Killer (2 page)

I was alone but I wasn’t lonely. The isolation and self-reliance were a balm. I took long walks through the woods at the end of the day, or whenever I got stuck on a writing problem. I discovered the ruins of an 18
^th
century farmhouse on my property that had been razed a hundred years ago. I would wander around the ruins of the farmhouse, ruminating on my writing and looking absently for signs of the old structure. Sometimes I would find little artifacts; a brick, or an old nail. My bookshelves became littered with relics I found there. A three hundred year-old old bottle of Kill Devil rum sat empty on the window sill above my kitchen sink, catching the morning sun through its thick, bubbled, wavy blue-green glass.

So I spent the next five years in Featherton, Vermont, felling trees with my axe and my word processor, piling up firewood and filling paperback racks in airports and grocery stores everywhere. No one would ever confuse me with John Updike but I didn’t care. I had wood to cut and books to write. Always, always books to write. Because the demons were always, always just around the corner.

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE

Five Years Later

CHAPTER ONE

I’m sitting at my desk, wondering if I should kill the cute sheriff with an axe or a claw hammer in the final chapter of my fourth book when there is a sharp knock at my front door. It sends my over-caffeinated heart into a sprint. No one ever knocks. Even the UPS guy leaves his packages at the mailbox out on the state highway to avoid the quarter-mile driveway I deliberately leave rutted and unpaved. The door itself is solid oak—
real
oak, two inches thick, with four heavy gauge steel hinges and three titanium deadbolts, one by the doorknob, one on top of the door, and one at the bottom of the door, installed by the orthodontist, a lifelong New Yorker.

I unlock the door and open it to find Claire Boyle, the local sheriff and inspiration for the doomed fictional sheriff whose nude body I was just about to hack to pieces on my word processor. I don’t mention the coincidence to Claire.

“Morning, Jack,” Claire gives me a prim Yankee smile; the same smile I get from all the locals. After five years, the good people of Featherton, VT. have come to regard me with cautious curiosity. In town they nod at me on the street, but they don’t maintain eye contact for long. Claire has more reason than most to be cautious about me. Two years after I moved to Featherton, my barber Jezzie decided it was a sin and a shame that a local land-owning heterosexual man of marrying age was still single, so she set me up with Claire. I figured maybe enough time had passed since Sara, but after two awkward dates I told Claire it was too soon. I never called her again. And now, three years later, it’s too late.

“Want some coffee?” I ask as Claire comes in. She glances at me nervously, turning her Smokey the Bear hat around and around, hand over hand, as if she were steering her Sheriff’s Dept. SUV in a u-turn out of my cabin.

“No thanks. I, ah…just got a call from the Los Angeles Police.” She looks at me to see if this means anything. It doesn’t.

“They want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

The Smokey the Bear hat turning hard right, right, right.

“Well, I didn’t get much information from the detectives there, but I guess there was a homicide—a young woman—and they think maybe it was some kind of…copycat situation. From one of your books?” Her eyes flick up at mine for a second.

Shit. I have wondered occasionally about something like this—some random wack-job mimicking a gruesome murder from one of my books. I sit on the couch, hoping it’s a mistake.

“What makes them think it has anything to do with my books?”

“Evidently the young woman was found in a, uh, manner that a victim in your book was found.”

“Which book?”

She looks down. “I’m not sure…you know I haven’t really read much of your work.” Claire seems embarrassed. I remember her telling me she hadn’t read any of my books on our first date, as if it mattered to me. She’s too solid, too practical. Maybe even disapproving. She’s a fourth-generation Congregationalist. Her ancestors wouldn’t have messed around with me. They would have burned me at the stake for conjuring spirits, lickety-split.

“Okay. Sure. They can call me here at home.”

“Actually, they want you to come to Los Angeles.” She holds my gaze steadily.

“Why?”

“Like I said, they didn’t give me much information.”

“Well I need more information. Tell them they can call me and I’ll help them any way I can.”

“Look, Jack, I don’t want trouble any more than you do, but they said it was important that I get you to cooperate.”

Again the steady look.
What the fuck does that look mean?

“Is there something you’re not telling me, Claire?”

Round and round the hat goes. I wait, biding my time trying not to notice how she fills out her olive uniform, how the dark stripes on her slacks follow the curves of her thighs, the way she wears her holster just slightly lower around her hips than regulation probably dictates…
If she had worn her uniform on one of our dates things might have worked out differently…

“It’s not so much what they—” she begins. “They just said there were an awful lot of…consistencies with the murder scene and what was in your book.”

She stands there, turning her hat and looking at me.

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. They were pretty tight-lipped.”

I look out the window. The color is all but gone from the trees. Most of them are bare now, against a slate November sky. The ground is hard from the night frost and soon it will be covered with snow. I turn back to Claire, who is standing in the middle of the large braided rug on the living room floor. She looks out of place, the rug’s pattern of brown and white rings encircling her. I suddenly realize this is the first time a woman has set foot in this cabin in three years. It’s not a happy thought. The phone rings.

“Jack,” the voice of Arnie Brandt, my agent. “Have you heard?”

“I have a member of Featherton’s finest right here in my living room as we speak. What do you know about this, Arnie?”

“Well, I don’t know what she’s told you, but this detective, Marsh, I think his name is, called me from L.A. to track you down. We may have a problem.”

Arnie never called unless he had something concrete to say—news which was either good or bad. He’s using his “bad” voice.

“They won’t tell me anything more,” Arnie says. “They want you to come to L.A. so they can talk to you about it.”

“So I’m told. What do you think?”

“I think we’d better get out in front of this. You’re about to deliver and we don’t need this kind of publicity. I think you should go and cooperate in every way you can before this gets a chance to hit the press.”

And the shit hits the fan.

“Alright,” I say finally. “I’ll get the next flight I can. Have you talked to Joel?” I ask, meaning Joel Fisher, my lawyer in New York.

“Not yet. Obviously we need to keep him in the loop, but I don’t think you need to bring him along to L.A., per se,” Arnie says carefully. “Nobody at Terrapin knows yet, as far as I know. Just go and talk to the LAPD. That’s all they want at this point.”

I hang up, relieved to see Claire holding her hat still and giving me a wan smile. I look at her and shrug.

“Okay,” I say.

THINGS PAST

It was his fifth birthday but he didn’t know it. He didn’t know his name; he didn’t even know he was awake until he heard the Witch’s voice. In the dark place it was sometimes hard to tell when you were asleep and when you were awake. But the sound of the Witch laughing with a man woke him. The light under the door shone into the dark place and, after endless hours of complete darkness, the faint light hurt his small eyes. He was too young to understand the sounds from the room outside the closet, but he had heard them many times—the Witch laughing and moaning and shouting vulgar things to different men over the wild, thrashing music. He didn’t know the concept of “mother.” He only knew the dark place and the sounds with the men and the abrupt, terrifying attacks from the Witch. He hated her and wished her dead.

He knew it was wrong to hate. At least, he knew
others
thought it was wrong. But he couldn’t understand that. He had been to Sunday school—a day care center at a local church—when his mother was briefly incarcerated. He had no other family anywhere; he had never been to kindergarten, never seen a doctor, only rarely been outdoors. So when Social Services found him they didn’t know what to do with him. The people from Social Services were all the same: dull, officious, with their forms and clipboards and limited eye contact. No one said, “Your mother pleaded guilty to felony possession of methamphetamines and she’s doing thirty days at the county jail.” They simply said, “Your mother’s at County,” as though he would know what that meant. They had precious little time to spend on him, so Social Services took him to the day care at First Baptist and moved on to the next intractably messy and irresolvable case.

From the moment he arrived at the day care he was stunned—overwhelmed—so much so that he couldn’t speak for days. His young mind soaked up the sights and sounds, the songs, the picture books, the caring, compassionate women who ran the center—and the daylight. For the thirty days his mother was “at County,” he was passed from family to family at night, and during the day he sat, entranced, and listened to the songs the other children sang and looked at the picture books of baby Jesus and Mary and the angels…and he loved it all so much that he cried often. The women thought he was sad but he didn’t know how to explain that his tears were pure joy. He had never once told anyone about any feelings he had. He didn’t know how. He knew, even at this young age, that he was different. He could see the tender feeling in the women at the center; he could tell they loved Jesus and wept for his suffering. But the bleeding wounds of Jesus excited him in a way he couldn’t tell the women about. Even at this young age he knew he couldn’t tell anyone about
those
feelings. Later he would come to understand the special feelings, and they would bring him power and pleasure in measure with the heaven that the dying Jesus promised. In my father’s house are many mansions.

But on the brink of turning five, it was much simpler. He loved everything about the day care, but most of all he loved the stories. Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and his favorite—David and Goliath. He thought a lot about small David killing the brutal giant. He thought of it constantly and it comforted him.

Sometimes the families who took him in at night read fairy tales to their children. The happy-family children delighted in the stories and slept soundly after hearing them. But to him, the sorry young charge, the fragile charity case, the fairy tales loomed as large as the Bible stories, and he did not sleep. Because he had now learned about witches.

He thought one day he would tell stories to others. He could feel the budding urge to tell others about
his
life, his story, his Witch. He knew that his life had gone horribly wrong. He knew it when he saw the way the day care children lived with their families. They slept in beds, they were fed and clothed and loved. He felt the desperate need to be listened to, to be paid attention.

The women at the day care were surprised at how quickly he learned his letters and began to read. They encouraged the bright young boy when he printed his alphabet with his big red pencil, and then, soon, his name. He had a gift, they told him, and he nearly burst with pride and happiness, although he couldn’t express his feelings. They thought he was shy. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel,” they told him. And it increased his longing to learn one day to tell his stories to someone—to anyone who would listen.

Then his mother was released from her prison and he was returned to his. But he was blessed with a miracle—a present from one of the women at the day care: the small figure of an angel. She was head and hands only, eight inches tall, pink lips and blue eyes against pure white porcelain, her perfect little hands pressed together in prayer. In the dark place her presence soothed him in the hours of his torment, the hours of crying, begging, screaming… He would look at the Angel in the half-light, the Witch’s cluttered pile of filthy clothes his bed. The Angel looked down on him over her praying hands, head tilted slightly, Mona Lisa smile, her eyes china blue ovals of infinite compassion bordered by fine, dark lashes painted with delicate brush. He did love her. As much as he hated the Witch.

He pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the sound of the Witch and the man and the pounding music. But the sound wouldn’t stop. Tears ran silently down his soft cheeks and he thought he would begin screaming—a thought which terrified him. Screaming meant the door would fly open and the light would blind him and then would come the hands of the Witch—sometimes open, sometimes closed, once holding a high-heeled shoe which left a bleeding dent in his temple. He bit his lip to keep from screaming. Bit down hard until he tasted the warm wet salt of blood.

And then, that night, on his fifth birthday, just when he could bear no more, another miracle—

The Witch sounds were drowned out by the Angel’s voice.

He took his hands from his ears, astonished. The Angel had never made a sound before. But now he heard her clearly—her voice filled his ears, his head, his small heart.

He lay on the hard floor, mesmerized by the sound, as clear and sweet as a blackbird’s song. She was singing to him—a song he had learned at the day care.

Jesus loves me, this I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to Him belong,

They are weak but He is strong.