Adermoor Cove Part 3: Many Sleepless Nights - 2. Chapter 2

Carlos sat at his desk, watching the suspect. Ramona had left a half an hour ago after typing up a report; Carlos had elected to stay here so she could go home and be with Moira. “Thanks,” she’d said, obviously grateful. “I owe you one,”.

Now the station was quiet. The only other person in the station was Melvin the dispatcher.

The longer Carlos watched Lane the more perplexed he became. Lane was sitting on the edge of the bed now, looking at the walls. To Carlos he looked like a small boy who’d been put in the corner for timeout. He was thin and frail looking - it was a wonder he’d been able to throw Vanessa Stanton over the edge of the tower, even with Vanessa’s sickliness. And his words kept repeating through Carlos’s head: The darkness...it got inside her. There was nothing else I could do.

Carlos thought of the dream he’d had, of being in the boiler room, knowing the lunch woman was hidden behind the furnace, and felt a shudder pass through him. He rubbed his eyes and kicked himself inwardly. You’re just tired from lack of sleep, he told himself. Don’t let it affect your ability to do your job.

He got up and went over to the counter with the coffee maker on it and grabbed a styrofoam cup. After watching the dark steaming liquid pour into it. He poured in a healthy amount of cream and sugar and stirred; he could only assume Melvin had made it, therefore it would taste like rocket fuel, not coffee. He’d discovered long ago it was best to do one thing at a time when sleep deprived. The whole time his thoughts were on Lane. He took a sip of the coffee and turned back towards the cell. Against his better judgement he walked up to the cell.

“What did you mean back in the car?” he asked.

Lane looked up. Seconds ticked by in which he remained silent. “It’s a long story,” he said finally.

“Well you better get it straight. Because when the sheriff gets here you’re going to have a lot of questions to answer.”

Lane suddenly laughed. There was a cynical, hysterical quality to it. “I never should have come to this fucked up little town. I should have just kept driving and driving.”

“Why did you come here, then?”

“For answers.”

“Answers for what?”

Lane’s face darkened. “Who I am and why bad shit keeps happening to me.”

“Is that what happened to your arm, something bad happened to you?”

Lane looked down at the arm with the makeshift cast. “That was when I got into a fight with a crowbar - and lost.”

The door to the station opened and Sheriff Enzo came walking in. His eyes were red and puffy. The old man’s been crying, Carlos thought. This is a day I’ll never forget. Enzo gave Lane a seething look and said with a venomous voice, “Get him into the interrogation room, Carlos.

The interrogation room was a square room with white walls and white tiling. Lane and Sheriff Enzo sat at a square table in the center of the room. He'd offered Lane a cup of coffee. He spoke in a calm friendly manner that was really just a facade. Lane simply shook his head and kept his silence. Carlos watched it all in the recording room, behind the two way mirror. Speakers in the room allowed him to hear what was being said; video cameras recorded the whole conversation.

"So," Enzo said, his voice crackling conversationally through the speakers, "I have a lot of questions for you. Frankly I don't know where to begin. I'd ask your name but I don't know if you'd be telling me the truth since we found this in your car." He held up an evidence baggie full of IDs social security cards, and birth certificates. "You trying to get away from something?"

“Yes,” Lane said, looking the sheriff in the eye.

“What?”

“I don’t know...I was kind of hoping you could tell me. There’s something about this town. Something wrong with it.”

“Yeah,” Enzo said, “sick people like you who bring your twisted big city problems with you.”

“Actually,” Lane said, “I’m from here. I always thought I was from Indianapolis, where I was adopted, but as it turns out that’s not the case.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I just got here yesterday. I just found out Vanessa Stanton is my aunt and she put me up for adoption to get away from this place. It didn’t work”

Carlos watched as his father leaned back in the chair and gave Lane a long hard look. Carlos didn’t like the look he was seeing on his father’s face; there was something dangerous looking behind there and he had no idea what it was. “You’re saying your a Stanton?”

“Yes,” Lane said. “My mother was Elise Stanton. She died moments after giving birth to me.”

Enzo stood and leaned across the table so his face was just inches away from Lane’s; his olive toned skin had turned tomato-red. “You’re lying,” he spat. “And what does any of this have to do with why you killed Vanessa Stanton, an old woman already moments from stepping through death’s door?”

Lane stared back in defiance. Carlos had to give him credit, he was a tough little shit. “I don’t know, you tell me. The town killed her, not me. Whatever it is here that infects people. It got inside her and she attacked me. And she told me not long before she died that you know about it, so don’t tell me I’m fucking lying!”

Slowly Enzo’s face changed. His eyes became glassy and his face went from bright red to a pale shade of green. Carlos couldn’t remember the last he’d seen him look scared. “Infected?”

The younger man nodded. “I’ve always just called it ‘the darkness.’ Somehow it gets in people and controls them. They always come after me. Sometimes it leaves behind stains on the walls...and there’s things that come out of it, like bugs. And it moves almost as if it’s alive...Vanessa told me she had answers; she said I might be able to stop it. That’s why I came here, to Adermoor Cove. I just want to find a way to stop it.”

Once more, with an air of finality, Enzo rose from the table. He had the black-crevasse look on his face Carlos recognized, which meant he had shut himself down. Whatever he was thinking or feeling, whatever decision he'd made, there was no getting through to the sheriff. "You stick with that story and there won't be much of a trial - the judge will just have you locked up in the loony bin and you will never get another chance to see the light of day."

It was then Lane's resolve shattered. "Fuck you!" he shouted, vocal cords standing out against his neck. His hands were clenched into fist. "Fuck you and everyone on this God forsaken island!" He crumpled forward in his seat and buried his face in his arms, handcuff chain scraping against the table.

Even in the interrogation room, through the speakers, Carlos could hear his muffled sobs and it made him think of a rainy night seven years ago in Boston: A seven year old boy had come home from school, just off the school bus, to find his mother wasn't home. The door was unlocked so he just went inside thinking his mother had just made a quick run to the grocery store, fixed himself a sandwich to hold him over until dinner, and sat at the kitchen table and did his homework.

Carlos suddenly remembered the boy's name had been Timmy Maddox, the mother's Rebecca.

Timmy waited until five o'clock in the morning before he got worried enough to try and reach his mother on the cell. He later told Carlos it wasn’t like her to not be home when he got out of school or leave without her cell phone. At seven Timmy got scared and called the cops.

Timmy was sitting on the porch swing when Carlos had arrived at the scene, and the sound Lane was making wasn’t so different from the one Timmy had made. It was the sound of fear, pain, and desolation.

As it turned out Rebecca Maddox had been in the house the whole time. Carlos found her in the upstairs bathroom. She'd locked the door so Tim couldn't discover what she'd done to herself. Carlos would never be able to forget the water, darkened with her blood, and the bone-deep slashes she'd carved into herself. The few friends who'd known her later said they didn't know Rebecca had been thinking about taking her own life; they couldn't imagine why she would want to leave her young son behind with no one to look after him. But the prescription bottles found by the forensic staff, prescribed by the psychiatrist, had told a story no one knew anything about.

It was a memory Carlos hadn't told his father and didn’t think he ever would. In those days he'd still been a beat cop and felt the same drowning helpless feeling he did now.

Enzo came back into the booth, looking grave, tired, and old. His words passed through Carlos’s ears like water: Unless an angel comes along and posts his bail, he'll be transferred to Bangor first thing tomorrow...I'm going to get a few hours of shuteye...You look like you could use some too...Go home, get some sleep…And I don’t want you telling anyone about this just yet...

"Has this morning been a fucking nightmare or what?" his father asked.

Eyes burning from exhaustion, Carlos thought, Everyday is a fucking nightmare.

                                     …

Once back at the house exhaustion hit Carlos like a ton of falling bricks. He stripped down to his birthday suit and crawled underneath the covers. The bedroom felt wonderfully cool. The pulse of the fan almost sounded like rushing water. For the first time since he'd bought the place with money he'd saved up over the years, the house felt like home.

As sleep gradually started to take him a question drifted through his mind: Why did I move back here?

And then he was dreaming again. Not of the boiler room this time, but a different dream. He was walking up the driveway leading to the lighthouse. The sun was just starting to set. In the bleeding light, the beacon at the top of the lighthouse shone brightly. Carlos wondered if there'd been a mistake, if Vanessa Stanton hadn't really been thrown to her death, but was in fact at the top of the tower, shining that light.

He could hear someone crying, a little boy.

It sounded like Timmy Maddox.

A question floated feverishly through his mind: What's Timmy doing here in Adermoor Cove?

He passed the yellow security tape and walked the rest of the way to the porch. He realized it wasn’t Timmy crying as if in the greatest agony a person could find themselves in, but Lane. He sat in the rocking chair where it was said Vanessa Stanton used to sit before she was diagnosed with cancer (you mean before the darkness took her just like it took the lady in the boiler room, a small voice in the back of his mind whispered), head lowered. When he sensed Carlos coming he lifted his head. A mix of tears and eyeliner trailed down his face like liquid ash. His suffering only made him look more beautiful. He rose from the rocking chair and waited.

Carlos climbed up the steps and stopped so that Lane was standing slightly above him. "Why are you crying?"

"Because every fucking day is a nightmare," said Lane. "I need you to listen to me. You know something's going on. You know how this town is. You don’t remember because you blocked it out - but you do remember the lady in the boiler room. And you know after you told your father she was never seen again. Things have a way of going missing here. What is it your father always used to tell you?"

"'Here in Adermoor Cove we do things our own way," Carlos recited.

Lane nodded. "That's right."

"But I don't want to remember. I don't want any of this to be real."

"And that's the problem with this town. People don’t want to acknowledge there is something very wrong with this island. They cover it up to make it look all pristine and pretty so the tourists will come every summer, without incident. But you have to remember because the dark times are coming."

"It's too bad you're a murder suspect," said Carlos, "because I really want to kiss you."

Lane smiled through his tears. “Well I guess it’s good this is a dream, then, huh?”

                        …

By the time Carlos went into the station at three o’clock in the afternoon, feeling refreshed, the dream was mostly forgotten the way most dreams are. He stepped into the station to find Ramona Sterling and Jack Nichols standing together by the coffee maker, talking in low voices.

“What’s going on?” Carlos asked. “What are you guys gossiping about? Or is it about me and I'm not supposed to know?”

Ramona glanced towards the sheriff’s office door which was cracked open. “You just missed it. Ted Magyer just came in and posted that kid’s bail not an hour ago.”

“What?” Carlos whirled around. Sure enough the holding cell where Lane hardy had been held was empty.

“Things are starting to get mighty interesting around here, wouldn’t you say?” Nichols said, taking a sip of his coffee.