LITMIR.BIZ

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      Deplorable, Nasty, Unsettling, Sick

      Bloomfield was even more nondescript and reserved than Picton or Glenora. Dan found the town’s only bank, still located on the main drag, and held his breath. He went in and offered the letter from Magnus granting him permission to access the box’s contents. The clerk gave him a suspicious look, impatiently adjusting her glasses as Dan explained that he’d been given the letter from his uncle, who had spent the past half-decade fighting a serious illness.

      “Sir — this account hasn’t been paid in more than five years,” she said, as though he were personally accountable for its dereliction. “We cannot be held responsible for the contents of a safety deposit box that has not been paid for any length of time exceeding two years.”

      “I understand that,” Dan said. “I just wondered if you could check to see what happened to the box’s contents.”

      “I can tell you what would have happened.” Her face wore the look of a teacher speaking to a particularly dull three-year-old. “The bank would have sent out several letters requesting payment, and then, receiving no answer from you, we would have extended a courtesy time of two years’ wait. After that, the box would have been drilled open and the contents removed.” She stared him down, the better to make her point. “You understand, of course, that we do not keep spare copies of the keys. Once you have opened the account with us, no one can access the box but you.”

      “Or in this case, my aged and infirm uncle.”

      “Be that as it may,” another teacher-child look passed over her face, this one more wrathful in its proportions, “we cannot access the box without the key your uncle was given when he opened the account with us. Even if we needed to, we could not see what was inside the box without it.”

      The reasoning went on like this for some time until the clerk seemed satisfied that Dan had been apprised of official banking procedures and was thoroughly taken to task over his shameful neglect-by-proxy on behalf of his uncle’s account.

      “But if the box has already been drilled, might I not have access to the contents without the key?”

      She peered at him closely, her face a reminder of the ignominy of all that was implicit about irresponsibility in regard to past due accounts. “I will speak with my manager.”

      The manager, a thin-faced and surprisingly pleasant young man in an out-of-season linen suit, came forward and shook Dan’s hand. He looked over the letter and nodded. “We 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

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