Sanford Crow

CHAPTER 22

When Diane called him and told him what she'd found, he couldn't believe it. He still couldn't. Even now, as he stared lifelessly at the phone.

It wasn't possible, it couldn't be. How could he not have known?

Because you are a horrible brother. You didn't even bother to visit, to make sure he was taken care of. In fact, you didn't even bother to care.

Ten years—it had been ten years since Eric's release from the hospital. Diane carried on to calmly explain deinstitutionalization. The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was repealed once President Reagan came into office. Federal funding was dropped, and patients thought to suffer from severe mental illnesses were let loose—most of whom became homeless.

"Why?"

"Never mind, Sanford, that's neither here nor there. My point is that Reagan messed up, and what he created was an epidemic. Millions of patients were released, your brother being one of them."

Sanford saw images of his brother panhandling on the streets. He only knew him as a little boy, and that's all he could picture him as. An innocent six-year-old, afraid of his own shadow, living among the trash and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag.

The shades to the window were opened. The outside was dark besides for the streetlights balefully glowing through the plate-glass window. He felt eyes on him, staring through the black with perfect clarity—a predator of the night. An odd sound invaded the silence.

Huh?

It was the phone: he had forgotten he'd been holding it.

"Hello? Dr. Wesley?" Nothing but the dull whine of the dead line responded. He hung it up. How long had he been sitting there? He didn't know, but he felt his feet prickling with pins and needles as they slowly awoke.

He walked over to the opened shades. The window was black, reflecting the night's sky. He saw his own reflection and the cuts on his face. In the seconds before he pulled the curtains shut, he felt that someone was there, and they were laughing.

Eric? No, he wouldn't know where to find me.

He'd continue to feel eyes on him for the rest of the night, even after paranoia had caused him to shut off all the lights. In bed, he lay and he wept. Sleep would not come easily that night. In fact, sleep would not come at all.

* * *

The next morning was no normal morning; the night before had seen to that, and the headline on the first page of the newspaper cast him deeper into the twilight zone.

A SECOND FAMILY MURDERED, A COMMUNITY LEFT IN SHOCK.

A family has been found dead in their apartment at the Crescent Towers in Peekskill, New York.

The deaths of Christopher Serra, 41, Ann Serra, 39, and their children Miles and Melinda Serra, 9 and 5, have been ruled as murder.

Sanford stopped reading; his face turned the same color as the newspaper—a pale, lifeless gray. Crescent, the name hit him like a cannonball to the gut. The Crescent Towers is where he lived. Where he was currently sitting, reading the newspaper with his coffee.

If a murder took place in his own building, wouldn't he be aware of it? Wouldn't he have noticed the cops, detectives, and reporters?

Sanford stopped reading for a moment and thought, am I that oblivious? Then continued to read with a strange sense of inevitability. Something was coming.