EQMM, July 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then began more changes than Marty had expected. Jenny laid it out for him. They would sell the house and move Up North to the family cottage she had just inherited. Ryan, their youngest, would complete his senior year in high school there. Jenny would refresh her nursing license and become the breadwinner. And if they did all that and Marty quit drinking, they could do it together and Jenny would not leave him. He was numbed by the shock of being presented those choices and he did the only thing he could think to do and accepted them.

  Marty toweled off and checked the phone. No missed call. The pitch black of the night was still holding off the dawn, which was coming so late these days it seemed like it would never get there. Marty looked out the window toward the lake, where the slap of the waves was so insistent he thought at times he would go mad.

  When Marty and Jenny were dating he had thought the view from the cottage and the lull of the surf from Little Traverse Bay were wonderful. They would drive for three hours after work to have just a weekend there, often with Jen's family or with another couple or sometimes alone. They drank cases of beer or endless bottles of wine and body-surfed in the lake or lay all day in an inner tube undulating with the waves. It was a wonderful area of cherry orchards and roadside pie stands. When the kids were small, they made sandcastles and had bonfires at night and made card houses on rainy days, and in the back of his mind he always knew it was possible that one day the cottage would be theirs. He loved the old place with the stone fireplace and pine walls and creaky old floors, corner shelves cluttered with Petoskey stones the kids had found at the beach and scraps of birch bark and pine cones and clamshells, all discovered like treasure. He barely dared hope that he would actually ever own it and that he and Jen would spend their retirement summers there.

  Yet when Jen's mom died and very shortly afterward her dad, and the cottage was theirs, he felt so different about it he couldn't believe it. It was like being dropped off in the middle of a desert. He could not breathe there. The summer was over, fall was fading away, and the winter loomed like a grizzly bear on haunches. Already the wind off the lake rattled the windows and puffed at the drapes.

  From his son's room he heard the muffled alarm on Ryan's phone, a funny Flintstone yabba-dabba-do ringtone. Ryan was the last of their three kids at home and Marty and Jen had both been afraid pulling him along Up North to finish high school in the much smaller and rural district would be a risk. But he surprised them by thriving and making friends. Instead of being treated like an outsider, Ryan was welcomed like a movie star and included in everything. He adapted brilliantly to the change in culture and never complained that there was nothing to do or that the closest movie multiplex was forty-five minutes out of town. Ryan explained to Marty that November fifteenth was a blessed day to his friends, the opening of firearms deer season, and suggested hopefully that they might take up hunting this year.

  “Everyone goes,” Ryan explained. “Even the girls. There's one girl here, Allie, she's so crazy about hunting she wears camos starting in October. She's got this thing for Brad Wilson on my team and she leaves, like, a map to her deer blind on his locker and stuff. Can we go, Dad? You used to hunt, didn't you? When you were young?”

  Marty said he would think about it, though he didn't envision it would ever happen. He'd been on hunting trips with friends before and found them to be little more than a chance to drink in the woods. One or two guys would actually be into it, the hunting part, and for the rest of them it was a getaway. He'd never acquired any skills at it and disliked the thought of ever touching a loaded gun.

  The high school in this town was small enough that Ryan could actually play football, which was marvelous to watch. Marty sat in the bleachers through the crisp autumn nights, pungent with burning leaves, and watched his son with astonishment. Athletic but small, at his school in the city downstate Ryan had played JV and mostly sat on the bench at that, but here he played varsity and ran the ball so brilliantly that Marty nearly had to pinch himself he felt so happy. Then he would remember they would be going out for pizza afterward, or a hamburger, and there would be no beer, which seemed like finishing a race and hitting a brick wall. Marty wondered how long the surprise would last each time he remembered he could never drink again.

  “It's five-thirty,” Marty said in the doorway of Ryan's room.

  Ryan lifted his head and reached under the covers for his phone. The light of it glimmered like Tinker Bell as he checked for messages.

  “Dad, I don't think there's school today,” he said. “Did you hear about the murders?”

  Marty was always shocked by the fast-moving chain of information among kids by texting. He'd tried to figure out how to do it but could somehow not grasp the code of getting the letters to make the message.

  “Why would that cancel schools?” he said.

  “They were all teachers,” Ryan said and buried his head back in the pillows, almost instantly back to sleep.

  Marty felt as though an electric current were running through him. He looked down at his own phone. Still no return call from Ed. He called again and the phone was answered, but not by Ed.

  "Free Press news room, this is Kelly Mundy.”

  Who the hell was that? Marty wondered. Why was someone new there when they'd been chipping away at the old staff for years?

  “Is Ed there?” Marty said.

  “Ed's on medical leave,” Kelly Mundy said. “I'm sitting at his desk while he's gone.”

  “Ed's sick? What's wrong?”

  “I'm sorry, I can't tell you. Privacy laws, you know.”

  “Yeah, sure. Privacy,” Marty said. “This is Marty Phillips. I worked for Ed for like a million years. I don't know you. Are you new?”

  “A couple of months.” She sounded about nineteen. Why the hell did she get to sit at Ed's desk? “What can I do for you, Marty, at such an early hour of the morning?”

  “Is Jack Wilson there? Or Stephanie Anderson?” He named two other editors he knew well.

  “I'm afraid it's just me at this hour.”

  “Okay,” Marty said. “Look, I got shoved out with the last buyout and I live Up North now. Did you hear about the murders here? Three people in separate houses. I was calling Ed to see if he wanted me to go over to the state police and see what I could find out for you.”

  “I saw it on the wires,” Kelly said. “We'll be taking what AP can send us.” That wasn't the way it used to be, Marty thought to himself. In years past the Free Press would have wanted a staffer on this, absolutely.

  “Yeah, well, I think I could get something to you sooner.”

  “No doubt,” Kelly said. “But I don't have any authorization to pay freelance.”

  “I don't care about pay,” Marty said.

  “I can't ask you to do anything for free. It's a violation of wage and hour rules.”

  “Of course it is,” Marty said. “Look, this story is enormous. Everybody killed, they were teachers at the high school.”

  “Really? That's not on the wire yet.”

  “I know it isn't, because this is just a tiny town and they don't know the half of it yet. I haven't even left my house and I know more than they do. When is Jack in?”

  “Probably about ten.”

  Marty asked for Jack's direct line and said he would call back later.

  Part of the move Up North included selling their house in the suburbs, which by a miracle they were able to do without losing all of the equity they'd built up in twenty years, and selling both of the cars to buy one used Subaru. The arrangement was that Marty would drive Ryan to the high school and then pick up Jenny from the hospital, after which she would disappear into a deep sleep until sometime in the afternoon. While Jenny was sleeping, Marty was expected to go look for a job, any kind of job. Packing groceries would be okay, just to keep himself busy and bring in some amount of cash. Or he could sit down at the computer and write his novel. Or ease into the crawl space and wrap insulation around pipes. So far there was no novel and no j
ob. Most of the insulation, unused, remained piled up in the garage. Errands seemed to devour the days. Picking up groceries. Doing the wash. Or now and then he drove into town to an AA meeting, but he found himself unable to actually go in.

  He was just leaving for the hospital when Jenny called.

  “I can't leave,” she said. “There's an emergency. Everyone has to stay over.”

  “Sure, I should have known,” Marty said.

  “Is it on the news?”

  “A little,” Marty said. “I'm trying to get in touch with the newsroom and get on the story.”

  There was a silence on the phone and then Marty thought he heard a very faint output of breath, or maybe the call was dropped.

  “Jen?” he said.

  “I'm here,” she said. “How many does the news say?”

  “Three.”

  “Well, it's four now. They just brought in Mr. Johnson.” That was Ryan's calculus teacher.

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “He was moving his garbage cans out to the road. They were all shot from a distance in their driveways or on their front porches. Two last night, after they came home from conferences, one in the middle of the night when Ms. McIntosh was letting her dog out. And now Mr. Johnson dragging his cans to the road.”

  It was a sniper sharpshooter. Marty closed his eyes and searched in his brain for where there might be one single hidden bottle of wine in the cottage. Over the years they'd brought so many in, you'd think there must have been one that had been forgotten, hidden in a closet or an old trunk, or on the top shelf of the old cabinets that reached to the ceiling. When they first moved in, it had motivated him to squeeze into the crawl space for the insulation job, thinking maybe one of his kids had stashed something there to try to drink covertly. He found one empty beer bottle, a Schlitz, too old to have been from his kids’ era, and the bottom of a woman's two-piece bathing suit he estimated to be from the 1960s. But no hidden booze of any kind. It wasn't surprising. Marty had never been one to lose track of what he had and he couldn't understand people with big wine collections. Why have so much more wine than you would ever drink? Or why not drink what you had? It made no sense.

  “I don't know how long I will have to stay,” Jenny said. “Can you bring me my phone charger? I'm down to two bars.”

  Marty said he would. Doing those small things for Jen actually delighted him. Since their lives had changed so radically he found he could hardly ever do anything for her. He did any small thing she asked with very little thanks. And if he initiated it—having something ready to eat when she woke up in the afternoon; folding laundry; putting a small bouquet of wildflowers from the yard on the counter—he got no response at all from her. She was in a permanent mood these days, serious and hell-bent on getting to work, then getting her sleep, worrying about winter coming and how the cottage would hold up for year-round living. Her parents had installed central heating just before they each got sick and it had never been tried. Long gone were the days when Marty and Jen could sit together on the couch and have a glass of wine and talk about everything, working things out. She'd stopped drinking years before but so quietly that Marty had not noticed.

  When he got to the hospital, one TV news truck was already there, a local one, uploading its live-cam apparatus toward the heavens. It was a lucky day for one of those reporters. The location was so remote it would take awhile before a larger operation would be able to show up, and the national news was likely to take the local feed. He spotted a young girl with big hair who looked about sixteen staring as if in shock at her notebook. The technicians moved as normal, as if it were any old city council meeting, slow and steady, connecting wires. While he was watching, Jen appeared at the car window on the passenger side. She had to knock to get his attention. He unlocked the door but she gestured for him to just roll down the window.

  “I have to run,” she said, taking the phone charger he handed her. “Everyone is in a state of panic. They don't know if someone else will be coming or what.”

  “I called in,” Marty said. “Ed's on medical leave for something but Jack will be in around ten.”

  “Marty,” Jen said.

  “What?”

  “You don't work there anymore.”

  “I know, but . . .” he said. He gestured to the television truck.

  “But nothing. You don't work there and they don't want you to work there.”

  “What the hell?” he said. Did she have to put it that way? What was up with that?

  “And Ed had a heart attack. At his desk. I got an e-mail from his wife.”

  Marty stared at her. That might have been something he'd wanted to know. He couldn't envision why she hadn't told him.

  “Where's Ryan?” Jenny asked.

  “Home sleeping,” Marty said. “No school.”

  “Thank God. I heard sometime during the night they were going to hold school just to see who didn't show up. Stupid idea.”

  “They think he's a student?” Marty said.

  “They think he's a she,” Jenny said. “I heard the troopers talking. They found a shell casing in the woods outside Ms. McIntosh's house. Next to a tube of Victoria's Secret lip gloss. Okay, I gotta go. I'll call you later. And you need to go home to be with Ryan.” She turned and actually trotted back to the Emergency Room entrance, her plum-colored hospital scrubs fluttering around her legs beneath her coat. She stopped to show her ID to the state trooper and the two of them spoke for a second, casually, and Marty could see Jenny laughing. He was surprised to realize how long it was since he had seen her laugh.

  He thought they used to laugh a lot. But looking back through the most recent years he found it was a blur and maybe there had not been much laughter. He'd felt at the time he was keeping it all together. It was just a little innocent drinking. It took the edge off. It entertained him. It was his private business, he thought. There were many ways to be able to drink and still participate in life. A shot in his coffee in the morning. A bottle in his dresser he could take a pull on as he was getting dressed. A drink at lunch, which didn't seem unreasonable. And a few drinks in the evening. Well, a few that anyone saw. There were always trips back and forth to the bedroom during the evening for an extra boost from the hidden bottle until the night dissolved into paralysis in his chair in front of the TV. Sometimes he awoke in the night and went upstairs to bed. Sometimes he just stayed where he was and awoke dry-mouthed and feeling like death until he could start again.

  Marty tried to live with the truth of what Jen had said about the Free Press. He didn't work there anymore. They didn't want him to work there anymore. He'd had a wonderful career full of many exciting, gritty crimes and scandals, though in the last years he'd been pulled off the police beat and shuffled off to a suburb. It was just a reorganization, he'd been told. They wanted to up the caliber of the suburban reporting and they needed a pro like him. That's what they said. But the city council meetings bored him to distraction. And the stories that emerged were even worse: zoning quarrels, DPS labor disputes, road-construction updates. It got so that he was turning in four or five paragraphs every few days, all unmemorable, all buried somewhere in the back pages where he rarely ever even saw them. And then there was the custom invitation to take the buyout. A strong suggestion to take it, the kind that sounded like there was no choice at all.

  He checked the time and tried to figure out if he was going to call Jack at ten and make another pitch to cover the story, or if he was going to lose his nerve. The action of the news cameras and the police in the hospital parking lot was hypnotic and he wanted to stay. He could just go right up to one of the troopers and chat and learn more about what had happened. He knew how to do that and he was good at it. But he knew he needed to turn the Subaru around and head back down the charming bayside highway that connected the cottage to town. It was close to a twenty-minute drive. It was emerging in his mind that there was someone on the loose killing people somewhat randomly and that he needed to check on Ryan. />
  He pressed the quick-dial button on his phone for his son. With school canceled for the day maybe the two of them would come back into town later for a burger at a little bar downtown, the U and I Lounge, where he'd gotten into the habit of stopping in during the endless hours of the day. The first day he walked in he knew the bartender by type: the kind who would remember what you had the last time and would make it for you before you even sat down. Marty met his eyes and held out his hand. He told him his name and said, “Do everyone a favor and don't serve me. Ever.”

  The bartender nodded seriously. “No matter how much you beg and plead,” he said. And then he served him the most delicious Virgin Mary he'd ever tasted, so that when Marty raised it to his lips he nearly spit, so sure was he that there was booze in it.

  The bartender laughed. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I'd never do that to you.”

  Marty had been longing to enter that welcoming and cozy place and have a tonic and lime and see what the latest scuttlebutt was on the killings and get a grip on his courage to call the paper again without sounding like he was desperate. Ryan bleeped in on the line. “I'm on another call, Dad. I'll call you right back,” and Marty was actually relieved to hear his son's voice. The radio was now reporting a few updates: At least two of the dead were teachers at the high school, they said. School in the district was closed. They were still reporting only three killed.

  When he got home Ryan was on the computer. He turned around briefly but was busy typing.

  “Dad, you are not going to freaking believe this.”

  It was possible for Marty to see his son and barely recognize him. The youngest of three boys, Ryan had brought up the rear like a little tow-headed caboose, barely a fully formed person while the other two boys emerged into adolescence and young adulthood. It was during the heaviest of the drinking years that Ryan became a teenager and now he was almost eighteen as if by magic.