Kelly grinned, steepling her hands beneath her chin as though praying in fear. “Oh, puh-puh-puh-please don’t t-t-t-tell.”
Kyle lunged forward and shoved her. Kelly flew back and hit the wall of the treehouse, stumbled, and fell into the wooden table of books next to her, one of two stone gargoyle bookends dropping to the floor with a heavy thud.
Kyle turned to leave. Kelly rose behind him. Hoisted the stone gargoyle overhead with both hands…
• • •
Her older brother unconscious at her feet, Kelly knew she had to work fast. Fortunately, she knew what worked and what didn’t when it came to starting a good quick fire. She had no gasoline or other extreme accelerants, but then she wouldn’t have used them if she did have them. She’d read in her favorite book at school that fires caused by such extreme accelerants were not difficult to detect in the ensuing investigation. It needed to look as though Kyle died from trying to smoke cigarettes in his treehouse, the careless boy.
So what to do? Kelly had found over the years that the minimal amount of lighter fluid in a cheap lighter was more than enough to get a good blaze going under the right conditions. And a wooden treehouse containing plenty of books and magazines was ideal.
Kelly snapped off the top of her plastic lighter and sprinkled the fluid evenly over her brother’s unconscious body. She placed her pack of cigarettes next to him along with her soda can filled with cigarette butts. Took a step back and pulled a pack of matches from her pocket.
Common sense told her to run the moment her brother went up. She needed an alibi. But she could not resist watching, if just for a short while. Not to mention the prospect of her brother regaining consciousness to find himself burning alive was far too enticing to pass up. Besides, he might somehow manage to escape his predicament, in which case she would need to whack him another one with the stone gargoyle bookend.
And she was right.
With the match lit and dropped, her brother was soon engulfed in flames, the flames then waking him. He began screeching wildly, slapping frantically at the growing blaze that was cooking his skin.
So Kelly whacked him another one. And he went out. And Kyle Blaine lay there on his treehouse floor and burned to death.
• • •
Kelly Blaine’s neighbor three doors down was more a convenience than a friend. Jenny Hayward, though twelve years old, read at a first-grade level, and it was not for lack of trying. She was simply not equipped with the ability to process or comprehend the way other kids were at her age. She made up for this in spirit and compassion and was considerably well-liked among her peers, but to Kelly Blaine, Jenny Hayward was a sometimes-useful tool, nothing more.
Today her tool would be playing the role of alibi-confirmer.
“What are we watching?” Kelly said as she strolled into Jenny’s living room with a big smile.
Jenny sat bolt upright on the sofa, eyes wide and fixed on Kelly. “What are you doing here?”
Kelly gave a silly little frown. “You told me to come.”
Jenny’s brow scrunched, trying to make sense of it. “I did?”
Both of Jenny Hayward’s parents worked. After school, her seventeen-year-old brother watched her. Her seventeen-year-old brother who hardly ever left his bedroom. Kelly had counted on this.
Kelly laughed. “Are you okay?”
Jenny nodded, though her dazed expression suggested she was still trying to process it all. “I don’t remember…”
“You told me to come over right after school so we could hang out. You really don’t remember?”
Jenny gave an uncertain nod. “Yeah, I guess I do. How did you get in?”
“Your brother let me in. If you don’t believe me, we can go ask him.”
“No. No, that’s okay.” Perhaps the one person who did not share an affinity for Jenny Hayward was her own brother. Kelly had counted on this too. That and the kid smoked a mountain of marijuana, immediately casting speculation on anything that might come out of his mouth in the near future.
“So, if anyone were to ask, you would tell them I came over right after school, right, Jenny?”
Jenny nodded.
Kelly smiled and took a seat next to her. Sirens sounded in the distance. Kelly took the remote from the coffee table and turned up the volume.
• • •
The back lot of The Joan Parsons Show, Burbank, California
Autumn 2012
“Miss Blaine?” the chauffeur driver called, holding the limo’s door open for her.
Kelly, smoking a cigarette near the back door of the studio, lost in the pleasant memory of her brother’s death, snapped from her daze and nodded toward the chauffeur. She took a hard and final drag on her cigarette, turned, and flicked it towards the studio. The pleasant recall of her brother was now completely gone, replaced with something that had been needling her since the moment it was spoken.
Monica Kemp, you are not.
6
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
One year later
Allan Brown could make eggs, all kinds. He could flip a mean pancake. Cook bacon and sausage blindfolded. Toast? Please. He even knew to cut it at angles to make it somehow taste better. He was a master at the breakfast arts.
When it was just him and the girls.
Him and the girls and four of their friends the morning after a sleepover? He was a day-one white belt in the breakfast dojo.
Not that he didn’t try. The trick wasn’t cooking the food itself; the trick was cooking the food and having all of it ready at the same time. Pancakes went cold. Toast got burnt. The forecast for eggs sunny-side-up was way off. He never even made it to bacon and sausage.
Turning his back on a kitchen countertop littered with culinary atrocities, he smiled apologetically at the table of hungry little faces and threw a Hail Mary.
“Who wants McDonald’s?” he asked.
The table cheered, and relief nearly buckled Allan’s knees. And then just as fast, never once giving him a moment without painful reflection, grief slowly dissolved his smile and reminded him that his wife, Samantha, would have handled this morning effortlessly—and happily.
• • •
The last of the sleepover girls finally dropped off, Allan would have sold a toe for a nap.
“Daddy?”
Allan looked in the rearview mirror and caught his daughter Jamie’s eye. “What’s up, honey?”
“Are we still sleeping at Aunt Kat’s tonight?”
“Yup—Daddy’s hosting that thing tonight, remember?”
Jamie’s twin sister, Janine, chimed in. “Why can’t we come?”
“Because it’s for grownups only, kiddos. Sorry.”
“We’ll stay in our room,” Jamie said.
“What’s going on with you guys? I thought you loved sleeping over at Aunt Kat’s.”
A unanimous but hardly enthusiastic: “We do.”
“Would you rather stay with Mr. and Mrs. Rolston next door?”
“No.”
“So then what’s going on?”
Neither sister responded.
Allan came upon a residential area and rolled his SUV to a stop. He turned in his seat. Both kids looked as if they were on the way to the dentist. “Okay, what’s going on with you two?”
Jamie asked: “Is tonight’s thing about Mommy again?”
Allan felt the familiar burn in his chest. It would have been nice to blame it on the McDonald’s he’d just eaten; that could be fixed quickly with a few TUMS. No TUMS were quick-fixing this.
“It’s not really about Mommy,” he said. “It’s about the thing that made Mommy pass away.”
“Cancer?” Janine said.
Allan nodded.
“Did all the people going tonight know someone who died from cancer?”
Allan nodded again. “It helps us to all get together and talk like we do. It’s therapeutic.”
“What’s that?” Jamie asked.
“Therape
utic? It means something that helps you heal. The more Daddy can talk about Mommy, the less sad he’ll be.”
Jamie pulled a face, a confused, frowny expression. The same expression he’d seen countless times on his wife when trying to convince her the appeal of Western movies or a man’s need for a cave in his home. Parallels like this between his girls and his late wife were frequent, their impact always forcing him to take a moment to regroup. His therapist said the frequencies of these parallels would increase as the girls aged, as their personalities and nuances (those were the toughest, the nuances; the little things like the confused, frowny face now) were unavoidably cultivated with his wife’s DNA.
His therapist had said the parallels would increase yet his ability to cope would grow stronger, his ultimate goal being the ability to, one day, recognize a trait of his wife in one of his girls and experience a pleasant nostalgia for what he’d once had. Stark, stark contrast to what he experienced now: the desire to break down and sob in front of his girls, share their excusable naivety in asking why? over and over until his voice quit.
“Talking about Mommy makes you feel better?” Jamie said. “I get sad when I talk about Mommy.”
“Me too,” Janine added.
“I know you do. That’s why Daddy’s thing tonight is just for grownups. Someday you’ll understand that sharing your sadness with others can sometimes help.”
“Therapeutic,” Jamie said.
Allan smiled and tapped her knee. “Bingo,” he said, feeling an odd mix of pride and sorrow at his daughter’s retention at the expense of her mother’s passing.
“So my Deejays all good in the ’hood then?” he asked in a painfully lame attempt at sounding like one of the many teen hip-hop idols they worshipped.
“Eww, Dad, stop,” Janine said.
“I will never stop calling you my Deejays.” His Deejays, short for “double-J’s,” itself short for “Janine and Jamie,” had been proudly branded as such (at least from Allan; Samantha could only roll her eyes and smile helplessly) the moment he and Samantha had chosen the names for their twin girls.
“No,” Janine said, “you need to stop talking like you think you’re cool.”
“Ouch.” Allan turned back in his seat and started up the car again. “Don’t be player hatin’, girlfriends.” Was that a thing? Player hatin’? Girlfriends? It sounded like something. His lameness was embarrassing even to him. But he had ulterior motives. And as soon as his Deejays started to giggle and mock their dorky dad, his ulterior motive for some serious levity at his own expense had come to fruition.
Allan pulled up to a stop sign and locked eyes with his girls in the rearview. After a quick huddle of whispers and giggles, both sisters made the letter L with their thumbs and index fingers and slapped them on their foreheads for their father to see—the classic “loser” gesture that even Allan knew.
“What?!” he cried playfully.
Janine and Jamie started laughing hysterically. Allan managed to maintain his flabbergasted expression even though he was grinning inside. He hit the accelerator and started through the stop sign, only to jam on the brakes as the car to his right blew right through its own sign.
“FUCK!”
Everyone sat frozen in the big SUV for a moment: Allan’s right arm extended across the passenger seat, instinctively bracing what would have been his wife; the girls in the back seat, wide eyed and open mouthed.
Everyone slowly thawed, and Allan turned in his seat again. “You girls okay?”
Both girls nodded, but were now clearly stifling giggles.
“Oh, that was funny to you, was it? Another car nearly smashes into us and—ohhh…it was because Daddy said a bad word, wasn’t it?”
The girls could no longer contain their giggles. Allan shook his head and started for home again. “You girls know you should never use that word, right?”
“Not until we’re older,” Janine said.
“Not ever.”
There was no intersection at the next stop sign for assholes to blow through, so when Allan saw the police car with its flashing blue and red in his rearview shortly after, his initial thought was that the cop was pulling him over to get details on the jerk who’d all but killed them. Make of the car, what he looked like. Perhaps the guy outran the police and now they were stuck with Allan’s eyewitness account to catch the bastard.
Nope.
“License and registration, please.”
Allan did as such. “What’s the problem, Officer?” he asked. It felt weird out of his mouth. Like a line in a movie.
The officer took his registration and license without a word and went back to his cruiser.
“Daddy, what happened?” Janine asked.
Allan, without a sprinkle of sugarcoating because he too was in the dark, answered honestly: “I have no idea.”
The cop returned and handed Allan his license and registration back.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” the cop asked.
“Honestly?” Allan began. “I figured it was because of that guy before me. The guy who blew through the stop sign at the intersection back there.”
The cop carried on as if Allan had said nothing. “I pulled you over because you didn’t bring your vehicle to a complete stop at that last stop sign.”
It was out of Allan’s mouth before he could leash it. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, sir, I’m not. You should always bring your vehicle to a complete three-second halt at a stop sign before proceeding. You rolled right on through in less than one.”
“And what about the guy who almost killed us a few minutes ago?”
“I’m sorry?”
Allan relayed the tale.
“Well, I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t spot him. Only you.”
Allan forced a smile. “All right, all right—I’m sorry, Officer. It won’t happen again.”
The cop handed Allan a ticket. “Please be more careful next time, sir—” He gestured in back toward the girls. “You’re driving for three, you know.”
Allan’s anger was all but cartoon steam shooting from his ears. The sarcastic contempt in his reply was unavoidable. “Yes, Officer, I am well aware of my children, thank you. That’s why I was telling you about the guy who—”
The officer turned his back on Allan and returned to his cruiser.
“Asshole,” Allan said through clenched teeth before realizing it would result in another round of giggles from the back.
Except it didn’t. The girls seemed to realize the unfairness of the situation too and, if given permission, would have happily labeled the officer and the situation an asshole as well. Maybe even a fucking asshole now that Daddy had increased their vocabulary. And at this stage in the game, Daddy might have even applauded them for it.
The process over, Allan all but tiptoed his SUV back home. Each stop sign and light was met with a good five-second pause, despite a honk or two from behind. The scales of justice were anything but horizontal today. Every day. Every damn day for the past two years.
Vertical, they were. The bastards were vertical.
7
Allan pulled the SUV into his garage, killed the engine, and caught the girls just as they were ready to dart from the car. “Wait!”
Both girls froze, each with a foot already out their passenger door.
“Daddy said two bad words back there. He was wrong.”
“Tell it to the swear jar,” Janine said.
Allan chuckled. “I will.” He then raised the ticket the cop had given him. “But we may just need to empty it in order to pay for this.”
“You said we could use that money for bowling!” Jamie whined.
Landmark Lanes, a nearby spot that was a waking dream for every kid (bowling, laser tag, arcade games, good junk food) and equally so for every honest adult (bowling, laser tag, arcade games, good junk food), was not something he was about to deny his kids (or himself; the blessed place had a bar too).
“Don’t worry, we�
�re still going to Landmark.”
The girls, pleased with their father’s flip-flop, went to dash away again.
“Wait!”
They returned, both simultaneously huffing their impatience.
He had nothing to say. Well, that wasn’t true; he had lots to say, but at that precise moment he didn’t know how. Sometimes it was easier to look and love and hope they felt it.
“Daddy?” Janine said.
“Yeah?”
“You’re getting that weird look again.”
“What weird look?”
“Like you’re going to ask us for a hug or a kiss or something.”
He laughed. “I’ll get my fill tonight while you’re asleep.”
“Can’t,” Janine proclaimed triumphantly, “we’ll be at Aunt Kat’s!”
Allan looked away for a moment, suddenly remembering something. “That reminds me; I need to call her and—”
The sound of two car doors slamming shut cut him off. The girls were already entering the house through the garage entrance.
He laughed again and followed them in.
• • •
When Allan entered, both girls were already stationed in front of the TV. Bellies down, hands under chins, lower legs wagging back and forth like cats’ tails, concentrations unbreakable from their latest teen heartthrob, whom Allan couldn’t even identify because they changed so often (in name only; to Allan, they were all skinny hair helmets that he would snap in two if they came near his daughters). Of course, the girls being only nine years old, this had yet to be an issue. But the day would come when a kid like that would be ringing his doorbell, wanting to take one of his babies out. And he’d answer that door wearing a not-quite-right smile and a red-spackled “NRA for Life” T-shirt.
Oh, how he loathed ruminating over stuff like this. He didn’t even want to think about the day when it was time to have “The Talk.” He shuddered. Best leave that one to Aunt Kat, he thought.
Aunt Kat. Gotta give her a buzz.
He gave one final look at his oblivious girls, silently warning them to never grow up, and then headed into the kitchen. He took the traffic violation and pinned it to the fridge with a magnet Aunt Kat herself had given Jamie and Janine. The magnet was a square that held a photo from a few years back
Bad Games- The Complete Series Page 76
