Relentless

found a residential neighborhood, cars parked at the curb, in driveways. I went looking for keys behind sun visors, under seats. Couldn’t believe the risk I was taking. I was crazy with terror for the girls. I stole a Chrysler PT Cruiser, put our bags in it, moved the girls from our car. Emily grumbled, but I shushed her to sleep.”
    As Penny squinted through the smeary windshield, rain persisted, but suddenly the traffic washed away. Mirrors reflected the emptiness behind the Mountaineer. Ahead, no taillights were visible. Beyond thereach of headlights, the highway became a hidden vein in the wet flesh of the night, and we raced forward like an air-bubble embolism toward an unknown but inevitable moment of destruction.
    “This was back east,” John said. “We lived in New York State, but the hundred miles took us into Pennsylvania. In the PT Cruiser, I kept going south. My agent, Jerry Simons, lived in Manhattan but owned a four-acre retreat in Bucks County, spent weekends there in summer. Margie and I stayed once, for a week. Now, late September, I didn’t know if Jerry was using the place. I called his cell phone, got him in New York, made up a story about needing isolation to finish my novel. The house was available. I knew where the spare key was hidden. The girls and I were there in three hours.”
    To this point, the tightly controlled emotion with which John Clitherow recounted these events suggested that I was the first to whom he had told the story in almost three years and that his need to unburden himself was acute. The urgency with which he spoke seemed to arise from a determination to share information that might spare me from losses like those he suffered.
    When he arrived in memory at the house in Bucks County, however, his manner and his tone changed. His urgency abated, as did the note of guilt in his account. The distress that had been swelling toward anguish now shrank to a chilling insensibility, and his voice became flat, his cadence slow.
    “I couldn’t sleep that night in Bucks County. Sat in a bedroom armchair, watching over the girls, torn by grief and guilt and fear. I loathed myself, my helplessness. Self-hatred is exhausting. After dawn, I fell asleep in the chair. Woke and saw the girls were gone. Stumbled like a drunkard through the house, hunting them. Just before I found them in the family room, I heard them screaming.”
    The seeming indifference in Clitherow’s voice didn’t sound like stoicism, not like an intentional suppression of feeling. It was apathy,the consequence of reaching a tipping point. Having felt too much for too long, he was drained of feeling, of the desire to feel.
    “In the living room, Emily and Sarah, still in their pajamas, ran toward me, weeping, screaming. I opened my arms, but they pushed away, eluded me. They ran into the kitchen, up the back stairs. And I saw they’d been watching television. And I saw on the screen … my wife, naked and chained to a wall. And she was still alive. And a man, face concealed by a hood, he was … he was … cutting her.”
    As I listened to John Clitherow, the cell phone grew damp and slippery in my hand. I held it tighter.
    “And I didn’t hear the girls screaming anymore,” he continued. “I went upstairs to find them. And they weren’t in the bedroom where they had slept, where I’d watched over them. And they weren’t in the next room or the next. And they weren’t downstairs. And they weren’t in the backyard. They were gone. And I never found them.”
    Suddenly I wanted Penny to take the next exit, turn away from the place to which we were headed. We weren’t detectives, we didn’t know how to gather evidence and build a case. Besides, if we went where Waxx had been, if we probed his past, he was more likely to find us. The shadow of the predator is no place for the prey to hide.
    John Clitherow droned through a nightmare that was no less terrifying for the flat tone of his voice: “And I went back into the family room where my wife was still on the TV. And he was still doing things to her. And on the floor in front of the TV were the pajamas my daughters were wearing when they ran screaming from the room, returned to me like my wife’s rings were returned. I tried to take the DVD out of the player, there was no DVD. I changed channels. She was dying on all of them. And something happened to me then, I don’t remember clearly, and I think I smashed the TV screen with a lamp. And I knew