by Michael West
Michael West
Copyright © 2013 by Michael West
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.
Cover art and illustrations: Matthew Perry
Cover art and illustrations in this book
Copyright © 2013 Matthew Perry & Seventh Star Press, LLC.
Editor: Amanda DeBord
Published by Seventh Star Press, LLC.
ISBN Number: 978-1-937929-19-0
Seventh Star Press
www.seventhstarpress.com
[email protected]
Publisher’s Note:
The Wide Game is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are the product of the author’s imagination, used in fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, places,
locales, events, etc. is purely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
For the Class of 1988,
This stroll down a dark and twisted memory lane.
Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat:
Those whom a god wishes to destroy, he first drives insane.
PROLOGUE
Ten years had passed since the murders, and, like most who still made their home in Harmony, Father Andrew Chapman thought the nightmare was over.
The old priest stepped from his vestry into the evening dimness of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church, his mind preoccupied with far more recent sins. The Harmony Herald was tucked beneath his arm, filled to the brim with lurid tales of sex in the White House. He gave his pulpit a casual glance, pictured tomorrow morning’s sermon, and sighed heavily. How in the hell was he supposed to stand up there and preach God’s commandments when the leader of the free world had broken half of them?
He turned his attention to the rest of the building, wondering where the next catastrophe would choose to manifest. At sixty, the church was almost as old as its priest, and twice as temperamental. On Father Andrew’s desk in the rectory, a repair list a mile long gathered dust. After all, Harmony was a small Indiana farming town, and there was only so much his parishioners could give. He shook his head and hoped tomorrow morning’s masses would enjoy air conditioning, a roof that wasn’t leaking, and a sound system that was in working order. It was a rare day when everything ran to spec.
Behind the altar, a bronze Jesus hung from His bronze cross, weeping bronze tears. Father Andrew genuflected before Him, then rose and gave the newspaper a final study. Just below Mr. Clinton’s sexploits was an article on the local high school, on the Class of 1988 and their ten-year reunion. God loves the small towns, he thought as he turned away, a smile dawning on his weathered lips. Only in a one stoplight town like Harmony could a high school reunion and the President of the United States share ink on the same front page, unless of course the President had attended said high school.
The door to the vestibule blew open; humid August air flooded the tabernacle. Flames danced around the painted feet of a Madonna statue – candles parishioners had lit in remembrance of the dead.
Father Andrew whirled around and moved down the long center aisle toward the entrance. Heavy brass spindles formed door handles; he grabbed them and looked out into the night. No one looked back. Must be a storm coming. He started to pull the doors shut, then something near the threshold caught his eye.
A crow.
The bird laid on its back, staring up at the priest with eyes as glassy as sable marbles. Its beak hung open and mute, its wings unfurled and still. Someone had slashed up its belly; its newly freed entrails uncoiled onto the concrete steps below.
Damn vandals.
Last Good Friday, kids had marred St. Anthony’s walls with spray paint, scrawling red pentagrams and “666” across the pure white boards. The bastards even hurled a rock through a stained glass window depicting the Lord’s Passion. Father Andrew ran an aged hand down his haggard face. There was a time, still sharp and bright in his memory, when the fear of God would have stopped young people from defiling sacred buildings, but that time had passed. Now God Almighty was something people thought they might believe in, and the Devil? Well, there was no Devil. Didn’t you know? He’s an invention, a Judeo-Christian bogeyman, created to scare children into saying their prayers before bed. The concept of sin was outdated as well, something for a dead world. It didn’t apply to the lives of modern men and women.
Over the years, Father Andrew had counseled couples seeking to be married in his church, and he often saw that the bride and groom had listed the same address under residence.
“You’re living together,” he would say with distaste.
“Sure we are,” they would answer. “Is anything wrong with that?”
“Well ... The Bible calls it fornication,” Father Andrew would say to their surprise, then think: And in the time of Our Lord, you’d be taken out in the street and stoned to death.
Yes, Father Andrew was what the kids would call “old school,” and proud of it. A sin in the time of Christ was the same sin today; there was just a whole lot more of it to go around. There was a Devil, just as there was a Hell, just as there was a Heaven, and just as certainly as there was a one true God and His son, Jesus Christ. It was a package deal. If you believed in one, you had to accept the others.
“Amen,” the old priest said aloud, then turned back toward the vestry, toward the broom and dustpan he kept there. His booming voice echoed through the empty house of worship, the same powerful voice that kept parishioners awake for his sermons. The breeze from the open door had blown out the candles, throwing much of the interior into darkness.
A blur of movement in the corner of the priest’s eye; a dark shape rose swiftly from between the pews. The figure seized Father Andrew, curled its left arm around his chest, and held something up to his throat. He only saw it for an instant, but he knew it was a knife ... a knife covered in blood. The attacker’s hands were red and sleek with it.
“Bless me, Father,” a voice cried into his ear. It was so panicky, so shrill, he couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or a woman. “Bless me, for I have sinned.”
When he was in the seminary, Father Andrew would lay awake at night thinking about the sanctity of the confessional. What you were told in confession stayed in confession. End of story. If you slid the wooden panel back and saw Jack the Ripper or Charles Manson screaming murder, you tried to get them to turn themselves in, but you couldn’t expose them – not to the police, not to the families of their victims, not to anyone at all. Although he had thought about this quite a bit in the forty years that followed, he’d never been confronted with a murderer, nor had he been held hostage at knifepoint.
You had to love St. Anthony’s – every day held some new surprise.
“Please ...” My son? My child? You? “... Put down the knife and we can talk about this.”
“I can’t do that, Father.” The bloodstained knife shook with each word. “They’re coming. They’re coming for me and I need forgiveness.”
The police? Father Andrew wondered, but before he could utter a word his captor screamed again.
“I’m so sorry! Christ ... Jesus ... Please, Father, I need forgiveness for my sins!”
“All right,” he found himself saying. “Please, stay calm.” He looked at the knife, at the blood. There was so much blood. “I’ll hear your confession.”
“Thank you, father,” the figure muttered, a shaky voice choked by tears.
Now that it had lowered an octave, Father Andrew thought the voice sounded familiar, but he still couldn’t say for sure who it was. He attempted to make the sign of the cross with his right hand, but his attacker’s hold made it
difficult.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. May God, who brightens every heart, help you to know your sins and trust in His mercy.” Father Andrew swallowed, his Adam’s apple touching the wet edge of the blade. “What are the sins you wish to confess to God?”
“Father Andrew,” the voice behind the knife said, “have you ever heard of the Wide Game?”
“Yes,” the old priest replied. It was not a subject he wished to discuss, but he knew of it. Live any length of time in Harmony and you couldn’t help but hear of it – hear what happened the last time a group of kids had played. What Father Andrew didn’t know (and what his attacker had only just discovered) was that the game had not ended with the murders of ten years ago.
The game had not ended at all.
Part One:
Playing the Game
One
The fall of 1987 left a wound on Paul Rice’s brain that would not heal. The memory of it would begin to fade, to permit some sense of normality to regrow, then something as innocent as a song on the radio would scrape the forming scab, allowing it to bleed into his thoughts once more. Though he was a man of twenty-seven, his pale blue eyes appeared older, and gray had banished much of the brown in his hair. He was tall, but had gained enough weight in the past decade that he was no longer a “bean pole,” and, beneath his Planet Hollywood Indianapolis T-shirt, his back bore burn scars from the day he rolled his Mustang. He now drove a green ’97 Jeep Cherokee, which he halted in front of his mother’s house – the house where he grew up. His eyes drifted to the second story window, his window, and he found he was sweating.
He turned off the motor and swallowed. “We’re here.”
“Mamma’s!” Christopher screamed from the back.
Paul looked in the rearview mirror. His son, asleep for much of the two-hour trip from Indianapolis to Harmony, was wide-awake now and clapping wildly in his car seat. At three, few things thrilled him more than a trip to Grandma’s house.
Megan, the newest member of his family, still slumbered beneath the Baby Looney Tunes blanket of her own car seat. She had also been lulled to sleep by the motion of the Jeep, and she smiled into her fist. Paul often watched her, wondering what she dreamt. At two months old, she knew little of the world. He envied her.
“You ready?”
Paul turned his attention to the passenger’s seat, to Mary, his wife. She wore overalls and a white, short-sleeved shirt that exposed her freckled arms. Her freshly permed hair formed a blonde mane around her tanned face, and even though her eyes – a deeper blue than his own – lay hidden behind sunglasses, Paul could still see the concern they held for him.
He nodded, emotion making him hoarse as he spoke. “Yeah. I’ll grab Megan and the diaper bag.”
As Paul opened the door, Mary reached over to lay her hand on his and squeeze it. He looked back at her, and she flashed him a grin. In reply, he offered her the best smile he could muster, and stepped from the Jeep into the muggy August afternoon. Paul tilted the handle on Megan’s seat until he heard it click, then lifted it from the base. He slid the carrier over his arm, grabbed the diaper bag, and slammed the door before following Mary and Chris around to the concrete steps.
It was a large house. Cedar siding covered its walls and the shingled roof of the porch encircled it like a skirt. It had a full, unfinished basement, four large rooms on the first floor, four slightly smaller ones on the second, and an acre of lush green lawn that ended ... ended at the corn.
Harmony was an island in a sea of corn. Christened by a handful of Catholic settlers in 1816, it was now home to thirteen thousand souls; men, women, and children, adrift between the shores of Indianapolis to the South and Chicago to the North. Weathered wooden barns and farmhouses made it reality, lining gravel and dirt roads that cut through the green fields like the veins of a leaf. The bustling downtown had Mahoney’s Marathon gas station to the east, and the limestone and marble of Town Hall to the west. Local businesses filled in the rest, and a stoplight swung in the wind halfway between. Nature baked it in summer, drowned it in spring and fall, and buried it beneath snow and ice in winter. But despite all of that, or because of it, the land thrived.
Paul had been to his mother’s house the week Megan was born, a proud father showing off how well he could spawn, but the crop had been in its own infancy then. Now, as they used to say, the stalks were as high as an elephant’s eye and a stone apart. They moved and swayed in the breeze, blades of grass in a giant’s lawn, beckoning him to enter into their embrace.
All reports, in fact, predicted this to be the best crop of corn in ten years.
Mary’s hand touched Paul’s shoulder, a rubber band snapping him back into the world. “Your Mom’s waiting.”
Lynn Rice was on the porch, holding Chris in her arms. At fifty-four, she appeared younger than Paul – her hair jet black from a bottle, her skin smooth. When she smiled, however, furrows formed around her eyes, finally betraying a hint of her maturity.
Seeing her standing there, waiting for him, Paul flashed back to Duran Duran’s Strange Behavior ’87 tour. He’d driven to Indianapolis with friends to see the concert. Afterward, Danny Fields suggested they run around downtown looking for the band’s hotel room. That night, Paul wound up French kissing Deidra Perkins in the glass elevators of the Hyatt Regency, his first such kiss. That night, she became his girl. When Paul finally made it home at four in the morning, his mother waited on the porch in her robe, her face red with anger. He gave her a story about car trouble, and she had taken him at his word, but even her worst punishment would not have dampened the joy of that night.
“Paul,” his mother said, hefting Chris higher in one arm, holding the other out to hug him.
“Hi, Mom.”
When she pulled away, her eyes fell immediately to Megan. “Let me get a look at my girl. Oh ... she’s gotten so big.”
His mother set Chris down on the step and took the carrier from Paul’s arm. Lynn had no girls of her own, only Paul and his older brother Allen, and wanted a granddaughter. When Chris was born, she had all but given up hope of getting one from Paul. Then Megan came into the world – her dream finally fulfilled.
“Come on inside, I’ll make you kids some dinner.”
“We’re eating at the reunion,” Mary reminded her. “But I know Chris has to be starving. He only ate about half of his lunch.”
“You didn’t eat your lunch!” Lynn Rice gave her attention to her grandson, her voice changing to its I’m Talking To A Child tone. “What do you want for dinner? Hot dogs or liver?”
Chris jumped up and down on the porch. “Hot dogs! Hot dogs!”
“Well, come on then.”
Paul put his arm around his wife and they followed them inside, his Grandmother’s grandfather clock greeting them as they entered. The huge brass pendulum still swung, waving each second into oblivion, its deranged ticking still clearly audible. Once, after a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Paul took Deidra home to sleeping parents and they watched MTV, kissing and touching each other for hours. He could still remember speeding home, the sun rising over his shoulder, trying to enter the house without waking his mother, each swing of that grandfather clock pendulum a guillotine blade falling, each tick a small bomb going off.
A flowered border divided the walls of the entryway in half. Below the strip, they were painted blue; above, they were white and covered in pictures. Paul’s own face stared back at him from behind some of the glass, others held his son, his brother, and then there were the black and white images of a stranger he had never met, his father who died in Vietnam.
“Chris,” Paul called, pointing at the woman in a white, beaded wedding dress in one of the pictures. “Who’s this?”
His son hurried over to look and a smile bloomed on his young face. “Mommy.”
Paul nodded, smirking. “And who’s this guy next to her?”
“That’s you, Daddy.”
“Six years ago this month,” Mary recalled. “Can you believe I was ever that thin?”
“Can you believe I was ever that thin?”
They laughed together. For Paul, it was the first genuine laugh in days, and it felt good. He rubbed Chris’s hair as they continued to follow his mother down the hall.
The kitchen lay at the back of the house. Lightly stained cabinets lined its walls, and its counters were mauve-colored, matching the flooring. In the center of the room stood an island with bar stools. Chris ran right up to one of the stools and climbed into it, making himself at home. His mother set Megan on top of the center island and reached for the knife block. A blade had once filled every slot, but now it sat half empty, its tenants lost and never replaced. She took a small steak knife, sliced open the hot dog package, then dug through her cabinets.
“Whatcha been up to, Paul?” his mother asked over the clatter.
“Not much. Just finished another Indiana commercial for the board of tourism.”
“I saw one last night, durin’ the news. I tell Mrs. Vogel they’re yours when she asks about you. Always says she looks for your name every time she goes to the cinema, says she thought you’d be doin’ the next Star Wars or somethin’ by now.”
“Me too,” Paul snorted. On another day he might have smiled, knowing that people remembered him so fondly, but today the remark struck him like a slap – a reminder of his ambitions unfulfilled.
“This kid,” she pointed at Paul but looked at Mary, “always had that video camera in his hand.”
Mary smiled. “Still does.”
“But this was back when they had regular sized tapes, not these Super 8 thingies you can hold in one palm. This camera had to go on your shoulder. You watch, Mary. Tonight, that’s what they’ll remember about him.” She put a pot of water on the stove to boil. “Did you write that slogan, Paul?”
“The state came up with that one.”
“‘It’s as close as your backyard.’ What’s that mean?”
