A Party to Murder

by John Inman

Jamie shrank away, but still he battled to clear his addled brain, trying to understand. “Debts for what? Debts for who?” he asked, wincing again as Tommy yanked at his hair, twisting Jamie’s face up to point to his own. “Who did we hurt? Revenge for what?”

  “For Jerod,” Tommy softly answered.

  A silence settled between them, broken only by the pounding of Jamie’s pulse and from the creak in his neck from having his head twisted back at such an impossible angle. He bumped his broken finger against the floor and almost screamed.

  “Who?” he finally stammered. “Who did you say?”

  To Jamie’s amazement, tears slid from Tommy’s eyes and spilled out onto his cheeks. Beneath the tears, Tommy offered a curiously cold smile as he released his grip on Jamie’s hair. He bent over to wrench the pick from the floor, ripping it away in a flurry of splinters. Hefting the tool in his hand, he slid his eyes to the attic window. As if Jamie were almost forgotten now, he stared out into the night. His gaze left the window and traveled around the room, almost casually, brushing over the forgotten toys one by one, studying all the rest of the dusty items. The small, childish bed. The chest of drawers with a stack of comic books on the top, draped in spiderwebs. The baseball bat leaning against the wall in the corner. While the storm wailed outside, Tommy’s eyes, glowing like embers burning in shadow, gradually wandered back to Jamie’s face.

  By the time they did, Tommy’s wounded, pensive gaze had once again begun to seethe with hate. And with utter disbelief.

  “You don’t even know his name,” Tommy whispered sadly, biting off each individual word and spitting them into the air. “You don’t even know what your lover did.”

  IT WAS the voices drifting down from above that pulled Derek awake. Jamie’s voice in particular. In his first conscious thought, Derek breathed a sigh of relief knowing Jamie still lived. Then with a grunt of pain, he took stock of himself. He tried to move his limbs, all of which seemed suddenly to be made of Jell-O for some reason. Focusing on his own predicament, rather than worrying about Jamie’s for the moment, Derek realized he might be in a wee spot of trouble here.

  First of all, peering through blood-drenched eyes, Derek tried to understand where he was. It took him a moment to remember; then he knew. He was in Tommy and Banyon’s bedroom. He and Jamie had been staring at the corpse they had discovered in the chifforobe. Oliver Banyon’s corpse.

  Derek twisted his head and found the chifforobe in front of him, right where it was supposed to be. Banyon’s body, too, was still there. Crammed into the space where clothes should have hung. The knife still protruded from his throat. Eyes open. As silent and still—and dead—as stone.

  Derek quickly turned away, squeezing his eyes shut, not because of the horror of what he was seeing, but because of the blood seeping over his face. He tried to wipe it away with his coat sleeve, but the blood continued to flow. It was blinding him. Burning his eyes. Delicately, easing his fingers through his hair, he found the wound, a long cut just below the crown of his head. Blood oozed from it, flowing over his fingertips.

  He stumbled to his knees. Gave his head a shake, trying to clear his thoughts, his vision. A splash of blood spattered the floor in front of him. Kneeling there with the room whirling around like a manic carousel, he wondered how much blood he had lost, or if he had suffered a concussion. Was this how a head wound made you feel? He didn’t know what he had been hit with, but he knew it had been hard and unforgiving. Far more unforgiving than his poor aching skull.

  Dropping back to the floor with his legs curled under him, he reached up and dragged a pillow from the bed. Stripping the pillowcase away, he wrapped it around his head and tied it in a big clunky knot over his left ear. At least it would stop the blood from flowing into his eyes.

  The clink of metal caught his attention, and he looked down at the floor behind him. His foot had come to rest against the machete, rattling it against the floor. He quickly snatched it up and hugged it to his chest. He was armed!

  His gaze shot toward the ceiling, where voices once again drifted down, settling over him like fallen leaves. The terror in Jamie’s voice sent a stab of anguish coursing through him. Derek clutched his chest, his fear for Jamie’s safety like a knife piercing his heart.

  The rush of emotion caused Derek’s vision to fade. Blackness once again began to close in. Afraid he would pass out entirely, he leaned sideways, resting his forehead against the mattress until the darkness passed. Desperately, he reached out and grabbed on to a chair. Praying he wouldn’t fall flat on his face, he waited for his head to stop spinning. Falling on his noggin was the last thing he needed. One more head injury would probably do him in. Wryly, he wondered what the hell was wrong with him that he could make a joke at a time like this. Or was it really a joke at all?

  Before he could think about it very long, a stream of bile rose in his throat. He gagged and doubled over, emptying his stomach onto the floor. After that, he felt better. Marginally. Dragging the bare pillow once again off the bed, he wiped his mouth with it and flung it across the room.

  Groaning with the effort, he pulled himself to his feet, using the chair as a crutch, and turned to face the door. The candle still burned where they had left it on the nightstand earlier, but he ignored it. If he was going to save Jamie, he couldn’t be walking through the house with a fucking torch in his hand. He’d have to be stealthier than that. He’d have to be sneaky.

  As the fuzz in his brain continued to clear, he slowly faced reality. He knew now beyond any doubt who the killer really was. It was a matter of simple subtraction, after all. Outside of Jamie and himself, there was only one human left alive on the property. And that was Tommy Stevens. He didn’t have the vaguest idea what Tommy’s motive for all this was, and at this point, Derek didn’t much care. He just wanted the fucker stopped.

  And he wanted Jamie safe in his arms.

  He carefully edged his way through the door and into the hall. The only touches of light that illuminated his path were the scattered streaks of lightning slicing across the heavens. And they weren’t coming as often as they had before. Perhaps the storm was at long last moving away.

  Derek froze and, tilting his head upward, listened. There it was again. The murmur of voices.

  He toed off his shoes and trod silently along the hallway. He dragged his hand along the wall to keep from toppling over and to better steer himself in the right direction through the blinding darkness. The cut on his scalp burned like fire, but the pillowcase prevented the still-seeping blood from running into his eyes. His limbs were wobbly, and he wondered if he really had the strength to do what he was setting out to do.

  To kill Tommy. It was the only way he could save Jamie, and he knew it. Tommy had to die.

  He gripped the machete and, moving more slowly now, more carefully, followed the bend in the hallway around to where it met the narrow staircase leading up to the attic. Here, with no windows near, the darkness was a solid, breathing presence. Above, he heard Tommy speaking again, his voice cold and threatening. Derek wondered if he was even aware of all the lives he had taken. Of the innocent people he had killed.

  But most of all, Derek wondered what he and Jamie had to do with it all. Why the hell had they been brought into this mess?

  The first step on the attic staircase creaked beneath his foot. Derek froze, listening. Tommy was still talking. He apparently hadn’t heard.

  Carefully, Derek proceeded up the narrow stairs, one agonizingly slow step at a time, the machete gripped tightly in his hand. Tommy’s words, Tommy’s explanation for it all, drifting down toward him as he climbed.

  JAMIE TREMBLED and shrank away. Tommy’s face was inches from his. Tommy’s breath was sour and reeked of hate.

  “He let me fuck him, you know,” Tommy was saying. “Ollie. He had a nice ass. He let Jerod fuck him too. That was before he dumped him, of course, and broke his heart.”

  Jamie forced himself to turn toward the voice. “I don’t understand,” he sa
id. “Who was Jerod? What did he have to do with everyone inside this house?”

  A trickle of blood spilled from the corner of Tommy’s mouth, and Jamie wondered if in his rabid fury, he had bitten himself. Jesus, was he really that nuts?

  “Jerod grew up in this house,” Tommy leered, his eyes burning into Jamie’s. “He played in this very room when he was little. We both did.”

  “The old couple in the basement…,” Jamie began, but Tommy waved him to silence.

  “Yes. They were Jerod’s adopted parents.”

  “A-and you knew them?” Jamie stammered.

  Tommy’s mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed. His voice turned colder. “Yes. I knew them.”

  A sudden understanding sparked in Jamie’s mind. “That’s why the pictures were removed. You were in them.”

  “Yes. A few of them. Jerod and I were friends. I visited all the time. Naturally, I found my way into a few of their family pictures. But mostly they were pictures of Jerod.”

  “So you were friends,” Jamie whispered, trying to understand.

  “Yes!” Tommy snapped, anger lighting his eyes again. “Of course we were friends. We were inseparable. I spent a lot of my childhood inside this house with my best friend. With Jerod.” Tommy’s eyes drifted to a photo on a desk by the window. The picture was small and faded to sepia, a cheap snapshot tucked neatly into a little wooden frame. It showed an elderly couple standing arm in arm. They were unsmiling. There were no children in the photo. There was only them. Jamie recognized the couple immediately. The last time he had seen them, they were lying sprawled in the coal room downstairs, beaten to death with a shovel.

  Tommy stared at the picture with such contempt in his eyes that Jamie almost sobbed in terror, waiting for that fury to fall on him.

  “What happened?” Jamie whispered, ignoring the tremble in his own voice. “Why did you kill them if they were good to you?”

  Tommy’s gaze drifted back to Jamie’s face. For a moment, he looked almost surprised to find him there. Once again, there were tears shimmering in his eyes. Tears, Jamie suspected, of both grief and madness. On Tommy’s young face, it was a terrifying combination.

  “We were close. Jerod and I. We loved each other,” Tommy calmly recited, as if he had told himself the same thing over and over again. His eyes drifted back to the picture on the desk. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “They caught us. We were seventeen.”

  “They caught you… having sex?” Jamie murmured, his eyes riveted to the knife he suddenly spotted in Tommy’s hand.

  Tommy sniffed and returned his gaze to Jamie’s face. “Yes. They caught us having sex. They threw me out of the house and told me never to come back. Jerod never came back to school, and I didn’t learn until later what had happened to him.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  Jamie watched as Tommy’s eyes softened. “Jerod was beautiful. The most beautiful young man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I understand,” Jamie said kindly, and to his own dismay, he found himself reaching out and touching Tommy’s arm to show he really did care. But Jamie needed answers too. And it seemed like the perfect time to acquire them. “But I still don’t understand what it has to do with everyone in this house. I assume you invited us all here for a reason. But what did it have to do with Jerod. I didn’t know him, Tommy. Why am I here? Why is Derek here, and all the others. Explain it to me. Please.”

  Tommy’s eyes went vacant, as if his brain waves had suddenly ceased to carry thought. He leveled an empty gaze on Jamie’s face, and licked another drop of blood from the corner of his mouth.

  “Explain it to you…,” he said, his voice as empty as his eyes.

  He lifted the knife in his hand and stared at it. He tested the edge of the blade on his thumb. Behind him, Jamie heard the scrape of a footstep on the stairs. Tommy didn’t seem to notice.

  “Tell me,” Jamie said again, his voice stronger now. Louder. A sudden burst of hope welled through him, caused by that one tiny noise he heard coming through the attic door. Was it Derek? Was he alive after all? “Tell me why everyone is here, Tommy. Tell me why you murdered them.” After a heartbeat, he added, “And tell me why you want to kill me too.”

  THREE STEPS down from the attic door, an avalanche of pain stopped Derek cold. A roar of agony exploded inside his damaged head. As a chilling weakness flooded through him, his vision began to fade again. The blackness closed in. As carefully and as quietly as he could, he lowered himself to his knees and tried to fight the urge to simply close up shop and let the darkness win. He squeezed his eyes shut, striving with all the strength he still possessed to stay alert. But the darkness claimed him anyway.

  When he opened his eyes, he knew that time had passed, but he didn’t know how much. Tommy Stevens was still blabbering behind the attic door, so Derek figured Jamie was alive, and that’s all he really cared about.

  He lifted his aching head from the floor, reknotted the blood-soaked pillowcase to make it more secure, then tried to concentrate on what Tommy was saying. Time had definitely passed, he quickly realized, for the conversation had moved on to Cleeta-Gayle Jones.

  And her relationship to the mysterious Jerod. Whoever the hell that was.

  Derek reached out and flattened his trembling hand against the attic door, as if that would help him absorb Tommy’s words more clearly. As if that might help Derek understand.

  JAMIE WATCHED Tommy lay the knife aside and lift the pick again. Slowly he raised his eyes to the level of Jamie’s face.

  “She was his mother, you know.”

  Jamie found himself stuttering. “C-Cleeta-Gayle Jones was Jerod’s mother?”

  “Yes. Although she never claimed him.”

  “What do you mean, she never claimed him?”

  In an explosion of anger, Tommy drove the pick into the floor again. Jamie almost passed out from fright. But Tommy wasn’t watching Jamie. He was staring once again at the old couple’s snapshot atop the desk.

  “She gave him up at birth. Never saw him again after that. Never cared enough to see him again. I heard her tell you she never knew him well. A bit of an understatement there. How can you know someone if you throw them to the wolves when they’re two minutes out of the womb?”

  Jamie tore his eyes from the pick and the shattered floor at his feet. He thought of Cleeta-Gayle Jones. He remembered the shame on her face when she spoke of her son. “Then how did you know who she was?”

  “After Jerod died, I found her. It took me a year.” He returned his gaze to Jamie. “She had to be killed, of course. She was the root cause of everything. She started it all.”

  “Did she know her birth son had committed suicide?” Jamie quietly asked.

  “Only at the moment of her death.”

  “You… told her,” Jamie sighed.

  “Yes. I told her.” Tommy almost smiled, but the smile turned to a sneer at the last moment. His voice rose in a scream. “He was only nineteen when he killed himself. Hell, yes, she had to know.”

  Jamie swallowed hard. His eyes kept shifting toward the baseball bat in the corner. He wondered how long it would take him to reach it and if his muscles were strong enough yet to attempt it.

  To kill a little time, Jamie asked, “What about Banyon? How did he warrant an invitation to your little party? And what happened to his gun?”

  Tommy smiled at that. A kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “There never was a gun. I lied.” Just as quickly, his face sobered. He shifted his gaze to the attic window when a grumble of thunder rolled across the heavens outside, but he immediately turned to Jamie once more. “Jerod was sent away. To separate him from me, I suppose. They turned him against me, you see. He finished high school in another city. Came back to enroll in college in San Diego. Boarded with some relatives of the old couple, I later learned.”

  “And Banyon?”

  Tommy sighed. “Banyon was the last straw for Jerod. His last hope at a gay life. He fell under Banyon’s ey
e shortly after he started college. Naturally, Jerod fell head over heels in love with him. His sexy little history professor. After a few discreet blowjobs, no doubt, and a flurry of illegal fucks, since Jerod was a student and damn near a minor, Banyon dumped him. It broke Jerod’s heart.” Tommy’s expression turned cruel, his eyes as cold as Jamie had ever seen them. Once again he tore the pick out of the floor and hefted it in his hand like he was gauging its weight. He turned back to Jamie. His gaze was dead now. Emotionless.

  “I discovered the school he went to, and I listened to all the gossip. That’s what turned my attention to Banyon. And my reason for stabbing the fucker in the throat. It was also the reason I contacted Mr. and Mrs. Jupp. After Banyon, they were Jerod’s next stop. His one final chance to lead a normal life. Or so he thought.” With barely disguised fury, Tommy added in a trembling voice, “They were the ones who truly killed him.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  SITTING ON the top step, Derek stroked the attic door in front of him. The cool wood against his fingertips somehow calmed him. His head was starting to clear, his vision opening up as much as the darkness would allow. He didn’t feel like he was going to faint any longer. He might even be getting his strength back. A portion of it anyway. Enough to function. Enough to launch an attempt to rescue Jamie.

  Sucking in a great gulp of oxygen, hoping that would clear his head a little more, he wiped at his face where the dried blood was starting to itch. On the other side of the door, Tommy was talking again. Orating, the little fucker. Enjoying himself.

  Carefully, Derek pulled the machete from between his hip and the floor. It made a scraping noise, but Tommy’s diatribe—whatever it was he was raving about—didn’t slow for a moment. He sounded angry now, though, and that scared the bejesus out of Derek. He could imagine Jamie’s terror, trapped in there with Tommy screaming at him like a maniac. Was he hurt? Derek didn’t know exactly what had beaned him in the head back in Banyon and Tommy’s room. All he knew was that it was Tommy who swung the weapon. Did he strike Jamie too? Was Jamie even now sitting on the other side of this door slowly bleeding out? Maybe dying?