The Influence(55)

“They’re looking as hard as they can. We all are. Everyone’s doing as much as they can.”

“It’s not enough!”

“I know that!” he shouted back at her. “Don’t you think I know that?” He stepped toward her, pointer finger extended. “It’s your fault for telling him he could hike out there. I never said he could! He’s ten years old, for God’s sake. Who lets a ten-year-old traipse around the desert on his own? You were too lazy to watch him, so you let him just wander through the wilderness…”

Darla burst into tears. “That’s not fair!”

“You’re just like your mother.”

“Go to hell!” She stomped down the hall, out to the kitchen, and was grateful when he didn’t follow her. It was still dark outside, the coming day little more than a white line at the edge of the eastern horizon, and she made some coffee and sat at the kitchen table sipping it, wondering where Dylan could be, praying that he was still alive.

Tom woke up and came out for breakfast sometime after seven. Ordinarily, she made breakfast for them both, but today she didn’t, and he didn’t ask her to. He poured himself some cereal while Darla walked out to the living room, where she sat down on the couch and picked up the needlepoint pillow she’d been working on as an effort to distract her from her pain and keep her calm.

She’d completed the purple petals of an orchid when there was a knock at the door. Gasping, she dropped her needlepoint. Tom emerged from the kitchen. Through the front window, she could see a sheriff’s SUV parked in front of the house. “Don’t open it!” she screamed.

Tom opened the door.

Darla was already crying.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ingram?” A sheriff and his deputy stepped into the living room.

“No!” Darla wailed.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Tom was crying now, too. Great hiccupping sobs wracked his body, and his shoulders slumped as though he were a human-shaped balloon that had just lost half of its air. She wanted to go to him, but she couldn’t move, and she heard through a wall of white noise that they had found Dylan’s body on a trail halfway up the mountain.

One of them needed to identify the body.

“Where is the body?” she heard Tom ask.

The body?

“Dylan!” she yelled. “He’s not ‘the body!’ He’s Dylan!” Now she did jump up and go to Tom. She hit him, pounding on his shoulders with her fists. “He’s your son! He’s Dylan! He’s not ‘the body!’”

Tom grabbed her wrists to keep her from hitting him, and when Darla saw the devastation on his face, she stopped her assault, all the energy draining out of her. Slumping against him, she sobbed.

“Where is he?” Tom asked, and she heard his voice through his chest, deeper than it sounded through the air.

The sheriff’s voice was thin and tinny by contrast, far away from her. “They’re taking him to the morgue in Sierra Vista.”

“Can’t we see him before?” Tom asked. “In the ambulance or whatever?”

There was a pause. “It’s better if you see him in the morgue.”

She didn’t like that answer. It made her think thoughts she didn’t want to think, and her mind started running down all the reasons it might be “better” for them to see Dylan in the morgue. Every scenario she could come up with involved injury, dismemberment and mutilation, things that could be cleaned up a little before viewing, and her sobbing shifted into overdrive as she imagined her son’s last moments of life filled with terrible suffering. He died alone, she thought. In pain. And she was filled with a despair so black and bleak that if she could have stopped living at that moment, she would have done so.

But she didn’t die, and she let Tom take over, and she went with him to the truck, and they drove all the way to Sierra Vista.

When they were finally let in to see Dylan, naked, covered with a sheet, lying on a silver table, it was far worse than she thought it was going to be. He hadn’t just had an accident; he’d been attacked.

And partially eaten.

As she’d expected, they’d washed him and tried to clean him up, but in a way that made it worse because the damage was clearly visible for all to see. The coroner tried to keep them from the worst of it, unveiling only her son’s head and letting the rest of him remain covered. But his face was half torn off, one eye missing, his throat slashed open, and at the sight of him, Tom started wailing, sounding to her like one of those Middle Eastern mothers ululating over the loss of a son. She herself was numb, and even as she identified the body—