by Arthur Day
ALSO BY ARTHUR DAY
Sampson and Delilah
When Fear Knocks
DEATH AT DAWN
LGBTQ Meets Main Street
ARTHUR DAY
Copyright © 2018 Arthur Day.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-4808-6654-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6652-2 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6653-9 (e)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963150
Archway Publishing rev. date: 12/12/2018
Contents
Pamela
Mj 2010
Mj 2005
Dianne
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Douglas worth
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccaal 2014
Mccaal
Douglas worth 2014
Buckmaster
Jacob warren 2013
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Doug worth
Buckmaster 2014
Jacob warren 2014
Mccaal 2014
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccall 2014
Dianne
Mccaal
Jacob warren
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Dianne vargas
Dianne
Jacob warren
Buckmaster
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Jacob warren
Douglas worth
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Buckmaster
Mccaal
Dianne
For my wife, Mary, who helped me through this labor with her patience and understanding and Dr. Virginia Jenkins for all her work on this manuscript. Thanks cuz.
PAMELA
The man came down upon Pamela hard, forcing her into the mattress forcing his weight upon her hips down and in though she could not see his face she thought she knew who he was and why he was doing this and why she was doing this with him and then he thrust and again and again hard without thought or love or even sex but to hurt and maim as an animal might in the midst of battle when two males meet and a decision is inevitable. She could feel his breath against her left cheek, hot, hotter than she had ever known a man’s breath to be, almost burning but still she could not see his face. She thought she knew his name but was not sure as she brought her legs up, a desperate prayer to the one above that went unanswered. The bed itself seemed to float as if a water bed yet not like that and there was a light in the air though it was night and the smell of lilies. He never tired and she could feel her body giving out, melting away with his heat and force until there was nothing left. Suddenly the weight was gone and she realized it was dark, darker than she had ever known darker than night or the dancing dark when she closed her eyes or her closet with the door shut and she heard a low, throaty animal-like growl from off to her left and she knew it was coming for her. She felt herself screaming.
And woke up breath coming in shallow jerks with the bedclothes wrapped around her in a sweaty tangle staring terrified at the dim mass of the wall across from her bed totally disoriented until her mind came back from the dark place and caught up with her eyes. It was always the same and afterwards she could never remember exactly who her dream attacker (she could not think of him or it as a lover) was or when she had known him or even if she had known him but she thought that she had. Perhaps he had written the note that had scared the crap out of her and caused her to yell at her neighbor. He was simultaneously a friend and a stranger. Slowly she disengaged from the bedding and wobbled slowly into the bathroom where she sat on the toilet with her head in her hands for several minutes until her breathing was even and her body was no longer trembling. Then she felt weak and exhausted as if she had just run a marathon and simply did not have the energy to get to her feet.
The mirror showed a pale face with black shadows under her eyes stands of greying hair hanging limp around her head. It was a face of someone long dead and recently dug up and a scrawny, aging body to go along with it. Damn woman you look awful. Good thing no one’s around to see you like this. How did I suddenly get so old? Spending nights with that awful dream that’s how. Need to call Carol and get in and get my hair washed and cut. That at least I can do. I’ll call her first thing. Right now need to get some sleep.
Looking through the living room window Pamela Pease could see the lawn with its lone white birch and beyond that the field leading down the hill to Compton Lake. It was a view she had seen thousands of times, first as a child and later as an adult though she had left it for foreign views for a number of years. It meant nothing to her, at least until she could no longer see it, and then she missed it as she missed Babo, her childhood doll with her spiky black hair and one eye hanging by a thread, and the taste of her mother’s puddings and the smell of her father’s pipe when she went into his sanctum sanctorum. It was a view that was part of her but that she could leave when more important events in her life intruded, demanding her attention and physical presence.
She stared out the picture window, her mind momentarily blank, filled with the view outside. The glass reflected a fuzzy image of her, an indistinct figure with long graying black hair tied back behind her head. Her face was angular, almost bony with thin lips and a long nose, a face that could have been beautiful or at least handsome if not chic when she smiled. Pam wasn’t smiling then. She rarely smiled anymore finding little in either man or nature to set her spirits on an upward track on which her lips would follow. She wondered briefly if she might be suffering from depression? Should see a doc when she went back home? Naaaa. She dismissed that thought and the dismissal even brought a smile to her lips. See? Nothing to worry about. See me smile. Pam stuck her tongue out at herself. At least she still had a sense of humor didn’t she? She definitely had reasons for not being a Pollyanna. Until MJ her choice in men had been bad and then she had screwed up her marriage.
Someone was watching her. She was sure of it, someone was watching and stalking her and, though they had been divorced for a while she wanted MJ there with her; his bulk and his experience would be as much security as she would need. She felt it
but could not prove it. It was nothing more than a tingling feeling on her back as if someone had lit it up with a laser light, a feeling that she was not alone and that such feelings would not end well. She would be walking and suddenly turn around but no one would be there. She would hear the crunching sound of a car going along the dirt road that would lead to the paved road into the village of Compton and beyond that the town of Junctionville but they always passed the house on their various errands. They all seemed so normal but then she wondered if someone was watching what did that person look like? If she didn’t know that then it could be anyone passing by in a car or on foot. It certainly would not be a man in a black cape and mask driving a huge, shiny black Suburban. It was probably all nonsense, a tale of woe spun by an overheated imagination in search of someone with whom to share.
She always had a hard time putting on weight. Food and she simply didn’t play well together and her appetite had gone south many years before when her life had turned into a storm, a nightmare from which at the time she did not think she would ever awake. She shifted her weight to her other foot and her image wavered slightly in the glass. Image, image on the wall, she thought. Who is absent when I call? Where was Mike when she needed him? Where was anyone when she needed them but of course that was her life just as it always had been when she was a girl way back then way back when she skinned her knee well really it was a cut and it bled and she ran from her bike lying on the sidewalk and ran screaming to her house but there was no one there for her mother and dad were working and would not be home and Bertie was supposed to be there but no one answered when she called her brother and she had been so angry that she had stopped screaming and was limping up the walk with blood on her leg and on her hand as well and where was Bertie who was always around and always protecting her and then she found him across the street shooting hoops with Eddie Forster and later in her room with his arm around her shoulders and a Band-Aid on her knee sniffling and loving the closeness of him, the warmth of his arm around her even the light touch of his breath on her cheek as he said it’s okay now it will feel better I promise but he hadn’t been around that time.
Pamela had been so mad at him that time and at times since then but she knew she would now have only memories of her brother who had died in Iraq blown to pieces on some hardscrabble slope of some freezing, barren mountain by someone following the dictates of a madman(for so we believe since he had openly stated that he hated anyone who did not kneel to pray in the same way that he did and thought the worst of people whom he had never met or even seen and that is surely indicative of insanity), some enemy who, like her brother, only wanted to do his job and return to his family alive and in one piece (may Allah be praised) seventy-two virgins or no seventy-two virgins. She was not there for him as he was for her, but wanted to be, had tried to enlist but was rejected. Not her fault, her parents told her. Act of God. Do not be so upset, Pamela. Write Bertie a nice letter instead.
Pamela turned away from the window and thoughts of her brother. Long gone and far away and she must live in the here and now. She must boogie on but how long could she continue to do that without Michael? It was like hopping around on one leg. One could do it but it was not comfortable and not suited for long term happiness. Of course being married to a man who worked twelve hour days and kept going off by himself on various “errands” as he called them was hardly a great situation either. Now she knew how wives of police officers and firemen and soldiers felt. She never knew if he would come back and wrap her up in the huge hug of his (hi there my chickadee he would say and she would feel the scrape of his face against her cheek) or someone would knock on their door at an odd hour and with grim visage to tell her that she was once more alone. Ironically, she was alone now anyway. To hell with it, she thought. No sense worrying herself into a psych ward somewhere over something or someone she could not see and whose presence she could not even prove. If someone’s watching me then let them watch. Hope they like the view. Maybe I should strip in front of the window and see if anyone pops up out of the trees. Hah. Might be enough to scare him off. Time to get outta Dodge for sure.
She had always been an active person. She had always jogged in her youth and now went for long walks around the lake. Activity seemed to clear her mind as it exercised her body and when fears and worries beset her she would always find her walks would push them back for a while. Early morning was the best time. The summer sun would just be hanging above the pines at the front of the camp and the slight ground fog would reflect the light into a rose-tinted fantasy as beautiful as it was ephemeral. The fog would hang just above the hay fields on the farms surrounding the lake turning them into a blurry dreamlike sheet of greens and greys that seeped into her mind and brought forth memories ranging back to childhood to yesterday to the days above and beyond the yesterday until her thoughts flew free of her muscles working, working and she looked down at the books on the shelves to her right most from the eighteenth and nineteenth century bought and read and put on the shelves by generations of Peese reading during the evenings after supper if there was not chess or bridge or Oh Hell or drunken Monopoly battles in progress.
Enough. She moved into the back part of the house, shedding her jeans and put on the old, worn gray shorts that she used for her exercise walks. Slipping through the front door she went down the drive to the dirt road leading to the village. She felt young and strong, her muscles worked with smooth strength, used to this routine, expecting it and enjoying it. There were no problems that she could not overcome. She had no need for a husband. That was so nineties. She was woman. She was in control. She was all powerful. The road unraveled before her pumping arms like brown string and ahead she saw the paved road to town and beyond that Rickett’s hay field with a patchy blanket of ground fog quickly retreating before the morning sun. With her body in motion her mind was set free to wander where it would and it chose the time when she had first seen MJ.
He had been alone in the crowd at the Carroll’s party standing stiffly off to one side trying to be inconspicuous and miserably failing but simply making himself more noticeable. If his size and obvious discomfort were not enough he seemed to draw young ladies of all sizes and descriptions. Pamela saw him and decided he was just eye candy and determined to ignore that part of the large room entirely.
“Cute, isn’t he?” Cindi Morton waved her glass of Merlot, perhaps her second or third.
“Who?” Pamela asked even though she thought she knew to whom her friend was referring.
“Whattdya mean who.” Cindi giggled, a high-pitched sound Pamela had not heard since her childhood. “That hunk in the corner behind you. Can you spot any other man here that comes even close?”
Pamela smiled and made the conscious decision not to turn around and look. “Oh that man.” She flicked her fingers through the air as if to shoo away a fly.
Cindi rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. “Christ, Pam. If you ignore men, particularly single men, you will spend the rest of your life getting over Jacob Warren.”
“And I suppose that your philosophy worked. If it has pants and a dick then fuck it,” Pam shot back. “How’s that doing for your marriage?”
“I don’t think Oliver knows and, if he does, doesn’t care as long as his shirts are pressed, Carolyn has the latest fashion for school and I don’t bring scandal down upon our house. I have often thought I should line naked women up in our living room just to see if it inspires my husband to think of something besides work. You want to volunteer to be first?” Cindi glanced sideways at Pamela, a twisted smile on her face, her eyes full of desperation and just a hint of something else.
Cindi may have avoided scandal, but it was simply a matter of time, Pamela thought. Through other friends she had heard stories of other parties not of the cocktail variety but murkier or maybe less conventional would be a better term and that Cindi’s beamer had been seen in other parts of town where the free sex of the sixties had carri
ed on into the nineties. Oliver was bound to know and if he hadn’t said anything it was probably for reasons of his own not because he didn’t care. Pamela knew he loved his daughter more than anything else. She laughed off Cindi’s invitation. “If I were the first I’d also be the last. Oliver would never think of sex again.”
“Don’t keep putting yourself down, girl. You’re not ugly. I don’t know why you feel that way but if you keep talking like that you’ll never attract a man but at least you’re no longer with Jacob Warren. That man is flat out crazy. All he wanted was a toy doll that he could show off and then put on a shelf until he wanted her again.”
Pamela felt uncomfortable and not for the first time on this subject. She knew she was not beautiful and did not have a good figure being all skinny and angular like boards poorly joined and looking as if they would separate at any moment but trying to use that as a shield did not work with Cindi. Pam should have known better. She did not feel that she had to attract a man. She was doing quite well all on her own, thank you very much. She definitely did not feel like flirting with the hulk behind her even if she knew how. Besides, she would hardly be any competition with the women currently clustered around him. “Oh do be quiet,” she snapped at her friend and walked off towards the bar that had been set up in the next room.
The party continued. Well educated, well dressed people, knowledgeable on current events, politically popular views, bon mots of the day, the best investments for the current market conditions, what schools were in favor and what schools to avoid gathered in small clusters banding and disbanding as people saw others that they simply had to greet with just the right degree of enthusiasm. Elizabeth Carroll was an expert at throwing such parties. She always insured the a few unknown but interesting people were invited so that one could come away from one of her parties talking to their spouse or significant other about the fascinating painter who had been there and currently had a show at that new gallery in Hartford and wouldn’t it be fun to go there soon and maybe buy something to help him out. Carroll also liked to mix her generation with those from the next. Pamela suspected that was the reason for her invitation along with a few other young people.
