The Tangled Woods (Dark Corners Collection, #5)

by Emily Raboteau

How could he have made the mistake of marrying a woman whose ambitions were to head a chapter of Jack and Jill of America, vacation at Disney, keep her hair neat—and without irony used words like chillax? Lately she’d even been threatening to rejoin the church.

Reluctantly, Reginald Wright pulled over. “Don’t say anything stupid, Reggie,” Ladette warned. “This isn’t a movie.” “Yeah, but it’s still the same old scene,” he said, flicking on the hazard lights.

Reginald turned on the radio angrily, landing in the middle of a news report about another school shooting, this one at a high school in Florida. “Jesus,” said Ladette, switching off the dial after catching the pertinent details. The type of rifle. The number of injured. The number of dead. “What are we coming to?”

It began to rain lightly. Thurgood fell asleep. His head was bent at a bad angle, making his neck look broken. Reginald felt exhausted too. He wondered why Ronit was blowing up his phone when he’d expressly asked her not to call during the break. He peeked at Ladette for signs of suspicion. Her profile was inscrutable, regal. He drove distractedly until prompted by the navigator to take Exit 298.

“One of these dead white kids’ parents gonna have to take a page out of Emmett Till’s mama’s playbook. Put their blasted-up corpse on the cover of Time magazine for everyone to gawk at. Maybe that would wake this damned country up.”

“There’s more. I told her about us, and she showed me a spreadsheet. The bad-man list.” “Excuse me?” “The bad-man list. It’s circulating widely. Your name is on it,” Ronit disclosed before hanging up.

On the second day while Ladette had her spa treatment, Reginald tried unsuccessfully to play Wizard World with his son. Everything was broken. His life was wasted. His mind was too muddled to sort it out.

“The problem,” he told Reginald in an arrogant, nasal tone, “must lie within you.”

“Let go of me! You don’t care about what other people want,” Thurgood yelled. “You only care about what you want!”

“The worst part is how hard you are on Thurgood. He’d do anything to make you happy, and that burden shouldn’t fall to him.” “Oh, I’m burdening him? You’re the one who wanted to name him after a justice of the Supreme Court.”

He pivoted. “How was your massage?” “It felt nice to be touched,” she said, returning to her book.

The water park was as big as a cathedral. There, Reginald grew annoyed with his son, perceiving a weakness he felt in himself.

Something dark and swift moved in his peripheral vision. A familiar silhouette. Someone screamed the alarm from the top of a slide. “He has a gun!” You have got to be kidding me, thought Reginald. And then chaos. He heard the shots before he spied the shooter. He ducked, assailed first and foremost by sound.

His eyes were red rimmed, panicked. “Play dead,” the man said. Where was Ladette?

The masked shooter wore black. He stood by the rack of life vests. He was methodical about his task. He wielded the rifle like a baton. It extended from his midsection. He turned gracefully on his heel. The bullets sprayed into the crowd. A salvo. More screams. Reginald thought of A Clockwork Orange.

The slippery floor had puddled in places with blood. He searched for nearby cover, but found none. By the snack shack a mother dragged herself, keening, toward her inert daughter, whose guts were spilled. The gunman emptied his magazine into the back of her head and paused to reload. Reginald looked away. He knew instinctively if he continued to track the shooter, he would die.

He desperately checked the flailing limbs churning the surfaces of the swimming pools. Already the water was reddening. Bodies floated among the inner tubes. Little bodies. His heart raced. Staying low, he crept toward the locker room.

The man in black stood level with Reginald, almost close enough to kiss. Slow as a mime, he raised his gloved hand and hooked his trigger finger under the ski mask, making as if to remove it. Reginald recognized him then. Who else could it be? The gunman lifted the mask, revealing Reginald’s own face.

The beard partly covered his rosacea and extended to his chest, which was tattooed with a bald eagle perched on a globe over a banner that said SEMPER FI. Both forearms were also tattooed. The script was gothic. When he crossed his arms, the text asserted itself: DEATH IS CERTAIN. LIFE IS NOT.

“He fucking hung himself.” “It’s ‘hanged,’” said Reginald. “You had it right the first way.”

“I didn’t want to fight you,” he panted. “Bullshit,” Reginald said. He attempted a smile, but his cheeks hurt too much. So did everything else but his hair. It was possible that some ribs were broken. “Thank you for your service.”