Page 12 of The Angel Maker

Katie walked over and kissed him.

“It means I won’t be long,” she said.

He didn’t reply.

It was growing dark as she drove onto her mother’s street. She passed the point where Hyde had attacked Chris all those years ago without looking at it, and then parked just past a driveway flanked by two large stone pillars.

She locked the car, then made her way down the driveway in the gloom. From the outside, the building looked impressive—and perhaps it had been once. It remained a stern, imposing Victorian mansion with towering, soot-black stone walls and tall, austere windows. But at some point in the building’s history, the interior had been clumsily converted into four apartments, each a single, drab corridor with a handful of rooms leading off to either side.

At the bottom of the drive, Katie stopped and looked to her left. There were four garages there, one for each apartment. Theirs was padlocked shut, the metal doors as brittle and fragile as old parchment. She remembered countless summer days, seeing her father sitting at a trestle table inside there, threading wick through a plastic container, then tacking it in place while wax heated in a cheap pan on the stove beside him. The ramshackle shelves around him were always filled with rainbow rows of candles. As a child, the bright colors had made her happy, but it had been a bittersweet feeling because she also knew they needed to sell those candles, not store them. The thing that made her saddest of all was when her father locked the garage on an evening and then walked slowly back to the house, as though he had a pain in his hip that got worse every day.

She made her way down a set of steps and let herself into her mother’s apartment.

“It’s me,” she called.

After a moment, her mother’s voice drifted down from the far end of the corridor.

“I’ll be through in a minute.”

“Okay.”

The curtains were open in the front room, but the fading light from outside barely illuminated it. Katie stepped on the switch that turned onthe standing lamp in the corner, bathing the old, familiar furnishings with dim light. Nothing had really changed in here over the years. The threadbare couch; her mother’s worn old armchair with its coarse, itchy fabric; the alcoves lined with makeshift shelves, still filled with dusty books that had mostly been her father’s and hadn’t been slid out of place in years. There was the same ancient wooden table by the window, as solid and heavy as if it had grown up through the bare floorboards below.

Katie walked across.

A half-completed puzzle was laid out on the table. She tilted her head, squinting down at it, and then felt a jolt as she recognized the image. The puzzle must have been custom-made from a family photo. It showed her mother and father standing with their backs to a window full of rows of brightly colored candles, and Chris and Katie side by side in front of them. She remembered that day. There had been a brief period when her father’s business had been successful enough to warrant renting a shop, and this picture had been taken when the four of them went to see it for the first time.

She stared down at her younger self standing beside her brother.

The two of them smiling.

“That was a nice day, wasn’t it?”

Katie turned to see her mother standing in the doorway.

“Yes,” Katie said. “It was. You’ll strain your eyes in this light though.”

“My eyes are just fine, Katie.”

“Yes, Mom. I know.”

Even so, she forced herself to look away as her mother made her way slowly over to the armchair, leaning on the stick she walked with. The sight of her always broke Katie’s heart a little these days, but it was important never to show it. Her mother refused to acknowledge that her abilities were dimming and failing, even though it must have been as obvious to her as it was to Katie. She had always been so strong. While Katie’s father had sometimes struggled to make a living, her mother had worked at a carehome, taking on long, backbreaking shifts. Her whole life, she had been someone other people relied on. The reversal of that was intolerable to her.

Which only reminded Katie of how shaken she’d sounded on the phone.

She waited until her mother had eased herself carefully down into the chair and then went and perched on the arm of the couch, her hands clasped between her knees.

“What’s going on, Mom?” she said quietly. “What’s happened with Chris?”

“He’s gone missing.”

“I know that. He went missing two years ago.”

“No, he came back, Katie.” Her mother blinked and looked at her helplessly. “He came back to me,” she said. “And now he’s in danger.”

It had started about three months ago, Katie’s mother told her, with a knock at the door. It had taken her some time to open it, but when she had, Chris had been standing on the doorstep. He had been an addict for much of his adult life, and borderline homeless for most of that, but she told Katie he had been dressed in neat clothes and looked healthy and well.

“I’m not making this up,” she said.

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