Mason clears his throat, then flashes that warm, welcoming smile that could make the strongest believer hand over his soul. Yes, Mace can be a devil when he has to, and for me, he will wear those horns twenty-four seven. I do appreciate all he’s done for me. If there were a decent way to pay him back, I would have done it by now.
“Erwin”—Mason starts—“we know you’d like to put the case behind you. As would we.” He tips his head my way as if I were just an aside. “You do look good, by the way. I’m glad about that.”
“Me too.” I decide to jump in, both feet. “Erwin, tell me exactly what you think happened that day. How did you get from Kaswell to Lake Glen?” I already know every detail of his story, but I’ve let his words collect dust in the recesses of my mind, and it’s time for a good buff and polish.
His jaw moves from side to side as if he were chewing on his thoughts, literally. There is something methodical about Erwin I had not seen before. But I was filled with rage back then. I only saw what I wanted to, and what I saw was a very guilty bastard. And yet ironically, and I’m ashamed to admit it, I had a touch of relief once Simone passed away, and to this day I’m not sure why. Life kept folding in on itself, one nightmare after the next. I had fully expected to meet with an untimely demise myself. Part of me still waits for my own proverbial hammer to drop.
He takes in a full breath, sniffing hard like a coke fiend. The pale backdrop of the room behind him makes him stand out like a shadow, a negative of himself. That’s what happens when you stare at something for too long while the sun casts its fury behind it. It burns the image into your mind, and you can see the impression of it long after you’ve closed your eyes. Something tells me I will see this new version of this once monster in my sleep. I had before. Only this time I will see him as a frail old man—a softer version, sanitized of all the rage I funneled his way. There is no more rage left inside of me for Erwin because I realize how powerless he really is. All of my rage is shiny and new for whoever is clawing at the back door of my life, demanding entry the most frightening way of all, through my mind.
“I was told it was a Tuesday.”
My stomach tightens, and I try not to look at my brother. As much as I hate the fact that Erwin began his diatribe with hearsay, I understand how needless it is to remember which day of the week it is when your life is turned upside down.
“I had just finished up my work for the day”—he continues—“I felt uneasy. No voices that afternoon or evening, though, and that might be why I felt so uneasy.” His chest bounces with a chuckle. “Camden House was taking care of me. Gave me meds each damned afternoon.” Camden House is a halfway house that volunteers its resources to helping identify the homeless and aid the mentally ill with medication if need be. They corroborated this part of his story. What they could not confirm was whether or not he was cheeking those meds. Not an uncommon practice among the mentally ill. In fact, rumor has it that all of those “voices” frown upon imbibing the best that modern medicine has to offer. It’s unclear how lucid he really was that day. Thus, his testimony is more than questionable.
“Go on,” I prod. My stomach is lightly growling. It’s almost time for my next meal, and God knows this entire experience is beginning to exhaust me. I used to chide Simone that she wore me out. And here she’s been dead for close to a decade and she’s still wearing me out just the same. Deep down, I damn her for that. It doesn’t bode well for the poor widower to think darkly of his long-deceased spouse, especially not after the bludgeoning that took place. But Simone wasn’t your average beloved spouse. She was so much more, a well that ran too deep, too dark. I can see her eyes piercing me with their hypnotic stare. You are my everything, she would repeat for years. It was her choral lament. But it never came out with kindness. Simone had a way of shrouding each of her words in a veiled threat.
Erwin picks at his left nostril. “So I don’t think I saw the Camden people that day because the car they sent to pick me up came a little earlier than that.”
There is that nebulous they once again. If you simply popped into the conversation, one might assume that he was talking about the Camden people themselves, but I didn’t just pop into the conversation. I’ve been listening in for years. The legal system, however, concluded there was no “they”. That there was no car. Erwin took a bus to Madrano Heights, the neighborhood just below ours, and hoofed it the rest of the way. Uphill—a steep hill at that. It would have been exhausting, considering all of the clothes he had on that day, dirt encrusted jackets, two pairs of jeans. That was the one element of the story that has always bothered me. In fact, I walked it a few weeks later, granted in the heat of the day, but I was wheezing by the time I made it back to the house, back to the crime scene. But this old man had the energy to bash my wife’s face in within an inch of his life, and, of course, all of her life was spent in the effort.
Mason leans in, letting out a sigh that sums up everything. “What kind of car was it again? What did the person look like?”
“Small car. Hell, I don’t know if it was a man or woman or what they looked like. It was dark. I went for a ride. They gave me a beer out of the deal.”
Mason lifts a brow my way. There was a beer missing from the fridge. I only know this because I was down to three that morning. It’s the kind of things men notice when it’s the only thing keeping them going. My kids were dead. My career wasn’t important. I was still grieving, reeling. And that’s why I went fishing. An overnight trip that I will forever live to regret.
Mace wraps his knuckles over the table as if calling him back to attention. Although, he might have been calling me. I can’t seem to get my mind to sit still, not here, not ever.
“And when you got to the house, what happened?”
“I opened the door and went inside like I was told to do.”
Here is where that nebulous “they” come into play again. Erwin was told to do many things that night.
He cocks his head as if considering this. “I went into the kitchen and got the damn beer myself. Had an opener in my pocket. You never know when something like that will come in handy.”
“And my wife?” I interject. “What was she doing at the time?”
He purses his lips, his eyes slit to nothing as he takes me in through those seething slits. Erwin has never appreciated the fact that I’ve accused him of such a heinous crime. He was prosecuted by the state, but his crooked finger always seems to point right back at me for landing him in the predicament he’s in. And in a way, it was my fault. I had married that woman who was killed. Had those kids who had drowned. I had started this nightmare, someway, somehow. It feels comfortable to bear the blame. That woman and those children were my charges, and somewhere along the line I fucked it all up. I couldn’t keep anyone alive or safe, with the exception of myself. I’ll be dammed if I’m going to screw it all up a second time. Ree and the kids come to mind, and my chest bucks with emotion as I do my best to stifle it.
“I never saw your wife, Peter. I got the beer and left. When I got dropped back off, they shoved a parting gift my way. I didn’t notice the blood. Just put the damn thing in my pocket. A hammer is hard to come by where I lived, but a good accessory to have with you in case the wrong people come around.”
I sag in my seat, trying to absorb it all once again. It’s almost comical listening to him talk about the wrong people as if there were monsters bigger than him he needed to shield himself from. But my gut is still clenched as if I were waiting for more.
“Try to think back and see if you can remember anything new. Anything at all that might trigger a memory of that night. Did the person who, you say, drove you around have any jewelry on, or an accent, maybe painted fingernails or a tattoo?”
He shakes his head, that faraway look in his eyes lets me know he’s rewinding time.
Mace leans in. “How about the car? Was there an odor when you got in? Did they play music? Hell, I don’t know, did it have dirty windows?”
My b
rother is grappling for straws, and to see him so exasperated makes this effort feel like a big, giant waste.
Erwin tips his head back abruptly as if he were just slapped in the face. “Yes, there was something, something silly. A tiny sticker of an armadillo. I grew up in New Mexico, and I remember thinking now there’s something you don’t see in the city. I thought, here I have one thing to be grateful about. Armadillo-free living.” His expression sours because, as it turned out, there was nothing for him to be grateful about whatsoever.
I look to Mace, and then like a celestial hammer from the sky it hits us both at once.
“Shit,” I hiss.
Mace offers a covert nod my way as we wrap it up with Erwin. I go as far as shaking the old man’s hand and about knock him to the floor with shock over it.
Mace and I wait until we’re outside of the prison before pausing, our faces stone-cold with fury for not extricating that little seemingly unimportant detail from him earlier.
“I say we head over to Armadillo Rental and see how far back they keep their records.” He gives my arm a quick squeeze. “I hate to say it, little brother, but Simone may never have gotten the justice we thought we gave her.”
A thousand insane scenarios rotate through my mind, none of them too sorry for Simone’s lack of justice.
“If he’s right, someone drove him to the murder scene, smeared his DNA over just enough of the house to put him away, and trucked him back to his street corner with the murder weapon.”
“Shit,” Mason barks as he kicks a loose stone into the landscaping.
“You don’t get to get angry,” I seethe and I pull him in by the sleeve. “We don’t kick anything. More importantly, we don’t kick ourselves.” My heart strums wildly in my chest. “If we’ve been set up—if he’s been set up—then this thing, this spider’s web I found my way into all those years ago—it’s not over. That body at the fundraiser, Loretta.” My eyes search the barbed wired field to my right as if searching for answers. “It means—”
“It means the spider is finally ready for its meal. Maybe the others were simply appetizers.”
I look to Mace, my eyes hypnotically trained to his. Ever since our father took off, there has been a cloud of foreboding in our lives. It grew far more ominous, turned black as night when my children, my wife died. And it has never cleared. Instead, it crouches lower, looms right over my head, pregnant with fury, ready to unleash the final fury of hell as if this were what it was gathering strength for all along. I can practically hear the thunder roll, growling in the distance, drumming through time and space as it makes its way closer, prowling along the periphery of my life as it lets out a deafening roar that paralyzes me from breathing.
The sky of my misfortune is black as night.
And something tells me it is about to rain like hell.
There’s no running from the impending storm. Something tells me I’ll have to face it head-on. And unfortunately for my family, so will they.
Ree
An icy wind blew in from the north, and I became a creature in hiding. The kids went to school, and I went right back into my curtain drawn home. There was a blistering pain in the depths of my heart when I drove by Lena’s house. It felt like I was subjecting myself to a nuclear heat to look over at it. I could feel my soul trying to evict itself from my body. This was a new prison my mother had put me in. I had thought that getting away from her, out of her clutches would have satiated my desire for freedom, but just her presence, her thick evil, less than a hundred yards from my person lets me know that she can put me in a prison whenever she damn well pleases, and judging by the fact she’s here, she damn well pleases.
Lena is at work, I know this. Therefore, I can deduce my mother is bolting from window to window like a feral cat trying to escape its suburban hell, waiting, watching to see what kind of a viral reaction she’s sponsored from me—garnering the meat for her next ridiculous email. I thought she might be pulling the puppet strings with Astrid, and now I’m beginning to think this is wickedness straight from the nectar. Of course, it’s her. She specializes in psychological torment. And as much as I was shocked to see Astrid buddying up to her, it pleased me in a sick way. She should be heavily exposed to my mother’s brand of psychosis. If she is very, very lucky, she will receive a full dose of her affection. Ultimately, everyone my mother’s necrosis touches dies a slow death. My mother in effect is the Grim Reaper, or in the least his right-hand man. A demonic entity in and of herself, who has mastered the skill of killing people long before they ever die. She is an ardent believer in suffering. She bows at the altar of misery and sacrifices pure souls to the cause each day. She is a purveyor of grief, a waking nightmare, a heated poker ready to strike anyone and everyone in her vicinity.
Bram was up early today. He had a restless night of sleep, while I wrestled it out with my nightmares right there next to him. He dotted my lips with a kiss before leaving, and I inhaled his cologne deeply as if it was medicine. Bram is the balm that can heal all of the wounds my mother ripped open yesterday. And, believe me, I find Lena just as culpable.
The spring sky is dove-gray and rife with misery. An ominous gloom has come to Percy Bay. A sure sign of foreboding, an omen trying to warn the residents of my mother the plague.
I make a cup of coffee—black, no sugar. I need to taste the bitterness, feel the burn—a literal palate cleanse to scrub the wickedness I inadvertently inhaled yesterday from my cellular structure.
Try as I might, I cannot put my mother out of my mind. I see her everywhere, drifting before me like a ghost, my reflection in the mirror—now that she’s melted away to nothing, the resemblance is horrifically uncanny. I see her floating there in my coffee as I stare at the dark water and taste her bitterness on my tongue. And that’s when the truth hits me, the building smashing over my spirit. There is no refuge from her. The earth is not big enough. There is nowhere left to run and hide. Her wings have the ability to darken every corner of this planet. But there is one thing that might be the panacea, and tragically, it’s my morbid fascination with my husband’s brutally murdered first wife. She is the one person who might be willing to swap places with me. Trading my mother for all those hammer blows she endured would seem obvious to the untrained eye. But my mother is just as lethal as a hammer. I should know. She’s been bludgeoning me for years.
Death would be quicker, Simone, and if it weren’t for my children, the husband we share, I would crave this, too.
I drag my coffee, my phone, and my striking resemblance to this newer version of the woman who bore me upstairs and to my closet. I don’t even bother slogging her notebooks to the bed anymore. Instead, I sit on a pillow on the floor, my coffee nestled next to a pair of high-heeled boots I haven’t worn in years, and I pull out the old composition book, riffling through it furiously as if it were a novel I couldn’t wait to finish in haste. The thought of finishing them invokes a sense of dread in me almost as deep as the one my mother is capable of inflicting.
I’ve grown to care about Simone. Her insecurities have become my own. Her hunger for life is contagious. I’d like to think that in some other lifetime we would have been friends. Good friends. Our children would have been siblings. I’m more than slightly infatuated with that bubbly, full of life redhead my husband once had everything with.
How could Bram be so ridiculous as to step out on her? After thinking about it for some time, I’ve determined that she’s misinterpreted the situation. Bram wouldn’t dare cheat on her, would he? Simone was vivacious, the mother of his children, so gorgeous she could have walked every runway in New York and Europe.
Before I was exposed to this intimate side of Simone, a small part of me used to believe that Bram had found in me someone younger than his previous wife, full of my own youthful innocence and natural curiosity that would invigorate his world. A small part of me believed that I offered him things that she couldn’t. That not only did I rescue him from his grief, but that I was a shiny new toy
on a silver platter, something akin to a trophy wife upgrade. And here, after spending mere hours with the inner workings of Simone’s deepest thoughts, I can see I was nothing but a downgrade.
May 25th
Peter came home two days ago acting as if nothing had ever happened. As if his penis hadn’t just invaded some other woman’s vagina. He showered and changed, watched television with the kids, and had the nerve to call me a party pooper when I didn’t want to join them.
That night he accused me of sulking. Sulking! I wanted to laugh in his face. How dare he waltz back in here, having satiated his every dark desire, and expect everything to remain status quo at home.
Of course, he doesn’t know that I’m apprised of his dalliance. How frightening to think this is the way he always behaves when he comes home from the city. And to think I’ve played the role of “happy wifey” so perfectly before. I was right there with him, watching endless Disney movies on a loop. Ushering the kids to bed early so I could do my best to seduce my husband. And how ridiculously exhausted he would come home to us. Come to think of it, he never fell victim to my advances, always sighting his unusual fatigue.
Ha! No wonder he was so exhausted. He just came back from a marathon fuck-fest with who knows who for who knows how long. It’s a wonder he could get it up at all for me. I am the boring wife after all who offers up nothing but mundane sex, who forces him to live a desperately vanilla missionary position life, who bitches at him for not helping with the dishes, or meals, who nags endlessly at him to put up curtain rods, to fix the broken showerhead in the guest bathroom, to take the damned hammock out of the box and put it together so I can nap in the sun, blissfully unaware while he finds someone to suck his dick in New York.
Psychological Thriller Boxed Set Page 9
