Revised Bury the Lead Ebook Formatting Embedded Cover

by Bury the Lead (retail) (epub)

  High School Student Expelled, Criminally Charged For Clown Hoax

  I hadn’t set the alarm. I despise the things, and my internal clock is generally sufficient for me. But you know how hotels are. The last guy in the room set the alarm, and clearing out the clock history hadn’t been on my list of things to do when I checked in last night. So now it was 6 a.m.―way earlier than I needed to be functional―and there was no going back to sleep.

  I gave it a good try, anyway. I lay in bed for long minutes after I shut off the alarm, eyes closed, chasing the vanishing silhouettes of Ada and my mother down a long, dark hallway that seemed to be descending into the center of the earth. Eventually sunlight shuddered through the cracks in the earth until the long hallways shattered around me, and Ada and my mother disappeared entirely. I forced my limbs to comply with the commands of my brain and scarecrowed my way to the breakfast buffet.

  Something in the more pragmatic part of my brain whispered that I should probably enjoy more exotic fare than the drive-in and hotel buffet while I still could. But I couldn’t summon the will to drive into Grand Junction and shock my palate with curry and sushi and Mexican food that didn’t come wrapped in foil. It wasn’t such an awful decision, after all. The palate really does adjust faster than you would think. There is even a kind of relief in not having to wonder or decide what to eat anymore. What I really miss these days is something more fundamental … air.

  It’s not the smell that bothers me, exactly. The aural palate is not unlike the oral palate in that regard. You get used to the smells of jizz and urine and sweat. What you don’t get used to is what is missing in the air. The absence of movement, of renewal. The absence of the flavors of rain or snow or freshly-cut grass or turned earth. There is a vitality, an eagerness, a mobility, in air that does not exist in the institutional world. There, the air is still even when the vents blow.

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  But that morning, I had no idea what a luxury air would become. So I stood in line behind a cadre of little old ladies in matching sweatshirts, waited my turn for the Danish waffle maker, and carefully spatulaed floppy microwave bacon onto my plate. It seemed quite the decadence then.

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  It was all quite simple in the end.

  I’ve never understood why people attempt to minimize the power of words. They are easily the most remarkable thing man ever invented. So remarkable that according to the Bible account, God himself is the Word, and only the breath of the divine granted us pitiful mortals access to that gift. Of all the wild stories in that book, that’s the one I’m most inclined to believe. What other explanation is possible?

  No other creatures even approach the complexity of the human language. Not content with transforming every yearning of the soul into the shape of a word, we capture the words themselves and pin them to a page with the precision of a scientist, differentiating between species and genus and family. We have entire classes of people whose lives are dedicated solely to manipulation of the same: diplomats, politicians, English teachers, reporters, authors. Strangest of all, the poet. Not just that he exists, but that he persists. That nations even today, long after the death of the last bard, cling to something called a laureate.

  @realDonaldTrump: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS!

  @realDonaldTrump: Congratulations to our great military men and women for representing the United States, and the world, so well in the Syria attack

  @realDonaldTrump: The reason you don’t generally hit runways is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix (fill in and top)!

  Words start wars and seal treaties, break hearts and ease sorrows. Is it in spite of this or because of it that we tell our children that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us? That blackest lies are often shouted the loudest, I suppose. That doozy certainly outdoes Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

  I may have laid down the breadcrumbs a little thickly, but they did the trick.

  * * *

  April 20, 2017

  I don’t know how much longer I can bear this weight in silence. I thought for sure Andy was going to find Ada’s body. I practically wrote him a map. But nothing. He claims he changed trails at the last minute. I admit, there is a part of me that wonders if Andy isn’t giving me the chance to come clean on my own. If he did find her, but remains silent out of some misguided sense of friendship. But then I tell myself that is simply my paranoia speaking. I am slowly becoming convinced that Edgar Allan Poe was a murderer, too. How else could he describe so clearly the paranoia, the guilt, the terror that attends more and more every moment that I live unsuspected? I know better than to think that Andy could ever leave Ada’s body out in the elements. If he’d found her, he’d have had to tell Chief Joe, to make sure she got home. Still, I live in horror of the truth. I feel her hand on my shoulder, her breath against my ear. The slightest sound, if unexpected, makes me jump out of my skin. The only place I find any peace is in Ada’s studio. She must have known, mustn’t she? Artists possess a strange prescience, I think. I understand, now, that she could never have stayed with me. But I think she also understood that I could never let her go. Why else would she have painted with her own blood? The ultimate striving after immortality, knowing how brief her days would be.

  * * *

  Like I said, pretty heavy-handed. But cops are if-then thinkers by nature. Feed them an if, they’ll make the leap to then all by themselves. They’re probably right most of the time.

  Of course, finding that poor kid Brett’s body up on Grand Mesa accelerated things substantially. I think the efficiency of those cadaver dogs is greatly exaggerated, because they found the corpse very close to where they must have been searching that Sunday while I was locked up at the station. To be fair, it sounds as if the body was at least partially camouflaged. And I suppose the cold up there would have inhibited the smell.

  As Chief Joe put it, in the end there were just too many coincidences around me that involved carcasses. They hadn’t quite figured out a theory of the crime by the time they arrested me, but they decided the public interest was overweening enough to merit taking me off the streets post-haste.

  Dictionary.com: post-haste: adverb, 1590s, from a noun (1530s) meaning “great speed” usually said to be from “post-haste” instruction formerly written on letters (attested from 1530s,) from post (adv.) + haste (n.) The verb post “to ride or travel with great speed” is recorded from 1550s.

  I did point out the obvious―that while they had what amounted to a written confession in my journal, the cadaver found did not match the one I’d supposedly disposed of. However, my article on the increase in transients and the legalization of marijuana bore witness to the fact that I was probably the last person to have seen the kid. Besides whoever killed him, of course. Casting about for an alibi, I did ask how they thought I could have had time to kill Brett and still slice-and-dice three dogs that same night.

  You can imagine how that went over. I’m pretty sure they had to go back to my house to find the opened box of dog biscuits I’d put under the kitchen sink. They’d been there the first time the cops had searched the place, but Santiago wasn’t exactly an FBI hotshot. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time to wonder why I had dog treats but no dog. Laying out every clue for them, one by one, was more tiresome than I’d anticipated. Or perhaps I just bore easily.

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  According to Law & Order, most cases are convicted on circumstantial evidence, all common assumptions to the contrary aside. I just needed to line up the circumstances for them, then sit back and wait for my defense attorney to knock them back down like so many bowling pins.

  As far as that went, it worked like a dream. Without a doubt, the greatest success I’ve had in my life.

  The w
ritten confession? All the entries in which I described Ada’s death at my own hands? Handwriting experts were able to easily prove that all the entries were written at the same time. With the same pen, in fact.

  My trips in and out of Grand Mesa were documented thanks to my annual pass. One of the problems for the prosecution was the sheer quantity of the trips. I was there all the time. So they struggled to impress the jury with the idea that there was anything out of the ordinary about my trips there that particular week. My attorney also pointed out the difficulty of my hauling a body a mile down the trail only to do a subpar job of hiding it.

  That argument was less convincing because obviously, that was exactly what someone had done.

  They could have used a Snowcat or something for the heavy lifting. I pointed out to my attorney that a sled and a tarp would have solved that problem fairly easily on those icy trails, but she did not appreciate my help in that regard.

  It was fascinating to watch the police decide which crime they wanted to pursue. Brett―his last name turned out to be Atkinson―was the body. Aside from my visits to the park and a suspicious newspaper article with an unnamed source referring to a body in that general vicinity, nothing linked me to Brett’s death. No forensic evidence tied me to that body at all. The police had even impounded my Subaru, presumably combing it for hairs or fibers or blood, but that had turned up nothing.

  Again, tarp, right? I honestly think most murderers get caught out of sheer laziness. The perfect crime is not that difficult to construct. Take some pride in your work, people.

  Aside from the dog biscuits and my hypothetical question regarding an alibi, they also found absolutely nothing to tie me to the dog killings.

  The Dog Killings. Sounds like a book title. Maybe I’ll use it eventually.

  Unfortunately―or fortunately―for my freedom, the other thing they couldn’t find was Ada. The bag she’d packed that night she left, her purse, her cell phone, were all missing too. It seemed she’d simply vanished from the moment she left the house. They scanned video surveillance at the bus stops in the area and found no sign of her. Her credit cards hadn’t been used. Her cell phone had been turned off or had run out of battery.

  It turned out that the conventional wisdom about not trying a murder case without a body is less than foolproof. Especially when the jury is composed of twelve Twitter-literates who are feeling foolish and resentful over having been so easily misled by print already.

  My appeal, however, is looking very hopeful. Reasonable doubt abounds. And if my attorney is successful in excluding evidence from poor Brett’s murder and the dogs, then a new jury will probably question why I was even arrested. To this day, there is no reason to assume that Ada is even dead. She was always a flighty soul. She could be happily painting away in a commune somewhere, unaware anyone is looking for her. I wonder if she would still be painting in her own blood, or if that’s the sort of thing an artist outgrows, like Picasso’s blue period.

  Speaking of Picasso, that was one subject the prosecution did harp on. When they couldn’t find Ada on the trails, they dug up my yard. Good thing I was never much of a gardener.

  Anyway, their excavations did uncover a body―poor little Picasso, Ada’s chiweenie runt dog. They did their best to spin that into something ominous, but I pointed out that I obviously wouldn’t have taken the time to give the little fella a decent burial if I’d killed him out of some sadistic urge. We’d just wrapped him in a blanket when we laid him in the ground, so the decomp was pretty advanced. Still, they tried to make a big deal out of the fact that his stomach appeared to have been torn out. I explained that we thought a coyote had gotten him, but like I said … resentful fools.

  No citizen is so pompous and self-satisfied as the one defending his intellect against reason and evidence contrary to his own conclusions.

  My own arrogance has extracted a price, however. An appeal is all well and good, even when the odds of acquittal are high. But the months and months of sitting in a concrete box are taking a toll. My experiment has been more successful than even I imagined, but now I fear I have become one of the subjects rather than the arbiter. Each day is a contest against the madness that grips the edges of my mind and forces its hot, fetid breath into my thinking.

  I try to occupy myself with observation, but the high-security unit in which I am housed limits my efforts. Still, I am amazed by the ordinariness which permeates this place. The guards stomp past―they always stomp, I’m not sure if their boots are really that heavy or if they find the echo of their own company comforting―hands resting on their belts as if standing ready to end someone were the most casual, nonchalant thing in the world. I wonder if they ever question a vocation whose primary requirement is to keep another human being in a cage? Perhaps the idea that the caged humans under consideration are evil makes the question moot. Still, it takes a certain something to lock another sentient, breathing being in a box and tell him that the air, the sun, the moon, are no longer his.

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  At least the guards can justify their existence on the basis of some higher calling. What truly baffles me is the attitude of the other inmates. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve had a few bad nights here. The days are worse, though. The imitation of life is my undoing.

  There is light, yes, but not sunlight. Florescent bulbs scream their illumination into white concrete walls that scream back as they swallow the light whole. Even the narrow window in my cell is frosted so that I cannot distinguish anything of the outside world. Every day I am forced to acknowledge that the sun has risen without seeing it or feeling it on my skin. Sometimes I am allowed in outdoor rec, where I lie on the concrete floor and try to absorb the sun into my flesh for an hour, as if the warmth could linger on my skin and sustain me through the hours of darkness. I don’t get to go out there as often as the other inmates, though, because I’ve demonstrated a tendency to fight rather than come back in when my time is up. So I am only allowed out when they have enough guards to drag me back in.

  Dictionary.com: immure: verb, used with an object: to enclose within walls, to shut in, seclude or confine, to build into or entomb within a wall

  The other inmates―I am making an active effort not to learn their names―get angry with me since my antics invariably cut into their time out. They don’t understand that I am not making a choice to fight. I don’t have any illusion that physical resistance is going to grant me any more time out or improve my lot in this place. Plainly the opposite is true. I am simply incapable of submitting to this confinement. Panic overtakes me. That door opens, and I can’t breathe.

  I watch the other inmates on their time out, strolling in and out of steel doors, calmly lifting their feet to be placed in shackles, chatting casually with the guards as manacles snap around their wrists. What madness is that?

  The librarian here is a decent fellow, though. He is patient with my many requests and does his best to keep a steady succession of books moving through my cell. I think the psychiatrist here probably told him it is in everyone’s best interests for my mind to remain occupied, but he doesn’t treat me like a beast. He treats me like a reader. We talk about our favorite authors and the series we are waiting to be completed.

  You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. – Patrick Rothfuss

  It turns out that prison books bear almost no resemblance to outside-prison books. What’s that word for something creeping you out because it is almost but not quite human? That’s what the books in here are like. They are almost-books. The smell is the first thing that clues you in. I admit I’ve been known to sniff the odd book in my lifetime. No need for that with these articles. The odor wafts up from them every time you turn a page. It’s the same odor as everywhere else in this place―sweat, fear, jizz, hot sauce―but horribly mixed with the cloth of the paper. I often have to peel the pages apart to read th
em, and rarely do I get a book with the cover intact. Reading is my primary escape, but throughout the hours I spend in that idyll, I am tied to this awful place by a slender cord of revulsion and horror engendered by the very book I am forced to touch.

  I do know the librarian’s name: Nichol. I know the psychiatrist’s name, too―Dr. Avery―but that is only because he makes such a point of it every time we meet. I think he knows that I am unwilling to grant reality to the players in this place, so he takes a singular delight in forcing me to at least acknowledge him by name.

  I can’t comprehend that slothful, subservient mind that submits so thoughtlessly to this imprisonment. I laugh when I watch them from my cell door, strutting like peacocks, puffing out their chests, yelling obscenities at the guards from behind the glass, as if they weren’t chickens in a cage, fluffing up their feathers and pecking at the ground until the fox comes in and tears out their throats. I don’t belong in this place with men who accept walls and bars and windows as if they were bred for captivity.

  For their part, they can’t comprehend the man who fights when he can’t win, who screams his throat raw in the middle of the day, who pounds his fists bloody on the walls in the middle of the night. At least as long as I’m fighting and losing, I’m still alive. The day I can offer my limbs to another man to be restrained, that I can allow these doors to close and lock on me while I smile, I’ll be a dead man. The inmates hate me more than they hate the guards who tell them what to do and when to eat and where to shit simply because I am inconvenient. Dr. Avery thinks I’m crazy, but crazy is a free man who adjusts and accepts being walled in.