A Pale Song
A serialized dramatic thriller
This novel was published in 2024. It is loosely based on the Gabby Petito murder. Reader discretion advised.
God acts too slowly and then with terrible quickness
Prologue
Above the horizon, afternoon light filters through the gaps among the leaves of the forest’s trees, disturbing the sightline. His breath is heavy—his eyes blinking but blank as he guides the one he had once viewed as a passion, now an object of his pathology. A spot with mounds of hearty grasses, rocks, and twigs—no soft earth—appears in a quiet and covered corner of the park. Whatever conversation there is, however he responds to it, sounds thick to his stuffy ears, like unintelligible groaning, blocked by blood pounding from the depths of his interrupted heart. There is movement. Bodies shift, agitated by angst, uncertainty, and the hollowed-out pluck of despair. The blindfold is fixed into place—the recitation of this end begins. Resisting many doubts, he lifts the shotgun and fires. The body falls to the ground like a dumb hunk of flesh. He readies the site and leaves the scene of a thing that for days now he had thought he couldn’t help but do.
Chapter One
Freehold, Texas—Fall 1998
Four-year-old Brian Hardy waddled quickly toward his father, who squatted, arms out for a bear hug, in anticipation of his son’s brute lurch against his chest. He swooped the ecstatic toddler up into the air, matching the boy’s happy giggles with low, fatherly chortles. Charles “Chuck” Hardy set his son’s feet atop two crates he had stacked, so the child’s face was closer to his, looking more directly into his eyes.
“Remember what we did yesterday?” Chuck asked. The boy giggled and shook his head wildly back and forth. “You don’t? Sure, you do. What did we do yesterday when you stood on these crates?”
Brian quieted but seemed lost, more than confused, mystified by his father’s voice and its modulations, looking off toward the dusty sunset behind the yard’s tree-lined enclosure. It hadn’t rained in weeks, so the dried-out detritus of the branches, the dandruff off birds’ wings, speckled the fiery blaze like pixie dust. The boy pointed toward its shimmer and said, “Tubbies!” somewhat urgently. “Tinky-Winky,” he clarified bashfully, forefinger at the edge of his mouth.
“No, no, no—” His father gently redirected him. “Look at me, son.”
Brian’s soft eyes looked up and into his dad’s instructive gaze.
“Remember? We said the alphabet.”
“Yeah,” the boy answered, looking down at the sandy grasses beneath the large and booted feet in front of him.
“Close your eyes and see if you can remember.”
“Yeah.” The boy mashed his eyelids and scrunched up his nose.
“Don’t be silly, now.” There was a pause, a relaxation in both of them, as Chuck began to tutor Brian. “A,” he said gently.
“Aaaeehh.”
“B.”
“Beeeeee.”
“Remember to open your mouth wide and make your sounds loud and clear.”
“BEEE,” the boy repeated, more loudly, trying to move his mouth the way he had been shown, his eyes still closed but trying to see from behind their lids, as the practice calmed him down, and they continued.
Little Brian had been displaying, “concerning” signs of hyperactive disorder, according to his pediatrician. His mother, Samantha “Sam” Hardy was the first to notice Brian’s agitations. It annoyed her at first, not sure why her son refused to sit still, unable to focus on the spoon bumping against his tight-lipped mouth, streaks of vaguely purple yogurt coating his cheeks at each jerk of his head. Determining he wasn’t the master of his attentions and, therefore misunderstanding his needs, she brought him in for evaluation. Brian was the first born to both parents. Ultimately, he was to be their only child.
The alphabet game was one of the inaugural methods they had implemented to discipline the boy’s ability to focus by mimicry, showing him how to calm himself and learn to take control of his mind. It had worked surprisingly well, and if either parent was able to get through the entire alphabet, Brian would be more attentive throughout the day and more inclined to proceed without a struggle, especially at the call for a bath and bed time. Perhaps he is normal after all, they’d considered during some of their nightly assessments.
Now in 2008, Chuck remembered these moments from ten years ago, the early years with his son and his wife, as he pulled into the visitor’s parking spot. The memories had blended into one archetype of the whole period he had imagined while driving to Bellow’s Brook Middle School to meet with the principal. Or was it just one memory of one instance, and it only seemed like it had happened many times? That one so vividly and certainly produced? The memory so acute like to be eternal? Was he deliberately remembering Brian in a certain way? What for? Happy, compliant little Brian. That’s what he’d held to? That’s what he had expected from his one and only child?
For Chuck, middle age had become a fog of doubt and denial, the kind of denial which is doubly repressed—denying any denying of denial—and inwardly troubling, aware of itself but forbidden to announce its name. What was what; which was which—nothing felt secured by meaning, rather things had acquired an illusory sheen for their repetition in life: the bed was a bed was a bed had turned into a bed that was all beds and none of them. The hardwood floor seemed adequate for a night’s sleep.
Memory was especially obstructed when his wife retold events her way, invariably decimating his remembrance of the same thing. Maybe all we have are idealized versions of personal history—idealistically good and idealistically bad, for narrative’s sake. Something feels good and right or bad and wrong about an experience, and it is remembered for that feeling alone—perhaps not a feeling felt at the time, but something sticks and stays, and an entire narrative, a subservient universe is constructed to remember that time, that thing, that version of life in that one particular way. No, he thought, the theory seemed too absolute to be right. Memory had no evidence. No conclusions were possible but speculation.
“Thank you for coming in today, Mr. Hardy.”
Chuck nodded quietly as the principal spoke, remaining silent to hear this person’s preferred version of events concerning his son.
“Brian is—how do I say this—he’s a difficult child.”
“Yes,” Chuck said, agreeable to the view but withholding further agreements. Once the principal received the confirmation, he relaxed and spoke more freely.
“He’s a troubled kid.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Most fourteen-year-old boys are, in some kind of way,” the principal offered.
“Quiet though, isn’t he?” Chuck asked.
“Mostly—from what I’ve heard and observed,” the principal said. “But sometimes he just stands still and yells, particularly during recess after lunch.”
Uncomfortable from the strangeness of this new and erratic behavior, Chuck adjusted his position in the chair. “I see,” he said. “We’ve—or I’ve—never seen that.”
“And where is Mrs. Hardy today?”
“Home.”
“Did she not want to join us?”
“She prefers to stay at home,” Chuck said effectively.
“Have you tried to talk with him?”
“Sure.”
“What does he say?”
“Not much.”
The principal dramatized the look on his face like the suffering of a tragic street clown falling down the gaunt sides of his narrow mug. Chuck almost laughed.
“Is there anything specifically that he’s done—to others, for example?”
“No, not that I can say. I’ve just gotten concerned notes from some of his teachers.”
“Female teachers?”
The principal paused; his head bent toward the desk. “Don’t you know who his teachers are?” He paused within the silence. “Yes. They’re all women.”
“I see,” Chuck said.
“Does he have issues with women?” the principal asked.
“Sometimes,” Chuck said. “I’ll have a talk with him.”
The meeting adjourned. There was nothing more the principal could say, however suspicious his thoughts were regarding the dad. Chuck just shrugged the whole thing off, knowing down deeper, he had a problem on his hands that he wasn’t quite willing to confront. Dealing with Brian meant dealing with other people’s versions of the past, and that would disrupt everything. Ignorance and volatility would remain in happy balance, one neutralizing the other, for as long as he could manage it.
On the way out, he’d spotted his son, separated from the rest of his class who were playing football. Chuck checked his watch. It was 11:15. After lunch recess. Brian was throwing rocks into the distance and away from the crowd but as if he were throwing them into it. Strong emotions flowed through the length of his arm as he shot the rocks into the air. Chuck would have pitied his boy, would have wanted to sweep him up and into another bear hug if he hadn’t known any better.