1 The Bank of the River by Michael Richan Page A

chatted
for a few moments, with the doctor saying all tests were negative and giving
Roy a clean bill of health. Steven asked about the cause of Roy’s collapse.
    “Well, Roy
tells me he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in several days,” said the doctor. “I’d
say it was due to exhaustion. Nothing else appears wrong. You can go, but I’m
prescribing sleep – lots of it.”
    Roy sat
upright in bed, looking between the doctor and Steven, with a grin on his face.
“Great, let’s go,” Roy said. “Where’s my clothes?”
    The doctor
held his hand up to stop Roy. “I’ll need you to wait here until a nurse comes
around and removes the IV. Then you’ll find your clothes in the drawer of the
cabinet by the door. But please don’t leave the room until a nurse brings the
paperwork by for you to sign.” The doctor turned to Steven. “You’ll make sure
he gets out of here OK?”
    “Yeah, I’m
driving him home,” said Steven.
    “Great. If
this should happen again in the next 72 hours bring him back in. Thank you
both, have a nice day,” the doctor said, and left the room.
    “If this is
right,” Roy said as soon as the door had shut, “Ben found who killed his son.”
    “Little
Tony,” Steven offered, “and others. Who knows how many more.”
    “I’m going
to guess four,” Roy said.
    Steven
looked at him, knowing he was right. “Yeah, four.”
    They paused.
Roy cleared his throat. “OK, let me start this again, see if we’re thinking the
same thing. Ben is searching for what happened to his son. He tried several
wild ideas, but they’re all just stabs in the dark. But then he settles on this
abduction story, decided that this suspect they released was the man who
abducted Little Tony. Then what?”
    “He stalks
the guy,” Steven offered. “I know I would. Ben had all the time in the world on
his hands, remember, he’d been combing through parks and fields and abandoned
properties. He switches his focus to this guy, to see if his theory is
correct.”
    “Because,”
Roy interjected, “if it is, he might be able to save Little Tony.”
    “So,” Steven
continued, “he stalks the guy, until something confirms to him that he’s the
guilty one. He discovers that Little Tony is gone, all the children are gone;
this guy has killed them. In his anger, he kills the guy, and he disposes of
the body. He feels a sense of justice, that he’s avenged the death of his son,
and he’s taken a killer off the streets, saved countless others.”
    “But that’s
not the end of it.”
    “No, it’s
not. Because whatever he killed came back to haunt him. All of Ben’s journal,
following that article, is about the stalking and the haunting. He conveniently
left the killing out.”
    “I would
have left it in,” Roy said with indignation. “Any father would have been
justified. I’da helped him pull the trigger.”
    “I know,” Steven
acknowledged, “but this guy’s no John Wayne and there’s no happy ending. He
kills the guy, he disposes of the body, it comes back to haunt him, and, in the
end, it haunts him to death.”
    “That
means,” Roy said, “that Ben’s reason for haunting you has been to alert you to
this fellow. We’ve been thinking the haunting was because Ben killed himself in
the house, but that’s only part of it. The haunting is because Ben wants you to
know who he killed, and why he killed him, because the job isn’t finished –
it’s still alive, in some form, still preying on people.”
    “All of the
occurrences I experienced, with the exception of the shadow, those came from
Ben?” Steven asked.
    “I believe
so,” Roy replied. “The shadow was a different matter altogether.”
    “But if the
shadow was after Ben, and it succeeded in killing him by getting him to cut his
own throat, why continue haunting the house? He’s achieved his goal at that
point, right?”
    Roy thought
about this. “It could be,” he said, “that we stirred it back up.”
    A nurse
appeared