Burning Bridges: A Renegade Fiction Anthology

by Benjamin Sobieck

~ Tace Baker

  Dorothy was dry. Parched for ideas. She felt like she lived in Mojave instead of northeastern Massachusetts. The blank screen stared at her. The deadline for her short story submission was two weeks from tomorrow. If she didn’t submit, ThrillerZine wasn’t going to send her the check for writing a crime story every month. If she didn’t get the check, she couldn’t quite make the May rent. No submission, no rent. She huddled with her laptop on the sagging middle of the couch looking around the small apartment for inspiration.

  George ambled into the room, which also included the kitchen. His gray hair stuck up in tufts off his thinning pate. When he rubbed a spot near where his part might have been, his hair took on a dangerously wild look. Wild like old insane man, not wild like lusty passion. That hadn’t happened in a long time. Just like his contributing to household expenses hadn’t, either.

  She could barely remember when George had been worth her giving up the way things had been: a decent salary, a tiny Manhattan condo, respect in the world of commercial marketing, good conversation with colleagues. Well, what was the point in thinking about that? She had relocated to Beverly. She’d married him. This was Massachusetts, not Manhattan. Now was now, and now was when she needed an idea.

  “Your headache still bothering you?” She tried to say it in a caring tone.

  George nodded, his eyes focused on a distance only he knew. “Yeah. It’s killing me.”

  She watched him standing in the kitchen. His skinny fingers twisted one end of an unkempt mustache looking like he had no idea why he had walked into the room in the first place.

  “Hey, George, I need an idea for a story. Who’d be a good person to kill off?”

  He gazed at her as if she had just awoken him. “How about the husband? He’s annoying, right?”

  She looked back at him and nodded. Now that was an idea.

  *****

  Dorothy wandered the aisles of the package store the next afternoon. George deserved a treat for providing her with inspiration. There it was, his favorite single-malt 18-year Scotch. It was a lot better quality than the cheap bourbon he usually drank. She put a bottle in the cart, plus a younger version of the same, and added a couple of large bottles of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon for herself, all she could afford after they rang up the Scotch. She picked up some bright daffodils, too, in honor of Spring, the season of change.

  As Dorothy angled George’s old Subaru into their apartment’s parking lot, the SUV that usually parked next to George’s spot pulled out. No wave, no smile. As usual. This was the unfriendliest place she’d ever lived, worse than Manhattan. Did any of the other residents even know she’d moved in with George two years earlier? Maybe they didn’t care about neighbors because they were mostly transient themselves.

  At the dinner table that evening, Dorothy poured George a glass of the better Scotch.

  Surprise followed pleasure on his face. “Hey, thanks, babe.” He took a sip and sighed, smiling. “Hey, what are these for?” He pointed to the pills next to his plate.

  “Acetaminophen. Taking it regularly can help with headaches,” Dorothy said. “I know how forgetful you are, honey, so why don’t you let me remember for you?”

  He nodded and washed down the pills with the Scotch that remained in his glass. When Dorothy poured him another couple of fingers, he just smiled. “How’s your story coming, babe?”

  She shuddered at a 60-year old man calling her “babe.” Even worse that he looked a decade older than 60.

  “I’m hauling on it. You have the best ideas, George.” She mustered a smile and took a long drag on her wine. “In fact I’m going to get back to it now. You’ll clean up, right?”

  “I guess. You know it makes my back hurt.”

  “Come on. You know that’s our deal.” His idea of cleaning up would never meet any reasonable standard of hygiene, but it was better than having to do it herself. She returned to her spot on the couch that doubled for an office and fired up the laptop.

  ***

  Four days later, she’d almost finished the story. It had pretty much written itself. She was about to create the final twist. She looked up and stared at George slumped in his recliner. The distraction of his snores angered her. She tried to summon up the love and respect she’d once felt for him and failed. There he sat in his same crappy apartment, his pale hairy paunch extruding between a ratty green sweatshirt and the elastic-waisted exercise pants he’d taken to wearing, not that he ever exercised in them. Grizzled stubble covered his unshaven cheeks. He didn’t even clip his nails, long and yellowed like a hermit’s. Only the black leather oxfords he wore, always laced up, always tied and firmly double knotted, always buffed until they glowed, remained of his former self.

  She’d thought about divorce. But it was expensive, and she’d probably have to pay his sorry ass alimony. No way.

  George wouldn’t wake up for hours. Dorothy threw a blanket over him, shut off the lights, and took the computer into her other office, their bedroom.

  ***

  Dorothy polished the story and sent it in with a week to spare. She then spent a day spring-cleaning the apartment. If it got any dustier, she’d have to start using her asthma inhaler. She opened the windows, pulled on rubber gloves, and scrubbed all surfaces. When the level in George’s Scotch bottle grew low, she filled it up from the cheaper one.

  “How’re your headaches, George? Better?” Dorothy asked that evening. “Did the switch to Extra-Strength help?”

  He nodded from across the table. “Your little pills are doing the trick.” He brandished the three acetaminophens next to his plate before swallowing them, then took another bite of her famous tuna risotto. Famous for being the world’s tastiest cheap meal.

  “That’s good. When you’re feeling better, maybe you can start looking for work again.”

  George smiled, but if the look on his face didn’t shout “Doubtful,” she wasn’t sure what would.

  “It’s been quite a while, babe, you know.” He pushed away from the table.

  I know, she raged in her mind. She smiled and tried to muster an encouraging look. “You’re smart, you’ll be able to find another software gig. But you might want to, you know, clean up a little. Shave, maybe?”

  “Yeah, maybe. But you took away the phone.” His voice was plaintive. “How could I even receive calls for interviews?”

  On the end table next to George was the letter from the phone company, canceling their land line because of lack of payment. Forced to choose, Dorothy had figured it was better to keep up on her cell phone payments.

  George rose with his eye on the television. Sure enough, it was time for his Bill O’Reilly fix.

  “Did you eat enough?” Dorothy called after him. Half his serving remained orphaned on his plate. His focus was on the talk show host. George didn’t seem to hear Dorothy. She watched him as he watched the screen. In the flickering glare, his skin matched the lemony paint she’d chosen in a fit of futile home improvement when she’d moved in. She hadn’t realized the landlord wouldn’t reimburse them and that she’d need that paint money for the electric bill soon enough.

  The next morning, Dorothy packed a suitcase with warm-season clothes and essentials. She tucked the bottle of acetaminophen into her purse and slung her computer bag over her shoulder. She wheeled the bag into the living room, where George snoozed in his usual position. She stood in front of him for a moment.

  “George?” She shook his shoulder.

  “Huh? Oh, hi, babe. You going somewhere?”

  “I’m going to do some research for a new story. I told you, remember? There’s food in the fridge. See you in a few days, OK?”

  “Sure. I’m not that hungry, anyways. Stomach hasn’t been so good lately. Hey, turn up the heat, will you? It’s cold in here.”

  Dorothy looked at the thermostat, which already read 75. She nudged the control up to 80. Why not?

  Dorothy bent over and brushed her lips on his forehead. “See you, George.”
The door locked shut behind her, and when she turned her key in the deadbolt, it snicked into its slot.

  The breeze outside wafted a mixed perfume of newly cut grass, a sweet flower’s scent, and salt air. At the post office, she picked up the check from her box and cashed it at the bank next door. At the train station she bought a ticket to New York City.

  Several weeks later in her cubicle at her new job, she found what she had been looking for on Boston.com: a short news blurb on the Metro North page. “Local man found dead in his apartment after neighbors complain of odor. No foul play suspected.”

  Her heart tugged for a moment. Suddenly Dorothy remembered the early days with George. It was like looking at a photo album. Two lovers walking Singing Beach, talking politics and books, laughing at a toddler running away from a small wave. She shook her head and opened her cell phone address book, selecting and pressing the number for the insurance company as she walked into the hallway.

  A few minutes later she jabbed the End button. That pathetic excuse for a man had borrowed off his life insurance policy. There was nothing left. She stalked back to her cubicle. The images on her wide monitor swam.

  “Dorothy, coming out to a lunch with us? We’re hitting the new sushi place around the corner,” Marios said. He slung a lean arm over her cubicle wall, looking like a Greek model in his Italian-cut slacks and the black scarf tossed around his neck that matched his curly hair. He flashed her a smile that could have lit up the city. “Love to have you.”

  Dorothy took a deep breath. This was her new life, right? Just what she had wanted. Just in time for spring. “Love to join you.”

  At Yoshinoya, after Marios and several others ordered beer and wine, Dorothy asked for hot sake. She rummaged in her bag for the pill bottle and shook one into her palm. It was her turn for a headache.

  Marios’ eyebrows went up. “Hey, don’t you know Tylenol with alcohol can wreck your liver? I just read an article about it.”

  “I know.” The sake slid down her throat with warm comfort. “I know all about it.”

  The End

  Tace Baker writes traditional mystery fiction from Ipswich, Massachusetts in the US. Her debut novel, “Speaking of Murder,” will be out from Barking Rain Press in September, 2012. When Quaker Linguistics Professor Lauren Rousseau finds her star student dead on campus and becomes a suspect herself, she has to use her facility for languages and regional accents to find the real killer. The book is the first in the Speaking of Mystery series. Tace's birth identity is Edith Maxwell, who writes the Local Foods Mystery series. Tace can be found at https://www.tacebaker.com, and on twitter and Facebook.

  Safety First

  ~ Joshua J. Mark

  No. No, no, no. That is where you have it all wrong. Skip lightly backwards, as though you’re at the beach, my friend. Here comes the darkness, frothing at your toes. That’s what it was like. You’re standing high and dry, friend. What do you know? Oh, it seems like nothing at first. So maybe you’ll get your shoes wet, you think. That’s just the beginning. Tide’s coming in fast. You’re going to drown you keep thinking that way.

  See, you keep getting the whole thing wrong. Darkness was dragging me down, undertow-supersize, friend, and don’t think it’s not there for you, too. Get it right. I was fine before the dead girl. Look at my record you don’t believe me. I don’t care. I just hit a rough patch there for a spell after the dead girl. You think you’re different than me? Think again.

  Her name was Samantha Stevens, like you have to already know. Just like the `Bewitched’ chick, sure, but she didn’t look anything like Elizabeth Montgomery when I saw her. Hell, sure, she must’ve looked great before somebody wrapped the wire `round her throat but she wasn’t looking any too pretty laying in that brook. Somebody - and I do mean `somebody’ as in ‘anybody you might pass on the street today’ - decided to rape her and strangle her and dump her by Jayne’s Pond, just up from it, in the stream. So, yeah, when I first laid eyes on the dead girl she was a bloated horror but, I was sure, she must’ve been a young, pretty girl before the killing went on. She had long, brown hair and a nice figure, athletic, tall girl, like my daughter, and same age, eighteen. They went to school together. Lisa was at the prom with her the night before. She sort of looked like Lisa, too, except for the bulging eyes and the black tongue sticking out of her mouth and the red wire marks and lividity around her throat.

  So it’s all bull, what you’re saying. I didn’t have anything in my head at all. I was just like you. No different. No different at all. I woke up, brushed my teeth, took my shower, put on the uniform and went out into the day. And, get it straight, I’m no rookie. I’ve been pulling duty for twenty years, my friend. I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff. That doesn’t mean I became the bad stuff. I’m one of the good guys. You get that straight if you mess up everything else. Jesus hung out with lepers, friend, but he never became one.

  It wasn’t any different from any of the other homicides I’d seen. No different. But it was. I didn’t know why at first. There were maybe two hundred kids at the prom the night before when she’d gotten into a fight with her guy. She’d left to walk home and that meant two hundred kids watched her go and each one of those kids, all with cell phones, had, maybe, ten or twenty or thirty friends or more. So the list was endless. Who killed Samantha Stevens? Hell, it could’ve been anyone in all of Sanford County. Could’ve been some guy passing through who, you know, could’ve picked her up that night and given her a safe ride home or - never mind, never mind even that - could’ve just kept on driving down the road and left her alone but, nope, had to stop for a little raping and killing instead.

  And this is what I’m talking about, friend. This is where you have the whole thing backwards. I’m not the one with something wrong with me. It’s all of you. And I know what I’m talking about `cause I was just like you before I saw the dead girl. I didn’t know how far up the beach the waters come or how fast and you don’t know what’s down there beneath, you can’t know, until it’s on you and, then? Then it’s too late. You got to stop it before it’s too late, you understand? You have to do something.

  The whole county was foaming at the mouth over it. You remember. What was up with the Stevens case, why the cover up, what’re the cops really up to, and all that crap. There wasn’t any cover up. There were just, like, five hundred people to interview. Yeah, we had DNA. We had DNA that first morning. But we didn’t have anyone it matched with. It’s sort of like having a key in your hand but you don’t know what door it goes to or where that door might be and, sure, maybe that door’s in Sanford but maybe, by now, that door’s down in New Orleans or up in Canada, all right? I mean, come on, you know this as well as I do.

  So all these kids I’m talking to every day. All these kids I’m interviewing and it started, I don’t know, maybe after the fifth or sixth, something like that. She was a cute little blonde girl and she was talking about the last time she saw Sam at the prom and suddenly her tongue just started growing out of her mouth, long, black, like a water snake, and her eyes were white and wide and I smelled that stink suddenly from her pants like I’d smelled a hundred times standing over dead bodies and, yeah, I had to leave the room before I puked all over her.

  Kept happening after that, too. Leaves falling and clear water over rocks in brooks and a blue sky overhead and then that stink in my nose of a sudden looking down at her laying in the water with that tongue out and those eyes. It comes up and just touches your toes and you think `so what’ at first, and `I’ve seen worse’ or something, but then you’re gone. It gets you all of a sudden and you go under and you’re gone. You ever think about what `drowning’ really is? Isn’t it just not getting what you need?

  No, no. Not me. I’m all right now. Sure, I hit a rough patch. Who doesn’t sometimes? I was going down, too. I could feel it. You know, sometimes at dinner I’d sit there looking at Claire and Lisa and I’d just want to start crying. A grown man, a cop of twenty years too, crying over dinner with h
is family around him and the dog under the table. This one night Claire made my favorite - meatloaf and homemade macaroni and cheese and salad - and I felt like I was choking on every bite of that, friend, like every bite was death and I just couldn’t swallow it. What? How do you not get this? I could not stop thinking about her. Who killed Samantha Stevens? I didn’t know. No one knew. He could be anyone in the deli where I got my egg sandwich and coffee in the morning. There was no way I could keep them safe. Anyone could have killed Samantha. Anyone could kill them - and for any reason. Lisa jogged home from school after her track practice. Claire had to walk three blocks from the bank to her car after work. Who was going to be watching over them to keep them safe? I couldn’t. I was too busy trying to find the scumbag who killed Sam.

  What motives did we have in the Stevens case? None. Everyone loved the girl. Sure, she liked to party and she liked a lot of boys. Last I heard that wasn’t anything to die over. There was not a single kid or parent I talked to had any motive for wanting that girl raped and murdered. So who was it? There’s no one without sin. There’s not a single solitary suffering soul you passed on the way into work this morning who hasn’t done something wrong. Everyone’s guilty. As it says in the Bible, `There is none righteous. No, not one. For all have sinned.’ And that’s true, too, but we’ve all sinned to greater or lesser degrees. I’ve gone sixty in a forty plenty of times but I’ve never wrapped a wire around a girl’s neck. Someone did, though, and that someone was still out there.

  Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to that. Don’t you already know all about it anyway? What’s my explanation going to do for you? Put all the pretty maids in a row and line up all the reasons for them being there and you still won’t understand a damn thing about them. Look into the eyes of the person you most love and what’re you seeing? You think you’re seeing them? Lots of luck to you, friend. You’re always only seeing your own reflection. We only see ourselves looking back at us, who we think we are, what we think we know. You think you’ll learn something new talking to me here? If you don’t know it already, God help you. I looked at Claire and Lisa and, finally, I saw through it all. I wasn’t seeing just my own reflection anymore. Not at all. I was seeing the truth. Jesus said, `Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’ and, friend, I really got that. I knew the truth.