by Lee Goldberg, Scott Nicholson, J A Konrath, J Carson Black,
“To help you kill him?”
“Yes.”
He guffawed sardonically. “Is this real? I mean, are you off your rocker?”
“Feels that way.”
The drizzle had become rain. I shivered.
“I have to get home,” he said. “I’ve gotta take John David and Jenna trick-or-treating.”
“Will you come with me?” I asked again.
“Take a wild guess.”
“I understand.”
“No. No, you don’t. You don’t understand anything.” He started to cry again, but he managed to hold himself together for another moment. “Let’s get something straight, all right? Don’t call me. Don’t come to my house. Don’t e-mail me. Don’t think about me. Don’t do one goddamn thing that would make this monster think we’re friends. We clear?”
“Yes, Walter. I want you to —”
“Don’t you say another word to me. Give me the rope.”
I untied our rowboats and cast the end of the rope to him. He cranked the outboard motor and chugged away, making a wide circle back toward his pier.
It was nearly dark, and the rain fell steadily and hard into the lake. I started the motor and pressed on toward my pier. Were the safety of Walter and his family not in question, I would have been heading home to kill myself.
20
THE walls of my office consist almost entirely of windows, and because the room juts out from the rest of my house into the trees, I feel as though I spend my hours writing in a piedmont forest. My desk is pushed against the largest wall of glass, facing the forest, so that nothing but an occasional doe or gray fox distracts me from my work. I can’t even see the lake from my desk, and this is by design, because the water mesmerizes me and would only steal my time.
Books abound, stacked on disorganized shelves and lying in piles on the floor. In one corner, there’s an intimidating stack of manuscripts from fans and blurb-seekers. A mammoth dictionary lounges across a lectern, perennially open. There’s even a display case, which holds first editions and translations of my novels, standing on one side of the door; a small gold frame enclosing a mounted photocopy of my first, meager royalty check hangs on the other.
Staring into the black forest as streams of rain meandered down the glass, I sat at my desk, waiting for the Web page to load. This would be the fifth college Web site I’d checked. I was focusing my search on the history departments of schools in New Hampshire and Vermont, but as the doors closed one after another, I’d begun to wonder if that cowboy’s memory wasn’t askew. Franklin Pierce, Keene State, the University of New Hampshire, and Plymouth had given me nothing. Maybe Dave Parker was Orson bullshit.
When the home page for Woodside College had loaded, I clicked on “Departments,” then “History,” and finally “Faculty of the History Department (alphabetical listing).”
Waiting on the server, I glanced at the clock on my desk: 7:55 P.M. She’s been dead twenty-four hours. Did you just leave her in that filthy basement? With his gig in Washington, I couldn’t imagine that Orson had gone to the trouble to take our mother with him. Depositing her body outside of the house would have been time-consuming and risky. Besides, my mother was a loner, and she’d sometimes go days without contacting a soul. My God, she could lie in that basement a week before someone finds her.
The police would have to notify me. I hadn’t even given consideration to reporting her murder, because for all I knew, Orson had framed me again. Matricide. It seems unnatural even among the animals. I couldn’t begin to wonder why. I was operating on numbness again.
At the top of the Web page listing faculty was a short paragraph that bragged about the sheer brilliance and abundant qualifications of the fourteen professors who constituted the history department. I scanned that, then scrolled down the list.
Son of a bitch.
“Dr. David L. Parker,” the entry read.
Though his name was hyperlinked, his page wouldn’t load when I clicked on it. Is that you? Did I just find you because of one short exchange with a stoned Wyoming cowboy?
The doorbell startled me. I was not expecting company. Picking up my pistol from the desk (I carried it with me everywhere now), I walked through the long hallway that separated my office from the kitchen and the rest of the house. Passing through the living room, I turned right into the foyer, chambered the first round, and stopped at an opaque oval window beside the door.
The doorbell rang again.
“Who is it?” I said.
“Trick-or-treat!” Children’s voices. Lowering the gun, I shoved it into the waistband at the back of my damp jeans. Because my house stood alone on ten acres of forest, at the end of a long driveway, trick-or-treaters rarely ventured to my door. I hadn’t even bought candy for them this year.
I opened the door. A little masked boy dressed up as Zorro pointed a gun at me. His sister was an angel — a small white bathrobe, cardboard wings, and a halo of silver tinsel. A calamitous-faced man in a brown raincoat stood behind them, holding an umbrella — Walter. Why are you —
“Give me candy or I’ll shootcha,” John David said. The four-year-old’s blond hair poked out from under the black bandanna. His mask was crooked, so that he could see through only one of the eye-holes, but he maintained the disguise. “I’ll shootcha,” he warned again, and before I could speak, he pulled the trigger. As the plastic hammer clicked again and again, I cringed with the impact of each bullet. Stumbling back into the foyer, I dropped to my knees.
“Why, John David, why?” I gasped, holding my belly as I crumpled down onto the floor, careful that my Glock didn’t fall out. John David giggled.
“Look, Dad, I got him. I’m a go see if he’s dead.”
“No, J.D.,” Walter said as I resurrected. “Don’t go in the house.”
I walked back to the door, caught Walter’s eyes, and looked down at the seven-year-old angel.
“You look beautiful, Jenna,” I said. “Did you make your costume?”
“At school today I did,” she said. “You like my wand?” She held up a long pixie stick with a glittery cardboard star glued to the end.
“Take a walk with us,” Walter said. “I left the car by the mailbox.”
“Let me see if I can find some candy for —”
He rustled the trash bag in his right hand. “They’ve got plenty of candy. Come on.” I put on a pair of boots, grabbed a jacket and an umbrella from the coat closet, and locked the door behind me as I stepped outside.
The four of us walked down the sidewalk, and when we reached the driveway, Walter handed his umbrella to Jenna. “Sweetie, I want you and J.D. to walk a little ahead of us, okay?”
“Why, Daddy?”
“I have to talk to Uncle Andy.”
She took the umbrella. “You have to come with me, J.D.,” she said, bossing her brother.
“Nooooo!”
“Go with her, son. We’ll be right behind you.” Jenna rushed on ahead, and John David ran after her and ducked under the umbrella. They laughed, their small buoyant voices filling the woods. His toy gun fired three times.
Walter stepped under my umbrella, and we started up the drive, the tall loblollies on either side of us. I waited for him to speak as the rain drummed on the canopy. The night smelled of wet pine.
“Beth’s packing,” he whispered. “She’s taking the kids away.”
“Where?”
“I told her not to tell me.”
“She knows about —”
“No. She knows the children are in danger. That’s all she needs to know.”
“Stoppit!” John David yelled at his sister.
“Kids!” Walter shouted gruffly. “Behave.”
“Dad, Jenna —”
“I don’t wanna hear it, son.”
I wondered where Walter’s anger toward me had gone.
“Do you really know where he is, Andy?” he whispered.
“I’ve got a possible alias in New England. Now, I can’t be sure unt
il I get there, but I think it’s him.”
“So you’re definitely going?”
“Yeah.”
He stopped and faced me. “You’re going there to kill him? To put him in a hole somewhere, where no one’s ever gonna find him?”
“That’s the plan.”
“And you have no compunctions about killing your own brother?”
“None.”
We started walking again. I had an awful premonition.
“You’ve called the police, haven’t you?” I said.
“What?”
“You told them about Orson.”
“No, Andy.”
“But you’re going to.”
He shook his head.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Come here, Jenna!” Walter hollered. His children turned around and ran back to us, their umbrella so low, I couldn’t see them. Walter took his umbrella from Jenna and lifted it up.
“Jenna, show Uncle Andy the tattoo you got at school.”
“Oh yeah!” she said, remembering. “Look, Andy, isn’t it cool?”
Jenna raised the sleeve of her robe and held up the delicate underside of her right forearm. My knees weakened. In pink Magic Marker, scribbled from her elbow to her tiny wrist:
W – Shhhhh. O
I looked up at Walter. His eyes flooded.
“All right, kids.” He smiled through it. “Here. Go on ahead now. Let us talk.” Jenna took the umbrella and she and John David ran ahead as we continued on, the mailbox not far ahead.
“She had it when she came home from school,” Walter said. “Beth noticed it when they were putting on her costume. Fuckin’ teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jenna said a nice man was drawing tattoos on all the kids at their Halloween carnival. She hadn’t seen him before.”
“Jesus, Walter. I am —”
“I don’t want your apologies or your pity,” he whispered. “I’m going with you. That’s what I came to tell you. We’re gonna bury Orson together.”
The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. “So when are you leaving?” he asked.
“A day or two. I’ve gotta go before my mother’s discovered.”
His eyes softened. “Andy, I want you to know that I am s —”
“And I don’t need your pity,” I said. “It won’t help either of us do what we have to do.”
He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.
21
THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he’d designed a collage out of photographs, all taken in the sickly orange light of his shed. There was a head shot of Shirley Tanner’s boot-bruised face; a full body shot of Jeff in a hole in the desert; Wilbur on red plastic from the waist up — inside out.
Below the colorful collage, scrawled in Orson’s unmistakable hand: “What do you get for the guy who has it all?” On the inside he’d written, “Not a goddamn thing. A big happy birthday from Shirley and the Gang.”
Woodside is a foothill community in midwestern Vermont, isolated from the major cities of the North by the Green Mountains in the east and New York’s Adirondacks in the west. On an autumn day, it’s quintessential American countryside, breathtaking in its open vistas of rolling hills, endless mountain chains, and a quaint college town tucked into a vale.
According to the gas station attendant, we were three weeks late. Then the forests had been burning with the brightest color in thirty years. Now, the leaves brown and dead, few remained on the trees, and the blue sky gleamed awkwardly against the winter bleakness of the countryside. Vermont in November smacked of the same stiff beauty as dolling up a corpse for its wake.
Beyond the outskirts of Woodside, on the fringe of the Green Mountains, Walter and I approached the inn. Heading up a long, curving driveway, I saw a large white house perched halfway up the mountain. There was movement on its wraparound porch — empty rocking chairs swaying in a raw breeze.
Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson’s town. We’d almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.
Hauling our suitcases up the front porch steps, we collapsed into a pair of rockers. The mountainside fell away from where we sat for a thousand feet, and the late-afternoon sun shone on the forest of bare trees in the valley below. Naked branches moved with the breeze, and I imagined that three weeks ago the sound of chattering leaves had filled the air. Across the valley, which extended twenty miles west, I could see into New York State, and the grander mountains of the Adirondacks that stood there.
Wood smoke scented the forest, and sitting in the cold, listening and watching, I sensed Walter’s restiveness.
After a moment, he said, “It’s too cold to sit out here. I’ll check us in.” He stood up and lifted his suitcase off the porch. “You just gonna sit there?” he asked, walking toward the door.
“Yep.”
Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats faced each other in the center of the hardwood floor, a squat square coffee table between them. For seventy-five dollars a night, it was a lovely room. There were even fresh irises in glass vases on each bedside table. They made the room smell like an arbor.
Walter sat on his bed, unpacking his clothes, and I lay on mine, my suitcase still unopened on the floor. Voices moved through the walls, and I heard the hollow clack of footsteps ascending the staircase. Someone knocked.
Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, “Who is it?”
“Melody Terrence.” I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.
“Hi there,” I said.
“You guys settling in all right?” she asked.
“We sure are.”
“Well, I just came to let you know that we’re serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you’re interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again.”
“Thanks for the invitation.”
“Will you be joining us? There’s a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny’s been smoking a bird all day. We’ll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits —”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “We’ll see you there.”
“Excellent.” She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.
Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. “You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon” — he whispered the infamous title — “was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that’s all it’d take to put the FBI on our ass.” Walter moved into the dormer. His back turned, he looked into the woods, dark now that the sun had set. If the moon was up, it had yet to rise above the mountains and spread its meek light.
I moved across the room to my friend.
“Walter,” I said, but he didn’t turn around. “What? You scared?”
“We can’t fuck anything up,” he said. “Not one thing.”
Staring out into the Vermont night, the foreign darkness lodged a splinter of homesickness in my heart. A child again, I acknowledged the nostalgic pain, and then it passed.
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br /> “Thank you for coming,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t have to do this, Walter. I’m never gonna forget it.”
He turned back and faced me. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said. “Nothing.”
On a cold, cloudy Thursday, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I parked Walter’s Cadillac in downtown Woodside and set out at a keen pace for the campus. Two-and three-story buildings lined both sides of the street, which was quite busy for a small town. People filled the sidewalks, sitting on benches, gliding along on Roller-blades, on gazing into storefront windows. Most were students, and they vivified the town, easily identifiable by their backpacks and the unbridled, merry apathy in their faces.
I passed a drugstore, the Woodside General Store, the Valley Café, several apparel stores, and a coffee shop called Beans n’ Bagels, in front of which, canopied tables cluttered the sidewalk. It was the liveliest store by far, brimming with caffeine junkies and quirky music. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans mingled with the air outside the open vestibule. I would’ve bought myself a cup had I not downed two at the Woodside Inn, where Walter still slept in our room, drained from the previous day of driving.
The buildings ended, but the sidewalk continued from the downtown toward the wooded campus. I could now see the mountains that surrounded the town, the highest slopes already white with early snow. I wondered how many students had skipped classes for a day of skiing. A steely wind made my eyes water and I zipped my leather jacket all the way up to my chin and dug my hands into the warm pockets.
A brick walkway veered off from the main sidewalk toward a group of brick buildings. Heading up the walkway, I reached a hexagonal white gazebo within several minutes. It appeared to stand in the exact center of campus, as most of the buildings, each not more than forty yards away, surrounded it. Plaques had been nailed to each side of the gazebo, engraved with WOODSIDE COLLEGE, EST. 1800.”
I passed beneath the portico of a stone-columned building, the largest of the ten or so in the vicinity, and walked up the steps. A great clock surmounted the roof, surrounded by scaffolding, its black hands stuck suspiciously on 4:20.
