The Death Box(28)

I was trying to absorb every aspect of the case, true; but it was also true that I was hiding within the files and folders and pictures of torment. Ever since my arrival I had been postponing a call to my brother, Jeremy.

The call was not as easy as it sounded. Jeremy’s life was six years longer than mine, and more troubled. Our father had been a civil engineer renowned for brilliant responses to engineering problems, but he contained a pathological anger. When his needs were not met – someone late to the table, an errant glance, a report card less than exemplary – he’d fly into black and violent rages. His anger had focused on Jeremy, maybe because my brother physically resembled our father: fair and blue-eyed and with a loose and angular build. They also shared the same complex and brilliant mind, staring at a problem until it fell into components, then self-resurrected as a solution.

Our mother, simple and rural, had no concept of the situation. When the shattering rages befell our home, she would retreat to her sewing room, the machine’s high drone eclipsing my brother’s anguished screams and calls for help.

I had just turned ten when I suddenly became the choice for the anger, the beatings, the ranting, unintelligible lectures as I huddled in a corner, trying to push myself into the wall itself. And not only had our father selected me as the focus of his rage, his madness was seeping into every crack of our existence. Where weeks had once passed between rages, the horror now rang nightly through the halls. Another change: whereas our father had always threatened punishment, he was now threatening death.

“Get out here, you little bastard. I made you and I can kill you.”

Then, one afternoon beneath a blue Alabama sky, everything changed for ever. My brother Jeremy, sixteen years old, slight and sensitive and his face dusted with gentle freckles, lured our father into the woods, bound him to a pine tree and disassembled him with a carving knife.

“I never seen nothin’ like it,” I recall one ashen cop telling another on our rural front porch, police cars filling the long dirt driveway. “There was blood and meat ever’where. They found a kidney hanging up a tree.”

My brother sailed through the investigation. He soon left for college and a few years passed. Then came word that Jeremy had been implicated in the murder of five women, all with vague to startling resemblances to our mother. Given the mitigating circumstance – insanity – Jeremy was sentenced to life in prison.

Jeremy’s first break came when his case was noticed by Dr Evangeline Prowse, the head of the Alabama Institution for Aberrational Behavior. Intrigued by his penetrating intellect, she won his transfer to her institution, lodging him in a sort of maximum-security college dorm alongside some of the fiercest and most depraved minds to ever spring from human seed.

Jeremy prospered, eliciting friendships with hulking, insane murderers and drooling serial rapists, making it his hobby to understand their delusions and motivations, and thereby able to stroll inside their minds and make sense of the floor layout. And thus to control them, at least within certain bounds.

Then, a few years back and for reasons that may never be truly known, Dr Prowse arranged Jeremy’s surreptitious escape from the Institution, flying with him to New York City. Within days, all hell broke loose, and I found myself in Manhattan, where I discovered my brother’s past was more complex than anyone might think. And while not fully innocent of the murders, his participation was not, I felt, deservant of a life in a cage.

Eluding capture, Jeremy had recently reappeared in the guise of Dr August Charpentier, a retired Canadian psychologist now living in a remote mountain setting in eastern Kentucky and spending his days studying local flora, gardening, and charting financial news from around the globe.

Taking my laptop to the deck, I looked out over the cove, the wind still, the water blue and smooth as glass. I drew up my courage and Skyped Jeremy’s computer. A pause as the connection established. His face filled my screen, slender and delicate with large and piercing eyes. He remained in his Dr Charpentier disguise, longish hair and neat, professorial beard, both artificially gray. He wore a blue T-shirt, his chest broader than I remembered, muscle, not fat.

I forced a nonchalant smile to my face. “Howdy, big brother. How’s the weather up there?”

The blue eyes tightened to slits and the voice that returned was brittle and Southern and hissed through clenched teeth. “Where the hell are you, Carson? You’re not on Dauphin Island. Are those palms I see behind you? WHAT IS GOING ON? WHERE ARE YOU?”

Jeremy was near panic. Despite his repeated proclamations of being an independent spirit escaped from the system and living without the “shackles” of needing anyone, my brother seemed pathologically reliant on my structured world. My life had a pattern, the only one my brother knew, and I had broken it.