by J. Wachowski
“It’s six minutes of programming, Gatt,” I snapped back. “I’m sure network has other material that can conquer the game show.”
“I want to see it. Now. And I may have changes. So you’d better stick your ass to the chair and see what happens next.”
I could see daylight through the window. The view was exactly the same as a week ago-parking lot to weed field to pasture. Today though, I wasn’t looking at a horizon line. I was looking at a time line. Present and past laid flat, right in front of me. The rest of my life started now.
“What are you worried about, Gatt?” I had switched to crisis calm, but sales-mode was hard to muster. The protective shell hadn’t hardened over my work yet. I picked up a pencil and a piece of scrap paper lying on Gatt’s enormous desk. “I’m telling you this piece has class. It’s mysterious. It’s metaphysical. It’s tragic. The target demographics are going to eat it up.”
“Network is not ‘eating it up’ after that pitch you fed them.” Gatt dug inside his desk drawer for a fistful of sweetener. He ripped half a dozen sugar packets clean through the middle. Sugar crystals exploded all over his desk. Some of them must have made it into his cup. He gulped a swallow followed by, “Jesus God, I hate freelancers.”
“You saw most of the raw stock before I cut it together. Give me some credit.” I rolled my neck and got a sound like something breaking. Deliberately, I jotted a short message on the scrap paper. “You’re pissed at me because your nephew got his fingers burned.”
“Bullshit!” he countered. There was a growing sheen to his head which was pumping red and white flashes of furious blood to his skin. “You should have shown me the finished version before you released it. Simple courtesy, even if nothing had changed. Those guys at network are going to want your ass on a platter now. Your problem is you want it both ways. You want a team position but you act like a freelancer. Here today-gone tomorrow. No respect for the team!”
Same theme, new variation. “I’ve been up two days, Gatt. Speaking of bullshit, I’m too tired to take this right now.” I stood up.
“You walk out that door, don’t think you’re coming back.”
“No, I don’t think I am.” I pushed the note across the desk. Signed and dated, it read simply, I resign.
I turned around and Ainsley was standing in the doorway, wearing his goofiest grin, carrying a VHS cassette pinched between his bandaged fingers. His face was pale, his eyes glassy, and he had a hint of manic vibration about him. Six or seven hours in the booth, running on nothing but deadline adrenaline and diet pop, and my college boy was still standing. Don’t ask me why, but I felt a little flash of pride.
Ainsley tilted his head to see around me. “Seen the story yet, Uncle Rich? It’s great.”
Gatt couldn’t speak. He pointed. His eyebrows twitched. His nostrils flared.
“Go ahead and show him,” I told Ainsley. “I’m gone.”
4:23:51 p.m.
I begged a ride off the mailroom courier to pick up the Subaru. Then drove back to the hospital, waited around for the doctor’s discharge and suffered through forty minutes of paperwork, wherein I promised to turn my entire self over to accounts receivable for parts if I forfeited on my bill.
Tonya kissed us both goodbye and went back to the city. Jenny cried.
“I’ll be back on the weekend, honey. You can count on it.” Tonya always knew the right thing to say. For both of us.
At last, Jenny and I were on the way home. It was a quiet drive. We hadn’t really been alone together since I’d shipped her off to school on Monday. The silence swirled between us, warping into an emotional black hole that sucked my energy. I wanted to pull over and slump into a long, dark nap.
I’m in this for the long haul, I reminded myself. Consider Jenny first.
As we pulled into the garage, I looked for her face in the rearview mirror. “Home at last.”
“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. She climbed out of the car and into the house without a glance back. It took me longer to gather up the sack of stuff from the hospital and my camera bag.
“Remember that guy we met at the picnic on Sunday-Sheriff Curzon?” I followed her inside the house. “He’s supposed to stop by later. Maybe share a pizza…what?”
She stood stock still, four feet inside the doorway. I almost stepped on her.
When she tipped her head to look up at me, I could see her eyes had dilated, the black iris swallowing up the lighter brown of her eyes. Her lips moved barely making words.
“What?”
“Someone’s here,” she whispered.
My first instinct was straight out of a bad TV movie. “Don’t be silly.” We were only four feet inside the door. They’d told me Jenny might be jittery coming home, but this was more than I expected.
“Someone’s in the house?”
Her head bobbed up and down, fast. “The TV was on when I first came in,” she said. “And the light, too. But they turned off when I opened the door.”
It sounded a little too specific to be a hallucination. I pushed her behind me.
“I put the lights on timers, remember? Wait here. I’ll check it out. Stay by the door.”
“No!” She grabbed my wrist.
“Jenny, calm down, babe. You don’t want to wait?”
She shook her head.
“You want to come?”
Nod.
No one could be in the house. The fact that my heart was beating twenty percent faster was my irrational need for excitement.
I dropped all the junk I was carrying and took Jenny’s cold hand in my warm, moist one. I led her over to the closet, quietly opened the door and removed the midwest girl’s weapon of choice-a solid oak, regulation, Louisville slugger.
In sixteen-inch softball, the balls aren’t the only things that run bigger.
Jenny appeared suitably impressed.
“Stay behind me,” I said. “But watch my bat.”
The main rooms of the house made a loop-entrance area to living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and back to the front. A hall off the living room led to the bedrooms. The garage led straight into the kitchen eating space. We walked all the way around the house once, turning on all the lights, before I said, “All clear.”
“Let’s check the bedrooms,” she whispered. “Just in case.”
Right. We walked up the hall and checked the bedrooms, too. Nothing.
Jenny tried a smile and took a big, deep breath. “Could we check the basement, too?”
I hoisted the wood onto my shoulder. “You bet. Let’s go.”
Basements can be creepy on the best of days, but ours was definitely intruder free. Jenny looked slightly embarrassed, but she was speaking to me in full sentences now, so I didn’t mind.
We stopped in front of the spare fridge and I pulled out a frozen pizza.
“Would you take this up and turn the oven on, kiddo? I’m going to throw in a load of wash, before I throw myself in the shower.”
I was still wearing the clothes I’d started with on Monday. Even black jeans can only take so much. I dropped my pants and stuffed them into the washer.
“Double-check I didn’t leave anything in the oven,” I called.
Jenny remained where I’d left her, right at the bottom of the steps. “Go upstairs…by myself?”
“I’ll be less than two minutes. You want to take this with you?” I held out the bat.
Her mouth twisted in a rising grimace. That smile of hers needed work.
“It’s heavy.” She put the pizza box under one arm and carried the bat in front of her with both hands.
“Darn right it’s heavy. What should we do tonight?” I kept talking as she went up the stairway, giving her a voice to hang on to as well. After I tossed my shirt in the washer, I dug through the hamper for other stuff that could stand a double wash. “Want to watch a movie? After Sheriff Curzon leaves, maybe we could watch some cartoons…Jen?” There were no sound effects upstairs-oven d
oor squeaking, gas clicking as the oven fired-so I called louder, “Jenny?”
No answer.
A giant thud rocked the ceiling above my head.
My first thought was that she’d seized again and pitched a header on the kitchen floor.
I sprinted for the stairs, throwing on some old bathrobe hanging near the dryer, pounding up two at a time. As I rounded the top step, I hollered, “Jenny! What the hell was that?”
“Hello, Maddy.”
Pat the fireman was standing in our kitchen. I caught him in the act of picking up the fallen bat. He let it swing from his fingers by the cap end. “Did you send her up here to club me with a baseball bat?”
“Softball,” I corrected. Under duress, my primal nature reverts to know-it-all. “What are you doing here, Pat?”
Recognition took the edge off my shock and sharpened my anxiety until I tasted sour metal at the back of my tongue. He was wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a baseball cap-White Sox. Figures. My grandfather always said don’t trust a White Sox fan.
His eyes were glassy. The unblinking stare curdled my stomach.
“Where’s Jenny?”
“She dropped the bat and ran.” He seemed embarrassed by that thought. “I guess I scared her. I didn’t mean to. Everything’s gotten so complicated.”
“Uh-huh. How’d you get in here, Pat?”
City girls always lock the door. In the back of my mind, I figured if he broke a window to get in, he was definitely dangerous. If he got in through some other means, he might still only qualify as an idiot with really bad boundaries.
When resisting the urge to panic, go with whatever rationale works.
Pat juggled the bat to his other hand and reached down into the pocket of his jeans. As he shifted, I realized the right-hand pocket of his jacket was bulging with something large and heavy.
“I have a key.” He tossed it on the kitchen counter. It was a twin to the one I carried.
“Oh. How’d you get a key?”
“Your sister gave it to me.”
“She did?” You smell like her. “You knew Angelina.”
Pat huffed, a sad, ironic sort of laugh. The bat swung from his fingertips, side to side like a pendulum. “Jenny didn’t tell. What a kid. What an amazing kid.”
Jenny. Pat’s intrigue went right out of my head. Where was Jenny? There were four ways out of the room: past me, past Pat, out the door or up the hall. I hadn’t heard a door open or close and my ears had been primed. She must have run up the bedroom hallway. I stepped that direction.
“The wacky-intruder thing is getting old. You and my sister were friends-I get it.” My sister’s taste in men sucked. “What do you want?”
“How did your TV story turn out? What did you say about Tom and everything?” He perked up as he said it, sounded more like the Mr. Vegas I’d met before.
“Good. It turned out good.” I eased another step toward the hall.
“I heard about that fire. Heard you had your camera there. Did you put that in there? About the fire at the Jost farm?”
“Some. Yeah. Where were you that night?”
“I wasn’t on call. I was busy. Somewhere else.” He stacked the denials one on top of another.
“You know Rachel? Or her dad-Tom’s dad?”
“No. Not really. A little. She’s the one who got all Tom’s stuff.”
So much for my Tom-Rachel-Pat love triangle theory.
“Hey, did they ever find a note?” he rambled on. “A note from Tom? I was just wondering.”
“No. No note. Were you hoping they would?”
It would be hard to swing the bat in the narrow width of the hall. I took a giant step back, into the hall so Pat had to pass me to get to Jenny. He followed.
“What exactly did you say about Tom on that TV show?”
“You’ll have to wait until next Monday. Seven o’clock central time. Why don’t you watch? See for yourself.”
“Can’t wait that long.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The outer layer of my skin began to tingle with the rush of adrenaline. I backed into the hall. It was dark. Had Jenny hit the lights as she ran by? There was indirect light from the other room, but the black-and-white photos of ancestors my sister had hung along the hall-Momma, Daddy, Papa, Gran, all dead, all gone-darkened the passage with the fierce faces of family ghosts.
Pat followed me, step for step, into the hall. “I’ve got to go now. Jenny’s coming with me this time.”
The words this time rolled through my head crushing all other thoughts.
“Don’t worry. I’ll watch out for her.” He stopped advancing on me. Took off his baseball cap and rubbed a palm over his scalp. Hat in hand, he added, “I won’t put her out on the road side again, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hat went back on, backward. There was nothing shading those glassy eyes now. He was hopped up on something.
“You took Jenny off the playground.” Everything clicked. “She knew you, because you’d been dating her mom. That’s why she went with you.”
His words popped into my head, Jenny didn’t tell.
“You threatened her, didn’t you?” I swallowed the you son of a bitch. The guy was still gripping my Louisville slugger by the cap end.
We were halfway down the hall and running out of real estate. There were three bedrooms at the end. I had a good idea which one Jenny had chosen to hide in.
“You threatened a little eight-year-old girl. What happened to ‘prevent and protect’?”
Pat propped the bat in the notch of the bathroom door molding. Big, strong firefighter didn’t need a softball bat to get what he wanted from a woman in a bathrobe.
“Don’t shout,” he cautioned me. “You’ll scare her.”
“I’m not the one she ran away from.”
“Aren’t you?”
The flip side of knowing how to charm someone was knowing how to crush them. His words closed my throat. It felt like I’d fallen from a great height and landed flat on my back.
“Aunt Maddy?” a small voice called behind me. Jenny’s bedroom was on my left, which meant she was either in my room or her mother’s old bedroom.
“Jenny?” Pat called. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you, honey. Will you come out so we can talk?”
“No!” I found my voice with a shout. “Stay where you are, Jenny. Don’t come out.”
“That doesn’t help.” Pat jabbed his finger at me, less than three feet from my face.
I lost it. I backhanded him at the wrist, knocking his arm into the wall. His jacket was swinging heavily on that side, and the over-burdened pocket of his coat hit the wall half a second after his hand. There was a tearing shriek as the lining of his pocket split on impact. A large halogen flashlight dropped to the ground.
It was a Scooby-Doo moment: everybody looks down, everybody looks up. Maddy looks surprised. Pat looks guilty. Oh, those meddlesome kids.
“Ainsley told me he saw a light in the farmhouse the night of the fire.” The words popped right out of my mouth. “That was you.”
“I had to know if Tom left anything else.” Pat grabbed the flashlight and stuffed it back in the opposite jacket pocket. “Any more surprises. Your camera boy came to the firehouse and told us all about the bank manager’s visit to the farm, all about the papers being delivered. I thought maybe Tom left a note. That’s all. Shit’s sake, he left enough phone messages. The stupid ass.”
“The fire?”
Pat looked disgusted. His Sox cap came off again; he was sweating now. He wiped his face with the inside of his elbow and propped his butt against the wall as if he needed to rest before putting his hat back on. I couldn’t tell if he was tired, weak or strung out.
“It was an accident,” Pat said. “Simple as that. How was I supposed to know the guy was making coffee in the middle of the night? I’ll tell you something-six months ago, I never could have believed Tom could be such a selfish asshole. Mr. Holier-than-Thou. Those magazines I
put in his car were nothing. So what? He could have passed them around at the station and been a hero. No, not Tom! Here I am, busting my ass trying to improve the situation for everybody and all he does is fuck the whole thing up.” He rolled his eyes drama-queen style.
“You burned the Jost farm down-by accident?”
“Try and stay on track here, would you? Jenny and I are going someplace safe while you do something for me.”
“What?”
“You’re the one who likes finding shit. Find the bag that Gina hid from me.”
“What bag?”
He leaned toward me and smiled. “Like you don’t know. I promised I would make it right. But I’m not having a lot a luck here, so I think Jenny and I will take a little vaca-time and you can do the looking.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He nodded like I’d agreed. “Gina found that out how serious I can be. I tried to tell her to leave it alone but no, she’s on a mission.” His voice cracked. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Nobody wanted it to end like that.”
Conspiraces and madness, barely tinted by facts. “End like what?”
“Tom was good about it at first. He knew what it felt like to lose somebody. But when he found out-”
“What?”
“I didn’t want it to go that way. It really was an accident. But she was going to the police. I had to stop her.”
“You stopped her?”
“I had to!” He smashed his fist against the wall. All the family photos banged and tilted.
I felt just as off-balance. “You were driving the car that killed my sister?”
“Tom went totally insane when he found out. Said we’d both go to hell if I didn’t make a public confession. He would find a way to bring us into the light. Like I had anything to do with his family problems.” Pat put his back to the wall. Confessing drained the little bit of spine he had. “When I saw how he’d done himself, I knew. I knew he was going to try and take me down, too.
“And then you showed up!” He pointed at me with both hands and laughed. “What are the chances? I thought for sure Tom had set it up. I thought you were after me.”
My brain continued to process. The rest of me was numb. I think I slurred my next words.
