Sour Candy Read Online Free PDF Page B

him brought with it the first seed of doubt. He had,
after all, been in an accident. Could what Cortez was saying be
true, the knowledge of his real life jarred from his brain during
the crash? Could the kid really be his charge? There was so much to
take in, so much to process, and none of it made any
sense.
    “ What about the store?” he
mumbled.
    “ Say again?”
    “ The store. Walmart. Where I
saw the boy and the woman. The manager was there. Did you call him?
He can tell you I wasn’t with them, that the woman was there with
the boy.”
    “ Yes, Marsh called him
before we drove you home.”
    “ And?” Phil already knew
what the answer was going to be and he turned his grim defeated
smile to the rain.
    “ He says you were there
alone with the boy.”
    Phil took out his phone. “You know,
Detective, there are a couple of holes in your story too. It still
doesn’t add up, and I think you know that. I think that’s why
you’re here. I think you’re incredibly good at your job and you
operate on instinct. I think that same instinct is telling you that
something doesn’t jibe here and it’s driving you a little crazy not
being able to put your finger on it.”
    Behind him, Cortez was
silent.
    Phil continued. “It may very
well be the case that at some point today I went insane, or just
had all knowledge of the boy and my life with him knocked right the
fuck out of my head. I don’t believe that but then if I were truly mad I wouldn’t,
would I? No, what I actually think is that there’s something wrong
with that boy. I thought it the first time I saw his eyes and the
way he was dressed. I thought it when I saw the condition of the
woman I took to be his mother. She looked like she might have been
afraid of him and had simply checked out to protect herself. For
all I know maybe that’s why she killed herself. To get away from
him.” He laughed, because now he really did sound insane. But the
words wouldn’t stop coming. “I also think that before Mrs. Bennings
crashed her car into me, that child was not a part of my life, that
nobody I know had ever heard of him. I think he released Mrs.
Bennings from her obligations on the condition that she find a
replacement. Which she did. Maybe the candy was her way of
transferring the responsibility for him, some messed up ritual that
only made sense to them. And now that that’s done, my world has
been altered to accommodate him.”
    “ Phil,” Cortez said, using
his first name for the first time since they’d met. “You realize
how this sounds, right?”
    Phil tapped a finger on the screen of
his iPhone and saw that he had one missed call and a voice mail
from Lori.
    “ Yes, I do. I also know that
you managed to do a spectacular amount of research into my life and
the boy’s place in it in the short space of time since the
accident. Don’t these things usually take days, weeks, and wouldn’t
there have needed to be some compelling reason for you to do it in
the first place? But no, here you are and you know everything. It’s
like the whole police department suddenly dropped everything and
threw all their resources into proving that boy was mine. And I
know that nothing I say or do will change that reality.”
    He thumbed the icon to listen to the
voicemail and put the phone to his ear.
    “ Who are you calling?”
Cortez asked.
    Phil didn’t answer. He just listened,
and once he was done, he knew the boy had won.
    “ You know what else,
Detective Cortez? The worst thing of all?”
    “ What?”
    “ I think I know all of this
because the boy is allowing me to.”
     
    * * *
     
    Over the next hour, and with the child
still sequestered in the kitchen, they showed him framed pictures
they had taken from his office desk and the walls in the upstairs
landing. They covered a period of years and showed Phil grinning
with his son in various locations, most of which he had never seen
before. In one, he was fishing on a pontoon boat, the boy at his
side, both