"There," I say, switching off the engine. "Welcome to my castle."
Raven leans forward, examining the red brick building with its dirt stained walls and dust covered windows.
"Not much better than the warehouse," he says, unbuckling his seat belt.
All of his movements are slow and deliberate, as if everything demands effort and concentration. He looks like a ghost, his skin blueish pale and still dirty despite the cleaning we did by the tap in the basement. He needs a good hot bath. We both do.
We go up to the fifth floor, stopping on each landing long enough for him to catch his breath. The elevator has been out of service since before I was born, if Mrs. Macintosh from the first floor was to be believed. Going up and down the five flights of stairs had seemed like a small price to pay in exchange for the low rent, but for Raven this is probably an exercise at the limit of his endurance.
It takes us ten minutes to reach the chipped brown door on the last landing, next to the ladder leading to the roof.
"Voila," I say, throwing the door open. "Be my guest."
I fill the bathtub while Raven shuffles around the small apartment. Eventually, he appears in the door of the bathroom, looking exhausted and gaunt in the electric light.
"You look like shit," I say.
He just rolls his eyes, probably unable to summon enough energy for a reply, and watches me remove all the razors from the shelf.
"I'm not going to kill myself," he says. "I'm too tired."
"Better safe than sorry," I say, taking the things I've gathered outside. "Now, dive in. I'll see if we have any food left."
I can hear him turn off the water as I'm checking the fridge and the cupboards. I find a few cans of tuna, but everything else has rotten away during the days I've been out. I evaluate the kitchen in terms of suicide safety, and it doesn't look too good. There's knifes and other sharp objects he could use. On the other hand, now that he's not in pain, perhaps he won't be so eager to die.
I go into the small utility room and undress, stuffing my dirty clothes into the laundry basket. I pull on some clean sweatpants and an old stretched out T-shirt. I still badly need to bath, but it will have to wait.
I knock on the bathroom door and enter. Raven is in the tub already, almost completely submerged, with only his nose, chin and hollow cheeks visible above the surface.
"What's up?" I say, stepping over his dirty clothes, making a mental note to throw them into the garbage bin later.
"Perfect." His eyes are closed, water filling his eyelids, coming dangerously close to his nostrils. His hair is floating around his head like a dark halo.
"Good." I retrieve a bath towel from the cabinet and place it on the sink. "Use this when you're finished. And here's the shampoo. I'll get you some of my clothes."
"What did you mean," he says, "when you said that you knew what she did?"
I pause and look at his face, his eyes still closed, the rest of his body hidden underneath the surface that's already grey with dirt.
I turn around and go to the room.
I pick the blue paper folder from the shelf and flip it open. It only contains a few printed pages—I haven't found much, not with Catherine refusing to give me any clues. But what I have found still makes my blood boil when I look at it. I pick the top page and return the rest to the shelf.
In the bathroom, Raven is sitting now, his sharp elbows propped on the sides of the tube, his eyes fixed on me as I walk over. I stop and hold the printed page in front of his face.
He looks at it for a while, his expression so blank that my doubts begin to raise their heads. What if I got it wrong? What if it wasn't him, after all?
Then, he sighs and closes his eyes.
"Wow," he says. "I haven't seen this for a while. Where did you get it?"
"A news site archive," I say. "I've been checking all the child abuse cases around the state during the last decade or so."
"But they don't mention names," he says, his eyes still closed. "And they blur out the faces."
"They didn't blur her face."
I look at the print of the old article, a picture of a woman and a child in the middle of it. Even though the boy's face is pixelated, you can tell by the size of his hands wrapped around the woman's neck that it was taken a few years before the article was written, back when he was perhaps four or five. Back when the two of them were still a normal family—or at least maintained an appearance of one.
There's no need to see the child's face to recognize him, though, because his mother is right next to him, smiling into the camera, and she looks just like Raven, up to the smokey eyes make up and the cherry red lipstick.
* If you enjoy the story, please vote or comment! It will really make my day! *