A gasp went up from the nearby onlookers, who quickly spread word through the crowd that Suzanne’s killer had been caught.
“I’m sorry, Mark,” Pierce told me. “The DA wants you booked on suspicion of murder.” Then he began reciting my rights.
Neil, Parker, Roxanne, Carl, Thad, and Hazel all stood behind me, astonished, voicing words of support. Roxanne leaned forward and said into my ear, “I’ll do everything I can, Mark. I’ll meet you downtown.” Meaning, of course, that I was about to be hauled away.
I offered my wrists to Pierce, but he shook his head, telling me, “Just get in the car.” He opened the back door of one of the squads. As I got in, he stood between me and the crowd, giving instructions to the deputy who would drive us to the sheriff’s department. He was about to close the door for me and get into the front seat, when Thad poked his head inside the car.
“Mark,” he said, sounding panicky, “what’s happening? They can’t do this.”
Before I could say anything in response, Miriam Westerman burst through the crowd and nabbed Thad by the elbow, telling him, “The courts should have an easy time of it now, Ariel, deciding whose guidance is best for your future!”
Then Pierce closed my door, took the front seat, and told the driver, “Let’s get out of here.”
PART THREE
Three Days Ago
I HAD ANOTHER DREAM, which began as a replay of an earlier one.
I’m a boy of nine, visiting the house on Prairie Street for the first time. It’s the second day of my visit, and I’ve met everyone in the household except my oldest cousin, Mark Quatrain, who’s returning from college. Then somebody opens the door, and I see him. He’s very handsome, with wavy hair, and he’s wearing tan pants. Everyone else is hugging him; I want to, but think I shouldn’t. Trying to think of something clever, I tell him, “We’ve got the same name.” He smiles and says, “How about that?” Then he musses my hair with his hand.
Later that afternoon, I’m in Joey’s room, and I stroll out into the hall and look in on Mark. There he is with his shirt off, unpacking a suitcase and sorting through his records. Seeing me, he says, “I’ll find some Mozart.” He kneels on the floor, reaching for an album that slipped behind the stereo. His backside is toward me, and I can’t take my eyes off him. I feel lost for a moment; then I walk over to him and just, well… touch him.
Mark gets up fast, laughing, being nice. He says, “Go ahead. Touch me.”
I put my arms around his waist and squeeze him against me. He looks at the ceiling with his mouth open, and he puts his hands in my hair, and he pulls, and it sort of hurts but feels good anyway. He says, “I want to touch you, too, Mark.”
So I take one of his hands and put it between my legs, and I feel warm and hard there. He looks into my eyes and tells me how green they are, and I laugh, telling him, “Show me your cock. Fuck my mouth.”
I’m not little anymore, but his age, eighteen. We’re the same height, same build, same name, same khaki pants. There’s a twin-thing going on, and it heats up fast. We’re on the floor, groping each other. “Mark, oh, Mark,” we whisper.
So far, everything is happening the way it did in the earlier dream. But then, things start to get different.
“Hey,” says someone, popping into the room. But I can’t see him, and I don’t care—I’m busy with my cousin, my twin. “Hey!” he repeats. “Back off, Mark. That guy’s straight. Worse yet, he’s a rapist and a murderer. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s dangerous.”
Wearing the same khaki pants that Mark and I wear, Parker walks over to where we are sprawled on the floor together, and he stands over me. The way he moves, the way the crisp fabric hugs his butt, everything about him—his body language—reminds me of my cousin Mark, just as it did on the day when I hired Parker. And now I’m doubly aroused, with my fantasy-cousin lying there at my side, with my hot managing editor straddling my shoulders. “Besides,” he tells me, reaching a hand down to me, “that guy’s just a kid. You need a man, Mark. I’m here for you.”
As he pulls me to my feet, I’m no longer nine, no longer eighteen, but an adult. Parker and I are now the same age, same height, same build, same khaki pants. There’s sort of a twin-thing going on, and it heats up fast while Mark Quatrain watches us, grinning, lying on the floor. Parker and I share a long, deep kiss as our hands fumble to unbuckle each other’s belts. Then I feel Parker’s hand lift my balls, and I moan at his touch. With his other hand, he combs his fingers through my hair, mussing it, and my penis stiffens to the point of pain. Watching us, lying there, my cousin Mark unzips his own pants and starts masturbating.
Parker tells me, “Rub your dick in my hair,” and he kneels in front of me, thrusting his head at my groin. As instructed, I slide my penis through his curls and instinctively grab his hair with both of my hands, forcing his face to nuzzle deeper into my groin. “Oh, Mark,” he groans, “I’m gonna come.”
But the voice didn’t come from the man kneeling in front of me. It came from the man lying on the floor. It is no longer my cousin Mark, but Parker, in the first throes of orgasm. “This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he tells me, shooting semen that arcs into the air, then lands in puddles that disappear within the wrinkles of his crumpled khakis.
Spontaneously, my testicles clench, and I feel the rush of orgasm pulse through my penis into the hair of the man kneeling before me. My fingers are buried in Mark Quatrain’s curls, and as I come, I pull. He yelps, enjoying the pain, ejaculating at my feet. Breathless, I lift my hands from his head and discover strands of his hair wrapped around my fingers.
He looks up at me, smiling with woozy bliss.
I crouch to kiss him, slipping deeply asleep.
Waking in the dark, I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was shortly after six. The near silence of early morning was broken only by the sound of the furnace blower and by a low chatter that resembled the grinding of teeth. The weather had turned bitterly cold again, so cold that the brick walls of the house seemed to grate their own mortar in defiance of the gelid outdoor air.
The bed was warm and comforting, heated, no doubt, by the passions of my dream. The dream, though bizarre, was highly pleasurable, and I took it as a signal from my subconscious that despite the horrendous turn of events following Suzanne’s funeral the week before, I could now sleep more easily.
The murder charges against me didn’t stick. While tests confirmed that the finial found in my car was in fact the murder weapon, it obviously had been planted in my trunk. Even Dumont’s hotdogging DA, Harley Kaiser, itching for a conviction, conceded that I was framed. Roxanne convincingly argued that if I had committed the crime, I’d simply have burned the finial in any of the house’s fireplaces; the sheriff himself, Doug Pierce, confirmed that he’d seen several of the fireplaces in full blaze on Christmas Day. What’s more, if I had been dumb enough to carry the bloodied king-thing around in my car, I wouldn’t have been smart enough to clean off all its fingerprints, a task that someone had scrupulously tended to. No, it just didn’t add up, so the finial in my trunk could not be used to prove me guilty of Suzanne’s murder. But it didn’t exonerate me, either, and Kaiser ordered me not to leave town—I was still on a short list of suspects.
Following my arrest, both Neil and Roxanne spent the full week in Dumont, Neil for moral support, Roxanne on legal matters. Her first order of business was to clear me with the DA. Aside from the fact that he couldn’t build a strong case against me, Roxanne shrewdly reminded him that I would soon be taking over as publisher of the Register and that it would not be in the best interests of his next election to antagonize me. He may not have liked the tone of her reminder, but he was smart enough to know that she was right.
Less easily handled was the matter of Thad’s guardianship. As Doug Pierce had warned, Miriam Westerman proceeded with her court action to take responsibility for the boy, and immediately after my arrest, she was granted temporary custody, alleging that my dubious charac
ter posed a danger to the child. Roxanne quickly set the wheels in motion to appeal that ruling and have Thad remanded to my permanent custody, but she cautioned me that the process could be time-consuming, the outcome iffy.
With the crisis of my arrest dispatched, and with the custody question temporarily at bay, both Roxanne and Neil returned to Chicago last Sunday, needing to get back to their regular jobs. I felt guilty enough that I had not yet lived up to my end of the “arrangement” with Neil, having spent no time with him in Chicago since my move north during Christmas week. It was now January twelfth, a Wednesday (eighteen days since Suzanne’s murder, nine since her funeral), and Neil had already spent three consecutive weekends in Dumont. Since I was now under orders not to leave town, he’d be returning for a fourth.
So all was unusually quiet that early morning as I lay in bed mulling my dream. Neil and Roxanne were back in Chicago. Thad was with Miriam Westerman. The only others sharing the house with me now were Hazel, in her quarters downstairs near the kitchen, and Parker, asleep down the hall from me in the room that had once been Mark Quatrain’s.
Thinking of Parker—not the intruder who had nudged into my dream, but the real person sleeping in my cousin’s room—I was grateful he was there in the house. He’d been steadfast in his efforts to help me through the difficult events that had transpired since my arrival in Dumont, and he’d proven himself a tireless worker during his many days of unpaid research in the Register’s morgue. Initially, our plan was that he would stay at the house until he was able to get a lease on a suitable place of his own, but the search for alternate housing hadn’t been mentioned since his arrival, and I wondered if Parker entertained notions that the living arrangement on Prairie Street might become permanent.
Then I realized (and it was a disquieting thought) that I had not broached the subject of Parker’s residence because I myself felt no urgency to have him move out. Reminding myself that I must do nothing to encourage his stated but repressed affections for me, I nonetheless acknowledged that our friendship had grown increasingly close and comfortable over those past three weeks. So I pondered the possibility of suggesting that he plan to stay.
Would such a setup simply be too weird? Unconventional living arrangements seemed to be central to the history of the house, originally designed for both my uncle’s young family and his long-ago business partner. Then it passed to Professor and Mrs. Tawkin, an unconventional duo by any definition. Neil and I had recently moved in as its next inhabitants, he and I constituting another unconventional couple, at least by Dumont standards. Add Thad to the mix, as we were now petitioning the courts to do, and our little family would become even less typical. Add Parker, and it would get downright peculiar. How would Neil react to such a suggestion? I could very well guess.
These frets, I told myself, were premature. In five days, next Monday, I would officially take over as owner and publisher of the Dumont Daily Register, with Parker as my managing editor. That, after all, was the purpose of this move—I was giving new direction to my life in journalism, and I was doing so at considerable financial and emotional risk. Put things in perspective, I told myself. For the moment, the issue of where Parker would spend his nights was fairly trivial. If, within the next few weeks, he found his own apartment, the issue would be resolved. If not, I would face some sticky decisions—but it needn’t be dealt with now, at this moment, lying in bed, planning my day.
It was time to focus more on business and less on the family matters that had dominated my time since arriving in Dumont. That very afternoon, I reminded myself, Elliot Coop was to meet me at the Register’s offices with retiring publisher Barret Logan for the signing of some last bit of paperwork. I needed to phone Glee Savage and ask her to be there. She had already interviewed me for a big feature story that would appear that Sunday, detailing the change of ownership. She might want to describe the “color” of the signing itself—it might make a good lead for her story. And the impromptu ceremony might make a good photo-op as well. I needed to write some notes—it was too early to start phoning people.
I sat up in bed, switched on the lamp, and squinted, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light. There on the nightstand was my trusty Montblanc and a fresh reporter’s notebook—old habits die hard. I wrote a few reminders of things to accomplish that day, and it was refreshing to realize that they all pertained to the newspaper, none to Suzanne’s unsolved murder. I felt invigorated. It was barely dawn, I had already accomplished some productive work, and I still felt the energized afterglow of my dream’s hot climax.
Maybe (it had been far too long since I’d done it) I should lace up my running shoes, head outdoors to tick off a mile or two before sunrise, then come home for coffee. I got up, crossed to the window, held back the curtain, and touched the glass. It was so cold, it burned my fingertips.
So I shrugged into my robe, deciding to pad downstairs and start the coffee. First coffee, then maybe a fire in the den, then the paper, then the idea of taking a run could be revisited. Maybe.
The idea of taking a run was never revisited that morning. Considering the weather, I neatly nudged the notion from my mind, dismissing it as ridiculous while I settled onto the little sofa in my den. The coffee was brewed, the fire was built, and I was dressed, with the morning paper spread before me on the low table. The sun had risen, bright if ineffective against the cold. Varied house noises (running water, creaking stairs, door thuds) told me that both Hazel and Parker had risen for the day.
Postseason Packers hoopla had made its way forward from the sports section and dominated the front page of the Register. My pen was not within reach, but I made a mental note to have a word with someone about that. It was a quiet morning for news—no developments on Suzanne’s murder—and the front page also contained a boxed story promoting Glee’s comprehensive Sunday feature on the impending change of management at the paper.
As I leaned from the love seat to turn the page, Hazel entered the den with a carafe. “Good morning, Mr. Manning,” she told me while stepping forward to refill my old Journal mug. “Sorry I wasn’t up in time to make coffee for you.”
“No problem.” I smiled. “Actually, I sort of enjoy performing the morning ritual myself.” I sipped from the mug, reconfirming that my coffee was in fact better than hers. “So feel welcome to sleep late whenever you like.”
She nodded a wary thank-you, as if she understood the ulterior side of my thoughtfulness. “If you have no objection,” she told me, “I thought I’d begin some of the sorting and packing we discussed.”
“Excellent,” I told her. Having been settled into the house for some three weeks, I’d grown annoyed by the disarray of the extra bedrooms upstairs, which had become virtual dumping grounds during the Tawkins’ move out and my own move in. I suggested, “Start with Joey’s old room—it’s the worst.”
She chuckled at my understatement. “Would you care to go through anything before I phone Goodwill for a pickup?”
I shook my head. Easy decision. “Just use your own judgment, Hazel. You know this house and its contents better than anyone. Anything of value, hang on to. Anything of interest to Joey or Thad, offer to them. Anything else, throw out.”
“Yes, sir. That’s clear enough.” She retreated from the room, then paused in the doorway to tell me, “I’m hoping I’ll run across those items that the Tawkins packed away for us, especially the three children’s baby books. With Suzanne gone now”—Hazel paused, letting a momentary pang pass—“I’d really like to look through those albums. Joey should have them. And someday they’ll go to Thad.”
“Happy hunting,” I told her softly. While the lost mementos had no sentimental value to me, they clearly meant a great deal to her, and I hoped she would find them. I added, “You’ve got a big project ahead of you. If you like, I could pick up the groceries for tonight.” Joey and Thad were coming over for a midweek dinner, a family supper we hoped to make a tradition of.
“Thank you, Mr. Manning,” she
accepted my offer, “that would be most kind of you. I’ve already made a list. I’ll leave it on your desk later.”
As she backed out of the room, I heard Parker greet her in the hall. “Morning, Hazel. I started a new pot in the kitchen.” Then he entered the den, mug of coffee in hand.
“Hi, Parker,” I told him, motioning for him to join me. “You’re looking chipper this morning.” Fresh from the shower, his hair was still damp. He wore a bulky V-neck sweater over a white T-shirt. Below, of course, were the perpetual khakis. Sitting in the chair across from me, he looked downright cuddly in the glow from the fire, and I enjoyed a fleeting replay of his surprise appearance in my dream. I realized, in fact, that I was aroused by the sight of him—a reaction that was undeniably pleasurable, but entirely inappropriate to the working relationship I would officially establish with him next week. With a conscious effort to suppress this response to his physical presence, I resorted to a foolish commentary on the weather. “Cold one, huh?”
He nodded, slurping his coffee. “It doesn’t really bother me—it’s not as if we’re out digging ditches.” He laughed at the thought of it. Then his visage turned thoughtful. “Truth is, Mark, these have been the most exciting and rewarding weeks of my life. Weather be damned, you and I are about to embark on a career move together that could change the face of small-town journalism. Forgive my broken record, but this is all I’ve ever wanted.”
Yeah, I’d heard that before. For some reason, I told him, “Poor Neil. He’ll be driving back up here on Friday evening—four weekends in a row. I owe him so many visits, I’ll never live up to my end of the bargain.”
“Neil’s cool with it,” Parker assured me. “Clearly, the man loves you. Besides, you’re under orders not to leave town.”
“Can you imagine!” I laughed at the irony of the situation. “I move up here, make a major commitment to this town’s business climate and its future, only to end up targeted as a murder suspect, a virtual prisoner in my own house.”
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