,” his mother said, without much conviction.

“Dad says that all the time,” the boy said defensively, then words came tumbling from him: “I saw the fire from my window, Dad. And those cops standing around it like a marshmallow roast. What the... heck’s going on?”

“Is that all you saw?” Roy said, and sat next to them.

“That’s all.”

“Probably some kids. Halloween.”

“Dad, Halloween’s two weeks from now.”

Roy smiled, shrugged. “Sometimes big kids get an early start.”

Richie shook his head. “Kids shouldn’t play with fire, even if they are big.”

“No, they shouldn’t. You better scoot upstairs, son.”

The boy turned to his mother. “Tuck me in again?”

She smiled, took his hand. “You bet.”

“See you in the morning, Dad!”

The officer with the camera had just left when Helen came down. Wind was whistling tunelessly through the open window. Roy stood looking at the scorched floor.

She slipped her arm in her husband’s, looking toward the jagged remains of the picture window. “We’ll need to board that up tomorrow.”

“I’ll take care of it tonight.” He kicked at the shards on the floor. “Guess you believe me now. Unless you think I really know how to put on a show.”

“I believe you.” Her eyes were on the broken window. “You saw something out there. What did you see?”

He didn’t answer at first. Instead he led her back to the couch and they sat again. No cushion between them now. He told her as best he could.

She shivered, held onto his arm again. “Sounds like something out of King Kong.”

“More like Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

They just sat there for a while, the fire dwindling, at once comforting and yet a reminder of the more unpleasant flames that had come sailing through the window not long ago.

Finally Roy said, “What happened to us, baby?”

“Maybe... maybe there wasn’t enough ‘us.’ Just you and your practice and your idealism. And me and my artwork and the gallery.”

Her father had set her up with an art gallery in Atlanta’s Little Five points area of quirky shops and boutiques. She was not an arty type, though — she did lovely landscapes that the tourists bought. She was good. He was proud of her for that.

He walked her out to the Toronado and they collected her suitcase.

“If we’re going to be trapped in here for a few days,” Roy said, as they headed back in, “maybe we can work some things out. Without any lawyers.”

“Without my father?”

“Without your father.”

“About Richard.”

“About Richie.”

He escorted her to the foot of the stairs and she started up without him, then turned and said, “Roy, you should know that I don’t have any desire to play the little woman to a small-town doctor.”

“I suppose you’d like it better if I had a private practice in Buckhead.”

“Yes. I would.”

And she went up to bed.

As he hammered the boards in place over the busted-out window, he hoped he was disturbing her rest.