don’t get many requests going back that far,” he said. “Though oddly, someone was in here last week looking for something in another name from this same time period.”
Dan felt the chill crawl up his spine as he wondered about the coincidence of the timing. “Family looking for a long-lost will?” he asked casually.
“Not at all. Police business, actually. Though I had to turn them away empty-handed.”
“That’s a shame,” Dan said.
“In any case,” the man said, turning to his clerk. “I believe we can help Mr. Sharp, Karen.” He turned back to Dan. “We don’t actually dispose of the contents of safety deposit boxes ever. No matter how long the account has been derelict.” He smiled at this revelation of the bank’s good graces and nodded to the vault at the back. “We have a special place where we keep the contents in a sealed envelope, hoping that someone will show up one day — just as you have done — and that we will be able to return the items to their rightful owners.”
He gave Karen the nod and she went off to retrieve the contents, returning in less than a minute with a manila envelope and what Dan hoped was Craig Killingworth’s diary. She was all smiles as she asked him to sign a register acknowledging that he had picked up the box’s contents five years late. He paid the penalty fee and left, feeling like a neglectful library user who’d returned a book so long overdue it had gone out of print.
Outside in the parking lot, he slit the seal on the envelope and let its contents fall into his hands: a single cassette tape and a thick notebook puckered with the weight of Craig Killingworth’s entries. The creased pages held together for another instant then opened to reveal their long-unread secrets.
Dan was exhausted. He’d spent the past eight hours reading Craig Killingworth’s diary — a litany of fear, confusion, regret, and loss. It was the last testament of a man who had bound up all hope for the future in being reunited with his boys and who could never stop hoping for that day as long as he lived. He’d been tortured by his inability to change the one thing that defined him.
Dan read as Craig outlined his decision to reveal his secret torment to his wife, the one person he felt he could trust, setting in motion his betrayal at her hand. For more than a year, entry after entry detailed the torture he’d endured trying to be what she wanted him to be. This was followed by a hiatus of four months during which he added not a single entry. It resumed with the title “Crash,” as he described his recovery from the botched suicide attempt.
As Magnus suspected, that was when his wife’s plan had taken hold. She knew that nothing but death would stop Craig from exposing her lies and her efforts to separate him from what he loved most. If I can’t have you, nobody will! He’d inscribed these chilling words in the diary, the words Magnus claimed were Lucille’s, as she blackmailed him into being what she wanted him to be — lover, father, family man. Straight in every way. But ultimately he’d been unable to keep up the facade. And Lucille Killingworth had responded by separating him from his sons, knowing it would destroy him. Magnus was right. She was a monster, plain and simple.
The diary told Dan little he didn’t already know or suspect. Still, a man didn’t fill in a diary entry on the day of his death, walk over to the bank to deposit it safe and sound in a security bin before giving up the ghost. Craig Killingworth had made plans to secure the record of his ordeals long before whatever had happened to him. He’d even given Magnus the key to make sure it was followed up. Except Magnus hadn’t been able to do that for the last twenty years. Sometimes better never than late.
Clearly, Craig Killingworth had planned his death to the final detail. An orderly man, his writing showed that same attention to detail as his mind trod the many possible solutions to his problem and its likely outcome. Even while detailing his plans to leave with Magnus, and the brief blossoming of hope he saw in that, his diary entries vacillated daily between leaving and killing himself. As much as I love Magnus, he wrote, without my sons, I have nothing. Most days I think it would be easier to end the struggle. To give her the thing she wants most — my death.
Craig Killingworth had preferred death to a life without his sons. Lucille Killingworth had sensed that. She’d asked herself how she could drive him to suicide, and that was the answer she received. She’d systematically lied to the courts and taken away what mattered most to him. Dan imagined him standing on that lonely shore by the bay as he looked into the void his life had become and decided it was no longer worth it. A few hesitant steps onto the ice, a crack as it gave under his weight, and he would be gone. The trail would die out. The sun would come up the next day, and a man who’d touched hundreds of lives would no longer be there. They would think he’d left home on his bicycle, taken the ferry across the river, and vanished.
Love’s a terrible fever. It burns when it’s new and aches when it’s old. It tempts and taunts, beguiles and bewilders, before leaving you high and dry with the worst hangover you’ve ever experienced. It’s a whore and a thief, a liar and a sinner, though it goes by many names. Are there ever any survivors?
Sometimes, Craig Killingworth wrote near the end of his account, I think the only things that matter are the choices we make, for better or worse, for right or wrong. But he’d struggled with his choices for too long. The last entry, made the day of the hearing right after the court stayed the order separating him from his sons, contained a simple sentence: She’s won. Craig Killingworth had known then what the story held for him. He’d already made his choice. He simply hadn’t wanted to tell Magnus that it left him without a future.
What Lucille had driven her husband to do was terrible, but in the end he had been the architect of his own demise. Whatever had finally befallen Craig Killingworth had clearly been perpetrated by his own hand. It was too late to save him now, to point twenty years down the road and say, Here are your boys — live for them: the drug addict who needs you to love him so he won’t destroy himself, the arrogant one who needs to know that he doesn’t have to be insensitive to be a man.
Dan turned to the beginning of the diary and reread Craig Killingworth’s determined first entry. In a strong script he had written: Whatever happens I will never give up my fight. But he had. In the end, he hadn’t found the determination to live.
Donny buzzed him in.
Dan brandished the diary as he came through the door. “You’ve got to read this. It even describes his sudden impulse just before he drove off the road rather than undergo any more torture at the hands of that woman and her barbaric therapist who promised to help him change his orientation.”
“Whoa!” Donny said, taken aback. “First ask how the boy is doing.”
“Sorry. How are things with Lester? How are you two getting along?”
“Fine. We’re getting along fine. Thank you.”
Dan glanced around. Nothing had changed in the condo. For having a teenage terror under his roof, Donny seemed to have maintained remarkable control of his premises. For a moment Dan wondered if “fine” meant more than it said. Should he ask for reassurance that Lester hadn’t come onto him, as he had with Dan, and that Donny hadn’t succumbed to the boy’s charms, such as they were? Then he remembered who he was talking to: Donny the wise, Donny the compassionate. The look of disdain that would greet the question stopped him dead. He already knew the answer. Better yet, he knew himself. He would never have entrusted Lester to Donny if he’d had any doubts. A father’s work was never done, it seemed.
“Great — I’m glad to hear. Where is he?”
“In bed. It’s past eleven o’clock, and those are the rules. He goes to bed by ten thirty.”
