by Barry Lyga
“The guy came here once.” G. William’s tone offered no room for disagreement. “He could come back. I’m not letting him come and go as he pleases. Maybe this is a game to him, but not to me. Got it?”
Before Jazz could answer, he heard the front door open and a pair of unmistakably high heels clicking on the hardwood foyer. Who could—?
He shot a look at G. William, who pretended innocence when Melissa’s voice sounded out: “Jasper? Jasper, where are you?”
“You called her?” he demanded.
“Your gran’s getting worse.”
“She’s always been a little—”
“Yeah, she’s always been a little. Now she’s a lot.”
“You think I belong in foster care? Really?”
“Not my call to make. That’s Melissa’s.”
They stared at each other in silence for a moment, until Melissa called out again.
“We’re in the kitchen,” G. William answered.
A moment later, Melissa entered the kitchen, nodding to the sheriff (who tipped his hat chivalrously) before putting her briefcase on the table. Even though it was five in the morning, Melissa had still put on a severely professional skirt suit and done her makeup. Her own personal brand of body armor.
“Are you willing to listen to reason?” she asked Jazz.
Too tired for the usual sparring and intimidation games, Jazz merely shrugged.
Melissa’s lips pressed into a shiny red line. She wanted him to react. She needed him to react. He refused to give her the satisfaction.
Until she said…
“Jasper, I’m finishing up my report and filing it first thing on Monday. I wanted to give you a heads-up. Especially considering what just happened here. This environment…I’m suggesting you be removed to foster care and your grandmother placed in an assisted-living facility. If you want to add your own letter to the report, to counter what I have to say, you’re welcome to, but I’ll need it by Sunday night. You have my e-mail address, right?”
She said it all in a rush, as though afraid he would interrupt her. But he had no fight left in him. Not now.
People matter. People are real. People matter. He couldn’t convince himself.
“Do what you have to do,” he told her, not even looking at her, staring instead into the coffee cup on the table before him. “Whatever.”
“This is really for the best—”
“If you’re done, you can get out of my house,” he said.
The kitchen went so silent that he imagined he could hear Melissa’s blood pressure. Then she turned on her heel, snatched up her briefcase, and marched out of the kitchen. A moment later, the front door opened and closed.
“I know you’re upset—”
“Leave it alone, G. William.”
“I know you’re upset,” the sheriff tried again, “but that was uncalled for. You should call and apologize.”
“Apologize?” He lurched out of his chair, shoving it back across the linoleum with a squeak and a stutter. “Apologize? She’s gonna put me in some foster home, and my grandmother’ll end up strapped down to a bed twenty-three hours a day in some stack-’em-and-pack-’em old-age home! And I’m supposed to apologize to her?”
G. William shrugged. “Sorry, Jazz. I know it’s not ideal, and I know it’s not what you want, but she’s probably right, you know?”
Jazz had nothing to say to that.
After the house was empty again, Jazz called Connie to let her know what had happened and to tell her that he wouldn’t be at school that day. They agreed to meet in the afternoon to visit Howie in the hospital. Connie told him not to worry about the foster home.
“It might end up being a good thing,” she said. “Getting out of that house. Taking care of yourself for once, not your grandmother. And maybe it won’t be a foster home. Maybe it’ll be your aunt—”
“Yeah, and Billy’s sister lives, like, three hundred miles away. What about that, Con? What about us?”
She had no comeback; he felt vaguely guilty for shutting her down like that, but only vaguely. He was tired of everyone telling him what was good for him.
He meant to rest on his day off, but being with Gramma during the day was like babysitting a toddler who thinks the height of fun is badgering you every single minute. She spent a feverish twenty minutes panicking after the police left, worried that she’d somehow offended them (still thinking they were all at a sock-hop in the fifties), and bawling her eyes out like a young girl. Then she stood in the kitchen, screaming out the window at the forlorn, lonesome birdbath, berating it for not attracting any birds. “You’re a pathetic excuse for a birdbath!” she yelled. “I’ve seen birdbaths with dozens of birds, hundreds of birds, thousands of birds. You shouldn’t even call yourself a birdbath! You’re a bird-repellent. Why do you hate birds?”
She grabbed the shotgun and went outside and threatened the birdbath with it, yelling and waving the heavy gun around until she was exhausted. Then she came back inside and stumbled into the parlor.
“Good boy, Billy,” she said, patting Jazz’s cheek with one withered palm. “Good boy.” And she planted a dry, lingering kiss on his forehead. “Good boy to take care of your mama.”
Jazz shivered.
Upstairs, he tried to nap while Gramma watched a game show. He drifted off for a few minutes, minutes haunted by the knife, the voices, the flesh. Just like cutting chicken, Billy whispered from the past, or from his imagination. Just like cutting…
And Jazz woke up
—wakey, wakey—
thinking of Rusty, both nightmares converging now, oh joy, oh lovely, oh how wonderful. He stared at the blank spots on the wall where Billy’s first victims had been. He printed out new pictures and tacked them into place, then stared at them for what seemed to be hours.
Who am I cutting? In the dream. Or who did I cut? Was it Mom? Did Billy make me—
No. He wouldn’t go there again.
Eventually—still sleepless—he meandered downstairs. Gramma had vacated her place in front of the TV. Panicking, he checked the window and saw the cop still sitting there. Okay, so she was still inside, then.
He found her in what had once been the formal dining room. No one had eaten in there for years, and the china closet had been nearly empty for just as long. Gramma sat on the old dining table, cross-legged, her nightgown tucked up around her spindly thighs, her hands clasped in her lap. She glared at him with eyes at once cold and burning.
“Mom,” he said with relief. “What are you doing in—”
“Why are you calling me ‘Mom’?” she demanded, her voice low and gravelly. “Running around this house like a damn baby, crying for your mommy. You pathetic child.”
Oh.
“Mommy,” she whined, a cruel grin on her lips. “Mommy, where are you? Mommy! Mommy!”
“Okay, Gram—”
“Mommy! Mommy! Ha! Remember you as a boy, little Jasper. Followin’ your mama around like a puppy. Glued to her skirts.”
Jazz swallowed.
“But your mommy ain’t around no more, boy. Your mommy’s gone. You hear? Gone.” She cackled and her cruel grin grew wider. “Gone, gone, gone! Praise God, gone!”
Jazz’s jaw tightened.
“Your mother was a terrible person. It’s her fault, what happened to your daddy. He was just as fine as can be until she came along and she, you know…” Here she leaned back a bit, and the nightgown rose even farther. Jazz’s stomach turned. “And she swallowed him with evil and made his soul black and ruined him.”
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t even remotely true, and Jazz couldn’t stand for it. “Watch what you say about my mother, Gramma,” he warned her.
She licked her lips. “Mama’s boy. Like I said. She was evil. She made your daddy evil. And you was born outta her evil. What d’you think that makes you?”
Jazz’s temper flared and he lurched toward her, his fists clenched.
“You go ahead, Jasper,” she whispered, a cunning light in her
eyes. “You hit me. You go on and do it. Think it’s the first time I been beat up? Do you?”
He growled and spun around and smacked the flat of his hand against the china closet instead. One of the remaining dishes toppled and cracked.
Gramma laughed. “Mama’s boy!” she chortled. “Ain’t got the guts to smack me around, huh? Only one cure for a mama’s boy, Jasper.”
He spun around and stalked out of the dining room, but her voice followed him down the hall: “Only one cure! Gotta become just like your daddy! That’s the only hope for you. You’re gonna become your daddy.…”
CHAPTER 24
Jazz spent a chunk of the day fantasizing about ways to kill his grandmother, plotting them and planning them in the most excruciating, gruesome detail his imagination would allow. It turned out his imagination allowed quite a bit.
He spent the rest of the day convincing himself—over and over—not to do it.
She was goofy and childlike so much of the time that sometimes it was easy to forget that her madness had a cunning dimension to it, too. She knew Jazz’s weaknesses. She knew which buttons to push. And when the right synapses fired in the wrong order, she did it cruelly. Gleefully.
By the time Connie was free for the day, his grandmother had shifted into a young girl’s persona, asking Jazz (whom she thought to be a priest of some sort, apparently) with a slight lisp if she could have some pudding, since she’d been such a good girl and said all her Hail Marys. Jazz resisted the urge to throttle her. There was some yogurt in the fridge, and it only took him a couple of minutes to convince her that it was actually pudding.
He bundled her up on the sofa with her blanket and an old teddy bear and Nickelodeon, then hopped in the Jeep to pick up Connie. She slid into the passenger seat and gave him a long, lingering kiss that warmed him all over.
“Are you all right?” she asked when they came up for air. “After last night and this morning and—”
“I’m fine,” he said, surprised to hear himself say it. It might have even been the truth; he couldn’t tell. His world had changed in ways he couldn’t yet understand. In The Crucible, Reverend Hale says at one point, “Man, remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.” It was that kind of change.
They made good time getting to the hospital, but were shocked to find Doug Weathers waiting for them in the lobby.
“Hey, kid, about last night—no hard feelings, right? I didn’t know it was Gersten. Glad he’s doing better.”
“I have no comment,” Jazz said.
Weathers laughed a big, expansive, fake laugh that earned him a scowl from the nurse at the registration desk. “Look, let’s talk about this thing with Helen Myerson. You heard about it? Between her and your teacher and that other woman found in the Harrison field on Sunday, there’s some real action in this town again.”
“People are dead, you idiot!” Connie said.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Weathers raised his hands defensively. “I’m just describing the situation, is all. Now, what if these murders were all connected somehow?” A light danced like a cheap stripper in his eyes. “Wouldn’t that be an interesting story?”
“What are you getting at?” Jazz asked.
“I’m just saying—maybe I write something up. Maybe you offer some commentary. As a sort of expert in the field, you know?” He licked his lips. “And everyone gets what they want.”
Jazz wasn’t tempted in the least, and he could feel Connie’s agitation rising beside him. He was ready to push past Weathers when the man said, “I’ll even give your buddy some glory. Run a piece about the kid who confronted the killer and got slashed for his troubles.”
Jazz stopped halfway to the elevator, turning to Weathers. “What did you just say? Did you just say ‘slashed’? How did you know he was slashed and not stabbed?”
Weathers grinned. “C’mon, Jasper. I have sources. I can’t reveal them.”
Jazz stared into Weathers’s eyes—pale gray, with flecks of brown.
“Do you wear contacts?” he asked the reporter.
“What?”
“I’m watching you,” Jazz said with as much menace as he could, then took Connie’s hand and stepped into the elevator.
“What was that all about?” Connie asked when the doors closed and they were alone.
“Nothing. Maybe. I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Let’s just see Howie. That’s what matters right now.”
In his room, Howie was in and out of sleep, heavily drugged and loopy. His parents had taken up a vigil at his bedside and neither of them looked ready to move. Connie offered to fetch something for them to eat, so Jazz was left alone with them, trying to melt into a corner, waiting for one or both of them to turn from Howie’s bed and launch a fusillade of angry invective at him.
It never came. They seemed too relieved and exhausted to be angry. The day would come, though, he knew.
Howie surfaced briefly around dinnertime, clutching his mother’s hand and asking for a glass of water. He noticed Jazz and winked at him, then said, “Man, these drugs are a-may-zing!” That was the extent of his conversational skills at that point, so Jazz and Connie left and scored sandwiches at a diner, sitting across from each other in a booth.
“Have you heard anything new from the police?” Connie asked, picking through her french fries for the crispiest ones. “Any leads?”
“No. Nothing yet. I guess they’ll tell me when they do. Or not. I don’t know.” His BLT tasted slightly rotten; not enough that it was noticeable at first, but just tainted enough that the flavor mounted with each bite. “What was school like today?”
She stalled, sucking on her drink straw. “It was rough. Some people saw the news about Ginny on the Web this morning, so word had spread by homeroom. But the details were all jacked up and people were just babbling. A bunch of people weren’t even sure it was real until they announced it over the PA. And there was a lot of crying, and it was just awful, Jazz. Really awful.”
She laid one hand on the table between them. Jazz stared at it for a moment before realizing she wanted him to hold her hand. He squeezed it.
“All the Crucible people got together at lunch. We were trying to figure out something we could do. Like a memorial, you know?” She wiped at new tears beginning in her eyes. “We want to do something.”
A memorial. The idea made Jazz slightly uneasy. It wasn’t quite the same thing as a serial killer’s trophy, not quite the same as the things Billy had taken from his victims. But it was close enough. Marking the dead seemed so maudlin. So obsessive. But that was what people did. They marked the dead.
“You’ll think of something,” he told her. “All of you guys.”
“And you,” she insisted. “You’re a part of the cast, too. No one knows you were there,” she said quickly, knowing what he was about to say. “No one knows you saw her die.”
“They will.” There would be something on the Web, and eventually on TV, with more details about the murder of a young, pretty, popular teacher. There would be a report that eyewitnesses had seen the killer flee. That one of them had been injured. And Howie was in the hospital, and people in Lobo’s Nod knew how to add one and one; they came to two every single time.
“Can we go?” he asked. A headache had begun to test the tender nerves threading through his right temple.
“You’ve hardly touched your sandwich.”
“Leave it.” He fumbled for money and left several bills on the table. “Let’s go.”
Gramma made up for her rotten behavior earlier in the day; by the time Jazz got home, she had passed out on the floor in front of the TV (which she had switched over to the Speed Channel at some point) and was gently snoring there, the teddy bear serving as a makeshift pillow.
How on earth, he wondered, looking down at her, could such a peaceful, contented-looking woman be such a lunatic monster? How could she give birth to a force of pure evil, suckle it, raise it to its own grotesque brand of perfec
tion?
Lacking the strength to carry her upstairs, he left her on the floor. The cop was still parked outside—another detail soon to be entered into the local gossip database, he knew—but he double-checked the front door, the kitchen door, and all the windows before slinking upstairs. By now the headache was done testing and had decided to kick up a fuss. His head was lopsided with pain.
Nonetheless, he had things to do. It was almost the weekend. Melissa’s report would be filed on Monday, and he needed his rebuttal letter to accompany it. He couldn’t let her report go unanswered for any length of time if he wanted to stay in the house.
Remember Bobby Joe Long scrolled across his computer screen.
“Are you sure you want to stay in the house?” he mumbled to himself as he slumped at the desk, his computer’s monitor too painful and too harsh for him to look at it directly. “A foster home might be a vacation. Samantha’s house might be a blessing.”
It was tempting to look at it that way, but he knew that once he was out of the house and in the system, he’d have no way back. He’d fooled Social Services into thinking that his grandmother was taking care of him for the past four years, when the opposite was closer to the truth. And he’d never even met his aunt Samantha. There was no guarantee she’d even want him. Now he had to find a way to at least stall the process until he turned eighteen. Then he could do whatever he wanted, and no one could stop him.
I do whatever I want, Billy had said once, grinning over his trophy collection. With one hand, he fondled a necklace he’d taken from a victim. With the other, he stroked Jazz’s hair. And no one can stop me. I’m their God. I say if they live or die. Greatest feeling in the world.
Jazz’s fingers trembled on the keyboard. Maybe he should let them take him away. Maybe that would be best.
CHAPTER 25
The Impressionist had the TV on for background noise as he went over the plans for his next piece of action. Everything was ready; there was no more preparation to be done. He only had to execute the plan.
